Handbook of Medieval Studies: Terms - Methods - Trends

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Handbook of Medieval Studies Volume 1

Handbook of Medieval Studies Terms - Methods - Trends Edited by Albrecht Classen

Volume 1

De Gruyter

ISBN 978-3-11-018409-9 e-ISBN 978-3-11-021558-8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Handbook of medieval studies : terms, methods, trends / edited by Albrecht Classen. p. cm. ISBN 978-3-11-018409-9 (alk. paper) 1. Middle Ages - Historiography. 2. Middle Ages - Study and teaching. 3. Literature, Medieval - History and criticism. 4. Middle Ages - Bibliography. 5. Medievalists - Biography. I. Classen, Albrecht. D116.H37 2010 940.1072-dc22 2010040766

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

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V

Table of Contents

Table of Contents Volume 1: Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

XV

Survey of Fundamental Reference Works in Medieval Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

XXV

Abbreviations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

LXVII

List of Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . LXXVII

Main Topics and Debates of the Last Decades and their Terminology and Results Arabic and Islamic Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Arab West (Thomas F. Glick) . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Arab East (Mark David Luce) . . . . . . . . . . . . . Arabic Literature (Mark Pettigrew) . . . . . . . . . . . . Archeology and History of Art in Pre-Islamic Iran and Central Asia (Matteo Compareti) . . . . . . . . . . Classical Persian Literature (Mark David Luce) . . . . . . Islamic Philosophy (Alessandro Cancian) . . . . . . . . . Islamic Theology (Livnat Holtzman) . . . . . . . . . . . Natural Sciences in the Islamic Context (Glen M. Cooper) Qur’anic Studies (Erik S. Ohlander) . . . . . . . . . . . . Shi’ism (Alessandro Cancian) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Archaeology in Medieval Studies (Christopher Landon) . Art History (Elina Gertsman) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Astronomical Instruments (David A. King) . . . . . . . . Bakhthinian Discourse Theory, Heteroglossia (Stephen M. Carey) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Biblical Exegesis (Frans van Liere) . . . . . . . . . . . . . Botany (Alain Touwaide) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Byzantine Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Byzantine Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Byzantine Art and Architecture (Sophia Germanidou) . . Byzantine Philosophical Treatises (Georgi Kapriev) . . .

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3 6 14

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25 38 46 56 69 81 93 104 117 126

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131 137 145

181 185

Table of Contents

Byzantine Sciences (Alain Touwaide) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Byzantine Theology (George Arabatzis). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Classics and Mythography (Gregory Heyworth) . . . . . . . . . . . . . Codicology and Paleography (Alain Touwaide) . . . . . . . . . . . . . Communication (Albrecht Classen) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Computer-Based Medieval Research (with an Emphasis on Middle High German) (Ulrich Müller) . . Conversion (Matthew J. dal Santo) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cornish Literature (Brian Murdoch). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Crusades Historiography (Andrew Holt) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Deconstruction in Medieval Studies (Maurice Sprague) . . . . . . . . Diplomatics (Theo Kölzer) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Disability Studies (Julie Singer) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Editing of Medieval Texts (Craig Baker) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . English Studies (Robin Gilbank) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Enlightenment Perspectives on the Middle Ages (Reinhold Münster) Epigraphy (Walter Koch) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Eschatology (Peter Dinzelbacher) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Everyday Life in Medieval Studies (Valerie L. Garver) . . . . . . . . . . Feminism (Barbara Stevenson) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Folklore in Medieval Studies (Salvatore Calomino) . . . . . . . . . . . Formalism (Scott L. Taylor) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . French Studies (Wendy Pfeffer) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Friendship and Networks (Walter Ysebaert) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Gender Studies (Hiram Kümper). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . German Studies (Francis G. Gentry) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Heraldry (Heiko Hartmann) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Hermeneutics and Textual Criticism (Raymond J. Cormier) . . . . . . Historical Studies (Andrew Holt) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Historiography of Medieval Medicine (Carrie Griffin). . . . . . . . . Historiography of Medieval Science (Sarah Powrie) . . . . . . . . . . Iberian Studies (James A. Grabowska) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Icelandic, Danish, and Old Norse Studies (Russell Poole) . . . . . . . Inter-/Crosscultural Studies (Barbara Stevenson) . . . . . . . . . . . . Interdisciplinarity in Medieval Studies (Gerhard Jaritz). . . . . . . . Intertextuality and Comparative Approaches in Medieval Literature (Sarah Gordon) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Irish Studies (William Sayers) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Italian Studies (Claudia Boscolo) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Japan, Medieval (Barbara Stevenson). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

VI 195 240 253 266 330 343 353 369 379 393 405 424 427 450 468 489 506 525 540 550 558 565 580 594 602 619 624 639 651 666 678 685 706 711 716 727 738 749

VII

Table of Contents

Jewish Studies (Jean Baumgarten) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Law in the Middle Ages (Scott Taylor) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Legal Historiography (German) (Gerald Kohl) . . . . . . . . . . . Manuscripts: Past and Present Approaches (Susan Noakes) . . . Marxist Approaches to Medieval Studies (Sarah Gordon) . . . . . Masculinity Studies (Daniel F. Pigg) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Material Culture (Mark Cruse) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Medievalism (Ulrich Müller). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Medievalism in Modern Children’s Literature (Siegrid Schmidt) . Mentalities in Medieval Studies (David F. Tinsley) . . . . . . . . . Metrology (Moritz Wedell) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Museums and Exhibitions (Siegrid Schmidt) . . . . . . . . . . . . Music in Medieval Studies (James Zychowicz) . . . . . . . . . . . . Mysticism (Debra Stoudt). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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756 771 788 807 822 829 836 850 866 874 897 919 931 939

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967

Volume 2: Narratives of Technological Revolution (Adam Lucas) . . . Narratology and Literary Theory in Medieval Studies (Jonathan M. Newman) . . . . . . . . New Philology (Susan Yager) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Numismatics (Rory Naismith) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Occitan Studies (Michelle Bolduc) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Performance of Medieval Texts (Ulrich Müller) . . . . . . . Pharmacy (Alain Touwaide) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Philosophy in Medieval Studies (Stephen Penn) . . . . . . . Political Theory in Medieval Studies (Scott L. Taylor) . . . . Popes and Papacy (Frances Parton) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Popular Religion / Spirituality in Medieval Studies (Daniel E. O’Sullivan) . . . . . . . . . Post-Colonialism in Medieval Studies (James Tindal Acken). Queer Studies (Forrest C. Helvie). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Race and Ethnicity (Diane Auslander) . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rediscovery of the Middle Ages (Late 18th Century / Turn of the Century) (Berta Raposo) Religious Studies (The Latin West) (Peter Dinzelbacher) . . . Research Institutes, Archives, and Libraries for the Middle Ages (Gertrud Blaschitz) . . . . . . . . . . Scripts (Peter A. Stokes) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Semiotics of Culture (Sarah-Grace Heller) . . . . . . . . . . .

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990 999 1007 1023 1039 1056 1090 1111 1122

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1129 1137 1142 1155

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VIII

Table of Contents

Slavic Studies (Marta Deyrup) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Social Constructionism (Daniel F. Pigg) . . . . . . . . . . . Social and Economic Theory in Medieval Studies (Harry Kitsikopoulos) . . . . . . . . . . Social History and Medieval Studies (Harry Kitsikopoulos). Technology in the Middle Ages (Thomas F. Glick) . . . . . The Term ‘Middle Ages’ (Hiram Kümper) . . . . . . . . . . . Text and Image in the Middle Ages (James Rushing) . . . . Theology (Christian) (Leo D. Lefebure) . . . . . . . . . . . . Time Measurement and Chronology in Medieval Studies (Camarin M. Porter) . . . . . . . . . . Transfer of Knowledge (Alain Touwaide). . . . . . . . . . . Utopias / Utopian Thought (Heiko Hartmann) . . . . . . . Welsh Studies (Andrew Breeze) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . 1253 . . . . . . 1264 . . . . . .

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1270 1292 1305 1310 1319 1339

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1350 1368 1400 1409

Aesthetics (Mark Cruse) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Allegory (Bettina Full) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Author (Michelle Bolduc) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Body (Scott Pincikowski) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chivalry (John A. Geck) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Comic (Sarah Gordon) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Contrafacture (Daniel E. O’Sullivan). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Curialitas (Courtliness) (Gregory Heyworth) . . . . . . . . . . . Discourse (Karen K. Jambeck) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Fictionality (Stephen Mark Carey) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Frontier, Transgression, Liminality (Waltraud Fritsch-Rößler). Game (Maurice Sprague) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Gestures (Klaus Oschema). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Images (Gerhard Jaritz) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Laughter (Waltraud Fritsch-Rößler) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Memory (Paula Leverage) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mouvance (Roy Rosenstein) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Parody (Sarah Gordon) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Prosopography (Christian) (K.S.B. Keats-Rohan) . . . . . . . . Ritual and Performance (Gerhard Jaritz) . . . . . . . . . . . . . Space and Nature (Christopher Clason) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Text (Mark Cruse) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Transcendental (George Arabatzis) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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1421 1430 1440 1450 1459 1468 1478 1482 1488 1500 1504 1508 1513 1520 1524 1530 1538 1548 1552 1559 1563 1576 1582

Important Terms in Today’s Medieval Studies

IX

Table of Contents

Typology (Heiko Hartmann) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1589 Violence (Scott Pincikowski) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1593

Textual Genres in the Middle Ages Adversus-Iudaeos Literature (Hiram Kümper) . Art Manuals (Flavio Boggi). . . . . . . . . . . . . Autobiography and Biography (Julie Singer) . . Ballads, Songs, and Libels (Christian Kuhn) . . . Bestiaries, Aviaries, Physiologus (Renee Ward) . . Bibles (Popular) (Brian Murdoch) . . . . . . . . . Books of Hours (Elina Gertsman) . . . . . . . . . Calendars, Islamic (Simone Cristoforetti) . . . . . Cantigas de amigos (Samuel G. Armistead) . . . . Ceremonial Texts (Christine Maria Grafinger) . . Chansons de geste (Stephen Mark Carey) . . . . . Charms and Incantations (Russell Poole) . . . . Charters (Philip Slavin). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chronicles (Graeme Dunphy). . . . . . . . . . . . Cookbooks (Timothy J. Tomasik) . . . . . . . . . . Courtesy Books (Klaus Oschema) . . . . . . . . . Debate Poetry (Patricia E. Black). . . . . . . . . . Dictionaries / Glossaries (Albrecht Classen) . . . Didactic and Gnomic Literature (Russell Poole) Dits (Steven Millen Taylor) . . . . . . . . . . . . . Drama (John A. Geck) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Encyclopedias (Nadia Margolis) . . . . . . . . . . Financial and Tax Reports (Georg Vogeler). . . . Glosses (Frans van Liere) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Gospel Harmonies (Heiko Hartmann) . . . . . . Hagiographical Texts (Michelle M. Sauer) . . . . Heroic Epics and Sagas (Hermann Reichert) . . . Historical Romances (Jaime Leaños) . . . . . . . Kharjas (Samuel G. Armistead) . . . . . . . . . . .

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1605 1607 1614 1618 1634 1642 1647 1652 1657 1660 1683 1700 1706 1714 1722 1728 1735 1742 1750 1755 1760 1767 1775 1785 1791 1798 1807 1831 1840

Volume 3: Lapidaries (Rosmarie Thee Morewedge) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1845 Last Wills (Hiram Kümper) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1862 Latin Comedies (Gretchen Mieszkowski) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1872

X

Table of Contents

Legal Texts (Hiram Kümper) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Letters (Christian Kuhn) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Letter Collections (Latin West and Byzantium) (Walter Ysebaert) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Minnereden (Maurice Sprague). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Miracle Narratives (Daniel E. O’Sullivan) . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mirrors for Princes Islamic (Mark David Luce) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Western (Cristian Bratu) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Notarial Literature (Edward D. English). . . . . . . . . . . . . . Numismatic Literature (Rory Naismith) . . . . . . . . . . . . . Papal Bulls (Herwig Weigl) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Penitentials and Confessionals (Michelle M. Sauer) . . . . . . . Pharmaceutical Literature (Alan Touwaide) . . . . . . . . . . . Political Treatises (Vasileios Syros) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Prayer Books (Elina Gertsman). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Proverbs (Rosmarie Thee Morewedge) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Religious Lyrics (Daniel E. O’Sullivan) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Schoolbooks (Michael Baldzuhn). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Scientific Texts: Artes Liberales and Artes Mechanicae (with Emphasis on Anglophone Research) (Carrie Griffin) Sermons (Robert W. Zajkowski) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Short Verse Narratives (Norris J. Lacy) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sisterbooks (David F. Tinsley) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Travelogues (Maria E. Dorninger) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Trobadors, Trouvères, Minnesinger (Ulrich Müller) . . . . . . Villancicos (Samuel G. Armistead) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Visionary Texts (Elizabeth Boyle) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . World Maps ( Jens Eike Schnall) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . 1878 . . . . 1881 . . . . 1898 . . . . 1905 . . . . 1911 . . . . . . . . . . . .

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1916 1921 1950 1956 1963 1968 1979 2000 2021 2026 2056 2061

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2069 2077 2086 2093 2102 2118 2128 2131 2136

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2145 2150 2153 2160 2165 2170 2176

Key Figures in Medieval Studies from ca. 1650 to 1950 (selection) Adler, Guido (Pieter Mannaerts) . . . . . . . . Árni Magnússon (Jens Eike Schnall) . . . . . . Auerbach, Erich (Bettina Full). . . . . . . . . Baer, Yitzhak (Philip Slavin) . . . . . . . . . . Barbi, Michele (Beatrice Arduini). . . . . . . . Bédier, Joseph (Craig Baker) . . . . . . . . . . Benecke, Georg Friedrich (Gertrud Blaschitz)

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XI Besseler, Heinrich (Pieter Mannaerts). . . . . . . . . Bezzola, Reto Raduolf (Mark Cruse) . . . . . . . . . Billanovich, Giuseppe (David Lummus) . . . . . . . Bischoff, Bernhard (Hiram Kümper) . . . . . . . . . Bloch, Marc (Nadia Margolis) . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bodmer, Johann Jakob (Maurice Sprague) . . . . . . Borst, Arno (Judith Benz). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bosl, Karl (Stephen Mark Carey) . . . . . . . . . . . . Boyle, Leonard Eugene (Christine Maria Grafinger) . Branca, Vittore (Federica Anichini) . . . . . . . . . . Braune, Wilhelm (Joshua M. H. Davis) . . . . . . . . Brunner, Otto (Judith Benz) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Burdach, Konrad (Gertrud Blaschitz) . . . . . . . . . Cappelli, Adriano (Christine Maria Grafinger) . . . . Cardini, Franco (Daniel Rötzer) . . . . . . . . . . . . Castro (y Quesada), Américo (Samuel G. Armistead) . Chenu, Marie-Dominique (Leo D. Lefebure) . . . . . Cleasby, Richard (Marc Pierce) . . . . . . . . . . . . Cohen, Gustave (Nadia Margolis) . . . . . . . . . . . Contini, Gianfranco (Beatrice Arduini) . . . . . . . . Curtius, Ernst Robert (Alexander Sager) . . . . . . . D’Ancona, Alessandro (Claudia Boscolo) . . . . . . . Docen, Bernhard Joseph (Maurice Sprague) . . . . . Donaldson, E. Talbot (Kathy Cawsey) . . . . . . . . Dopsch, Alfons (Valerie L. Garver) . . . . . . . . . . . Duby, Georges Michel Claude (Carol R. Dover) . . . Duhem, Pierre (Sarah Powrie) . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ehrismann, Gustav Adolph (Alexander Sager). . . . Ewert, Alfred (Craig Baker) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Faral, Edmond (Anne Latowsky). . . . . . . . . . . . Frappier, Jean (Raymond J. Cormier). . . . . . . . . . Fuhrmann, Horst (Karina Marie Ash). . . . . . . . . Funkenstein, Amos (Yossef Schwartz). . . . . . . . . Furnivall, Frederick James (Kathy Cawsey) . . . . . Ganshof, François-Louis (Valerie L. Garver) . . . . . Gerbert, Martin (Christine Maria Grafinger) . . . . . Gilson, Etienne (Daniel Rötzer) . . . . . . . . . . . . Gollancz, Sir Israel (Stephen Penn) . . . . . . . . . . Grabar, André (Linda Marie Rouillard) . . . . . . . . Grabmann, Martin (Yossef Schwartz) . . . . . . . . .

Table of Contents

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Grimm, Jacob Ludwig Karl, and Grimm, Wilhelm Karl (Scott E. Pincikowski) . . . . . . . . . Gurevich, Aron Iakovlevich (Elena Lemeneva) . . . . . . . . . . . . . Hagen, Friedrich Heinrich August Wilhelm von der (Christopher R. Clason) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Haupt, Moriz (Gertrud Blaschitz) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Heer, Friedrich (Peter Dinzelbacher) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Hibbard, Laura Alandis (Linda M. Rouillard). . . . . . . . . . . . . . Hilka, Alfons (Wendy Pfeffer and Albrecht Classen) . . . . . . . . . . . . Hilton, Rodney Howard (Candace Barrington) . . . . . . . . . . . . . Holmes, Urban Tigner, Jr. (Nadia Margolis) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Holthausen, Ferdinand (Marc Pierce) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Huizinga, Johan (Tracy Adams) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . James, Montague Rhodes (Mark Cruse) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jeanroy, Alfred-Marie-Henri-Gustave (Beverly J. Evans) . . . . . . . Jónsson, Finnur (Russell Poole) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Junius F. F., Franciscus (Jens Eike Schnall and Robert K. Paulsen) . . . . Kane, George J. (Marilyn Sandidge) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kantorowicz, Ernst Hartwig (Roberto Delle Donne) . . . . . . . . . . Katz, Jacob (David Graizbord) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ker, Neil Ripley (Peter A. Stokes) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ker, W. P. (Barbara Stevenson) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kibre, Pearl (Carrie Griffin) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kittredge, George Lyman (Kathy Cawsey) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Klaeber, Friedrich (Helen Damico) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Klibansky, Raymond (Sarah Powrie) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kuhn, Hugo Bernhard (Markus Stock) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kuhn, Sherman M. (Marc Pierce) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kurath, Hans (Marc Pierce). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kuttner, Stephan (Scott L. Taylor) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lachmann, Karl Konrad Friedrich Wilhelm (Stephen Mark Carey) . Ladner, Gerhard B. (Christine Maria Grafinger) . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lagarde, Georges de (Scott L. Taylor) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lamprecht, Karl Gotthard (Christopher R. Clason) . . . . . . . . . . . Lassberg, Joseph Maria Christoph, Freiherr von (Maurice Sprague) Leclerq, Jean (Daniel J. Watkins) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Le Goff, Jacques Louis (Carol R. Dover) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lehmann, Paul (Alison Beringer) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lejeune, Rita (Kevin B. Reynolds). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lewis, C. S. (Jason Herman) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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XIII Lexer, Matthias von (Graeme Dunphy) . . . . . . . Liepe, Wolfgang (Albrecht Classen) . . . . . . . . . Loomis, R. S. (Amy L. Ingram) . . . . . . . . . . . . Lot, Ferdinand (Amy L. Ingram) . . . . . . . . . . . Lowe, Elias Avery (Peter A. Stokes) . . . . . . . . . . Lubac, Henri de (Michael Johnson) . . . . . . . . . Luick, Karl (Jerzy Wełna) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Maier, Anneliese (Sarah Powrie). . . . . . . . . . . Maitland, Frederic William (Janice M. Bogstad) . . Malkiel, Yakov (Samuel G. Amistead) . . . . . . . . Mallet, Paul-Henri (Jens Eike Schnall) . . . . . . . Manitius, Max (Alison Beringer) . . . . . . . . . . . Manly, John Matthews (Anita Obermeier) . . . . . Massmann, Hans Ferdinand (Maurice Sprague). . Maurer, Friedrich (Brian Murdoch) . . . . . . . . . Menéndez-Pidal, Ramón (Kimberlee Campbell) . . Meyer, Marie-Paul-Hyacinthe (Anne Latowsky). . Mitteis, Heinrich (Albrecht Classen). . . . . . . . . Mohr, Hans Wolfgang Julius (Ulrich Müller) . . . Müllenhoff, Karl Victor (Maurice Sprague). . . . . Murray, J. A. H. (Marc Pierce) . . . . . . . . . . . . Mustanoja, T. (Kirsti Peitsara) . . . . . . . . . . . . Nardi, Bruno (David Lummus). . . . . . . . . . . . Noreen, Adolf Gotthard (Marc Pierce) . . . . . . . Ohly, Ernst Friedrich (Graeme Dunphy) . . . . . . Paris, Gaston Bruno Paulin (Daniel E. O’Sullivan) Paul, Hermann (Marc Pierce) . . . . . . . . . . . . Pfeiffer, Franz (Gertrud Blaschitz) . . . . . . . . . . Prawer, Joshua (Philip Slavin). . . . . . . . . . . . Rajna, Pio (Claudia Boscolo) . . . . . . . . . . . . . Reese, Gustave (Beverly J. Evans) . . . . . . . . . . Rico Manrique, Francisco (Enrico Santangelo) . . . Riquer Morera, Martín de (Kimberlee Campbell). . Robertson, D. W. (Jason Herman) . . . . . . . . . . Robinson, Fred Norris (Anita Obermeier) . . . . . Rougemont, Denis de (Linda Marie Rouillard) . . . Ruh, Kurt (Freimut Löser and Ulrich Müller) . . . . . Runciman, Sir Steven (Robert W. Zajkowski) . . . . Sapegno, Natalino (Enrico Santangelo) . . . . . . . Sapori, Armando (Christine Maria Grafinger) . . . .

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Scherer, Wilhelm (Maurice Sprague). . . . . . . . . . . . . Schlegel, August Wilhelm (Christopher R. Clason) . . . . . Schlegel, Friedrich (Berta Raposo). . . . . . . . . . . . . . Schoepperle Loomis, Gertrude (Karina Marie Ash) . . . . Schramm, Percy Ernst (Janos M. Bak) . . . . . . . . . . . Schultz, Alwin (Gertrud Blaschitz) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Schwietering, Julius (Heiko Hartmann). . . . . . . . . . . Sievers, Georg Eduard (Russell Poole). . . . . . . . . . . . Simrock, Karl Joseph (Christopher R. Clason) . . . . . . . . Skeat, Walter William (Kathy Cawsey) . . . . . . . . . . . Southern, R. W. (Amy Ingram) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Spitzer, Leo (Bettina Full) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Stengel, Edmund Ernst (Andreas Meyer) . . . . . . . . . . Strauch, Philipp (Albrecht Classen) . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tellenbach, Gerd (Christine Maria Grafinger) . . . . . . . . Tolkien, John Ronald Ruel (Katharina Baier) . . . . . . . Traube, Ludwig (Francesco Roberg) . . . . . . . . . . . . . Vilmar, August Friedrich Christian (Marc Pierce) . . . . Vinaver, Eugène (Amy L. Ingram) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Wackernagel, Karl Heinrich Wilhelm (Maurice Sprague) Waddell, Helen (Robin Gilbank) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Weber, Gottfried (Waltraud Fritsch-Rößler) . . . . . . . . . Wehrli, Max (Heiko Hartmann) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . White, Lynn Townsend, Jr. (Candace Barrington) . . . . . Whitelock, Dorothy (Ben Snook) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Wright, Joseph (Marc Pierce). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Young, Karl (Regula Meyer Evitt). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Zingerle, Ignaz Vinzenz (Gertrud Blaschitz) . . . . . . . . Zumthor, Paul (Tracy Adams) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Introduction The present reference work aims to fill a significant lacuna in scholarship that I will address throughout this introductory article, and subsequently in a critical survey of the relevant resources in our field. As a Handbook, it wants to make available detailed and meticulous surveys of the state of art in Medieval Studies and to reflect upon the historical development of our field in its myriad manifestations (research areas, terms, topics, figures, methods, theories, etc.). After all, the Middle Ages continue to create a lot of excitement both within the academy and outside, and we are, it seems, on a positive growth curve, particularly now in the early 21st century, considering the astounding proliferation of critical editions, translations, and interpretations that flood the book market. The history of research in all kinds of areas in Medieval Studies constitutes an essential component in our understanding of where we have come from and where we will probably turn to in the near future. More precisely, any of our comments on and interpretations of any phenomenon in the Middle Ages depends considerably on the scholarly context past and present. Evaluations change, the foci on specific periods, genres, figures, themes, etc. vary, and new theoretical concepts have considerable influence on how we view the medieval past. Much fundamental work was produced already in the 19th century, whether we think of critical editions, individual studies, bibliographies, and other kinds of databases. But each discipline or subject matter has been examined from many different perspectives since then, both in light of various theoretical models and through the kaleidoscopic lens of a multitude of methodologies. Some of these approaches have maintained their validity until today, others have been dismissed, and the intense debate continues until today how best to examine the Middle Ages critically. It is not uncommon to realize that older scholarship still has to tell us a lot even now, or once again, if carefully viewed in light of what medieval voices revealed in reality.1 The relevance and meaning of specific statements in medieval documents and our

1 See the entry on “Religious Studies” by Peter Dinzelbacher for excellent insights in this regard. Another illuminating example proves to be the discussion of Lynn Townsend White Jr.’s contribution to the history of technology (see Candace Barrington’s article on White).

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reading of medieval art objects, architectural designs, and musical compositions, to mention just a few areas of scholarly investigations in Medieval Studies, have changed and continue to be in flux even today, depending on new approaches, readings, interpretations, perspectives, critical lenses, and methodologies. In other words, as in most other academic fields, the process of learning, criticizing, re-evaluating, re-assessing, canonizing, and deconstructing the very canon proves to be endlessly ongoing because we are all part of the same large scholarly discourse, or rather, we create this discourse and determine its continuous development.2 But this process requires regular review and substantive analysis, which the present Handbook hopes to provide both for the present and future generations of scholars in Medieval Studies. Total completion cannot be achieved, and comprehensive coverage of all aspects would be elusive, but the present Handbook covers a considerable breadth of a multitude of research fields. As my own criticism of previous efforts in this field will indicate (see the following survey article on the relevant reference works in Medieval Studies), the very ideal that carries such efforts seems to be almost elusive and deceptive because we can only hope to capture a faint sense of what life in the Middle Ages was really like. We can read what some philosophers had to say, and we can ponder the meaning of specific statements by poets, artists, composers, and preachers, but how easily do we fall prey to a myopic perspective, either because of our lack of comprehensive approaches, or because the texts and works by their contemporaries have not survived. A full understanding seems impossible however, wherefore the concept of discourse, as developed by Michel Foucault,3 promises a good alternative since it does not require a complete coverage of what people thought, said, and argued about at a specific time, yet takes into account the widest array of statements and reflections that constituted that discourse. In this sense, we always need to probe what the dominant discussion at a specific time can reveal about specific topics, ideas, and concerns. The entries in our Handbook do not focus primarily on the medieval discourse, but on the scholarly discourse since the late 18th century, tracing the growth of the important disciplines particularly over the last hundred years, outlining what we know, what is being discussed, and how we have approached the critical issues at stake.

2 I examine the larger implications at much greater length in my introductory article. 3 Michel Foucault, L’ordre de discourse: Leçon inaugurale au Collège de France prononcée le 2 décembre 1970 (Paris: Gallimard, 1971).

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The goal pursued in this Handbook does not consist in an attempt to compete with such seminal reference works as the Lexikon des Mittelalters or the Dictionnaire de Spiritualité. Instead, the question pursued here focuses on how individual subject matters have developed in historical-scholarly terms over time. What were the various methodological approaches to specific themes, and what source materials were regarded as most relevant? What primary documents have been seen as truly relevant at what time and by whom for what purposes? In fact, all these questions allow us to probe not only further into the history of the Middle Ages at large, they also facilitate a much better understanding of how we have learned to understand the medieval world from our modern perspectives, if not how we have misunderstood it. The term ‘history’ in our context only means the specific time frame, not the narrow discipline of Historical Studies. Medieval Studies embrace virtually each and every field of human activities and ideas, whether literature, fashion, the arts, religion, technology, agriculture, banking, or architecture. But this amazing spectrum also proves to be a remarkable challenge, hence, after all, the need for encyclopedic treatments of that period. There are four different categories of entries that make up this Handbook of Medieval Studies. First the major topics of disciplinary nature come into play, such as Feminism, German Studies, English Studies, Art History, Crusade Studies, Queer Studies, and Islamic Art. Next contributors examine specific terms that have influenced Medieval Studies deeply, such as curialitas, frontier, game, rhetorics, satire, irony, and violence.4 The third group consists of articles covering the wide range of textual genres prevalent in the Middle Ages, though even here I had to make compromises and leave lacunae for a number of reasons, though I would have preferred a comprehensive coverage. However, to aim for totality would have been hubris, and no encyclopedia or lexicon has ever achieved such a goal. The truly critical ap-

4 There are, of course, numerous reference works on critical and literary terms relevant for all of world literature, see, for instance, Henri Morier, Dictionnaire de poétique et de rhétorique, 2nd augmented and rev. ed. (1961; Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998); The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); Wendell V. Harris, Dictionary of Concepts in Literary Criticism and Theory, Reference Sources for the Social Sciences and Humanities, 12 (New York, Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood Press, 1992); Ross Murfin and Supryia M. Ray, The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms, 3rd ed. (1997; Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin, 2009); Metzler Literatur Lexikon: Begriffe und Definitionen, orig. ed. by Günther and Irmgard Schweikle, ed. Dieter Burdorf, 3rd completely rev. ed. (1984; Stuttgart: Metzler, 2007).

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proach requires selection, discrimination, prioritization, and categorization, and this is the case in our Handbook as well. Finally, the fourth group deals with some of the key figures in Medieval Studies, that is, both the grandfathers and founders in our field, and major scholars who deeply influenced their academic discipline at least until 1950, and in a number of cases even beyond that.5 There was no way to draw an artificial line of separation a few years after the end of the Second World War, so I chose a flexible approach in this regard. Some scholars enjoyed a very long career, others only a short one, but those who became active really only after ca. 1960 are not considered here (here disregarding one or two where the circumstances justified it). After all, it was not possible, with very few exceptions, to take into consideration the last thirty and forty years of research in terms of individual participants because it would have inundated all reasonable limits for such a reference work. The emphasis hence rests on those figures who laid the foundations and have continued to be deeply influential in their specific areas of investigations until today because of their seminal work.6 The overall purpose of our reference work consists of an effort to outline the major steps in the history of research since the 19th century (in some cases since the 18th century). The articles covering the scholarly disciplines, technical terms, and textual genres are supposed to trace in a concise, yet not too skeletal fashion, who the major players were, what significant positions and schools dominated the respective field, who published the most seminal studies, who provoked major debates and influenced the discourse, and then to determine what the most critical issues have been in the evolution of each discipline. Readers should not expect to be presented with a comprehensive bibliography; instead the entries address a more substantive need, that is, to learn quickly how research on, say, the history of astronomy, medicine, German Studies, Gender Studies, Arabic literature, Biblical exegesis, Crusade Studies,

5 For an impressive and comprehensive overview of the major historians in our field, now see John Burrow, A History of Histories: Epics, Chronicles, Romances and Inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the Twentieth Century (New York: A. A. Knopf, 2007); Rüdiger vom Bruch and Rainer A. Müller, Historikerlexikon: von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, 2nd rev. and expanded ed. (1991; Munich: Beck, 2002). Cf. also Norman F. Cantor, Inventing the Middle Ages: the Lives, Works, and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century (New York: W. Morrow, 1991). 6 Rewriting the Middle Ages in the Twentieth Century, ed. Jaume Aurell and Francisco Crosas (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), contains biographies of some of the most important medievalists from England, France, Spain, Germany, Belgium, the United States, and Italy.

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hermeneutics, etc., has developed over time. Likewise, in the next category, the entries cover critical terms that have been highly influential in Medieval Studies, and again the intent was to provide an overview of how each term underwent crucial transformation and how it has been used in Medieval Studies over the last hundred to two hundred years or so. Similarly, the categories of ‘genres’ and of ‘figures’ pursue the same concept. I had hoped to incorporate as much non-European research and research topics as possible, and I am rather pleased with the present result, despite all kinds of shortcomings. Particularly the research on the worlds and cultures of Asian, African, and Arabic societies in the Middle Ages could not be dealt with as exhaustively as I would have liked, either because the task itself – and this actually applies to all aspects covered or, alas, left out – was too challenging, or because of certain natural limits that we all have in reaching out to the wide world of scholarship in those, at least for scholars in the Western world, somewhat remote areas and far beyond the scope of our traditional area of expertise. The reality of academic and other professional demands made it impossible for a number of contributors to submit their promised work either in time or at all. So, horribile dictu, ‘Religion’, for example, is not as extensively covered by itself as I would have wished, but there is an entry on ‘Theology in Medieval Studies.’7 Overall, there are certain problems that cast this matter in a different light. The history of Christianity represents a huge field for which many different lexica and encyclopedias have already been published (see the following survey article). To do justice to the many branches of research on medieval religion would require a separate Handbook, for which there is no space here. Admittedly, there is a separate entry on Jewish religion, and even here severe challenges surface immediately. But despite the erroneous assumption of a monolithic medieval Christianity, the number of individual groups, orientations, interpretations, institutions, organizations, and even whole churches is legion.

7 I am particularly grateful to Peter Dinzelbacher for accepting this entry at the last minute, so to speak, after a previous author had suddenly withdrawn. See also Dinzelbacher’s excellent book series “Handbuch der Religionsgeschichte im deutschsprachigen Raum in 6 Bänden.” The individual volumes have not appeared in a chronologically linear progression; instead vol. 1 appeared in 2008, vol. 2, by contrast, already in 2000: Peter Dinzelbacher, Hoch- und Spätmittelalter. Mit einem Beitrag von Daniel Krochmalnik (Paderborn etc.: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2000). Apart from the historical overview, he discusses the media of how faith was conveyed, the world of imagination, spiritualization of concrete, earthly space, spiritualization of time, sacred performance, sacred words, and spirituality of human beings. Krochmalnik examines Jewish spirituality at the same time.

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All articles were written independently, and ultimately the quality of the content was the authors’ individual responsibility. Of course, as the editor I have made my utmost effort to guide, to probe, to correct, to suggest, and to add information as much as possible, but overall I had to trust the contributors in having made their own best judgment in selecting the most important publications, editions, and reference works in their specific areas. Formally, I have tried to streamline every entry as much as possible, but absolute conformity could not be achieved because of the vast differences in individual contributors’ approaches, styles, and methods, and also because of the differences of the various disciplines. For instance, scholarly literature on the history of medieval law or on prosopography had to be dealt with in structural terms that are different than in the research fields of medieval Occitan or German Studies, for instance. In general, and it is worth repeating this to make it absolutely clear what the objectives were and what was realistic altogether, comprehensiveness or an exhaustive treatment of every aspect in the medieval world, has not been possible right from the start. Nevertheless, I hope that the present result offers at least an approximation of the overarching goal. Above all, we are providing important overviews of the history of research in a wide array of fields, stretching, for instance, from Byzantine architecture to German legal historiography, and beyond. Some disciplines proved to be just too demanding and too extensive, or no contributor could be found to meet the challenge, who had the time, or who was willing to volunteer for this massive enterprise. The field of medieval law would have required a whole cohort of experts, but I am pleased that at least one contributor deals with a broad overview of legal historiography, whereas another focuses on the history of German medieval law. The same can be stated for almost all other areas, so I must beg indulgence from the future readers of this Handbook. It can provide guidance only so far, yet the current result promises to establish a solid groundwork for the wide discipline of Medieval Studies. After all, whenever we begin to investigate any aspect of the Middle Ages, irrespective of the specific angle we might pursue, immediately a plethora of new perspectives, topics, texts, works, etc. opens up almost limitlessly. In a way I also beg the reader for his/her indulgence if a specific entry is missing because circumstances beyond my control made it impossible to cover everything to the extent desirable. Perhaps some of the shortcomings can be addressed and dealt with in a second edition or in a future volume with addenda. The deeper we analyze a topic, the more sub-genres, sub-fields, sub-categories etc. tend to emerge, and then require careful and detailed critical

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Introduction

treatment. That is, however, exactly one of the critical limits that could not be breached without excessive, highly time-consuming efforts to the detriment of all other contributions. I prefer to have at least published a fragmentary Handbook of Medieval Studies that covers the majority of fields, terms, genres, and key figures than none. The bibliographical information in the main body of the text in each entry is mostly provided in a truncated manner, though this should still allow the user to trace and find each individual reference in the library with ease. By contrast, the last section then offers the full information. The titles of book series and the volume numbers, however, have always been left out. For the large topics, it was not practical to force the contributors to follow a very stringent model, so there is a certain variety of structures applied. By contrast, the entries of figures follow by and large the same pattern. After a general introduction about the person’s significance comes his or her biography. The next section deals with the scholar’s publications, and the subsequent one focuses on the impact the scholar has had on his or her field. The entry concludes with a list of the scholar’s major publications, and with a short bibliography of the relevant reference works. There are mostly six categories for these biographical entries, but some authors have collapsed one or two for practical reasons. The entries on genres and terms pursue more of a chronological perspective, but the emphasis here rests, just as in the category of topics, on the internationality of research. Contributors were strongly encouraged to consider not only secondary literature published in English, but to take into account all (!) relevant material, whether in Spanish, French, Italian, German, Dutch, Swedish, etc. Everyone has linguistic limitations, of course, but I believe that the contributors have made good to excellent attempts to be as inclusive as possible. After all, Medieval Studies are an interdisciplinary discipline by default, and there is truly an international community of Medievalists, many of whom I have had the pleasure of getting involved in this Handbook. Having said all that, I have only left the pleasant task of expressing my great gratitude to many different individuals involved in this massive project. Without the numerous contributors this project would never have been possible, of course, but I am particularly thankful for the consistently high caliber of their work. I am very thankful to the University of Arizona Alumni Foundation for giving me a small grant to support me in my endeavors. I am grateful to my research assistant, Courtney Johnson, University of Arizona, for her help in the last stages, and I must also extend my thanks to the editorial staff at Walter de Gruyter in Berlin, especially Christine Henschel and Markus Polzer. Johanna Kershaw, Oriel College, Oxford University, provided excellent

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translations of some of the articles. My greatest gratitude, however, goes to Heiko Hartmann, erstwhile editorial director at de Gruyter, who had first conceived of this plan and approached me several years ago, proposing that I assume this daunting task. I hope that the present result will meet at least most of the expectations and more or less serve the needs of our discipline outlined above. Despite all my trepidations regarding the feasibility of editing such a massive reference work, I am firmly convinced of its usefulness and of the importance in charting a field that has grown so vigorously from the late 18th century to the early 21st century, that is, today. The fact that such a reference work still can be published by a major academic press indicates clearly what I indicated at the beginning and what I will continue to examine in the introductory survey article. Despite many challenges of linguistic, institutional, administrative, financial, and even political nature, Medieval Studies are doing very well both in the academy and outside, and they continue to provide a major framework of learning and a source of inspiration for anyone interested in Western civilization and the related cultures. Of course, we would not be what we are today without the Middle Ages, and any modern university that claims to live up to minimal standards of current academics, especially in the Humanities, will have to acknowledge first and above all the fundamental significance of Medieval Studies both for teaching and research. Hence I would like to salute my own academic home, The University of Arizona, for providing me with some financial support and free time, including a one-semester sabbatical, to accomplish the goal of preparing such an extensive reference work. However, I need to emphasize as well that I basically worked without any staff and only very little supplemental financial support. Fortunately, many colleagues who contributed to this project were so gracious to alert me to problems or to provide additional information, but the ultimate responsibility for the entire Handbook rests on me, of course. If the long-term editing process has taught me anything, it is the absolute need to work in an interdisciplinary fashion in Medieval Studies. In this sense, as I believe, this field sets a standard for many other disciplines. Almost ironically, Medieval Studies have much to offer for the future of the academy.8 Presentism, as Kathleen Biddick called this phenomenon, deeply

8 I would like to express my gratitude to Pieters Maennerts (Research Foundation–Flanders / Katholieke Universiteit Leuven), for valuable last minute input. My thanks also go out to many other colleagues whose names are mentioned in the final footnote to my “Survey of Fundamental Reference Works in Medieval Studies” article.

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impacts all our research of the Middle Ages. Jaume Aurell and Francisco Crosas offer the following observation: “Presentism dominates over preterism, its opposite, in our relations with the medieval period, because we are capable of identifying the Middle Ages more as a mirror than as a mirage. Presentism brings us closer to the period studied, no matter how distant it may be, but it undoubtedly also has the possibly perverse effect of anachronistically applying the parameters of present culture in analysing it.”9 Of course, we have all vested interests, and our modern concerns in a way always direct and influence our investigation of the past. Nevertheless, Medieval Studies represent truly interdisciplinary approaches and have demonstrated over decades and centuries the degree to which sound philological, historical, art-historical, socio-economic and other research methods can yield highly significant and trustworthy results. The present Handbook strives to provide a comprehensive overview of this long-term struggle, and as much as we are dwarfs standing on the shoulder of giants, we hope one day to offer the necessary support for future generations to look further and deeper than we have been able to do today. Finally, I have tried to be as comprehensive as possible in covering all the major topics, terms, genres, and figures relevant for our field. But the reader will certainly notice some lacunae, basically unavoidable and painful in the case of an encyclopedic reference work like this Handbook. But overall, I believe, most important topics are represented here, and if not, then there were painstaking and also difficult circumstances beyond my control.

9 Rewriting the Middle Ages, 11. See also Katheleen Biddick, The Shock of Medievalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 83; William H. Dray, “Some Varieties of Presentism,” id., On History and Philosophers of History, Philosophy of History and Culture, 2 (Leiden and New York: Brill, 1989), 164–89; Matthew Davidson, “Presentism and the Non-Present,” Philosophical Studies 113.1 (2003): 77–92; Craig Bourne, A Future for Presentism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006).

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Survey of Fundamental Reference Works in Medieval Studies Albrecht Classen1

We can only concur with Joseph R. Strayer’s assessment from 1982 that “Interest in the Middle Ages has grown tremendously in the last halfcentury” (ix), and we would have to add nothing but that this growth has amazingly proliferated since then, now more than a quarter of a century later. This growth has occurred both in quantitative and also in qualitative terms, considering the impressive extent of topics covered by medievalists today, as richly documented by major and minor conferences, symposia, and workshops all over the world, such as at the Medieval Institute of Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, or at the University of Leeds, the University of Cologne, the Centro di Studi sull’alto medioevo of Spoleto, etc. The sheer output of academic and non-academic books on the Middle Ages is truly staggering, and the range of topics dealt with seems almost endless, whether we think of political history, literary history, history of fashion, architecture, music, history of technology, everyday life, religion, philosophy, the relationship between man and animals or man and nature, travel, transportation, communication, the experience of death, sickness, birth, love, marriage, money, spirituality, or heresy. Whereas, in previous decades, scholarship tended to focus on Western Europe primarily, today we have learned to recognize the tremendous influence from many different cultures and the impact of the contacts between the Christian and the Muslim world, not to forget the vast and deeply learned Jewish culture within the heartland of medieval Europe. As Strayer emphasizes, “it has become impossible to ignore the Byzantine, Jewish, and Muslim contributions. They were the sources from which Western Europe drew its material and intellectual luxuries – silks and spices, algebra and astronomy – and even an undergraduate finds 1 In deliberate contrast to all the entries in this Handbook of Medieval Studies, this introduction always provides the full bibliographical information, which explains the appearance of a regular apparatus with footnotes in the traditional format.

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himself confronted by references to the scholars and techniques of these civilizations.”2 Whether the chronological demarcation of the Middle Ages still should be, for its beginning phase, at ca. 500 and, for its waning, or autumn, to borrow Johan Huizinga’s term, around 1500 C.E., respectively, might be questioned today. After all, we have learned even more than had former generations of scholars to recognize the important continuation of countless traditions from the world of antiquity to the early Middle Ages, and also from the 15th century to the world of the Reformation and the Renaissance, if not beyond. But this is a matter of recent explorations once again and should not necessarily concern a Handbook of Medieval Studies that is trying to take stock of what we know about that period today from various perspectives. Nevertheless, this should be kept in mind for many of the entries in this Handbook because literary, philosophical, economic, artistic, and religious traditions continued certainly far beyond the somewhat artificial milestone of 1500, and indeed throughout the entire Ancien Régime until 1789 (in France) or 1917 (in Russia), such as in the case of the Mirror of Princes, a highly popular didactic genre instructing rulers about how to govern and how to live an honorable, virtuous life that continued to be written and to be published far into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The enormous quantity of facts and data determining that past world is so huge, indeed, that only an encyclopedia might really accomplish the task of summarizing all relevant information, for individual scholars can no longer hope to deal with the entire universe of the medieval world all by themselves. But facts alone do not tell the whole story, and they can be rather deceiving in that we have learned just too many times how much so-called “facts” were primarily the product of imagination, wishful thinking, or simply of an ideological program. Moreover, scholars have always been victim to the selective nature of the surviving evidence, regularly produced by the winners of history, the dominant class or social group, and many times by male scribes and artists to the disadvantage of their female counterparts or minority groups within their society. The number of pertinent chronicles is legion, and they are what they are, that is, attempts by individuals to come to terms with their own past as they perceived it, some injecting a strong dose of subjectivity, others striving for as much objectivity as possible. Chronicles

2 Dictionary of the Middle Ages, ed. Joseph R. Strayer, vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1982), ix. It consists of 13 vols., the last vol. and the index having appeared in 1989. An important supplement volume followed in 2004, see below.

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are texts in the first case, and hence subject to some of the same limitations as many literary texts.3 The only reasonable approach to Medieval Studies can be, to state the obvious, a critical one, informed both by traditional and contemporary theoretical concepts, methodologies, and interpretive tools. We have to be critical with regard to the sources, to the proper evaluation, and to our full understanding of their meaning, an approach that already characterized the high point of the Middle Ages when rationality entered the philosophical discourse during the 12th century.4 This critical approach, however, has ever been subject to ideological influences, interpretations, and even subjective interests/agendas. Schools of thought have regularly formed and dominated intellectual life. Academia is not an institution free of value systems and programmatic principles. Of course, here I am preaching to the converted, but all this still needs to be observed and reviewed, nevertheless. Medieval libraries are filled with falsifications, and individuals and political parties even then tried their hardest to undermine their opponents’ position, esteem, authority, and power, or simply to hold on to their own property, whether properly acquired or ill secured.5 Poets competed against each other, and so did artists and composers. Scholars, theologians, medical doctors, teachers, and architects argued and polemicized hard and bitterly, which also determined the sources we have left about and from them. Our modern attempts to gain some kind of understanding requires a careful balancing of how we evaluate the documents, always keeping in mind that they represent subjective perspectives.6

3 Graeme Dunphy is currently editing a comprehensive encyclopedia on this genre, Encyclopedia of the Medieval Chronicle (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming). 4 Edward Grant, Good and Reason in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 5 Robert F. Berkhofer III, Day of Reckoning: Power and Accountability in Medieval France. The Middle Ages Series (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Fälschungen im Mittelalter: Internationaler Kongress der Monumenta Germaniae Historica, München, 16.–19. September 1986, Schriften der Monumenta Germaniae Historica, 33 (Hanover: Hahn’sche Buchhandlung, 1988–1990). 6 A great example for the excellent results that we can achieve if we consider as many different voices within one discourse, especially in the field of religious competitions since late antiquity when the bitter conflicts among Christians, Jews, and Muslims really began, now proves to be Alexandra Cuffel’s superior and well researched Gendering Disgust in Medieval Religious Polemic (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), see my review in Mediaevistik, forthcoming.

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Again, all that would not need to be stated here once again, yet it sheds important light on the ever-present necessity to evaluate where we stand today vis-à-vis the sources and the various interpretations. Neither a lexicon nor a dictionary, let alone an encyclopedia with its much more ambitious scope, normally reflects such problems. Only occasionally do we observe more specific attempts to outline the history of research, although that history informs us as much about the past as the actual sources and documents. Considering the absolutely overwhelming amount of information available today about almost any aspect of medieval life in material and intellectual/ spiritual terms, we need both an encyclopedic approach and a critical approach. The primary purpose of this Handbook of Medieval Studies, which I will illuminate in greater detail below, consists of offering such critical overviews, which will lay the foundations for future research considering that the readers will be able to learn of the major stepping stones in each respective field, avoiding the often observable dilemma of reinventing the wheel when we investigate specific aspects in medieval history, language, culture, literature, technology, economics, and agriculture. To aim for the goal of grasping the whole medieval universe, that is, to try to be a ‘Renaissance man,’ an ‘uomo universale,’ with regard to the Middle Ages, would amount to hubris in light of some 1000 years of medieval history, more than three dozen of distinctly spoken languages, and a huge geographical expanse and cultural and ethnic diversity determining medieval Europe. Just as in so many other fields of academic investigations, the more we know today about the medieval world, the more we have also to realize how limited this very knowledge truly is because it has grown almost exponentially, both horizontally and vertically over the last two hundred years.7 Interdisciplinarity proves to be a conditio sine qua non for modern Medieval Studies, whether we deal with the experience of love, death, friendship, fear, God, or natural disasters and catastrophes. Violence, hatred, contempt or fear of the other, persecutions of minorities, or wars against enemies often find their explanations in fundamental concepts common among all people. 7 Surprisingly, just such an attempt was made by Karl Bertau, Schrift–Macht–Heiligkeit in den Literaturen des jüdisch-christlich-muslimischen Mittelalters, ed. Sonja Glauch (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2005); for some critical comments, see my review in Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch 42, 1 (2007): 155–59. Basically, Bertau draws most of his information from the Lexikon des Mittelalters and tries to establish global intercultural links without a thorough grounding in most of the cultures, languages, and documents dealt with. Hence, the number of problems of his approach is legion, unfortunately.

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Since the early Middle Ages, for instance, if not considerably earlier, the representatives of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam fought against each other drawing from deep-seated and commonly shared feelings of disgust of bodily effluents, especially blood and the excrements. The polemics launched against each other were surprisingly similar and indicate that Christians knew fairly well what Jewish thinkers argued, and vice versa, and the same applies to the Muslims and their religious counterparts.8 Simply put, the more complex the image that we can sketch of the medieval world or parts of it becomes, the more accurate it actually emerges, even though the vast diversity of aspects pertaining to any of those huge topics threatens to make us not to see the forest for just too many trees. Strayer and his colleagues aimed at North American high school and college students, and scholars, which represents a considerable challenge concerning how to design the individual articles, offering solid and in-depth information, yet without overpowering the individual readers who obviously would have very different backgrounds, interests, and abilities. Strayer noted, however, that the Dictionary would provide “definitions and explanations of medieval terms and ideas that arise in their reading. Those at the university level will find further information on the people, events, and concepts of the Middle Ages. Finally, there is the specialist, and every medievalist is a student throughout his career, for the deeper digs, the wider the gaps. By combining previously fragmented areas of Medieval Studies, the Dictionary enables the scholars and others to survey the field quickly, offering them a singular means of coordinating the various branches of medieval scholarship into an accessible and coherent whole” (x). The problems with this three-pronged approach are self-evident and have often been pointed out by critics who find this Dictionary at times too superficial and simplistic, and particularly too much focused on the English Midlands, Normandy, or the Île de France, neglecting, above all, social-historical, mental-historical, and spiritual-religious aspects, as William Chester Jordan commented in the “Preface” to a supplement volume from 2004 edited by himself.9 This additional volume laudably tries to address many of 8 See the excellent study by Alexandra Cuffel, Gendering Disgust in Medieval Religious Polemic. The author impressively commands all the relevant languages and displays an amazing knowledge of the specific sources in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and Arabic, not to mention various medieval vernacular languages. Cf. now John Sewell, ‘The Son Rebelled’, Laughter in the Middle Ages, ed. Albrecht Classen, forthcoming. 9 Dictionary of the Middle Ages: Supplement, 1, ed. William Chester Jordan (New York, Detroit, San Diego, et al.: Thomson Gale, 2004), vii.

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the concerns that had been voiced regarding the original conceptual design of the Dictionary, adding many new perspectives, themes, topics, and subject matters relevant for the Middle Ages that have surfaced in the scholarly investigations during the last decades and continued to evolve in the international academic discourse as significant for our full comprehension of that past world. Most noteworthy might be the articles on “Medievalism” and on “race,” which suggest some new approaches scholarship has pursued in the recent decades. After all, our field is in constant flux, reflecting new methodologies, concepts, theoretical approaches, and perceptions. In fact, this supplement volume impressively indicates the vibrancy and innovative character of Medieval Studies at large, whether we think of minority groups, poverty, intra-religious exchanges, the history of mentality, the history of everyday life, or the history of emotions. But despite all those attempts to internationalize and to open up our field to the widest possible range of research topics, we continue to be severely hampered by linguistic challenges, a lack of communication, and access to the primary sources, not to mention the disciplinary boundaries that limit us excessively to very narrow and specific research agendas, as if medieval poets or chroniclers, for instance, had pursued a similarly narrow viewpoint as we do today. To put it bluntly, taking into account an extreme situation, medieval scholarship published in the Far East, whether China, Japan, or Korea, normally remains inaccessible to European scholars, and vice versa. But we do not have to go so far as to realize how limited we all are because most medievalists outside of the following areas are not particularly, or not at all, versed in Scandinavian, Dutch, Finnish, Hungarian, or Gaelic, to mention just a few languages. Major contributions to Medieval Studies have been produced by Russian or Polish colleagues, but there does not seem to be a good linguistic bridge to Western languages, unless we can rely on a translation into any of the major languages spoken in the West (and always the other way around as well). Sadly, this linguistic limitation also emerges even within Western Europe, if we think of the many Anglophone, Francophone, or Iberophone scholars who cannot read German, Danish, Flemish, Czech, or even Italian, and vice versa. And there are many more languages that we ought to understand in order to do justice to the actual needs and demands of our academic discipline. I like to think that Latin continues to be a lingua franca, at least among the experts, though we do not speak it anymore, except, perhaps, in the Vatican, among Latin teachers, and Neo-Latin scholars. At least a certain degree of reading ability common among us all still might be the norm, irrespective

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of the specialized field within Medieval Studies. By the same token, what languages were known among medieval and early-modern poets? Most of them could probably not understand more than one or two languages other than their mother tongue, although exceptions must also have existed, particularly among poets, travelers, and artists. After all, as we increasingly begin to fathom, there was, for example, a steady stream of Indian, Persian, and Arabic literature into medieval Europe, as a considerable corpus of late-medieval verse or prose narratives indicates (e.g., Barlaam and Josaphat).10 Many translators were involved, however, even then, which ultimately made the international transfer of literary themes and motifs possible, and this probably on a much broader basis than has been previously assumed, though many details still escape us because Western medievalists do not know the complimentary material produced in the east, and vice versa. How could we expect, for instance, a 15th-century scholar working on Dutch or Slavic literature to know anything about Persian or Indian literature transmitted through many different channels and languages? In other words, there remains much work to be done, though on a more comparative and interdisciplinary level than ever before. And, to return to the issue of Latin, we must strive to reinvigorate the modern study of this lingua franca commonly used in the Middle Ages by the political elite, the Church, and the administration. Otherwise, despite the best efforts at making medieval texts available to modern readers through translations, the access to the vast depository of medieval documents will be in danger.11 The editors of the famous German Lexikon des Mittelalters, with the first fascicle of the first volume having appeared in 1977, the ninth, and last volume in 1998, aimed specifically at the scholar and intend to provide detailed and in-depth information about history, culture, and everyday life (‘lifestyles’ in their words) of the entire medieval world on the basis of written

10 Albrecht Classen, “Kulturelle und religiöse Kontakte zwischen dem christlichen Europa und dem buddhistischen Indien während des Mittelalters: Rudolfs von Ems’ Barlaam und Josaphat im europäischen Kontext,” Fabula 41, 3/4 (2000): 203–28. See also Sabine Obermaier, Das Fabelbuch als Rahmenerzählung: Intertextualität und Intratextualität als Wege zur Interpretation des Buchs der Beispiele der alten Weisen Antons von Pforr, Beihefte zum Euphorion, 48 (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2004). 11 Paul Freedman, “Medieval Studies,” Dictionary of the Middle Ages. Supplement 1, ed. William Chester Jordan (New York, Detroit, et al.: Thomson Learning, 2004), 383–89; especially 388.

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documents and visual objects.12 They realized, of course, as many other editors before them, that the spectrum of our current understanding of the Middle Ages has expanded so much that no individual scholar would be in a position any longer to gain a more or less complete overview and understanding of that world and culture. Most impressively, the Lexikon offers erudite articles about a seemingly inexhaustible range of topics, themes, ideas, people, works, and objects from the Middle Ages.13 But this Lexikon also intends to reach out to a general readership, which necessarily forced a (too) clean separation of the actual presentation of the topic covered in each entry and the relevant research literature (X).14 Moreover, the editors were faced with the difficult decision: how to limit the range of aspects because there might not be an end in sight. Consequently, they decided not to exclude any particular area, “da das der Überzeugung, ein Gesamtbild der mittelalterlichen Epoche könne nur unter Einschluß aller uns überlieferten Erscheinungsformen mittelalterlichen Lebens vermittelt werden, widersprochen hätte” (XI; because this would have contradicted the conviction that a comprehensive picture of the medieval period could be conveyed only if all forms of medieval life that have survived until today would be included). This challenge, however, could not be met for the countless numbers of medieval art works, which are therefore dealt with more collectively in a type of topography of art (“Kunsttopographie”). Mindful of these complex parameters, the Lexikon deliberately takes into account also those worlds and cultures located at the margin of the European Latin world, including the Byzantine Empire, the Arabic-Islamic kingdoms, and the Ottoman Empire. Moreover, the editors underscore that the history of medieval Jewry represents an integral aspect of medieval European history at large, irrespective of, or rather also because of, countless pogroms, persecutions, and expulsions (XI), that sometimes blind us to the intensive cohabitation and collaboration of both religious groups in everyday-life situations,

12 Lexikon des Mittelalters, 9 vols. (Munich and Zurich: Artemis Verlag, 1980–1998), a separate volume with the index appeared in 1999. By now it already seems high time to produce an updated, revised, and expanded edition because Medieval Studies make such rapid progress. 13 However, there are inexplicable gaps, such as the absence of a lemma on the Inquisition or on chess. 14 When one resorts to the digital version of the Lexikon, available on a CD-ROM, the bibliography appears in a separate window only after one has clicked on the respective button, which visually distances the text even further from the critical apparatus.

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in scholarship, and medicine. Insofar as many medieval Europeans sought contacts with distant lands, including Mongolia, China, the Philippines, and India, relevant entries have been added to this Lexikon. As to the chronological framework, the editors defined as their historical period the time between 300 and 1500 C.E., meaning that late antiquity and then also the period until the end of the 15th century are considered here as well. The editors do not deny that the Middle Ages continued to hold sway well after 1500, actually extending even to the 18th century in some specific areas, but the turn from the 15th to the 16th century actually represents a decisive turning point in history that would allow us to determine the end of the Middle Ages from many viewpoints (XII). The cultural-historical lexicon for the Nordic Middle Ages, Kulturhistorisk Leksikon for Nordisk Middelalder fra vikingetid til reformationstid (CulturalHistorical Lexicon for the Nordic Middle Ages, from the Time of the Vikings to the Age of the Protestant Reformation), first published between 1956 and 1978, with a second (identical) edition in 1980, also needs to be considered here as a major reference work.15 Each article provides in-depth information about a wide range of topics, including religion, law, agriculture, crafts, literature, social conditions, architecture, painting, sculpture, nutrition, cooking, etc., accompanied by excellent bibliographies. The editors have made every effort to meet their own theoretical goal of truly addressing cultural history in the Middle Ages, whether the respective articles deal with “Arbeidsfest” (workers’ holidays), “Bergsprivilegier” (mining privileges), “Biskop” (Bishop), or “Vindue” (window), “Vinhandel” (wine trade), or literary topics such as Volsunga saga. There are no lemmata on historical persons/characters, however. Appropriate for the targeted audiences, the articles are written in Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian. It would have been helpful, however, if at least the entry titles had been translated into English or German. Those unfamiliar with any of the Scandinavian languages, can now turn to a newer one-volume encyclopedia dealing with that world, Medieval Scandinavia, ed. by Phillip Pulsiano, who extended the time frame a bit further into the past, beginning roughly with the Migration Period, but ending likewise with the time of the Protestant Reformation. The range of themes is considerably broader, at least far beyond ‘cultural history’ per se, and includes such aspects as “Cosmography,” “Eddic Poetry,” “Graves,”

15 Kulturhistorisk Leksikon for nordisk Middelalder fra vikingetid til reformationstid, ed. by a whole gremium of scholars from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. 2nd ed. 20 vols., with one supplement vol. and one vol. for the register (1956–1978; Viborg, Denmark: Rosenkilde og Bagger, 1980–1982).

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“Homilies,” “Land Tenure and Inheritance,” “Outlawry,” “Reliquaries,” and “Saints’ Lives.” Although addressing a wider audience, each article is appropriately accompanied by a solid bibliography, avoiding the usual shortcoming of Anglophone publications to include only English titles for an English-reading group of users of this type of reference work.16 Slavic scholarship has also produced an excellent reference work for the Middle Ages, particularly the comprehensive Lexicon Antiquitatum Slavicarum: Summarium Historiae Cultus Humanitatis Slavorum, published in Polish.17 Scholars in neighboring countries have, of course, made many attempts to come to terms with the Middle Ages in their own areas, see, for example, A Handbook for Slavic Studies, ed. by Leonid Ivan Strakhovsky (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949), which is, however, not at all limited to the Middle Ages.18 See also Slovar’ srednevekovoi kul’tury, ed. Aron Akovlevich Gurevich; M. Andreev, Summa culturologiae. 2nd ed. (2003; Moscow: Rosspen, 2007); and Derzhava Riurikovichei: slaviane, Rus, Rossiia: entsiklopedicheskii slovar’ v shesti tomakh, ed. V(ladimir). V(olfovich). Boguslavskii, 6 vols. (Tula: Russkii leksikon, 1994–).19 Similarly as the Nordic cultural history, Kulturhistorisk Leksikon for Nordisk Middelalder fra vikingetid til reformationstid, especially in the Lexicon Antiquitatum Slavicarum the following topics are covered: culture, social and economic conditions, literature, linguistics, archeology, anthropology, art, religion, politics, and historical events of the Slavic peoples from their origin to the end of the 12th century. The contributors do not only deal with the cultures

16 Medieval Scandinavia: An Encyclopedia, ed. Phillip Pulsiano, co-ed. Kirsten Wolf (New York and London: Garland, 1993). 17 Słownik starorytno ´sci słowianskich: ´ Encyklopedyczny zarys kultury Słowian od czasów najdawniejszych, ed. Władysław Kowalenko, Gerard Labuda, and Tadeusz Lehr-Spławi nski ´ (with changing editors), 8 vols. (vol. 8 ed. by Antoni G‰siorowski, Gerard Labuda, and Andrzej We˛ dzki), Institutum Scientiae Rerum Slavicarum Academiae Scientiarum Polonae (Wrocław, Warsaw, and Cracow: Zakład Narodowy imienia Ossolinskich-Wydawnictwo ´ Polskiej Akademii Nauk, 1961–1996). 18 See also Georgij Petrovic Fedotov, The Middle Ages: The 13th to the 15th Centuries, ed. John Meyendorff, The Russian Religious Mind, 2 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966). 19 Cf. Kirilo-metodievska entsiklopediia v tri toma, ed. Boniu Angelov, Petur Nikolov Dinekov, Dimitur Simeonov Angelov, and Liliana Grasheva, 4. vols. (Sofiia: Izd-vo na Bulgarska akademiia na naukite, 1985–2003); Sima M Cirkovic, Leksikon srpskog srednjeg veka = The Lexicon of Serbian Middle Ages (Beograd: Knowledge, 1999). I have not been able to examine all these reference works through autopsy.

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and histories of the Slavs, but also with those of peoples in contact or in neighborhood with them. Moreover, we find countless entries on locations, figures, objects, rituals, performances, texts, art works, music instruments, epitaphs and inscriptions, foodstuff, countries, tribes, territories, and archeological finds. Occasionally there are also larger topics covered, such as monastic movements, charters, the church, feudalism, trade (including with slaves), and many others. The initial goal had been to publish two volumes only, which determined the usual length of entries, but since the Lexicon then grew to eight volumes, the articles accordingly increasingly gained in length and depth. They are accompanied by most useful bibliographies. There are numerous illustrations, tables, and maps. Other attempts to update this Slavic Lexicon and to produce an equivalent in German, for instance, failed, see, for example, Enzyklopädie zur Frühgeschichte Europas, ed. Joachim Herrmann and Gerard Labuda (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1980), of which only a sample fascicle appeared. See also Enzyklopädie zur Geschichte des östlichen Europas (6.–13. Jahrhundert), ed. Christian Lübke and Andrzej Wêdzki (Greifswald: n.p., 1998; only the letter ‘A’ was covered).20 But we have now Siegfried Tornow’s Was ist Osteuropa? Handbuch der osteuropäischen Text- und Sozialgeschichte von der Spätantike bis zum Nationalstaat. Slavistische Studienbücher, Neue Folge, 16 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2005). The author deals with the Slavic world from prehistory to the present, focuses on the languages in Eastern Europe, the expanding influence of Christian missionaries, the emergence of sacred languages and scripts, education and culture, and the various text genres used in Eastern Europe. Above all, he covers the history of Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages, in the age of Humanism, and the Protestant Reformation, in the Baroque, Enlightenment, the 19th, and in the 20th century. The extensive and international bibliography provides an excellent research tool. A most important reference work of recent date proves to be Wieser Enzyklopädie des europäischen Ostens, ed. Günther Hödl and Lojze Wieser, together with Feliks J. Bister et al. (Klagenfurt: Wieser, 1999–); vol. 18: Selbstbild und Fremdbilder der Völker des europäischen Ostens (Image of Self and Images of Foreigners by the Peoples in the European East), ed. Karl Kaser and Martin Prochazka, section 3: Dokumente-Abteilung (Klagenfurt: Wieser, 2006). See also vol. 10: Lexikon der Sprachen des europäischen Ostens, ed. Milosˇ Okuka with Gerald Krenn (Klagenfurt: Wieser, 2002). I have not been able to autopsy this new reference work, but it promises to emerge as a 20 See also Maciej Gotwski, Komizm w polskiej sztuce gotyckiej (Warsaw: Panstwowe ´ Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1973).

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most significant data base for all studies focused on Eastern Europe in many different fields, from the Middle Ages until today.21 Although the major historical lexicon Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe does not limit itself at all to the Middle Ages, it still contains a wealth of relevant articles, whether we turn to the topic “Bauer” (farmer), “Bildung” (education), “Christentum” (Christianity), “Monarchie” (monarchy), “Natur” (Natur), or “Politik” (politics).22 If we use the entry for “Zivilisation, Kultur” (civilization, culture) as an example, we can quickly gain an idea how this monumental reference work is structured and where its true value lies, and this also for Medieval Studies. The author of this article, Jörg Fisch, begins with a global discussion of culture, then turns to ancient Greece, Rome, and the Middle Ages, whereas the term ‘civilization’ was unknown in those times. Instead, it emerged, first exclusively in its Latin form, only in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, that is, in the wake of Humanism, and then was translated into the various vernaculars. Subsequently, Fisch takes his readers to the history of culture in the following centuries.23 Although the subtitle of this huge lexicon focuses on “political-social” language in Germany, the contributors regularly take all of European intellectual history into view, which is particularly prevalent in the period of the Middle Ages, and so is regularly covered here as well. In this context we need to refer to another fundamental reference work that is unfortunately much too little known outside of the Germanophone world despite its extraordinary scholarly value: the Handwörterbuch zur deutschen Rechtsgeschichte (Handbook of the German Legal History). Initiated by the famous Germanist Wolfgang Stammler in 1960, this Handbook was edited by him and the legal historians Adalbert Erler and Ekkehard Kaufmann until Stammler’s death in 1965. Vol. 5, edited by Erler (deceased), Kaufmann, Dieter Werkmüller, and Ruth Schmidt-Wiegand, appeared in 1998. Although the emphasis rests on the Germanic aspects of legal history, particularly Roman Law and most neighboring laws have also been consulted. The historical time frame is not at all limited to the Middle Ages, in fact it extends down to the late 20th century, but medievalists will still be 21 I would like to thank Jerzy Strzelczyk, Instytut Historii, Uniwersytet im. Adama Mickiewicza, Poznan, ´ Poland, for his help in identifying and understanding these important publications. 22 Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, ed. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck, 8 vols. (Stuttgart: E. Klett, 1972–1999). 23 Jörg Fisch, “Zivilisation, Kultur,” Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, vol. 7, 1992, 679–774.

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exceedingly well served by this reference work. Each article is composed by an individual contributor, each followed by a solid bibliography.24 A second, completely revised edition is currently in progress, ed. by Albrecht Cordes, Heiner Lück, and Dieter Werkmüller (2004–). The most erudite and comprehensive reference work for medieval German literature proves to be the famous Verfasserlexikon, also founded and published by Wolfgang Stammler,25 and completely revised and expanded in the second edition under the leadership of Kurt Ruh, together with Gundolf Keil, Werner Schröder, Burghart Wachinger, and Franz Josef Worstbrock. Here the complete corpus of texts written by authors in the German Middle Ages, along with a considerable selection of authors writing in Latin, is dealt with most comprehensively. Stammler had already set the tone when he insisted on incorporating also authors of historical, philosophical, theological, legal, medical, and scientific texts and treatises.26 The editors additionally included writers from antiquity and the Middle Ages who exerted considerable influence on German literature, such as Aristotle, Augustine, Bernard of Clairvaux, Boethius, Bonaventura, etc. Similarly, Middle Dutch authors, insofar as their impact was noticeable in medieval German literature, were also included. The editors, closely following Stammler’s guidelines, tentatively drew a line at ca. 1480 for Latin literature when humanism developed more strongly, but the major historical date really serving as a milepost was the government of Emperor Maximilian I (1493–1519). Many text traditions, such as the late-medieval drama, continued well into the 16th century. The most important editorial decision for this Verfasserlexikon consists in the inclusion of the manuscript tradition with exact call numbers and references to the locations where the manuscripts are housed. Furthermore, we are informed about critical editions, interpretations, and bibliographical and historical studies pertinent for each topic, author, genre, text, etc. As in the case of virtually all encyclopedic enterprises, once a dictionary or lexicon has been completed, supplemented volumes become necessary, and this was the case with the Verfasserlexikon as well.27 There is no doubt that future ex24 Handwörterbuch zur deutschen Rechtsgeschichte, ed. Adalbert Erler and Ekkehard Kaufmann, co-founded by Wolfgang Stammler. Vol. 5 ed. Adalbert Erler (†), Ekkehard Kaufmann, and Dieter Werkmüller, with the philological assistance of Ruth Schmidt-Wiegand, 5 vols. (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1971–1998). 25 Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters: Verfasserlexikon, ed. Wolfgang Stammler, 5 vols. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1933–1955). 26 Vol. 1, “Vorrede,” V–VII; here V. 27 See also the supplement to the Dictionary of the Middle Ages, cf. above.

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pansions of the general scope of texts to be covered here, new discoveries, new critical editions, and interpretations, hence new perspectives and realizations will one day require a third edition.28 Medieval French literature is also treated rather comprehensively in the Dizionario critico della letteratura francese, ed. by Franco Simone, but this work comprises the entire history of French literature.29 Of more interest to the medievalist is the excellent volume on Le Moyen Age, edited by Robert Bossuat, Louis Pichard, and Guy Raynaud de Lage, in the Dictionnaire des lettres françaises/Le Moyen Age, substantially updated since the 1960s under the editorship of Geneviève Hasenohr and Michel Zink.30 It mirrors, in many ways, though still limited by size, the Verfasserlexikon; it also offers qualified articles on related subjects, such as “Courtoisie,” “Musique au Moyen Âge,” or “Troubadours,” and many more. See also Dictionnaire des littératures de langue française, ed. Jean-Pierre Beaumarchais, Daniel Couty, and Alain Rey, 3 vols. (Paris: Bordas, 1984). The same constraints apply to the Dizionario enciclopedico della letteratura italiana,31 containing, overall, good entries, along with bibliographies. In fact, there is a plethora of similar dictionaries for Spanish, English, or Portuguese, for instance, but I believe that in terms of scholarly breadth, depth, and fundamental research presented, not to for-

28 Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters: Verfasserlexikon, 2nd, completely new ed. by Kurt Ruh, together with Gundolf Keil, Werner Schröder, Burghart Wachinger, and Franz Josef Worstbrock, 10 vols. (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1977–1996; supplement fascicles 1–5 as vol. 11: 2000–2004; Handschriftenregister (Register of Manuscripts), ed. Christine Stöllinger-Löser, vol. 12: 2006; Register der Drucke. Sonstige Textzeugen, Initien: vol. 13: 2007). 29 Dizionario critico della letteratura francese, ed. Franco Simone, 2 vols. (Turin: Unione Tipografico-Editrice, 1972); see also The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French, ed. Peter France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). 30 Dictionnaire des lettres françaises, ed. Georges Grente. Ed. entièrement rev. et mise à jour sous la direction de Geneviève Hasenohr et Michel Zink (1951; Paris: Fayard 1992). The volume on Le Moyen Age appeared in 1964. See also the useful Dictionnaire du Moyen Âge, ed. Claude Gauvard, Alain de Libera, and Michel Zink, Série “Quadrige” 386 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2002). It contains 1790 truly relevant entries on concepts and practices/customs such as “intuition,” “cénobitisme,” “courtoisie,” “cuisine,” “dot,” “encyclopédisme,” “lois somptuaires,” “pauvreté,” “peinture,” “regalia”, etc., as well as on people, places, movements, and events in Europe and the Middle East in the fields of history, literature, art history, law, philosophy, etc. I would like to express my gratitude to Nadia Margolis, Mount Holyoke, for pointing out this dictionary to me. 31 Dizionario enciclopedico della letteratura italiana, ed. Giuseppe Petronio, 6 vols. (Bari: Gius. Laterza & Figli; Rome: Unione Editoriale, 1966–1970).

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get the clarity of presentation, the Verfasserlexikon certainly serves as an ideal model for the study of any other language and culture in medieval Europe.32 A major attempt to address this desideratum was made by Hans Robert Jauss and Erich Köhler when they launched the book series “Grundriss der romanischen Literatur des Mittelalters” in 1972, which is incomplete until today. It was supposed to replace the book series “Grundriss der romanischen Literatur des Mittelalters,” ed. by Gustav Gröber (Berlin and Leipzig: Walter de Gruyter, 1897–1906), and has, indeed, accomplished much, though the project has been riddled by many technical problems that make it rather cumbersome and difficult to utilize it easily and efficiently. Vol. 1, Généralités, ed. by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1972), outlines the overarching plan. Following this overview, vol. 2 covers lyrical genres; vol. 3: the epic romances; vol. 4: courtly romances; vol. 5: short verse narratives; vol. 6: didactic, allegorical, and satirical literature; vol. 7: the age of Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch; vol. 8: 14th- and 15th-century French literature; vol. 9: 14th- and 15th-century Spanish literature; vol. 10: 14th- and 15th-century Italian literature; vol. 11: historiographical literature from the origin to 1500; vol. 12: medieval theater; and vol. 13: a synthesis, chronology, and index. Each volume consists of individual articles composed by experts in the specific fields, writing in the various Romance languages. One of the most comprehensive reference works for the history of literature both on a global level, but then also, specifically, focusing on the Middle Ages, was the “Handbuch der Literaturwissenschaft,” ed. Oskar Walzel, the first volume of which focused on Die altgermanische Dichtung, by Andreas Heusler (Wildpark-Potsdam: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft Athenaion, 1926). Of course, the passing of time required the publication of a completely new handbook, which was edited by Klaus von See, beginning with a volume on Altorientalische Literatur by Wolfgang Röllig (Wiesbaden: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft, 1978). Von See edited the volume on Europäisches Frühmittelalter. Neues Handbuch der Literaturwissenschaft, 6 (1985), followed by Henning Krauss, who edited Europäisches Hochmittelalter (vol. 7, 1981), and by Willi Erzgräber, who edited Europäisches Spätmittelalter 32 There are, of course, massive biographical dictionaries for almost all European countries, see, for instance, Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, ed. Alberto M. Ghisalberti, 70 vols. (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana, 1960–2004), but they are not specifically geared for medievalists, though they are often also most helpful for them. For space limitations, I abstain from listing some of the major reference works; by the same token, I will not examine the many excellent dictionaries for medieval languages here.

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(vol. 8, 1978). The highly interdisciplinary character of these volumes deserves to be praised, and to elucidate it following I will outline briefly the topics covered in the last volume as an example: European literature in its political, social, and religious context (Willi Erzgräber); Dante and the Italian literature of his time (August Buck); late-medieval German epic narratives (Kurt Ruh); short verse narratives (Oskar Roth); English secular romances (Dieter Mehl); Langland, Gower, and Chaucer (Erzgräber); literature composed by representatives of the Teutonic Knights (Hans-Georg Richert); English saints’ legends (Theodor Wolpers); German lyric poetry (Alfred Karnein); medieval popular ballads in the Germanic context (Ernst Erich Metzner), French lyric poetry from Gauillaume de Machaut to Jean Marot (Klaus Heitmann); Middle English secular poetry (Wolpers); etc.33 But one of the most comprehensive, and still ongoing project focusing on world literature, including the European Middle Ages and Renaissance, must be mentioned as well, the “Dictionary of Literary Biography,” which began with a volume on The American Renaissance in New England, ed. Joel Myerson (Detroit, MI: Gale Research Company, 1978), and most recently issued a volume on Castilian Writers, 1200–1400, ed. George D. Greenia and Frank A. Domínguez (2008). Here each author and/or text finds philologically and critically sound treatment, beginning with a survey of the manuscript tradition, followed by a bibliography of the translation/s and edition/s, then by a full discussion of the content and/or significance of the author, and concluding with a list of references of secondary studies. Numerous illustrations of manuscripts, statues, paintings, etc. accompany the individual articles.34 Certainly a huge field of research, medieval Latin literature and its dissemination and reception throughout the subsequent centuries until today are remarkably well covered by Spazio letterario del medioevo.35 But the reader

33 There are, of course, many multi-volume literary histories in other languages, see, for a rather obscure example, Otto Maria Carpeaux, História da literatura ocidental, 8 vols. (Rio de Janeiro: O Cruzeiro, 1959–1966). 34 Another example would be: German Writers and Works of the High Middle Ages: 1170–1280, ed. James Hardin and Will Hasty, Dictionary of Literary Biography, 138 (Detroit, Washington, DC, and London: Gale Research, 1994). 35 Spazio letterario del medioevo, ed. Guglielmo Cavallo, Claudio Leonardi, Enrico Menestò, Piero Boitani, Mario Mancini, and Alberto Vàrvaro, 5 vols. (Rome: Salerno Editrice, 1992–1998). Vol. I covers the broad topic of text production; vol. II focuses on the dissemination of texts; vol. III deals with the reception of texts (history of reception); vol. IV is concerned with the modern perception of the Middle Ages from Humanism to Romanticism, Realism, and the modern

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faces the problem of little transparency insofar as s/he has to plough through a massive amount of information displayed in lengthy narratives that do not necessarily make it easy to identify and comprehend the crucial information. Nevertheless, the critical discussion of the specific authors, texts, and aspects in general is soundly based on the relevant research literature, coupled with solid references to the important manuscripts. Some of the major medieval authors have also been dealt with in encyclopedic fashion, such as Dante, see the Dante Encyclopedia, ed. Richard H. Lansing and Teodolinda Barolini (New York and London: Garland, 2000), or Geoffrey Chaucer (see All Things Chaucer: An Encyclopedia of Chaucer’s Works, ed. Shannon L. Rogers [Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood Press, 2007]). The world of King Arthur in its countless literary, artistic, and also cinematographic manifestations is impressively covered by The New Arthurian Encyclopedia, ed. Norris J. Lacy, Garland Reference Library of the Humanities, 931 (1986; New York and London: Garland, 1996). Francis G. Gentry, Winder McConnell, Ulrich Müller, and Werner Wunderlich edited a comparable reference work for the most important Middle High German epic poem, the Nibelungenlied, The Nibelungen Tradition: An Encyclopedia (New York and London: Routledge, 2002). Similar publications exist also for many other genres, topics, and writers, but for our purpose suffice this short list. The enormous interest in the Middle Ages among the academic and nonacademic audience in the modern world also finds expression in smaller, more pragmatic reference works, such as Joseph Dahmus’s Dictionary of

time, including film, theater, television, opera, and the arts. Vol. V contains an extensive chronological overview (with specific data), and a bibliography of medieval Latin literature using a chronological system, concluding with Pietro d’Abana (1250/57–1315/18). In many respects, most of the above mentioned reference works, such as the Literatur des deutschen Mittelalters: Verfasserlexikon, provide an important basis, combined with more recent primary and secondary literature. The bibliography is followed by an alphabetical index, an index of names and noteworthy topics, and index with passages cited, an index of manuscripts cited in the previous volumes, an index of the studies cited in the bibliographies following each entry, and an index of the bibliography itself. Overall, these 5 volumes (actually 6 because vol. 1 is divided into two) represent most important critical surveys and analyses. Unfortunately, because published in Italian, many international medievalists do not seem to be familiar with it, and many non-Italian libraries do not own a copy. World-wide only sixty-six research libraries currently hold a copy. I would like to thank Peter Dinzelbacher for pointing out this major reference work to me.

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Medieval Civilization,36 which contents itself with offering only short explanations of terms, names, places, concepts, objects, and texts. There is no bibliography anywhere, not even in a cumulative list that might have been included at the end of the volume. But Dahmus intended his work really as a dictionary, hence there would be no need for a scholarly apparatus because of the pragmatic purpose of this reference work. The two-volume Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages, edited by André Vauchez in conjunction with Barrie Dobson and Michael Lapidge (2000),37 represents a considerable improvement, both in scope and depth, particularly with regard to the brief bibliographies that are added to each entry. These are limited to about five to eight titles, though they often also contain only one to two references. The editors are fully aware of the tremendous progress Medieval Studies have witnessed, as illustrated by the outstanding International Medieval Bibliography and Medioevo Latino. Moreover, as they hasten to add, “This rapid growth is accompanied by a renewal of methods and approaches that has affected every medieval discipline, from history and art history to archaeology, philosophy and musicology” (vii). Their purpose, therefore, was “to harvest and publish the fruits of this rich growth, to which most of the contributors to the Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages have themselves contributed” (ibid.). True to the ideals of good encyclopedists, André Vauchez and his colleagues made every possible effort to address also the culture and history of those people who did not subscribe to Christianity, that is, Jews, Muslims, and “pagan” people, including Lithuanians, Lapps, Cumans, and Mongols (ibid.). Nevertheless, the focus still rests on the Christian world of medieval Europe, though this extends for them from Iceland and Vinland in modernday Canada to Ethiopia and Central Asia. This encyclopedia is primarily driven by the goal “to help Europeans of the third millennium identify with an inheritance that still marks their way of life and some of whose aspects still charm them, but whose meaning escapes them. With this intention, we have deliberately given a privileged place to philosophy, theology, spirituality, liturgy and iconography” (ibid.). Encyclopedias focused on the Middle Ages, but considerably smaller in scope include, for instance, the Encyclopedia of the Medieval World, ed. by 36 Joseph Dahmus, Dictionary of Medieval Civilization (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company; London: Collier Macmillan Publisher, 1984). See also the quite useful publication by Madeleine Pelner Cosman, Medieval Wordbook (New York: Facts On File, 1996). 37 Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages, edited by André Vauchez in conjunction with Barrie Dobson and Michael Lapidge (Paris: Editions du Cerf; Cambridge: James Clarke & Co.; Rome: Città Nuova, 2000).

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Edward D. English (2005),38 which also offers some further readings for each article, but again severely limits the number of titles and focuses, instead, simply on the factual information without problematizing anything. A special perspective finds most welcome consideration in the encyclopedia on women in the Middle Ages, attempting to encompass non-Western cultures (China, Japan, India, even some Aztec) in addition to the more familiar Western European topics – these too with some new approaches – edited by Katharina M. Wilson and Nadia Margolis, and also, though narrower in scope, Women and Gender in Medieval Europe: An Encyclopedia, edited by Margaret Schaus (New York and London: Routledge, 2006).39 The series “Routledge Encyclopedias of the Middle Ages” concentrates on a variety of specific cultural aspects, or groups of people, in the Middle Ages, such as Medieval Jewish Civilization and Medieval Islamic Civilization, and treating many other ‘national’ entities or identities from an encyclopedic perspective.40

38 Encyclopedia of the Medieval World, ed. Edward D. English (New York: Facts On File, 2005). 39 Women in the Middle Ages: An Encyclopedia, ed. Katharina M. Wilson and Nadia Margolis, 2 vols. (Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood Press, 2004). Schaus’s encyclopedia also appeared in the series “The Routledge Encyclopedias of the Middle Ages” as no. 14. 40 Medieval Jewish Civilization: An Encyclopedia, ed. Norman Roth (New York and London: Routledge, 2003); Medieval Islamic Civilization: An Encyclopedia, ed. Josef W. Meri, 2 vols. (New York and London: Routledge, 2006). As Meri emphasizes in the introduction, “Such fundamental questions as to what Islamic civilization is and what Muslims did to contribute to European understanding of the sciences, mathematics, arts, literature, philosophy, and government remain largely unanswered. What was the nature of ‘interfaith’ relations in the Islamic world, and what roles did Jews and Christians play in medieval Islamic societies?” xi). Clearly, despite its enormous progress, Medieval Studies continue to open up many unchartered areas and there is no end in sight as to what we still need to learn about that world. For other relevant encyclopedias, see also Medieval Italy: An Encyclopedia, ed. Christopher Kleinhenz, 2 vols. (New York and London: Routledge, 2004); earlier volumes include Medieval Scandinavia: An Encyclopedia, ed. Phillip Pulsiano (New York and London: Garland, 1993); Medieval France: An Encyclopedia, ed. William W. Kibler and Grover A. Zinn (New York and London: Garland, 1995); Medieval England, ed. Paul E. Szarmach, M. Teresa Tavormina, and Joel T. Rosenthal (New York and London: Garland, 1998); Medieval Germany: An Encyclopedia, ed. John M. Jeep (New York and London: Garland, 2001); and Medieval Iberia: An Encyclopedia, ed. E. Michael Gerli (New York and London: Routledge, 2003). See also The Oxford Illustrated History of Medieval England, ed. Nigel Saul (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

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Though of an older vintage, and primarily focused on a summary of factual knowledge, Aryeh Grabois’s Medieval Civilization (1980) still seems to serve its purpose very well even today,41 especially because of its unique emphasis on civilization on a broad scale, extending considerably beyond the medieval European latinitas. As Grabois notes, “the fact remains that most of mankind did not inhabit Western Europe, nor was civilization by any means confined to this part of the world. The Islamic culture, for example, reached a higher level of achievement than that of Western Europe before the 13th century, and cannot be ignored in an encyclopedia of the Middle Ages. Nor is it possible to leave out the great Oriental civilizations – those of India, China and Japan – which, isolated from the Western and Middle Eastern world, achieved great heights. While a similar compendium on the classical world can concentrate on the Mediterranean region, an encyclopedia of medieval civilization must be almost universal in scope” (7). Grabois’s scholarly position still can be fully approved today and demands our respect: “Perhaps there is no better way of demonstrating the universality of the medieval world than by studying the continuous interrelationships in the intellectual and scientific fields, wherein, on the foundations of the classical heritage, Christians, Jews, Moslems and Orientals taught and learned from each other, despite their political and religious animosities” (8). In this regard, the Encyclopaedia Judaica proves to be an invaluable resource, at least as far as Jewish culture and history are concerned.42 The contributors to The Medieval World, edited by Peter Linehan and Janet L. Nelson, took upon themselves the task of expanding on that notion of universality and interdisciplinarity and to deepen the encyclopedic ap-

41 Aryeh Grabois, The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Medieval Civilization (Jerusalem: The Jerusalem Publishing House, 1980); trans. as Enzyklopädie des Mittelalters. Deutsche Übersetzung von Michael Toch. Wissenschaftliche Redaktion der deutschen Ausgabe von Peter Dinzelbacher (1981; Zurich: Atlantis, 1988). See also Die visuelle Weltgeschichte des Mittelalters, ed. Edmund Jacoby (Hildesheim: Gerstenberg, 2005); Medieval Panorama, ed. Robert Bartlett (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2001; trans. into various languages). 42 See the very impressive, broadly designed, yet detail-oriented Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd ed., Fred Skolnik, Editor in Chief, Michael Berenbaum, Executive Editor, 22 vols. (1972; Detroit, New York, et al.: Thomson Gale, 2007). One of its worthy predecessors was the English-language Jewish Encyclopedia, 12 vols. (New York and London: Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1901–1906). Berenbaum identifies also successful Hebrew and Russian efforts to publish comparable, though always much smaller publications, vol. 1, 15. All these reference works, however, are not specifically geared toward the Middle Ages, yet also include them in multifarious ways.

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proach considerably, focusing on (I) identities: selves and others, (II) beliefs, social values, and symbolic order, (III) power and power structures, and (IV) on elites, organizations, and groups.43 The problem here rests in the highly selective treatment of specialized topics in the form of lengthy articles, which cumulatively might achieve the desired goal, but still fall short of the ideal to examine that period comprehensively. Again, however, such a lofty goal seems to elude all of us too easily, yet the critical issue affecting most such scholarly enterprises needs to be addressed. Smaller dictionaries of the Middle Ages have appeared in most European languages, such as the linguistic Diccionario medieval español: desde las Glosas Emilianenses y Silenses (s. X) hasta el siglo XV, ed. Martín Alonso, 2 vols. (Salamanca: Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca, 1986) and the more specialized Diccionario español de textos médicos antiguos [Spanish Dictionary of Ancient Medical Texts], bajo la dirección de María Teresa Herrera, 2 vols. (Madrid: Arco Libros, 1996), which clearly signals how much that cultural-historical period is regarded as a cornerstone of Western civilization in every country. And recently there are serious attempts (once again) to provide encyclopedic overviews for individual regions and countries in Europe, including the Middle Ages, such as The Welsh Academy Encyclopaedia of Wales, ed. John Davies, Jigel Jenkins, Menna Baines, and Peredur I. Lynch (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008). Although the Middle Ages constitute only one relatively small aspect among many pertinent to the entire history, culture, politics, and religion of Wales, the information offered spans many different themes, objects, works, monuments, texts, and figures from that period, accompanied by good maps, illustrations, photos. Shockingly, however, there is no bibliography, neither for the individual entries nor cumulatively because such matters have been “deemed impractical” (xxv). A unique perspective on the world of the Middle Ages is pursued in the encyclopedia dedicated to Trade, Travel, and Exploration in the Middle Ages, edited by John Block Friedman and Kristen Mossler Figg, who approach their task from a global perspective, defining their task as providing an “introduction to the history of travel, exploration, discovery, and mercantile activity in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the New World.” Moreover, considering the specific nature of their reference work, they also underscore the innovative and interdisciplinary nature of their enterprise which comes as by default because of their topic: “The encyclopedia has a cross-disciplinary focus that promotes the integration of historical, scientific, and literary per43 The Medieval World, ed. Peter Linehan and Janet L. Nelson (London and New York: Routledge, 2001).

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spectives, provides a synthetic view of parallel developments in East and West, and encourages immediate connections …”44 Medieval literature on a very broad scale is covered by the Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature, ed. by Jay Ruud (2006). This scale extends well into the Asian realm, including India, China, Japan, and Korea, whereas Africa and the Americas have been excluded because the medieval texts from those worlds have mostly survived only in oral traditions. And the written sources are modern renditions of the ancient material. Although each entry is accompanied by a short bibliography (with varying length), the editor really aims at English-speaking students, which also explains the greater emphasis on Old and Middle English literature. Unfortunately, instead of providing a solid overview as to which literary texts might really be the truly centrally important ones from the point of view of most recent research, Ruud has used as his guidelines “popular anthologies of world literature, of Western literature, and of English literature.” Consequently, he has “included entries from texts that are often used in introductory college or advanced high school classes, since the primary intended reading audience for this book comprises beginning students in these kinds of classes and their instructors who seek some background information.”45 Of course, this fully legitimizes his approach, and we should not look for higher, more scholarly goals, when they were not pursued in the first place. In fact, Ruud’s encyclopedia serves an excellent purpose and will provide a solid springboard for a possible cohort of future medievalists because these articles offer concisely written introductions, clear definitions, and all the necessary background information for readers of that age level.46

44 Trade, Travel, and Exploration in the Middle Ages: An Encyclopedia, ed. John Block Friedman and Kristen Mossler Figg (New York and London: Garland, 2000), vii. 45 Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature, ed. Jay Ruud (New York: Facts on File, 2006), v. 46 There are actually many similar encyclopedic enterprises for the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, see, for example, Lexikon der Renaissance, ed. Günter Gurst, Siegfried Hoyer, Ernst Ullmann, and Christa Zimmermann (Leipzig: VEB Bibliographisches Institut, 1989); A Concise Encyclopaedia of the Italian Renaissance, ed. J. R. Hale (London: Thames and Hudson, 1981). Similar publications can certainly also be found in Italian, Spanish, French, and other languages, but they do not need to be cited all. The four-volume Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation, ed. Hans J. Hillerbrand, 4 vols. (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), however, is a must to all interested in late-medieval and early-modern religious history.

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Most recently Gert Melville and Martial Staub tried their hands once again at this enormous and difficult task, editing a two-volume Enzyklopädie des Mittelalters, downloadable also as an e-book one time upon purchase of the print copy, addressing a German-speaking audience in which they asked their contributors to examine aspects far beyond the traditional concept of history and literary history.47 Other reference works are also being made available in electronic form, and we might soon witness a revolution in publishing of reference works in the near future deeply affecting Medieval Studies at large. In contrast to common approaches to the medieval world, the editors have not simply listed all kinds of topics as possibly relevant for medieval society from a historical perspective. Instead, along with a cohort of outstanding European medievalists, they collectively examine the world of the Middle Ages in a systematic fashion, above all, and thereby as comprehensively as possible. They discuss, at first, the structure of medieval society, then turn to social formations, kinship organizations, interaction and communication, faith and knowledge, finally, in the second volume, to literature, the visual arts and music, economy, technology, living spaces and conditions, and conclude with a section on the complex of events and regional history. Impressively, here the world of technology and production (agriculture and industry/craftsmanship) enjoys just as much attention as literature, the arts, and religion. But despite all the depth and detail provided in the individual contributions, this encyclopedia basically reiterates and summarizes our current knowledge and deliberately refrains from engaging in a more critical examination of the issues at stake although this was its explicit goal. Of course, in this sense Melville’s and Staub’s approach does not differ much, if any at all, from all previous efforts to create an encyclopedia covering that time and culture. Frankly, not much more can or should be expected from them as editors of an encyclopedia, though the question always looms large – what justifies the publication of yet another reference work, if the previous ones still meet all the demands and summarize appropriately and fully the current level of knowledge about the past? Most cumbersome, here the entire bibliography is placed at the very end of the second volume, without any possibility for the reader to grasp where the individual authors stand with regard to specific issues or positions in current scholarship, as if positivism still were 47 Enzyklopädie des Mittelalters, ed. Gert Melville and Martial Staub, 2 vols. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2008), see my review, forthcoming in Mediaevistik.

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en vogue. Somewhat simplistically, the editors emphasize that they hope to appeal to the curiosity of an interested reading public, without defining at all what that means at large and what the implications might be as to the scholarly approaches for the composition of the individual entries. After all, Medieval Studies have grown so much over the last century that we have reached today a level of complexity and controversy in the interpretation of virtually every aspect in the Middle Ages that it almost seems impossible to make any simple and straightforward claims or to argue naively regarding the proper interpretation of a poem or a romance. In fact, I would almost submit that we might be beyond the point at which the publication of encyclopedias was still possible and feasible in practical terms, unless we re-conceptualize the genre altogether, refraining from plainly stating what the basic facts might have been. Actually, do we even believe that the Middle Ages, or any other culture and world, can be defined and described in straightforward terms? Do we not have to accept the fundamental discursive nature of virtually all manifestations of human life, and this also then, perhaps only five hundred years ago? And did not those who dominated that discourse determine what documents were created, what art works were commissioned, and what chronicles were written? The problem with this and all other encyclopedias rests in the assumption that the knowledge about the Middle Ages can be easily and factually summarized, which also applies to any other period in human history. We know, perhaps more than we would like to, how much our perception and understanding of that past age is significantly constructed by modern interests, or dominant viewpoints in the past, and at any rate today often determined by mythical thinking, as best represented, for instance, by the modern notion of the medieval chastity belt – both a satirical object and topic developed in the late Middle Ages and a mythical concept about the medieval past created in the modern world.48 And there are countless other examples of mythical thinking concerning the Middle Ages, as the volumes published by Ulrich Müller and Werner Wunderlich forcefully indicate, which in a way 48 For a typical example of how the myth has become ingrained in modern thinking, without any solid historical foundation or textual evidence, reflecting almost nothing but contemporary, basically uninformed and unreflected assumptions about the ‘dark’ Middle Ages, and this even among serious and highly respected scholars, see Vern L. Bullough, “Chastity Girdles,” Human Sexuality: An Encyclopedia, ed. id. and Bonnie Bullough (New York and London: Garland, 1994), 107. By contrast, see now Albrecht Classen, The Medieval Chastity Belt: A The Myth-Making Process, The New Middle Ages (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

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also pursue encyclopedic goals.49 Whether we think of some of the major rulers, such as Charlemagne, the Crusades, then of specific locations, places, mountains, rivers, islands, poets, composers, magicians and sorcerers, we have always to realize how much modern notions have infused all those icons from the past, in a way colonizing them in order to gain a grasp on their meaning for us today. Most importantly, the myth of the ‘dark ages’ needs to be dispelled over and over again, especially because popular publishers like to perpetuate this notion because it appeals, in an intricate yet foolish fashion, to base instincts among modern audiences that prefer gruesome but fictional stories about a barbaric past over complex, sophisticated, yet scholarly accounts that seriously try to gain a full and critical understanding of events, people, texts, art works, and developments in the Middle Ages.50 Certainly, many aspects of the medieval world would have to be identified as barbaric, as primitive, as lacking in sophistication, culture, hygiene, etc. in comparison with those standards we are used to today. But any critic could raise similar charges even against the Western world in the 21st century resorting to different sets of criteria, such as the number of civilian casualties in modern wars, or ‘collateral damage’ in military parlance, the rate at which prisoners have been and continue to be tortured (see Guantanamo Bay), and the enormous contradiction between amazing and rapid advances in modern science and technology and the wide-ranging and extensive belief in superstition, magic, including religious explanations of the origin of our world, such as ‘Intelligent Design.’ At any rate, the term ‘Dark Ages’ does not help in any constructive fashion to comprehend the Middle Ages and only evokes Romantic, fanciful, titillating, horrifying, and deliberately shocking notions about a world that has been very little understood and continues to challenge us in our episte-

49 Ulrich Müller and Werner Wunderlich, ed., Mittelalter-Mythen, vol. 1 (St. Gallen: UVK Fachverlag für Wissenschaft und Studium, 1996), with a focus on: Herrscher, Helden, Heilige (Rulers, Heroes, Saints). Vol. 5, focusing on Burgen, Länder, Orte (Castles, Countries, Places), which seems to have concluded the series, appeared in 2008. 50 See the excellent contributions to Misconceptions About the Middle Ages, ed. Stephen J. Harris and Bryon Lee Grigsby, Routledge Studies in Medieval Religion and Culture, 7 (New York and London: Routledge, 2008). Unfortunately, in many cases when the arguments reach a critical point, the authors tend to break off and wrap up their discussion too quickly. And the bibliographical references, though certainly not brief, often lack some of the most important studies, particularly those not published in English.

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mological quest, constantly requiring further investigations. In this sense, our Handbook of Medieval Studies hopes to provide important stepping stones in this global endeavor by looking backwards, taking stock of where we are today and what might be, though this is not specifically the intent pursued here, the new directions of research in Medieval Studies. I strongly concur in this regard with Graeme Dunphy’s lucid and critical analysis of the term ‘Dark Ages’ as an ideological construct that could be applied to any period in the past depending on the particular interests pursued by those who either denigrate a special time or culture, or simply ignore it as not worthy their attention – a strategy that had already begun in the Italian Renaissance, if we think of Petrarch’s contemptuous comments about the literature composed prior to his own time.51 All this is not to say that there are no real facts available about the medieval world, but all those that we tend to rely on have been viewed through myriad lenses both in the past and in the present, hence the constant growth of new interpretations, approaches, methodologies, and perceptions. After all, throughout the entire Middle Ages, as in other periods, people, institutions, social groups, alliances, federations, and factions have made great effort to gain power and influence, to hold on to their authority and wealth, and to protect their property. Falsification was the name of the game, as historians have recognized for a long time, which means that we have to regard 51 Graeme Dunphy, “Literary Transitions, 1300–1500: From Late Medieval to Early Modern,” Early Modern German Literature: 1350–1700, ed. Max Reinhart, The Camden House History of German Literature, 4 (Rochester, NY, and Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 2007), 43–87; 43–87, here 43: “If we compare the high medieval writings of Walther von der Vogelweide or Wolfram von Eschenbach with the Reformation writings of Martin Luther or Ulrich von Hutten, the cultural gulf that opens up before us seems enormous, leaving the impression that the intervening years were ones of rapid transition. But when we acknowledge that a full three centuries lie between these two familiar landmarks, we realize that the rate of change was doubtless no faster than in any other literary epoch. If the period from the mid-thirteenth century to the end of the fifteenth may be called a transition, it is because the early thirteenth and early sixteenth centuries are established coordinates in the discipline of literary history.” See also Lucie Varga, Das Schlagwort vom Finsteren Mittelalter, Universität Wien, Seminar für Wirtschafts- und Kulturgeschichte. Veröffentlichungen, 8 (1983; Aalen: Scientia Verlag, 1978). I particularly like Richard Raiswell’s wonderful article “The Age Before Reason,” Misconceptions About the Middle Ages, 124–34. Reinhold Münster illustrates convincingly in his contribution to this Handbook (“Enlightenment Perspectives of the Middle Ages”) how much the 18th-century discourse on the meaning and relevance of medieval texts and art works shaped and determined modern perceptions of the Middle Ages.

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any statement from that time, whether in a chronicle or in a letter, in a poem or in a liturgical drama, with great care, and we really need to read between the lines. Simply put, we need to interpret them critically. Often it seems that we know considerably less about the real world in the Middle Ages than all the encyclopedias, dictionaries, and lexicons pretend to convey. Ironically, however, Melville and Staub claim to have published an encyclopedia based on a critical concept, which essentially only means that they have subdivided the major topics and specified in greater detail the individual subject matters for a more detailed examination. For them, the ‘critical approach’ finds its expression in the fact that they have granted each author considerable freedom in developing his/her topic according to their own orientation. Ultimately, then, there is no specific or noticeable attempt to examine their subject matter from a truly critical perspective. The history of research, as they perceive it, remains hidden in a rather selective, hardly international, and certainly not comprehensive bibliography. This is not to say that the authors would have ignored to cite some of the most seminal studies, but even here, in the bibliographies, the dominant emphasis on scholarly publications in German is evident because of the narrow target of this twovolume encyclopedia, a relatively sophisticated German reading audience outside of academia. Ultimately, the allegedly critical approach is actually missing because the editors cannot decide – which also might be the virtue and pragmatic strength of their publication – whom their reference work should serve above all. Can an encyclopedia actually aim for a critical treatment of its topics, or should it not rather try to digest, synthesize, summarize, and analyze the current level of knowledge and present it in a comprehensive manner? Intriguingly, the history of Medieval Studies as an academic field of research, particularly during the formative years in the late 19th century, proves to be almost as interesting as the study of the Middle Ages itself especially because here we observe how much our discipline – in its widest ramifications, whether we think of the history of fashion, of architecture, literature, foodstuff, arms, social history, or history of music52 – has been and 52 Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, ed. Friedrich Blume, 17 vols. (Kassel: Bärenreiter-Verlag, 1949–1986; 2nd ed. by Ludwig Finscher, 10 vols. [Sachteil] and 17 vols. [Personenteil], Kassel and New York: Bärenreiter; Stuttgart: Metzler, 1994–2007); the Neues Handbuch der Musikwissenschaft, ed. Carl Dahlhaus and Hermann Danuser, 13 vols. (Wiesbaden: Athenaion; Laaber: Laaber Verlag Müller-Buscher, 1980–1995; The New Grove of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie and John Tyrell, 20 vols. (London: Macmillan; Washington, DC: Grove’s Dictionary of Music, 1980); 2nd ed., 29 vols. (New York: Grove, 2001); the Dizion-

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will be truly determined by outstanding scholarly individuals, by multinational approaches, by a noteworthy gender balance (even in the older days), and by interdisciplinarity.53 ario enciclopedico universale della musica e dei musicisti, ed. Alberto Basso, 4 vols. (Turin: UTET, 1983–1984): le biografie, 8 vols. (Turin: UTET, 1985–1988); i titoli e i personaggi, 3 vols. (Turin: UTET, 1999). See also Diccionario de la música española e hispanoamericana, ed. Emilio Casares Rodicio, 10 vols. (Madrid: Sociedad General de Autores y Editores, 1999–2002). 53 Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline, vol. 1: History, ed. Helen Damico and Joseph B. Zavadil (New York and London: Garland, 1995); vol. 2: Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline: Literature and Philology, ed. Helen Damico, with Donald Fennema and Karmen Lenz (New York and London: Garland, 1998); vol. 3: Philosophy and the Arts (New York and London: Garland, 2000). See also the Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing, ed. Kelly Boyd, 2 vols. (London and Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1999). Further, see Harry Ritter, Dictionary of Concepts in History. Reference Sources for the Social Sciences and Humanities, 3 (New York, Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood Press, 1986); Marnie Hughes-Warrington, Fifty Key Thinkers on History. Routledge Key Guides (London and New York: Routledge, 2000). For the history of German philology, see Klaus Weimar, Geschichte der deutschen Literaturwissenschaft bis zum Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Fink, 1989); Lothar Bluhm, Die Brüder Grimm und der Beginn der Deutschen Philologie: Eine Studie zu Kommunikation und Wissenschaftsbildung im frühen 19. Jahrhundert, Spolia Berolinensia, 11 (Hildesheim: Weidmannsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1997); Rewriting the Middle Ages in the Twentieth Century, ed. Jaume Aurell and Francisco Crosas (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005). See also the contribution to this Handbook by Berta Raposo (“Rediscovery of the Middle Ages”), and A History of Arthurian Scholarship, ed. Norris J. Lacy, Arthurian Studies (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006). Andrew E. Mathis, The King Arthur Myth in Modern American Literature (Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland, 2002), also offers fascinating perspectives regarding the great popularity of medieval literature in the United States. One remarkable case of a medieval myth that still holds sway over modern fantasies and continues to influence modern media, politics, and quasi-religious groups concerns the Hohenstaufen Emperor Frederick II. Friedrich Nietzsche, just to mention one example, went so far as to identify him as a medieval superman who provided a role model for modern people. Stefan George adored Frederick as a global ruler who had been the only one capable of bridging the perennial divides between Orient and Occident; hence also between the various religions and cultures. Personalities such as Berthold von Stauffenberg (brother of Claus von Stauffenberg who attempted to assassinate Hitler on July 20, 1944) and Ernst Kantorowicz adulated this medieval emperor as a mythical figure that could heal and overcome all conflicts in the present time. David Abulafia tried to deconstruct this myth with his biography from 1988 (Frederick II: a Medieval Eemperor, London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 1988), but the Frederick myth has even grown ever since, particularly in Apulia and Sicily; see now Hubert Houben, Kaiser Friedrich II. (1194–1250): Herrscher, Mensch und Mythos (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2008), 176–228.

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Recently, Jane Chance published a most welcome biographical dictionary of women medievalists from Elizabeth Elstob (1683–1756) to Caroline Walker Bynum (1941–), which promises to inject the long-needed ‘feminization’ of Medieval Studies.54 But encyclopedias are not always the best medium through which to observe this intensive and complex development in the academic field of Medieval Studies from the late 18th century until today. Nevertheless, and this was the purpose of the investigation until here, the history of a specific type of encyclopedias also sheds important light on the general position of the subject matter both within the framework of scholarship and in light of public responses to it. In this sense, Strayer’s efforts more than 25 years ago were most remarkable, both for the specific accomplishments then and for the inspiration until today to produce and publish new encyclopedias, perhaps with a more narrow focus, or with a specific readership in mind. And they have spawned many comparable scholarly enterprises, though then always in much slimmer proportions. Henry Loyn, for instance, to parallel Grabois’s project, attempted to create an encyclopedic overview of a Middle Ages as “an age of real advance in every field, of political and social evolution, of intellectual and artistic creativity, and of commercial and scientific progress.”55 Without going into further details, we can be certain that similar publications focusing on the Middle Ages have appeared in many other languages as well.

54 Women Medievalists and the Academy, ed. Jane Chance (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), xxvii. 55 H. R. Loyn, The Middle Ages: A Concise Encyclopædia (London: Thames and Hudson, 1989); Sachwörterbuch der Mediävistik, ed. Peter Dinzelbacher (Stuttgart: Kröner, 1992); see also Deno J. Geanakoplos, Medieval Western Civilization and the Byzantine and Islamic Worlds: Interaction of Three Cultures (1968; Lexington, MA, and Toronto: D. C. Heath and Company, 1979). There are, of course countless other books that outline the history of the Middle Ages in brief sketches, but in this reference work we find at least the refreshing emphasis on the intercultural connectivity of Western with Eastern Europe and the Middle East. The various compendia, such as the Cambridge Medieval History, do not need to be mentioned here separately. For smaller, encyclopedic volumes, see The Cambridge Illustrated History of the Middle Ages, vol. II: 950–1250, ed. Robert Fossier. Trans. Stuart Airlie and Robyn Marsack (1982; Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Debating the Middle Ages: Issues and Readings, ed. and introd. Lester K. Little and Barbara H. Rosenwein (Malden, MA, and Oxford: Blackwell Publisher, 1998); Reading Medieval Culture: Essays in Honor of Robert W. Hanning, ed. Robert M. Stein and Sandra Pierson Prior (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005).

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Other scholars editing encyclopedias have turned their attention to those periods that are intimately connected with the Middle Ages, but represent, in one way or the other, transitional phases, such as the time between the fall of the Roman Empire and the emergence of early-medieval Europe, most noteworthy here the Reallexikon der germanischen Altertumskunde, founded by Johannes Hoops,56 or the early-modern world from 1450 to 1789, commonly identified as the Renaissance and the Baroque.57 In other words, there is always a need for a critical review of the state of art of a study area in specific intervals so as to perceive more clearly the rungs in the ladder of research over decades, if not centuries. Otherwise we might no longer be able to see the forest for all the trees, and could run the risk of ignoring some of the most seminal studies, editions, concepts, and ideas developed by our predecessors. We do not want to reinvent the wheel, but it seems that every new generation turns its attention away from the accomplishments of previous ones and tries to chart its own map as if the beacons had not be established already a long time ago. No self-respecting medievalist, for instance, would admit his or her ignorance of Ernst Robert Curtius’s European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, first published in 1948, but there is little engagement with his profound insights in current scholarship, and those who acknowledge his ‘classical’ contributions to comparative literature, both

56 Reallexikon der germanischen Altertumskunde, 2. völlig neu bearbeitete und stark erweiterte Auflage unter Mitwirkung zahlreicher Fachgelehrter, ed. Heinrich Beck, Herbert Jankuhn, et al., 33 vols. (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1973–2007). Not comparable at all, but for specific purposes certainly useful is Michael Frassetto, Encyclopedia of Barbarian Europe: Society in Transformation (Santa Barbara, CA, Denver, CO, and Oxford: ABC Clio, 2001). It seems rather problematic to approach such a huge task all by oneself, as in this case. The number of lacunae and desiderata is considerable, but each entry is accompanied by a short bibliography of English-language studies only, including translations. Frassetto does not indicate what kind of audience he intends to address, but it certainly seems to be specifically Anglophone, and mostly the general readership. 57 Europe 1450 to 1789: Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World, ed. Jonathan Dewald, 6 vols. (New York, Detroit, et al.: Thomson Learning, 2004), which contains solidly researched and extensive articles accompanied by mostly good bibliographies. See also Encyclopedia of the Renaissance, ed. Thomas G. Bergin and Jennifer Speake (New York and Oxford: Facts on File, 1987); Gordon Campbell, The Oxford Dictionary of the Renaissance (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), which is also single-authored, with the accompanying problems, as in the case of Frassetto’s encyclopedia. Much more impressive proves to be the Encyclopedia of the Renaissance, ed. Paul F. Grendler, 6 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1999).

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ancient and medieval, early-modern and modern, are mostly unaware of its original date of publication.58 Moreover, we also have to pay attention to major encyclopedias and reference works in such fields as anthropology, sociology, musicology, art history, medicine, religion, philosophy, etc., insofar as they concern the Middle Ages.59 In particular, I would like to point out the famous Dictionnaire de spiritualité, along with related encyclopedias.60 Particular mention deserves the 58 Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. from the German by Willard R. Trask. With a New Afterword by Peter Godman. Bollingen Series, XXXVI (1948; trans. 1953; 1983; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); see also Albrecht Classen, “Ernst Robert Curtius and the Topos of the Book. The Impact of an Idea on Modern Philological Research,” Leuvense Bijdragen 87, 1–2 (1998): 59–78. 59 See Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart: Handwörterbuch für Theologie und Religionswissenschaft, dritte, völlig neu bearbeitete Auflage, ed. Kurt Galling, together with Hans Freiherr von Campenhausen, Erich Dinkler, et al., 6 vols., 1 vol. for the index (1909–1913; 2nd ed. 1927–1932; Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1957–1965); vierte, völlig neu bearbeitete Auflage, ed. Hans Dieter Betz et al., 9 vols. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1998–2007); The Encyclopedia of Christianity, ed. Erwin Fahlbusch, Jan Mili cˇ Lochman, John Mbiti, Jaroslav Pelikan, and Lukas Vischer. Currently vol. 1–4; vol. 5 forthcoming (Grand Rapids, MI, and Cambridge: William B. Eerdmans; Leiden, Boston, and Cologne: Brill, 1999–2005); based on the German Evangelisches Kirchenlexikon, ed. Heinz Brunotte and Otto Weber, 3rd ed. Erwin Fahlbusch (orig. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1956–1961; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986–1997); cf. also Sacramentum Mundi: An Encyclopedia of Theology, ed. Karl Rahner SJ, and Juan Alfaro, SJ, Alberto Bellini, et al., 6 vols. (New York: Herder and Herder, 1968–1970; orig. in German). Invaluable also proves to be the Theologische Realenzyklopädie, ed. Gerhard Krause and many collaborators, 36 vols. (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1977–2004). It is accompanied by two vols. of a Gesamtregister (2006–2007), one vol. with abbreviations and acronyms (1994), and one vol. with an index of the complete work (1998). 60 Dictionnaire de spiritualité ascétique et mystique, doctrine et histoire, publié sous la direction de Marcel Viller, S.J., assisté de F. Cavallera, et J. de Guibert, S.J., avec le concours d’un grand nombre de collaborateurs, 17 vols. (Paris: G. Beauchesne et ses fils, 1937–1995). Vol. 17 (1995) consists of the “Tables Générales.” This dictionary proves to be so important because of its comprehensive coverage and the bibliographies attached to each article, many of which consist of older research that still holds great value but is often ignored today. See also the valuable Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique, contenant l’exposé des doctrines de la théologie catholique, leurs preuves et leur histoire, commencé sous la direction de A. Vacant et E. Mangenot, continué sous celle de É. Amann. 3rd ed., 15 vols. (1902; Paris: Librairie Letouzey et Ané, 1930–1950, with three volumes for the Tables Générales, 1951–1972). A major research tool also proves to be the Enciclopedia Cattolica, 12 vols. (Vatican City: L’Enciclopedia Cattolica e Il Libro Cattolico, 1948–1954);

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Dictionnaire d’histoire et de géographie ecclésiastiques, ed. by Alfred Baudrillart, Albert Vogt, and Urbain Rouziès, with the first volume having appeared in 1912 (Paris: Letouzey et Ané), which is still in the process of being completed, having currently reached the letter ‘k’ (ed. R. Aubert, Paris: Letouzey et Ané, 2004), and which is by now also available online for a charge. It provides highly detailed information about significant personalities, locations, and historical events relevant for the history of the Christian Church. See also the excellent Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche, ed. Walter Kasper with Konrad Baumgartner, Horst Bürkle, et al., 11 vols. (Freiburg, Basel, Rome, and Vienna: Herder, 1993–2001). Though the individual entries are considerably shorter, they cover a much broader thematic spectrum and offer more bibliographical references of more recent date.61 The history of the early Christian Church from the time of Jesus to ca. 600 C.E. is well served by the Encyclopedia of Early Christianity, ed. Everett Ferguson, together with Michael P. McHugh, Frederick W. Norris, and David M. Scholer (New York and London: Garland, 1990). Here we find detailed information about doctrines, practices, liturgy, heresies, locations, persons, countries, concepts, texts, terms, and art work, and each entry is most pleasantly accompanied by a detailed bibliography.62 Most useful and highly insightful prove to be the handbook of (in fact not only) German superstition, Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens, and the encyclopedia of the fairy tale, Enzyklopädie des Märchens. The fact that they have been published in German has unfortunately meant that many intersee also the English version, New Catholic Encyclopedia, 14 vols. (New York, St. Louis, San Francisco, et al.: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1967; Index: vol. XV, 1967; Supplement: 1967–1974: vol. XVI, 1974; Supplement: Change in the Church: vol. XVII, 1979). In all these encyclopedias, the articles regularly conclude with helpful bibliographies. Most recently, the publishing house Brill has launched a huge new Dictionnaire d’histoire et de géographie ecclésiastique on its website, in 2008, consisting of 30 volumes and 70,000 entries. I have not yet been able to autopsy this dictionary. 61 See also The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, based on the third ed. of the Realencyklopädie founded by J. J. Herzog, and ed. by Albert Hauck, prepared by Samuel Macauley Jackson with Charles Colebrook Sherman and George William Gilmore, 12 vols. (New York and London: Funk and Wagnalls Company, 1908–1912). Realencyklopädie für protestantische Theologie und Kirche, ed. Albert Hauck, 21 vols., 3rd and expanded ed. (1896–1913; Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1969); see also The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, ed. F. L. Cross. Sec. ed. id. and E. A. Livingstone (1958; London, New York, and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1974). 62 The editors also include a general bibliography for topics such as patrology, the rise of Christianity, the popes, and archeology (viii).

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national scholars are either not familiar with them or cannot utilize the treasure trove of specific information contained in them.63 Certainly, both deal with the global world of superstition and fairy tales throughout times, but a vast percentage of the material in both areas is anchored in the Middle Ages. Art historians are exceedingly well served, here disregarding numerous other encyclopedias for the entire history of art world-wide throughout time, with the Lexikon der christlichen Ikonographie64 and with the encyclopedia for the Iconography of Christian Art, originally edited in German, and translated into English, to name just two major reference works.65 Then there are also the useful lexica on animal symbolism in the Middle Ages, which involves iconography, religion, mentality, art history, and other disciplines.66 From here we also need to consider quickly the world of architecture, so magisterially represented by Sir Banister Fletcher’s A History of Architecture, 19th ed. John Musgrove, with John Tarn and Peter Willis (London: The Royal

63 Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens, ed. Hanns Bächtold-Stäubli, together with E. Hoffmann-Krayer. Handwörterbücher zur deutschen Volkskunde. Abteilung I: Aberglaube, 9 vols. (Berlin and Leipzig: Walter de Gruyter, 1927–1938/1941; vol. X: Register: 1942); Enzyklopädie des Märchens, ed. Kurt Ranke, together with Hermann Bausinger, Wolfgang Brückner, et al. Since Vol. 5 (1987): ed. Rolf Wilhelm Brednich (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1977–; vol. 12, fascicle 3 (up to the letters Su …) appeared in 2007). 64 Lexikon der christlichen Ikonographie, ed. Engelbert Kirschbaum, 8 vols. (Rome, Freiburg, et al.: Herder, 1968–1976). 65 Gertrud Schiller, Ikonographie der christlichen Kunst, 5 vols. 3rd ed. (1966; Gütersloh: Gerd Mohn, 1966–1991); Iconography of Christian Art, trans. Janet Seligman, 2 vols. (Greenwich, CT, and New York: Graphic Society, 1971). See also Louis Réau, Iconographie de l’art chrétien, 3 vols. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1955–1959). But there are many other similar reference works for art history, such as Erhard Aeschlimann and Paolo D’Ancona, Dictionnaire des miniaturistes du Moyen Age et de la Renaissance dans les différentes contrées de l’Europe, 2nd rev. and expanded ed. (Milan: U. Hoepli, 1949); Michèle Beaulieu and Victor Beyer, Dictionnaire des sculpteurs français du moyen âge (Paris: Picard, 1992); see also the useful encyclopedia for French castles, Charles Laurent Salch and Dominique Martinez, Dictionnaire des châteaux et des fortifications du Moyen Age en France (Strasbourg: Éditions Publitotal, 1979), and Edward G. Tasker, Encyclopedia of Medieval Church Art, ed. John Beaumont (London: B. T. Batsford, 1993). 66 Sigrid and Lothar Dittrich, Lexikon der Tiersymbole: Tiere als Sinnbilder in der Malerei des 14.–17. Jahrhunderts. Studien zur internationalen Architektur- und Kunstgeschichte, 22 (Petersberg: Imhof, 2004); see also Clemens Zerlin, Lexikon der Tiersymbolik: Mythologie, Religion, Psychologie, ed. Wolfgang Bauer (Munich: Kösel, 2003). There are many other reference works for symbols that are, however, too general to be cited here.

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Institute of British Architects and The University of Architecture, 1987; the 20th ed. was edited by Dan Cruickshank, together with Andrew Saint, Peter Blundell Jones, Kenneth Frampton; assistant editor Fleur Richards; Oxford and Boston: Architectural Press, 1996; the latest ed., 20a, appeared in 1998).67 Reflecting its more pragmatic approach in the first place, in its original 1896 edition, this monograph carried the subtitle: for the student, craftsman and amateur, being a comparative guide of the historical styles from the earliest period. Fletcher’s extraordinary reference work proves to be invaluable until today, excelling through its wealth of illustrative material (photos and drawings, including blueprints, detailed information about individual buildings, designs, architects, styles, and history of architecture).68 The long list of re-editions and lately also of translations into other languages has proven the enormous durability and foundational value of this magisterial reference work. What, then, by contrast, is the purpose of the present Handbook of Medieval Studies with its own claim on a certain encyclopedic approach? I have begun discussing this question in the introduction to this Handbook, but we need to pursue this topic further in the present context. Are there not already enough reference works available (see above)?69 Would there not be the great

67 Now see also Günther Binding and Susanne Linscheid-Burdich, together with Julia Wippermann Planen und Bauen im frühen und hohen Mittelalter nach den Schriftquellen bis 1250 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2002). 68 See also, though a bit dated, Russell Sturgis, A History of Architecture, 4 vols. Vol. 3–4 by A. L. Frothingham (New York: The Baker & Taylor Company, vol. 1: 1906; vol. 2: 1909; vol. 3–4: Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1915); David Watkin, A History of Western Architecture (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1986). There is, of course, a legion of similar studies of older and more recent vintage, both in English and in many European languages; see, for instance, Barbara Borngässer Klein and Rolf Toman, Geschichte der Architektur: von der Antike bis in die Gegenwart; photographs by Achim Bednorz (Bath: Parragon, 2008). 69 The subsequent cultural periods are also gaining in interest both among the academic and the lay audience, see, for instance, Encyclopedia of the Renaissance, ed. Paul F. Grendler, 6 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1999). Looking back, we also discover massive efforts to cover specific events in the past through quasi encyclopedic writing, see, for example, Kenneth M. Setton, A History of the Crusades, 2 vols. (Madison, Milwaukee, and London: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1969). The volume on The Middle Ages in the series obviously for younger readers: The History of the Ancient & Medieval World, ed. Henk Dijkstra. Vol. 9 (New York, Toronto, and Sydney: Marshall Cavendish, 1969), proves to be beautifully illustrated. Many publications focus on world history, including the Middle Ages, and march through thousands of years, claiming to cover a solid stretch of human history from the stone age to the present, such as Chronology of European His-

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danger of repeating what others have done already, if not to perfection, but at least highly comprehensively and in depth? All the criticism raised against some of the earlier publications would sound hollow, if not hypocritical, if the present publication did not try to set new standards and pursue innovative goals. In fact, the simple answer to the questions raised at first would have to be an unconditional ‘yes,’ but even if the goal would be to produce another encyclopedia focusing on the Middle Ages, we could at least point out huge differences between older and newer works, and since scholarship is continuously advancing, there is no doubt that we are in need of new broad surveys and summaries of our current knowledge perhaps every ten or twenty years. Nevertheless, the primary purpose of this new Handbook of Medieval Studies does not follow this path. Instead, the overarching and principle goal consists of examining the history of scholarship and of our understanding of how we have reached the current level of our knowledge about all kinds of subject matters, people, topics, texts, works, etc. We are, after all, as Bernard of Chartres pointed out in the 12th century, as John of Salisbury had summarized in his Metalogicon, and as this survey illustrates, nothing but dwarfs perched on the shoulders of giants.70 Yet, despite our small size, we are still positioned high up and can today see further than those giants, or than cohorts of previous generations of medievalists upon whose findings we base our own research and thus reach our own goals.71 This is not meant to belittle our predecessors; on the contrary, we pay tribute

tory 15,000 B.C. to 1997, ed. John Powell, 2 vols. (Chicago and London: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1998). There are countless other encyclopedias for ancient history, the world of Islam, the Near and Far East, and so forth. Actually, in the last decade or so publishers all over the world have produced so many encyclopedias and similar reference works about premodern history, culture, and literature that one wonders who still might be able to gain a critical perspective faced with such a flood of factual, or rather almost no longer so factual, literature, written very much in the vein of late 19th-century positivist Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886). 70 R[ichard] W[illiam] Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), 203. For the actual quote, see John of Salisbury, Metalogicon, ed. J. B. Hall and K. S. B. Keats-Rohan, Corpus Christianorum. Continuatio mediaevalis, 98 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1991), 116. 71 Regarding this topic and its implications for us, see Walter Haug, “Die Zwerge auf den Schultern der Riesen: Epochales und typologisches Geschichtsdenken und das Problem der Interferenzen,” id., Strukturen als Schlüssel zur Welt: Kleine Schriften zur Erzählliteratur des Mittelalters (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1989), 86–109, esp. 89–92 (orig. 1987).

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to their great accomplishments and build on their knowledge to further our own understanding. The field of research in the Middle Ages is still fairly young, barely two hundred years old, including some philologists who had begun to explore the history of medieval literature, religion, and philosophy already in the late 18th century, if not before. The 19th century witnessed an incredible surge in scholarship, and today Medieval Studies, a term originally coined by David Knowles for an inaugural lecture at the University of Cambridge in 1947,72 are practiced all over the world, focusing on virtually every aspect of human life and the human mind. We might scoff at some of the older text editions or histories of literature, but we would not be where we are today without them. This also applies to the history of art, history of technology, history of architecture, and other fields. As Paul Freedman has already observed: Although the nature of what is called medieval studies thus depends to some extent on academic organization and other external influences, some degree of interdisciplinary collaboration is essential to comprehending the medieval period. From the seventeenth century onward such great undertakings as the medieval Latin dictionary of Charles du Cange, the Bollandist project of describing the lives of the saints, or Jean Mabillon’s De re diplomatica have required an immense range of sources. The importance of literary, numismatic, and philological evidence was recognized early on, as was the peculiar way in which the Middle Ages has left more written records than the classical era but in a more disorganized fashion. The significance of religious controversy in forwarding pursuit of medieval texts and interpretations also meant that, from the beginning, fields, methods, and the use of sources could not be narrowly limited.73

Medieval Studies in a way have also witnessed, and responded to, all those ideological shifts and changes that have determined modern humanistic scholarship at large, whether we think of positivism, Geistesgeschichte (intellectual history), explication de texte, immanent, or close, reading, Marxism, structuralism, deconstructionism, feminism, Gender Studies, postcolonialism, Queer Studies, etc.74 Some of those have left a deep impact also on the 72 Paul Freedman, “Medieval Studies,” 383. Knowles specifically evoked a similar inaugural lecture given in 1944 by his predecessor, Z. N. Brooke, “The Prospects of Medieval History,” but by widening his own perspective, Knowles laid the theoretical foundation for the highly interdisciplinary nature of Medieval Studies today. 73 Paul Freedman, “Medieval Studies,” 383. 74 Some of the best reflections on the impact of theory on Medieval Studies can be found in Paul Strohm’s Theory and the Premodern Text, Medieval Cultures, 26 (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). See also the contributions to The Future of the Middle Ages: Medieval Literature in the 1990s, ed. William

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way how we view and approach the Middle Ages, others less so, but all of them have affected our field as well which seems to grow in leaps and bounds at least in terms of scholarship. The same observation might not hold true for teaching the Middle Ages, and in fact there are many warning signs because basic knowledge necessary for the study of that past world (medieval Latin, paleography, manuscript studies, liturgy) is taught to smaller and smaller groups of students wherever we look all over the world, even if the popular interest in the Middle Ages, also expressed in growing general education classes, not to speak of countless medieval fairs, festivals, concerts, costumes, games, etc., is steadily growing. The introduction to Medieval Studies, edited by James M. Powell first in 1976, and in a second edition in 1992, clearly signals how much we have to realize the necessity to have a solid command of many different disciplines in order to carry out comprehensive and well-grounded research in our field, especially when the focus rests on history and manuscript studies. The contributors to Powell’s volume deal with Latin paleography (James J. John), diplomatics (Leonard E. Boyle), numismatics (Philip Grierson), archeology (David Whitehouse), prosopography (George Beech), computer-assisted analysis of the statistical documents of medieval society (David Herlihy), medieval chronology R. Dean Ware), medieval English literature (Paul Theiner),75 Latin philosophy (Edward A. Synan), medieval law (Kenneth Pennington), medieval science and natural philosophy (Edward Grant), tradition and innovation in medieval art (Wayne Dynes), and

D. Paden (Gainesville, Tallahassee, et al.: University Press of Florida, 1994); Modernes Mittelalter: Neue Bilder einer populären Epoche, ed. Joachim Heinzle (Frankfurt a. M.: Insel Verlag, 1994); The Future of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Problems, Trends, and Opportunities for Research, ed. Roger Dahood, Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, 2 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998); Medieval German Voices in the 21st Century: The Paradigmatic Function of Medieval German Studies for German Studies. A Collection of Essays, ed. Albrecht Classen, Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft, 46 (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Editions Rodopi, 2000). See now Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages: Translating Cultures, ed. Ananya Jahanara Kabir and Deanne Williams, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 75 It remains entirely elusive once again why, in this context, medieval literature is exclusively identified with English literature. For another rather disappointing example, see Theodore L. Steinberg , Reading the Middle Ages: An Introduction to Medieval Literature (Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland & Co., 2003), who includes The Tale of Genji and Jewish literature, but entirely ignores Iberian, Latin, or German medieval literature, not to mention mystical literature at large.

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medieval music (Theodore Karp).76 Of course, here as well numerous lacunae mar the overall picture, such as the absence of liturgical studies,77 of the investigation of foodstuff,78 of weapons and armies, fortifications, and castles,79 and of Byzantine Studies, including respective prosopography of the various areas.80 This list could be easily expanded, but it would be ultimately futile because the history of people in the Middle Ages, their culture, mentality, private and public life, etc. found expression in a myriad of material and spiritual manifestations that no one can cover in totality. Can the teaching of the Middle Ages ever live up even only to a small portion of the global expectations? But let us not sink into a jeremiad over daily woes here and there in academia, since they are often quite the same that can be heard in other fields of the Humanities generally, and have been voiced for a long time (if not for ever). Concerns about the survival of Medieval Studies within the university are legitimate because we do not directly produce money when teaching the Middle Ages; instead we seem only to create costs for the institutions of higher learning. This also applies to all other fields under this vast umbrella, and 18th-century Spanish literature is not necessarily faring considerably better than 16th-century French literature, 3rd-century Roman architecture, ancient Greek philosophy, etc. I hasten to add, however, that this might ea-

76 Medieval Studies: An Introduction, ed. James M. Powell, 2nd ed. (1976; Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1992). 77 See, for instance, Cyrill Vogel, Medieval Liturgy: An Introduction to the Sources, revised and trans. William G. Storey and Niels Krogh Rasmussen, with the assistance of John K. Brooks-Leonard, NPM Studies in Church Music and Liturgy (1966; Washington, DC: Pastoral Press, 1986). 78 Melitta Weiss Adamson, Food in Medieval Times. Food through History (Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood Press, 2004); Ernst Schubert, Essen und Trinken im Mittelalter (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2006). 79 Jean-Denis G. G. Lepage, Castles and Fortified Cities of Medieval Europe: An Illustrated History (Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland & Company, 2002); id., Medieval Armies and Weapons in Western Europe: An Illustrated History (Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland & Company, 2005); id., The Fortifications of Paris: An Illustrated History (Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland & Company, 2006). 80 Robert Browning, The Byzantine Empire (New York: Scribner, 1980); Cyril A. Mango, Byzantium and Its Image: History and Culture of the Byzantine Empire and Its Heritage, Varirorum Reprints, CS 191 (London: Variorum Reprints, 1984); The Oxford History of Byzantium, ed. id. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); see also the multi-volume Prosopographical Lexicon of Byzantine History and Civilization, ed. Alexes G. C. Savvides, Benjamin Hendrickx, Alicia J. Simpson, Thekla Sansaridou-Hendrickx (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007 [1st vol.], 2008 [2nd vol.]–).

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sily constitute a fallacious conclusion depending on the criteria we use to determine the true cost effectiveness of individual subject matters or research areas (faculties) at any given university over a long period and considering the wider social implications and the value of educating our younger generations at large. There are no valid arguments – and here I am, unavoidably, preaching to the converted – to downplay the significance of the Middle Ages for a solid education in the Humanities, both today and in the future. In fact, as Bruce Holsinger has discovered, the medieval intellectual world continues to hold sway over the postmodern world insofar as most of the leading theoreticians of our time, whether Barthes, Foucault, or Derrida, but so also Panofsky, Habermas, and others, apparently received their fundamental philological training through an in-depth exposure to that world.81 Leaving aside common laments (justified or not), we witness a growing number of excellent critical investigations done in Medieval Studies, without facing any neglect in the traditional and still fundamental areas of philology and editorial work. Depending on one’s viewpoint, we are also fortunate in gaining access to more and more medieval texts from all kinds of languages and cultures through translations, which has a tremendous impact on the way how we can teach the Middle Ages. Further, there are efforts all over the world to make medieval manuscripts available in digital form, which provides us with unheard of new possibilities to carry out detailed and comparative research based on the original documents. Moreover, we also realize a slow but steady rapprochement of the various disciplines, considering the important, though still somewhat tentative collaboration of historians, art historians, musicologists, and literary historians, to mention just a few subject areas. Synergies are of greatest importance if they can be created meaningfully and effectively.82 Of course, there needs to be some common ground, shared interest, significant parallels and similarities, which are not hard to come by if we look carefully. But we do not know enough of each other, and are mostly ignorant regarding how each individual field has evolved over decades, if not centuries. Collaboration and interdisciplinary activities require shared 81 Bruce Holsinger, The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2005); see also Michael Johnson’s entry on Henri de Lubac in the present volume. 82 In fact, there exists a new review journal titled just that: Synergies Inde, ed. Vidya Vencatesan, whose special issue (no. 2 [2007]), honoring renowned French medievalist Jean Dufournet, devotes itself “Aux sources du dialogue des cultures: Regards croisés sur le Moyen Age en France et en Inde” (Mumbai: Revue du Gerflint, 2007). I appreciate Nadia Margolis’s pointing out this review to me.

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ground, and this ground can be established by looking at the foundational work that has been done in each area of research from the earliest days until the present. Of course, this would not be the conditio sine qua non for efforts to bring together colleagues from different disciplines to investigate topics of broader, hence shared, nature, yet each from his or her individual perspective. For instance, in order to understand how medieval people viewed children or old people we need to consult both chronicles and art objects, literary texts and musical pieces.83 After all, the history of mentalities, one of the most probing and innovative fields of research in Medieval Studies, requires a most comprehensive investigation of medieval culture, drawing all available information from a wide gamut of perspectives for the understanding of people’s mentality, that is, psychological conditions and motivations, desires, fears, and hopes.84 The same now also applies to cultural and anthropological approaches to Medieval Studies (Culture Studies), to Gender Studies, and also, though perhaps to a slightly lesser extent, Queer Studies and psychological approaches. We would also have to consider the latest methodological and theoretical approach determined by the interest in the human senses and the ability to perceive external signals via the various sensory organs, as reflected by medieval writers and artists.85 Albeit not encyclopedic in its format, the journal Annales: Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations, founded by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch (1929, originally as Annales d’histoire économique et sociale), deserves mention here. Ferdi83 Shulamith Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages (London and New York: Routledge, 1990); Childhood in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: The Results of a Paradigm Shift in the History of Mentality, ed. Albrecht Classen (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2005); Old Age in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Interdisciplinary Approaches to a Neglected Topic, ed. Albrecht Classen, Fundamentals of Medieval and Early Modern Culture, 2 (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2007). 84 Europäische Mentalitätsgeschichte: Hauptthemen in Einzeldarstellungen, ed. Peter Dinzelbacher, Kröners Taschenausgabe, 469, 2nd rev. and expanded ed. (1993; Stuttgart: Kröner, 2008). See also Hans-Werner Goetz, Moderne Mediävistik: Stand und Perspektiven der Mittelalterforschung (Darmstadt: Primus Verlag, 1999). 85 Again, see Goetz, Moderne Mediävistik; and C. M. Woolgar, The Senses in Late Medieval England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006). Cf. also Emotions and Sensibilities in the Middle Ages, ed. C. Stephen Jaeger and Ingrid Kasten, Trends in Medieval Philology, 1 (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2003); Lachgemeinschaften: kulturelle Inszenierungen und soziale Wirkungen von Gelächter im Spätmittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Werner Röcke and Hans Rudolf Velten, Trends in Medieval Philology, 5 (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2005); Elke Koch, Trauer und Identität: Inszenierungen von Emotionen in der deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters, Trends in Medieval Philology, 8 (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2006).

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nand Braudel (Mediterranean World and Philip II [1949; New York: Harper and Row, 1962) was another important member. Although they cover all centuries, this school’s adherents have added much to multidisciplinary Medieval Studies, perhaps best known through the work of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie.86 More modern descendants are Pierre Nora, whose monumental Lieux de Mémoire (Realms of Memory) volumes contain valuable information on medieval myths carrying over into post 18th-century French culture (7 vols., Paris: Gallimard, 1984–1992) and have been translated into several languages, as was the case with the studies published by the founders and leading members of the Annales. Legal and religious documents can essentially contribute to our global understanding of such issues that are indeed most important for medieval society at large, even though they seem to fall, at first sight, into the category of private life, or everyday history.87 Sexuality, one of the most pervasive issues that have troubled and excited people throughout the ages, cannot be adequately studied through the narrow lens of the historian alone, for instance, not to speak of the medievalist working in the area of religion and the arts.88 But the collective of medievalists in the widest possible range of disciplines promise to meet some of the challenges to build on past accomplishments and to forge a path toward future Medieval Studies.89 So, we are taking

86 Montaillou, village occitan de 1294 à 1324 (Paris: Gallimard, 1975). Now see Autour de Montaillou, un village occitan: histoire et religiosité d’une communauté villageoise au Moyen Age: actes du colloque de Montaillou, 25–26–27 août 2000, ed. Anne Brenon et Christine Dieulafait; sous la direction de Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (Castelnaudla-Chapelle: L’Hydre éditions, 2001). 87 Brilliant in the broad approach, opening up a new window into a specific, heretofore mostly ignored aspect of medieval society, but astonishingly naive and uncritical, prove to be the contributions to A History of Private Life, ed. Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby, 5 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987–1991). 88 Sexuality in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age: New Approaches to a Fundamental Cultural-Historical and Literary-Anthropological Theme, ed. Albrecht Classen, Fundamentals of Medieval and Early Modern Culture, 3 (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2008). 89 I would like to thank the following colleagues for their critical comments, suggestions, and corrections: Peter Dinzelbacher (Werfen/Salzburg), Heiko Hartmann (Berlin), Herwig Weigl (Vienna), Graeme Dunphy (Regensburg), Nadia Margolis (Mount Holyoke College, MA), Wendy E. Pfeffer (University of Louisville, KY), Raymond Cormier (Longwood University, Farmville, VA), Klaus Oschema (Heidelberg), Ulrich Müller (Salzburg), and Pieter Mannerts (Research Foundation–Flanders/Katholieke Universiteit Leuven). I am very grateful for all their observations, corrections, additional information, and above all for

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stock here, as comprehensively as possible, but in this process we also hope to lay the foundation for much more interdisciplinary research, traditionally a hallmark of Medieval Studies, and this also in the coming decades and centuries. With the help of this Handbook we can expect to meet the challenges of critical approaches to medieval research in the widest context. Knowing fully where we have come from and what the current state of research proves to be, we will be empowered to pursue our studies further on a more advanced level. More boldly, we might even claim that such a Handbook can be the springboard for all future Medieval Studies insofar as the past has always informed the present, and our knowledge of this process translates into the catalyst for future efforts, investigations, and interpretations.

their encouragement and support. Their help also strongly indicates the way how Medieval Studies will probably proceed in the future, relying much more on interdisciplinary, collaborative, and comparative research and approaches.

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Abbreviations

Abbreviations ABäG ABD ABGB ABMHRA ACIMP

ACPQ ADB AdM AE AEM AfD AfdA AfMw AHDLMA AHR AHVKB AJ AJS Review AK AKAWB Al-Qantara ALR Annales.HSS APSR AS ASNSL ASNSP (CLF)

Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik The Anchor Bible Dictionary Allgemeines Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch Annual Bulletin of the Modern Humanities Research Association Atti del convegno internazionale su Marsilio da Padova (Padova,18–20 settembre 1980) [Medioevo 5 (1979] American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie Annales du Midi American Ethnologist Anuario de estudios medievales Archiv für Diplomatik Anzeiger für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur Archiv für Musikwissenschaft Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen âge American Historical Review Archi des historischen Vereins des Kantons Bern The Archaeological Journal Association for Jewish Studies Review M. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Tavistock, 1972) Abhandlungen der Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften in Berlin Revista de estudios árabes Allgemeines Landrecht Annales. Histoire, Sciences sociales American Political Science Review American Speech Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa

Abbreviations

ASP ASQ AUU B.C.E. BBAL BCLSMP BEC BEO BIHR BIRHT BISI BJHP BJMES BMGS BMHG BPM BSOAS ByzZ C.E. CCCM CCM CCSL CEHE CFMA CHJ ChR CL CMA CN CNRS cols. CPh CSEL CT

LXVIII Arabic Sciences and Philosophy Arab Studies Quarterly Språkvetenskapliga sällskapets i Uppsala förhandlingar. Acta Societatis Linguisticae Upsaliensis Before Common Era Biografie e bibliografie degli accademici lincei Bulletin de la classe des lettres et des sciences morales et politiques (Académie royale de Belgique) Bibliothèque de l’École des chartes Bulletin d’Études Orientales Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research Bulletin de l’Institut de recherche et d’histoire des Textes Bulletino dell’Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medioevo e Archivio Muratoriano British Journal for the History of Philosophy British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies Bijdragen en Mededelingen van het Historisch Genootschap Bulletin de philosophie médiévale Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London Byzantinische Zeitschrift Common Era Corpus Christianorum, continuatio mediaeualis Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina The Cambridge Economic History of Europe Classiques français du Moyen Age Cambridge Historical Journal Chaucer Review Comparative Literature Concilium Medii Aevi Cultura Neolatina Centre National de Recherche Scientifique columns Classical Philology Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum Canterbury Tales

LXIX CUP D. Hist. DA DBE DDJb DFS DMA DP DR DSAM DTÖ durchges. DVE DVG DVjs E&S ed. EdM EETS EH EHR EI.2 EJ (1) EJ (2) ELLMA ELP ENC EQ erg. erw. Est ÉT fasc.

Abbreviations

Cambridge University Press Deutsche Historiker Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters Deutsche Biographische Enzyklopädie Deutsches Dante-Jahrbuch Dalhousie French Studies Dictionary of the Middle Ages M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon, 1977). Duquesne Review Dictionnaire de spiritualité ascétique et mystique: Doctrine et histoire Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich durchgesehen De Vulgari Eloquentia De Vlaamse Gids Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte Essays and Studies edited or editor Paul Lehmann, Erforschung des Mittelalters, vols. I–V (Stuttgart: Anton Hirsemann, 1959–1962). Early English Text Society Encyclopedia of Historians The English Historical Review The Encyclopaedia of Islam, second edition (Brill: Leiden 1960–2004) Encyclopaedia Judaica, first edition, (Jerusalem: Encyclopaedia Judaica 1971–1972) English Journal European Literature in the Latin Middle Ages Einleitung in die lateinische Philologie, ed. Fritz Graf (Stuttgart and Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1997). École nationale des chartes Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an ergänzt erweitert English Studies École de théologie fascicle

Abbreviations

FFC FMSt FSt GALex GCFI GLLM GLQ GQ

GRLMA

GRM Habil.schr. HAD

HEI History HJb HLF HPS HPT HRG

HS HSMS HVjS HZ IASL IC id. IGL IJCT

LXX Folklore Fellows’ Communications Frühmittelalterliche Studien French Studies (Oxford) A Greek and Arabic Lexicon Giornale Critico della Filosofia Italiana Geschichte der lateinischen Literatur des Mittelalters. Vols. 1–3 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1911–1931). Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies Theodor Nöldeke et al., Geschichte des Qorans, (1860–1938, rpt. 3 vols. in 1, Hildesheim: Olms, 1961) Grundriss der romanischen Literaturen des Mittelalters, ed. Hans Robert Jauss and Erich Köhler (Heidelberg: Winter, 1968–) Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift Habilitationsschrift The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, ed. D. Schiffrin, D. Tannen, D. and H. Hamilton (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001) History of European Ideas History. The Journal of the Historical Association Historisches Jahrbuch Histoire littéraire de France Hebraic Political Studies History of Political Thought Handwörterbuch zur deutschen Rechtsgeschichte, ed. Adalbert Erler, Ekkehard Kaufmann and Dieter Werkmüller, 5 vols. (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1971–1998) M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1990). Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies Historische Vierteljahrsschrift Historische Zeitschrift Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur Islamic Culture idem Internationales Germanistenlexikon 1800–1950 International Journal of the Classical Tradition

LXXI IJMES IMB IOS IRMAE

ITS JAOS Jb. d. BAdW Jb. JEGP JHI JKAWLSK

JMEMS JMH JNES JÖBG JPSR JQS JR JRAS JSJT LA LCI LexMA

LGB2

Liber Floridus

Abbreviations

International Journal of Middle East Studies International Medieval Bibliography Israel Oriental Studies Ius Romanum Medii Aevi, auspice Collegio antiqui iuris studiis provehendis (Milano: Giuffrè, 1961ff.) Irish Texts Society Journal of the American Oriental Society Jahrbuch der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften Jahrbuch Journal of English and Germanic Philology Journal of the History of Ideas Jaarboek/Koninklijke Academie voor Wetenschappen, Letteren en Schone Kunsten van België Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies Journal of Medieval History Journal of Near Eastern Studies Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Byzantinischen Gesellschaft Jewish Political Studies Review Journal of Qur’anic Studies Journal of Religion Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought L’Alighieri Lexikon der christlichen Ikonographie Lexikon des Mittelalters, vols. I–VI (Munich and Zürich: Artemis, 1980–1993); vols. VII–IX (Munich: LexMA Verlag, 1995–1998); Registerband (Stuttgart and Weimar: J. B. Metzler, 1999) Lexikon des gesamten Buchwesens, 2nd ed. Severin Corsten, Günther Pflug, and Friedrich Adolf Schmidt Künsemüller (Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann, 1995). Bernhard Bischoff and Suso Brechter, ed., Liber Floridus. Mittellateinische Studien Paul Lehmann zum 65. Geburtstag (St. Ottilien: Eos Verlag der Erzabtei, 1950).

Abbreviations

LiLi LM

loc. cit. LSE LThK

MA MA&R MAevum

MCDA MED Medieval Latin

Medioevo MedPers MET MF MGH MGWJ MGWJ MHG MHJ MiB Milde and Schuder MIÖG Misc. Med. MKVA MlatJb

LXXII Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik Karl Langosch, Lateinisches Mittelalter. Einleitung in Sprache und Literatur (1963; Darmstadt, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1983). loco citato Leeds Studies in English Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche, ed. Walter Kasper, 3rd revised ed., 11 vols. (Freiburg i. Br.: Herder, 1993–2001). Le Moyen Âge Die Musik des Mittelalters und der Renaissance Medium Ævum Marsilio da Padova (Padova, 18–20 settembre 1980) [Medioevo 5 (1979] Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis, ed. Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer (London: Sage, 2001). Middle English Dictionary Medieval Latin: An Introduction and Bibliographical Guide, ed. F. A. C. Mantello and A. G. Rigg (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1996). Medioevo. Rivista di storia della filosofia medievale Medieval Perspectives Medieval English Theatre Die Musikforschung Monumenta Germaniae Historica Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums Middle High German The Medieval History Journal Musikgeschichte in Bildern Wolfgang Milde and Werner Schuder, ed., De captu Mitteilungen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung Miscellanea Medievalia Mededelingen Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie van België, Klasse der Letteren Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch

LXXIII MLN MLR MMIS MP MR MRS ms/mss. MTSC MTSR MW N. F. NCMH NDB NH NM NOHM NRCF

OEN OUP PAAJR PAAJR PBB PG PIASH PIASH PL PM PMLA Poetics Today Poetics Today PPM

Abbreviations

Modern Language Notes Modern Language Review Medieval and Modern Irish Series Modern Philology Medioevo Romanzo Medieval and Renaissance Studies manuscript/manuscripts Medieval Technology and Social Change Method and Theory in the Study of Religion Muslim World Neue Folge New Cambridge Medieval History Neue Deutsche Biographie Nederlandsche Historiebladen Neuphilologische Mitteilungen New Oxford History of Music Nouveau recueil complet des fabliaux, ed. Willem Noomen and Nico van den Boogaard, 10 vols. (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1983–2001) Old English Newsletter Oxford University Press Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research Paul und Braune Beiträge = Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur Patrologia Graeca Proceedings of the Israel Academy of Science and Humanities Proceedings of the Israel Academy of Science and Humanities Patrologia Latina Patristica et Medievalia Publications of the Modern Language Association Poetics Today. A Journal for Analysis of Literature and Communication Poetics Today: A Journal for Analysis of Literature and Communication Pensiero Politico Medievale

Abbreviations

PPTSL PQ PT PUF QFIAB QS R RAN RB RBA RBPh RC RCPR RDM REB RÉJ RES rev. RF RHC RHD RHDF Rhetorica RhM RHPR RIDC RLA RMS RORD RP RPA RPh RR RSF RSO RSPT RTh

LXXIV Palestine Pilgrims’ Text Society Library Philological Quarterly Political Theory Presses Universitaires de France Quellen und Forschungen aus italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken Quaderni storici Romania Rendiconti dell’Accademia di Archeologia, Lettere e Belle Arti di Napoli Revue bénédictine Revue belge d’archéologie et d’histoire de l’art Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire Revue Celtique Revue Critique de Philologie Romane Revue des Deux Mondes Revue des Études Byzantines Revue des Études Juives Review of English Studies revised Romanische Forschungen Recueil des Historiens des Croisades Revue d’histoire du droit Revue historique de droit français et étranger Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric Rheinisches Museum für Philologie, Theologie und Philosophie Revue d’histoire et philosophie religieuse Rivista Internazionale di Diritto Comune Romance Languages Annual Reading Medieval Studies Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama Review of Politics Revue de philosophie ancienne Romance Philology Romanic Review Rivista di Storia della Filosofia Revista degli Studi Orientali Revue des Sciences philosophiques et théologiques Revue Thomiste

LXXV RUB SAC SATF Scand. Econ. Hist. Rev. SD SF SFI SH SI SMC SNPL SO SP sqq. SSD

TAPA TRE TRHS TS überarb. UNC unveränd. Viator Vivarium VL vol. VSWG WW YWES ZCPh ZfdA ZfdPh

Abbreviations

Revue de l’Université de Bruxelles Studies in the Age of Chaucer Société des anciens textes français Scandinavian Economic History Review Studi Danteschi Studi francesi Studi di filologia italiana Scripta Hierosolymitana Studia Islamica Studies in Medieval Culture Studies and Notes in Philology and Literature Symbolae Osloenses Studies in Philology sequentes Sign, Sentence and Discourse: Language in Medieval Thought and Literature, ed. Julian Wasserman and Lois Roney (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1989). Transactions of the American Philological Association Theologische Realenzyklopädie Transactions of the Royal Historical Society Theological Studies überarbeitet University of North Carolina unverändert Viator. Medieval and Renaissance Studies Vivarium. A Journal for Mediaeval Philosophy and the Intellectual Life of the Middle Ages Deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters: Verfasserlexikon volume Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte Wirkendes Wort The Year’s Work in English Studies Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie

LXXVI

Abbreviations

ZfrP ZNR ZP ZRG, Germ. Abt. ZRG, Kan. Abt.

Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie Zeitschrift für Neuere Rechtsgeschichte Zeitschrift für Politik Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte/Germanistische Abteilung Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte/Kanonistische Abteilung

LXXVII

List of Contributors

List of Contributors Acken, James Centre for Medieval Studies, Canada Adams, Tracey University of Auckland, New Zealand Anichini, Federica The College of New Jersey, Ewing Arabatzis, George Academy of Athens, Greece Armistead, Samuel G. University of California, Davis, CA Ash, Karine Marie Los Angeles, CA Auslander, Diane P. Graduate Center, City University of New York Baier, Katharina Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Germany Bak, Janos Central European University, Budapest, Hungary Baker, Craig Laval Université, Quebec, Canada

Baldzuhn, Michael Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Germany Barrington, Candace Central Connecticut State University, New Britain, CT Bashir, Hassan Texas A&M University at Qatar, Qatar Bashir, Shahzad Stanford University, CA Baumgarten, Jean Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS); École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris, France Berindeanu, Florin Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH Benz, Judith Juniata College, Huntingdon, PA Beringer, Alison Colgate University, Hamilton, NY Black, Patricia California State University, Chico, CA

LXXVIII

List of Contributors

Blaschitz, Gertrud Institut für Realienkunde des Mittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Krems, Austria Boggi, Flavio University College Cork, Ireland Bogstad, Janice M. University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, WI

Cawsey, Kathey Dalhousie University Halifax, Canada Clason, Christopher Rochester Hills, MI Classen, Albrecht The University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ Clivio, Gianrenzo Toronto, Canada

Bolduc, Michelle University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, WI

Compareti, Matteo Stra (Venezia), Italy

Boscolo, Claudia Royal Holloway University of London, UK

Cooper, Glen M. Brigham Young University, Provo, UT

Boyle, Elizabeth University of Cambridge, UK

Cormier, Raymond Longwood University, VA

Bratu, Cristian Baylor University, Waco, TX

Cruse, Mark Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ

Calomino, Salvatore Madison, WI

D’Alessio, Nuncio The University of Texas, Austin, TX

Campbell, Kimberlee Harvard University, Cambridge, MA

Dal Santo, Matthew University of Cambridge, UK

Cancian, Alessandro Foundation for Dialogue Among Civilizations, Geneva, Switzerland Carey, Stephen Mark Oakland University, Rochester, MI

Damico, Helen University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM Dangler, Jean Tulane University, New Orleans, LA

LXXIX Davis, Joshua University of Central Missouri, Warrensburg, MO Delle Donne, Roberto Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, Italy De Ventura, Paolo The University of Birmingham, UK Deyrup, Marta Seton Hall University, South Orange, NJ Dines, Ilya Jerusalem, Israel Dinzelbacher, Peter Werfen/Salzburg, Austria Dorninger, Maria E. Universität Salzburg, Austria Dover, Carol Georgetown University, Washington D.C. Dunphy, Graeme Universität Regensburg, Germany Egger, Christoph Universität Wien, Austria English, Edward D. University of California, Santa Barbara, CA

List of Contributors

Evans, Beverly State University of New York-College at Geneseo, Geneseo, NY Evitt, Regula Meyer Colorado College, Colorado Springs, CO Fritsch-Rößler, Waltraud Universität Innsbruck, Austria Full, Bettina Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg, Germany Fynn, Jeffrey Paul Tolland, CT Garver, Valerie L. Northern Illinois University, Dekalb, IL Geck, John A. Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto, Canada Gentry, Francis G. Spring Mills, PA Germanidou, Sophia Kalamata, Greece Gertsman, Elina Southern Illinois University School of Art and Design, Carbondale, IL Gilbank, Robin University of Wales, UK

LXXX

List of Contributors

Glick, Thomas F. Boston University, Boston, MA Gordon, Sarah Utah State University, Logan, UT Graizbord, David The University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ Grabowska, Jim Minnesota State University, Mankato, MN Grafinger, Christine Maria Biblioteca Vaticana, Città del Vaticano Griffin, Carrie University College Cork, Ireland Grosse, Max Universität Tübingen, Germany Grove, Jonathan University of Cambridge, UK Harbison, Robert Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green, KY Hartmann, Heiko Freie Universität Berlin, Germany Haywood, Louise University of Cambridge, UK Heller, Sarah-Grace Ohio State University, Columbus, OH

Herman, Jason The University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ Heyworth, Gregory University of Mississippi, MS Hollengreen, H. Laura University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ Holt, Andrew Starke, FL Holtzman, Livnat Bar-Ilan University, Israel Horowitz, Jeannine University of Haifa, Greece Huda, Qamar-ul Washington D.C. Ingram, Amy Northern Illinois University, Dekalb, IL Jaques, R. Kevin Indiana University, Bloomington, IL Jambeck, Karen K. Western Connecticut State University, Danbury, CT Jaritz, Gerhard Central European University, Hungary Johnson, Michael A. University of Texas at Austin, TX

LXXXI Kapriev, Georgi St. Kliment Ochridski University, Bulgaria Keats-Rohan, K.S.B. Oxford University, UK King, David Universität Frankfurt, Germany Kitsikopoulos, Harry New York University, New York, NY Koch, Walter Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich, Germany Kölzer, Theo Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, Germany

List of Contributors

Leanos, Jaime University of Nevada, Reno Lefebure, Leo D. Georgetown University, DC Lemeneva, Elena Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto, Canada Leverage, Paula Purdue University, W. Lafayette, IN Löser, Freimut Universität Augsburg, Germany Lucas, Adam Department of Aboriginal Affairs, Surrey Hills, NSW, Australia Luce, Mark David University of Chicago, IL

Kohl, Gerald Universität Wien, Austria

Lummus, David Stanford University, CA

Kümper, Hiram Universität Vechta, Germany

Macierowski, Edward M. Benedictine College, Atchison, KS

Kuhn, Christian Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg, Germany

Mack, Gregory McGill University, Canada

Lacy, Norris J. Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA Latowsky, Anne University of South Florida, Tampa

Mannaerts, Pieter Research Foundation – Flanders, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium Margolis, Nadia Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA

LXXXII

List of Contributors

Marner, Dominic University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada Meyer, Andreas Philipps-Universität Marburg, Germany Meyer Evitt, Regula Colorado Springs, CO Mieszkowski, Gretchen University of Houston-Clear Lake, Houston, TX Morewedge, Rosmarie Binghamton University, NY Müller, Ulrich Universität Salzburg, Austria

Niederkorn-Bruck, Meta Universität Wien, Austria Nijhuis, Letty University College Cork, Ireland Noakes, Susan University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN Obermeier, Anita University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM O’Brien, Juliet Princeton University, NJ O’Sullivan, Daniel E. The University of Mississippi, MS

Münster, Reinhold Universität Bamberg, Germany

Ohlander, Erik S. Indiana University, Purdue University, Fort Wayne

Munson, Marcella Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL

Oschema, Klaus Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, Germany

Murdoch, Brian University of Stirling, Scotland, UK

Paddock, Mary Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, Blacksburg, VA

Murray, K. Sarah-Jane Baylor University, Waco, TX Nagi, Joseph UCLA, Los Angeles, CA Naismith, Rory Cambridge University, UK

Parra Membrives, Eva Universidad de Salamanca, Spain Parton, Frances Cambridge University, UK Paulsen, Robert Universität Freiburg i.Br., Germany

LXXXIII

List of Contributors

Peitsara, Kirsti University of Helsinki, Finland

Reichert, Hermann Universität Wien, Austria

Penn, Stephen University of Stirling, Scotland, UK

Reinhart, Max University of Georgia, Athens, GA

Pettigrew, Mark Queens College, City University of New York Pfeffer, Wendy University of Louisville, Louisville, KY

Reynolds, Kevin York University, Toronto, Canada Rezakhani, Khodadad UCLA, Los Angeles, CA

Pierce, Marc University of Texas, Austin, TX

Rider, Jeff Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT

Pigg, Daniel The University of Tennessee at Martin, Martin, TN

Roberg, Francesco Hessisches Staatsarchiv Marburg, Germany

Pincikowski, Scott E. Hood College, Frederick, MD

Rodíguez-Velasco, Jesús University of California, Berkeley, CA

Poole, Russell University of Western Ontario, Canada Porter, Camarin University of Wisconsin at Madison, Madison, WI Powrie, Sarah St. Thomas More College, Saskatchewan, Canada Raposo Fernández, Berta Universidad de Valencia, Valencia, Spain

Rötzer, Daniel Paris-Lodron-Universität Salzburg, Austria Rosenstein, Roy The American University of Paris, France Rouillard, Linda Marie The University of Toledo, Toledo, OH Rushing, James Rutgers University, Camden, NJ

LXXXIV

List of Contributors

Sager, Alex University of Georgia, Athens, GA Sandidge, Marilyn Westfield State University, MA Santangelo, Enrico Università di Torino, Italy Sauer, Michelle M. University of North Dakota, Grand Forks, ND Sayers, William Cornell University, Ithaca, NY Schmidt, Siegrid Universität Salzburg, Austria Schnall, Jens Eike Universität Freiburg i.Br., Germany Schwartz, Yossef Tel Aviv University, Israel Singer, Julie Washington University, St. Louis, MO

Stevenson, Barbara Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw, GA Stock, Marcus University of Toronto, Canada Stokes, Peter University of Cambridge, UK Storey, Wayne Indiana University, Bloomington, IN Stoudt, Debra Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA Syros, Vasileios University of Chicago, IL Taylor, Scott L. Pima Community College, Tucson, AZ Taylor, Steven Millem Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI

Slavin, Philip Yale University, New Haven, CT

Tinsley, David University of Puget Sound, Tacoma, WA

Snook, Ben Selwyn College, London, UK

Tomasik, Timothy Valparaiso University, Valparaiso, IN

Sprague, Maurice Universität Salzburg, Austria

Touwaide, Alain National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.

LXXXV Vallerani, Massimo Università degli Studi di Torino, Italy Van Liere, Frans Calvin College, Grand Rapids, MI Vogeler, Georg Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich, Germany Vogtherr, Thomas Universität Osnabrück, Germany Ward, Renée University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada Wedell, Moritz Universität Zürich, Switzerland Weigl, Herwig Universität Wien, Austria

List of Contributors

Wełna, Jerzy Warsaw University, Poland Whitford, David Victoria, Canada Yager, Susan Iowa State University, Ames, IA Ysebaert, Walter Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Research Foundation-Flanders, Belgium Zajkowski, Robert Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, Binghamton University, NY; Hudson Valley Community College, NY Zychowicz, James Madison, WI

List of Contributors

LXXXVI

1

Main Topics and Debates of the Last Decades and their Terminology and Results

2

3

The Arab West

A The Arab West A. Introduction The Arab West is a cultural area that conventionally includes the Maghrib (Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, but usually not Libya), Sicily and al-Andalus (Islamic Spain and Portugal). The three Maghrib countries then acquired in the course of the 19th century a distinctive historiographical overlay due to French colonization that imparted idiosyncratic views of social organization (the importance of autonomous Berber “cantons”) and political organization (opposition of territory controlled by the state – bled al-makhzen – versus that under tribal control (land of dissidence, bled al-siba). B. History of Research. North Africa A series of important monographs in French formed the basis of modern North African historiography: Robert Montagne, Les Berbères et le Makhzen dans le sud du Maroc, 1930; Emile Félix Gautier, Le passé de l’Afrique du nord: Les siècles obscurs (1937); Robert Brunschvig, La Berbérie orientale sous les Hafsides (1940); Hady R. Idris, La Berbérie orientale sous les Zirides (1962). Gautier and Montagne argued similar points, that Morocco had never been unified because of the prevalence of free Berber “cantons” (Montagne), or that unification never happened because of a millennial struggle between sedentary peoples (Berbers) and nomads (Arabs and Arabized Berbers) (Gautier). Gautier’s argument, fascinating but hyperbolic, is based to an extent on the hypothesis of the 14th-century polymath, Ibn Khaldun, on the role of sedentary – nomad conflict in the rise and falls of dynastic states (in his Muqaddimah and Kitab al-‘Ibar). Reevaluation of the nature of Berber society was largely the work of anthropologists, especially Jacques Berque (Structures sociales du Haut-Atlas, 1955); and Ernest Gellner (Saints of the Atlas, 1969), both of whom had immense influence on historians. A landmark in urban history was Roger Le Tourneau’s Fès avant le protectorat (1949), which however perpetuated the notion of a city-based society dating back to the early Middle Ages.

The Arab West

4

C. al-Andalus The 19th-century Spanish historiography of Islamic Spain was vitiated by an inability to distinguish between race and culture and therefore to assume that indigenous Hispano-Romans converted to Islam somehow remained “Spanish” in culture. This essentialist approach was first attacked by Américo Castro (The Structure of Spanish History, 1954; revised as The Spaniards, 1971), who first made the case that the culture of al-Andalus was a normative Arabo-Islamic one; and then definitively by Pierre Guichard (Al-Andalus: Estructura antropológica de una sociedad islámica en Occidente, 1976), who provided the social mechanism by which indigenous peoples were assimilated into Arabo-Muslim culture, and, at the same time, demonstrated (most importantly through a study of tribal toponyms) the tribe-based nature of settlement. The first comprehensive narrative history of al-Andalus was written by the Dutch Arabist Reinhart Dozy (Histoire des Musulmans d’Espagne: jusqu’à la conquête de l’Andalousie par les Almoravides, 1861), a political history that extended only through the Almoravid period. The next was by Evariste Lévi-Provencal, in the form of an updated version of Dozy’s Histoire, with the same title (1932). However this political narrative was accompanied by an influential volume on the social and economic history of al-Andalus (L’Espagne musulmane au XIème siècle: Institutions et vie sociale, 1932). Because the kingdom of Granada lasted 250 years longer than the heartland of Islamic Spain, it has a distinctive historiography. The standard histories are Rachel Arie, L’Espagne musulmane au temps des Nasrides (1973); and L. P. Harvey, Islamic Spain, 1250–1500 (1990). The notion of social organization underlying much of this literature was a tacit adaptation of the bled al-makhzen/bled al-siba model to al-Andalus, under the assumption that the polity of the emirate, caliphate and independent kings alike was one of centralized control, punctuated by tribal rebellions. One of the problems of western Islamic historiography – especially that of al-Andalus – is the lack of Arabic documentation. As a result there has been methodologically interesting work, using Christian archival documentation for the reconstruction of aspects of Islamic history: Olivia R. Constable, who made use of Genoese notarial archives to document Italian trade with al-Andalus (Trade and Traders in Muslim Spain: The Commercial Realignment of the Iberian Peninsula, 900–1500, 1994), Charles Du Fourcq (L’Espagne catalane et le Magrib au XIIIe et XVe siècles, 1965), using documents from the Archives of the Crown of Aragon to reconstruct relations between the Catalonia and the Magrib; and the entire literature of the Christian resettlement of al-Andalus,

5

The Arab West

using land partition documents (Libros de repartimiento) to reconstruct the social and agricultural organization of Islamic Spain (see Glick, From Muslim Fortress to Christian Conquest, 1996, ch. 6). D. Medieval Archeology In the 1980s, a new approach to Andalusi society was adumbrated by a new wave of medieval archeologists who reexamined the social structure of al-Andalus from the perspective of Guichard who in an important study of fortifications together with André Bazzana and Patrice Cressier (Les chateaux ruraux d’Al-Andalus, 1990), replaced the older tacit paradigm of rural social organization with a new one, based on free tribal settlements under the protective wing of “castle-refuges” (husun) that were inhabited only in times of unrest. A huge investment of energy was spent over the next ten to fifteen years on identifying castle/village complexes. The paradigm was subsequently somewhat modified by Miquel Barceló and his students at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, who demonstrated convincingly that water systems, not castles, were the central organizing feature of such settlement complexes. A model study is given by Helena Kirchner (La construcció d’un espai pagès a Mayurqa (1997), who demonstrates the relationship between systems of irrigation canals and tribal settlements. E. Current Trends The wave of enthusiasm that carried the new medieval archeology for twenty years seemingly dissipated around 2000, or rather, its energies were devoted to regional syntheses. Representative works are Guichard’s on Valencia (Les Musulmans de Valence et le reconquete, 1990); Rafael Azuar on Alicante and the Islamic kingdom of Denia (Denia islámica: arqueología y poblamiento, 1989), and Virgilio Martínez Enamorado on Málaga (Al-Andalus desde la periferia: la formación de una sociedad musulmana en tierras malagueñas, 2003). Methodologically what is notable about these syntheses is that their sources are both documentary and archeological. There has also appeared a kind of revanchist retrieval, although also regionally delimited and with an archeological basis, of the older line of “continuism” that stressed continuity of culture and social organization from Roman through early Islamic times (see Sonia Gutiérrez, La cora de Tudmir, de la antigüedad tardía al mundo islámica: poblamiento y cultura material, 1996).

The Arab East

6

Select Bibliography Arabs and Berbers: From Tribe to Nation in North Africa, ed. Ernest Gellner (Lexington: Heath, 1972); Pierre Guichard, Al-Andalus, 711–1492 (Paris: Hachette, 2000); Thomas F. Glick, From Muslim Fortress to Christian Castle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995; revised as Paisajes de conquista, Valencia: University of Valencia Press, 2006); Abdelmajid Hannoum, Colonial Histories, Post-Colonial Memories: The Legend of the Kahina (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2001); Michel Terrasse, Islam et Occident méditerranéen: de la conquête aux Ottomans (Paris: CTHS, 2001).

Thomas F. Glick

The Arab East A. General Introduction The Arab East can be defined as the regions including modern day Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and the eastern portion of Turkmenistan. The Arab conquests of these regions began in the third decade of the 7th century and continued through the middle of the 8th century. In the 7th century, these lands were under the influence of three major powers: the Sasanian Empire in Persia, the T’ang dynasty in China and the Gupta dynasty in India. The Sasanian Empire encompassed Iraq, Iran, southwestern and northern Afghanistan and parts of Turkmenistan. On its western and northern frontiers, it bordered the Byzantine Empire, which controlled the Levant, the Caucasus and Asia Minor. Its northeastern boundaries were roughly defined as south of the Oxus River and the western bank of the Murghab River and the great Ghuzz Desert. Its easternmost province, Khurasan was less settled and expanded and contracted with the times. It comprised four main administrative centers in Marw, Abrashahr (Nishapur, modern day Mashhad), Herat and Balkh. The military command for the region was based in Marw, in present day Turkmenistan. Sijistan (Sistan), the region presently comprising portions of southeast Iran, northwestern Pakistan and southwestern Afghanistan had been nominally under Sasanian rule. Its easternmost boundary was Bust, situated at the confluence of the Helmand and Arghandab rivers. Further to the east the local rulers were aligned with the Indian Empire. North of the Oxus River (Transoxiana) were Khwarazm, which bordered the southern shore of the Aral Sea and Sogdia, which occupied the Oxus –

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Jaxartes Basin. Sogdia was a federation of loosely allied Iranian city-states that were nominally under Chinese suzerainty. The major city-states of Sogdia were Paykand, Bukhara and Samarqand. Further north in Ushrusana was Shash, near present day Tashkent. The peoples of this region were primarily of Iranian stock with a mixture of Turkic speaking peoples. B. The Righteous Caliphs (632–661 C.E.) The Arabs quickly colonized Iraq during this period. The two garrison towns of Basra and Kufa were established and soon became cities that experienced massive Arab emigrations. They were the main bases of operation from which campaigns to the east were launched. Under the caliph Umar (r. 634–644 C.E.), raids were launched into Persia. Persian resistance against the Arabs continued through the caliphate of Uthman (r. 644–656 C.E.). The Arabs established garrisons and appointed governors in the major cities and relative calm prevailed. The Arab governors of Iraq administered the eastern lands from Basra and reported to the caliph in Damascus. They were largely responsible for appointing governors in the east. The furthest frontier on the eastern border of the newly emerged Arab Empire was called Khurasan. This region comprised the former Sasanian province of Khurasan as well as Sijistan (Sistan) and Transoxiana beyond the Oxus. These three regions known as “Greater Khurasan” are the main focus of this article. The Makran and Sind were conquered by the Arabs in the early 8th century, but they remained backwaters during the period which concerns us. The Arabs quickly subdued Sasanian Khurasan and Sijistan. They raided as far east as Kabul and the Sind. Treaties were negotiated with the individual rulers of the major towns and cities of Khurasan and annual tributes were agreed upon. The local rulers were responsible for the collection and payment of this tribute. The Arabs did not maintain a large physical presence there during this period. Initially, after campaigning, they typically returned to Basra in Iraq. Due to this and internal Arab upheavals, such as the assassinations of the caliphs Umar, Uthman and Ali, the Khurasanis frequently used these periods of Arab unrest to rebel. This resulted in additional Arab campaigns, which necessitated the renegotiation of treaties. C. Umayyad Period (661–750 C.E.) Under the Umayyad caliph Muawiya (r. 661–680 C.E.), 50,000 soldiers and their dependents were sent to colonize Khurasan in 671 C.E. The majority of this group settled in the administrative capital of Khurasan, Marw. In 673 C.E., the Arabs mounted campaigns, which crossed the Oxus into Trans-

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oxiana (Ar. Ma wara al-nahr), where they attacked the Sogdian city-states. These campaigns resulted in an enormous amount of booty, but the treaties established there were short-lived. Rebellions continued until the governorship of Qutayba b. Muslim (705–714 C.E.). Qutayba launched a sustained campaign against the Sogdians with the military support of local levies. Paykand was completely destroyed and Bukhara and Samarqand were subjugated and Arab garrisons were stationed in these cities. Qutayba’s campaigns extended as far east as Kashgar. Qutayba’s conquests proved to be superficial. The Sogdians allied themselves with the western Turks, whose power had surged and during the last portion of Umayyad rule, Transoxiana was nearly lost to the Arabs. Sijistan was plagued with rebellion and Umayyad control was effectively restricted to the two major cities of Zaranj and Bust. In 736 C.E., in an effort to hold Greater Khurasan together, the Umayyad governor, Asad b. Khalid moved the administrative capital from Marw to Balkh. The majority of the population of Greater Khurasan did not convert to Islam. Religiously, the area was extremely diverse with a Zoroastrian majority and Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Manichaean and pagan minorities. Among the Arabs and new converts, tribal, political and sectarian differences were rife. These divisions among the Muslims coupled with continued rebellion weakened Umayyad authority. An anti-Umayyad movement had begun around 720 C.E. Its propaganda concentrated on the populations of Khurasan and finally in 746 C.E., the Abbasid Revolution under the leadership of Abu Muslim al-Khurasani began there. It quickly gained success in Khurasan and toppled Umayyad authority there and spread westward into Persia and Iraq. Continued victories propelled the movement into Syria and in 750 A. D. the Umayyads were defeated and the Abbasid dynasty was established. Abu Muslim al-Khurasani retained control of Khurasan and reestablished Muslim control over Transoxiana. However, in 755 C.E., he was assassinated by the Abbasid caliph, al-Manur, who appointed his own governor to Khurasan. D. The Abba¯ sid High Caliphate (750–833 C.E.) The establishment of the Abbasid dynasty was a turning point in the history of the Arabs and Islam. Previously, Arab Umayyad rule had dominated. Non-Arabs converting to Islam became clients (mawali), which made them “honorary Arabs.” However, their status was not equal to that of the Arabs. After the Abbasid revolution, things began to change. The capital of the empire was moved from Damascus to Baghdad and the victorious Khurasanis, who were a mixture of Arabs and Persians obtained a special status in the

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government. Non-Arabs increasingly attained high offices and positions of authority. The Umayyads heavily exploited Greater Khurasan. The Arab governors had amassed great wealth and did little to improve the infrastructure or public services. With the establishment of a new “Muslim dynamic,” trade increased and cities along the trade routes grew and prospered. While the majority of the population remained non-Muslim until the late 10th century, the number of new converts to Islam grew, as did the number of religious scholars. Arab religious scholars were no longer an overwhelming majority and a growing class of non-Arab scholars writing in Arabic flourished. The second half of the 8th century was a period of cultural and religious synthesis. The Arabs in the east became more assimilated into the overall society while for a period of three hundred years the Persians abandoned Middle Persian and adopted Arabic as their administrative, liturgical and literary language. The Arab conquests set into motion the conditions that led to the emergence of New Persian after this period. New Persian was written in a modified form of the Arabic script and included a large number of Arabic loan words. It developed an Islamic literature and gradually became the dominant Iranian language replacing Sogdian as the lingua franca of Central Asia. As the Arabs became more Persianized, the Persians became more Arabized. Additionally, the Turks, who had traditionally adopted Sogdian as their written language, replaced it with new Persian (Dari). However, Dari did not begin to emerge as a literary language until the 10th century. The Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad experienced a major schism in the beginning of the 9th century, which ultimately resulted in the loss of the east to Arab authority. Upon his death in 809 C.E., Harun al-Rashid’s son, al-Amin, became caliph and his son, Mamun, became the governor of Khurasan. A rift developed between the two brothers and a civil war ensued. Mamun, who governed from Marw, eventually triumphed. Born of a Persian mother, he was at home in the east and had seriously pondered moving the capital of the empire from Baghdad to Marw. However, rebellions in the western portions of the empire forced him to decide whether he wanted to be the governor of Khurasan or the caliph of the Arab Empire. In 819 C.E., he moved to Baghdad. The Abbasid reign from its beginnings in 750 C.E. through the caliphate of Mamun is generally known as the period of the High Caliphate. After this time, Arab authority in the east rapidly declined. Mamun appointed governors to Khurasan but none were able to govern it well or keep the peace. Finally, in 821 C.E., Tahir b. al-Husayn, a trusted general of Mamun of Persian origin was appointed to Khurasan. He reestablished order and soon became a patron of Arab learning. Politically, he estab-

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lished his autonomy from Baghdad and Arab rule and founded his own dynasty, the Tahirids (821–873 C.E.). TheTahirids were the last rulers in the east to make a pretense of being Arab. The successors of the Tahirids in the east, in the late 9th century and the early 10th century, the Saffarids from Sijistan and the Samanids in Transoxiana and Khurasan were ethnically Persian and actively patronized things Persian while promoting Islam. Arab control over the east ended. Subsequent dynasties of the Ghaznavids and Saljuqs were ethnically Turkish but culturally Persian. The Arab caliphs ruling from Baghdad gradually lost control of their once large empire that fragmented into a number of different states. The caliphs were unable to reclaim their past political power and eventually became only figureheads. The institution of the caliphate continued in Baghdad until 1258, when the Mongols invaded and killed the last Arab caliph. E. History of Research Scholarship on the Arabs in the East has primarily concentrated on the Umayyad dynasty and specifically the causes of the Abbasid revolution. Gerlof Van Vloten and Julius Wellhausen led this research in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Europe. Van Vloten’s Recherches sur la domination arabe, le chi’isme et les croyances messianiques sous les Omayyades (1894) perceived the Abbasid revolution as a Persian nationalist movement, which struggled against repressive taxes and social inequality in order to overthrow the Arab oppressors. He believed the revolution was energized by the rise of Shi’ism and the expectation of a liberator or messiah. Wellhausen supported Van Vloten’s views; however, in opposition to Van Vloten, he saw the revolution as having its roots in Islam rather than Persian nationalism. Julius Wellhausen’s The Arab Kingdom and Its Fall appeared in 1902. It was the first critical work to use Tabari’s History of the Prophets and the Kings and the first presentation of an Islamic subject using modern historical method. Wellhausen, as a product of his age, was concerned with nations, states and persons and the struggle between them for power. This preoccupation with politics and nationality completely disregarded economics. Wellhausen saw the Umayyad dynasty as essentially an Arab kingdom. He further forwarded the belief that the empire had become factionalized along north/south (Qays/Yaman) Arab tribal lines during the Islamic era. His views established the paradigm that remained virtually unassailed, for more than 70 years. Wellhausen closely and critically examined his and their sources. He favored the earliest ones. He strongly believed that the literary tradition should be subjected to intense criticism and analyzed for contradictions and biases. Wellhausen’s works were followed by a number of modern

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scholars, who advanced scholarship in the field by collating and editing critical editions of important manuscripts. European institutions had continued to collect Arabic manuscripts from the Middle East, Central Asia and India. As these works were described and catalogued a major effort began to produce critical editions of them. In these pursuits, Vasily Barthold, Hamilton A. R. Gibb and Richard N. Frye figured prominently. Vasily Barthold was a polymath. He was one of the first scholars to critically use both Arabic and Persian sources in his research. He saw the Umayyad period as one of exploitation. He believed that the Arabs had no real administrative aims and that they were content to maintain control over the Khurasani Arab population while extracting taxes and tribute from all. The rapid succession of Umayyad governors and their acquisition of vast fortunes proved this point to him. Barthold’s major contribution to this early phase of Islamic history was his groundbreaking work on the history and geography of Central Asia. He was meticulous and systematically identified cities, towns and landmarks throughout Central Asia, utilizing a variety of scientific methods and incorporating archaeological and numismatic findings. He was a prolific writer, who wrote primarily in Russian and German. His works were considered so important that his major work, Turkestan Down to the Mongol Invasion (1900) was translated into English from the Russian with Barthold’s collaboration by Hamilton A. R. Gibb in 1928. Hamilton A. R. Gibb continually added to the prior studies of his colleagues. In examining Greater Khurasan, he contrasted a highly decentralized Transoxiana with the centralized former Sasanian realm of Khurasan proper and he stressed that their social and political systems had developed independently. He viewed Qutayba b. Muslim’s conquests in Transoxiana as superficial and held that Sogdian resistance to the Arabs was based on commercial interests and their tradition of regional independence. He highlighted the roles of Asad b. Abdullah and Nasr b. Sayyar at the end of the Umayyad period in trying to right injustices and unify the frontier by bringing the Arabs and mawali closer together. He tried to demonstrate that once the Arabs began to focus on trade that resistance decreased dramatically. Gibb was one of the first to utilize Chinese sources. His major work on this subject is The Arab Conquests in Central Asia (1923). Gibbs other works focus on Islam, literature and the interaction of Islamic societies with other cultures. Richard N. Frye concentrated on examining all facets of ancient Persia. While others had primarily focused on changes that were ushered in with the Arabs and Islam, Frye maintained the point of view, that the Persians were a dominant and changing force. Some of his major works are The Golden Age of Persia: the Arabs in the East (1975), Islamic Iran and Central Asia (1979) and The

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History of Bukhara (1954). Frye took special effort to inform us as to what sources on the subject have apparently been lost to time. C. E. Bosworth’s contribution to the study of the Arabs in the East must also be mentioned. Wellhausen and Gibb examined the East as a whole. Barthold had concentrated on Central Asia and Frye on Iran. Bosworth’s contributions are in geography and particularly on Sijistan (Sïstan). His Sïstan Under the Arabs, (1968) greatly complements the study of the Arabs and the East. These six scholars comprise what has been termed as the classical school of thought. Our understanding of Umayyad Khurasan has been shaped by their seminal works. Together they have provided a firm historiographical and geographical knowledge of this period, while advancing textual criticism and exploring all available sources. F. The Revisionists In the absence of an abundance of detailed information on the causes and factors leading up to the Abbasid revolution (747–750 C.E.), a new school grew up. The common thread linking the two schools has been an emphasis on the discontent in Khurasan caused by oppressive taxes for all, the assimilation of the Arabs into Khurasani society and their subsequent loss of political status, coupled with constant ongoing inter-tribal rivalries. The ruling dynasty was viewed as mostly impious and wrongly guided. The chronicles of Tabari, Ibn al-Athir, al-Baladhuri, Ibn A’tham and Ya’qubi provided the foundation for these ideas. The discovery of new sources such as the anonymous Akhbar dawlat al-Abbasiya and Tarikh al-Khulafa, and other works have helped to feed the fire of an ongoing classical versus revisionist battle. M. A. Shaban’s radical interpretation of the character of the Abbasid revolution in his Islamic History, C.E. 600–750 (A.H. 132): A New Interpretation (1971) attacked the classical school and claimed that the Arabs had no interest in war, opposed taxes, resented the Persian elite in charge of collecting taxes and were fully assimilated with the local population and were sympathetic to conversion. He saw the Abbasid revolution as primarily Arab, emerging out of Marw, as a result of lost status and privilege. He viewed the revolution as a three-way struggle between old military, new military and settlers. He dismissed the existence of tribal rivalries and transformed the north/south (Qays/Yaman) rivalries into ideological parties with common political, social and economic interests. He claimed the northern Arabs (Qays) were advocates of expansionist policies, while the southerners (Yaman) were proponents of assimilationist ones. He further claimed that there were few converts to Islam at this time.

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Shaban’s theories caused quite a stir when they were published. They challenged Wellhausen’s paradigm. However, Shaban’s work has not withstood the critical scrutiny of scholarship. His theories were more interpretation than fact, and his use of the sources was fairly loose. However, while he is faulted for a lack of good scholarly practices, his fresh approach to the subject was much needed. His revisionist school grew to include Daniel Dennett (Conversion and the Poll Tax in Early Islam, 1950), Farouk Omar (The Abbassid Caliphate: 132/750–170/786, 1969), Moshe Sharon (Black Banners from the East: the Establishment of the Abbasid State: Incubation of a Revolt; and Revolt: the Social and Military Aspects of the Abbasid Revolution, 1983), and Jacob Lassner (Islamic Revolution and Historical Memory: an Inquiry into the Art of Abbasid Apologetics, 1986). All of them asserted the Arabness of the Abbasid revolution and minimalized the role of the Persians. G. Recent Scholarship In the wake of the classical and revisionist schools, there has been a search for new sources that could shed more light on our rudimentary understanding of this period. Again, the main interest for this period has been the Abbasid revolution and the proving or disproving of the various theories of Wellhausen and Shaban. Two others scholars, Saleh Said Agha (The Revolution which Toppled the Umayyads: neither Arab nor Abbasid, 2003) and Fukuzo Amabe (The Emergence of the Abbasid Autocracy: the Abbasid Army, Khurasan and Adharbayjan, 1995) have introduced studies, which systematically examined the ethnic character of the Abbasid revolution and questioned the Abbasid dynasty claim. Agha focused on demographics and convincingly established the varied ethnic composition of the Abbasid revolution, deconstructing Shaban. Amabe in his collection of essays examines the Qays-Yaman dispute and agrees with Shaban as to its political nature in Syria but finds that the tensions in Khurasan had nothing to do with the Syrian ones. Additionally, he has convincingly disputed Shaban’s claim of the limited numbers of troops enrolled in the payrolls and that the old military (muqatila) were all dismissed from the rolls and replaced by Syrians and new troops. Finally, both Agha and Amabe have shattered Shaban’s theory that the majority of revolutionaries came from Marw and that no propagandists (da’is) operated outside of it. The debates, rebuttals and different interpretations of the events culminating in the Abbasid revolution have provided an abundance of opinions and used a variety of approaches. Both the classical and revisionist schools have fueled a continual series of studies, but none of them have approached the subject by examining Khurasan as a whole, from the advent of Islam until

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the Abbasid revolution. Scholars will continue to search for new sources on this subject. As more and more manuscripts are described and catalogued each year, it is possible that more pieces of this puzzle will be found. Select Bibliography Salih Sa’id Agha, The Revolution which Toppled the Umayyads: Neither Arab nor Abbasid (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2003); Fukuzo Amabe, The Emergence of the Abbasid Autocracy: The Abbasid Army, Khurasan and Adharbayjan (Kyoto: Kyoto University Press, 1995); Vasily V. Barthold, Turkestan Down to the Mongol Invasion (London: Luzac & Co., 1928); Clifford E. Bosworth, Sistan Under the Arabs: From the Islamic Conquest to the Rise of the Saffarids, 30–250/651–864 (Rome: Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente, 1968); Richard N. Frye, The Golden Age of Persia: The Arabs in the East (New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1975); Hamilton A. R. Gibb, The Arab Conquests in Central Asia. (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1923); M. A. Shaban, Islamic History: A new Interpretation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1971); Gerlof van Vloten, Recherches sur la domination arabe, le chi’isme et les croyances messianiques sous les khalifat Omayyades (Amsterdam: J. Muller, 1894); Julius Wellhausen, Das arabische Reich und sein Sturz (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1902).

Mark David Luce

Arabic Literature A. Introduction Throughout the Middle Ages, Arabic was employed by millions of Arabs and Muslims, not only as a scriptural language, but also as a shared medium of scholarly and literary communication. Accordingly, medieval Arabic literature was a rich and diverse tradition. This article provides an overview of the formation of the medieval literary canon and a survey of major trends in the study of Arabic literature from the 19th century to the present. The modern Arabic term adab signifies both “good manners” and “literature” in its specialized sense (poetry, drama, and artistic prose). In the Middle Ages, however, adab had a broader semantic range, conveying conduct and manners, knowledge and refinement, and, especially, the kind of socialization expected of secretaries, courtiers, and intellectuals. Adab writings, by extension, were those that contributed to this socialization, works that were both aesthetically pleasing and instructive. (For a full discussion of this term, see Seeger Bonnebakker, “Adab and the concept of belles-lettres,” The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature: ^Abbasid Belles-Lettres, ed. Julia Ash-

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tiany et al., 1990, 16–30.) The focus of this article is the study of secular belles-lettres, but it is important to remember that in the Middle Ages, practically all non-technical writings were expected to be composed according to contemporary standards of adab. B. The Legacy of Medieval Literary Scholarship Modern scholarship on medieval Arabic literature has adopted much of the conceptual framework of literary categorization formulated in the Middle Ages. In particular, the medieval canon, with its attendant aesthetic judgments and assumptions, has had a lasting influence. Until relatively recently, modern scholars have devoted little attention to those texts regarded as inferior or marginal in the Middle Ages. The first and most fundamental criterion for determining the “literariness” of a text was its linguistic register. Early in the Islamic era, Arab linguists became concerned with the question of diglossia, the perceived corruption of formal, fully inflected Arabic into various uninflected regional dialects. With a few notable exceptions, sub-literary status was assigned to compositions in colloquial dialects. Poetry was the premier literary genre in the Middle Ages. Despite its pagan religious milieu, the orally transmitted poetic tradition of the preIslamic era (al-jahiliyya, literally, “the age of ignorance”) was especially admired and regarded as a rich repository of linguistic and cultural information. The most famous canonical collection, the mu^allaqat (“the pendants” or “hanging odes”), consists of exemplars of the qasida, a formal, polythematic, monorhymed ode, by the most highly esteemed pre-Islamic poets. Much medieval criticism was prescriptive, dwelling on ideals and models for imitation and codified norms (^umud al-shi^r, “the pillars of poetry”). Pre-Islamic poetry, the mu^allaqat especially, provided such models. The traditional periodization of Arabic literature after the coming of Islam is loosely based on dynastic shifts and perceived changes in poetic style. The early Islamic period (622–660) and the reign of the Umayyad caliphs (660–750) is generally viewed as a transitional phase. The rise of the ^Abbasid caliphate (750–1258), signaled a definitive break with the tribal, nomadic past. The panegyrical ode (madih) had served a tribal function in pre-Islamic Arabia, but became an important medium of state propaganda in the caliphal era. Its most celebrated proponents were Abu Tammam (d. 846), alBuhturi (d. 897), and al-Mutanabbi (d. 965). Shorter forms, notably the ghazaliyya (love poem) and khamriyya (wine-song), both frequently set to music, became popular in less formal court contexts. Medieval critics perceived marked differences in style and tone between pre-Islamic poetry and that of

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the ^Abbasid period. Badi^ (“innovative new style”), a trend towards complex rhetorical embellishment that came into fashion in the early 9th century, became a key means of distinguishing the ‘modern poets’ (al-muhdathun) from the ‘ancients’ (al-qudama#). In the later Middle Ages, poetry became increasingly imitative, hence the modern distinction between the ‘classical’ period (the ^Abbaasid caliphate) and the ‘post-classical’ period (beginning after the Mongol conquest of Baghdad in 1258). Artistic prose was largely an innovation of the caliphal era, although brief narratives in the form of first-person reports (akhbar) recording important tribal events had been transmitted since pre-Islamic times. Reports of this sort, considered nonfictional, became the basis of historiography and biography. Of special significance were the hadith reports that inscribed the deeds and utterances of the prophet Muhammad. In the ^Abaasid period, reports were sometimes embedded in essays, such as those of al-Jahiz (d. 869?), and included in large compilations of short narratives on a variety of subjects. The most famous were literary anthologies: Ibn Qutayba’s (d. 889) ^Uyun al-akhbar (“Choice Anecdotes”), Ibn ^Abd Rabbihi’s (d. 940) Al-^Iqd alfarid (“The Precious Necklace”), and Abu al-Faraj al-Isfahani’s (d. 967) Kitab al-aghani (“Book of Songs”). Other compilations of this sort fell into an endless variety of sub-genres: histories, biographical dictionaries, manuals of etiquette, Fürstenspiegels, accounts of wonders and marvels, and so on. For the most part, prose narratives were expected to have a reliable chain of transmission and to deal with (plausibly) real events. Those fictional narratives that were tolerated were instructive allegories or sophisticated (therefore edifying) satires. An early experiment in this area was Ibn al-Muqaffa^’s (d. 757) Kalila wa-Dimna (“Kalila and Dimna”), a translation of animal fables from Pahlavi. The most popular fictional form of the Middle Ages was the maqama, a picaresque genre in rhymed prose developed by al-Hamadhani (d. 1008) and al-Hariri (d. 1122) and imitated up until the early 20th century. Medieval literary scholarship was prolific and remarkably introspective. The study of Arabic literary history depends on vast Medieval anthologies, commentaries, biographical and bibliographical compendia, and other resources. Medieval terms and conceptual categories – genres, modes, rhetorical terms, and so on – have, by and large, been adopted by modern scholars. Modern scholarship has also inherited a certain geographic bias (focusing particularly on the urban centers of the Fertile Crescent), and the traditional primitivist aesthetic that favored early ‘classic’ texts over later innovations. Naturally, issues that were of particular interest to medieval commentators and critics have continued to play a prominent role in the study of Arabic literature.

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C. The 19th Century: Discovery and Rediscovery Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 is often cited as the first significant cultural encounter between modern Europe and the Arab world, and an important catalyst for scholarly activity on both sides of the Mediterranean. Not incidentally, it was also the first significant military encounter, marking the beginning of European imperialist ambitions in the Middle East. Throughout most of the 19th century, scholarship on Arabic literature, both among Arab intellectuals and Orientalists, consisted mainly of collecting, cataloguing, editing, and publishing texts. In the early 19th century, modernization programs in the Arabic-speaking Middle East coincided with a new interest in classical literature. By midcentury, this interest had grown into a broad literary and cultural movement, al-Nahda (the “Revival” or “Renaissance”), which represented, among other things, a growing awareness among Arabs of their shared cultural heritage (al-turath). Al-Nahda was contrasted with ^Asr al-inhittat, a perceived “Period of Stagnation” or ‘Dark Ages’ (from the late Middle Ages through the Napoleonic invasion), characterized, politically, by the rule of non-Arab dynasties, and artistically, by an ostensible decline in originality. As Ottoman authority waned and European colonial activity intensified, al-Nahda became identified with both a revival of interest in medieval culture on the one hand, and rapid westernization on the other. Al-Nahda is chiefly associated with Egypt and the Levant, where the principle encounters with Europe took place. While the translation, imitation, and assimilation of European literary genres in the Arab world has been widely studied, far less attention has been devoted to the process by which classical Arabic literature became an object of study in the modern Arab world. (See, however, Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age 1798–1939, 1962; and Jack A. Crabbs, The Writing of History in Nineteenth-Century Egypt, 1984).The degree to which classical Arabic literature was ‘rediscovered’ in the 19th century is open to debate. Certainly some classical genres and authors had never ceased to be widely appreciated and studied in both the eighteenth and 19th centuries. The most dramatic development was not ‘rediscovery’ but wide distribution brought about as printing supplanted manuscript culture. In 1822, the Khedive Muhammad ^Ali established the Bulaq Press in Cairo as part of his modernization project. Although the Bulaq Press specialized in technical manuals and translations of European textbooks, it published editions of Alf Layla wa-layla (“The Thousand and One Nights”) and Ibn al-Muqaffa^’s Kalila wa-Dimna in 1822, soon followed by other medieval literary works. Protestant missionaries and the Jesuits set up presses in the Levant, and by the end of the century, most major Arab cities had presses. Newspapers and journals also published classical as

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well as contemporary literature, and soon became important fora for cultural dialogue. Some early contributors to al-Nahda include the Egyptian educator and translator Rifa^a al-Tahtawi (1801–1871), who advocated and supervised the publication of heritage texts at Bulaq, the Egyptian poet Ibrahim al-Dasuqi (1811–1883), an editor at the same press, and the Lebanese Christian poet Faris al-Shidyaq (1804–1887), an editor at the British Arabic press in Malta who later established an Arabic press in Istanbul. Butrus al-Bustani (1819–1883), a Lebanese Christian journalist and linguist, compiled the first modern Arabic dictionary (Muhit al-muhit, 1867–1870) and contributed to the first modern Arabic encyclopedia (Da#irat al-ma^arif, 1876–1882). The study of the Arabic heritage, including classical literature, became increasingly institutionalized with the foundation of national libraries and colleges, such as the Egyptian Dar al-kutub and Cairo Teacher’s College (both established in 1870). Efforts to preserve and disseminate the great works of the past involved constant negotiation with contemporary issues. It was chiefly modernists and reformers who guided the revival. Muhammad ^Abduh (1849–1905), the celebrated Islamic modernist, religious scholar, and educational reformer, introduced the study of classical Arabic literature at al-Azhar (Cairo’s medieval college of Islamic studies). This radical attempt to inject a ‘liberal arts’ program into al-Azhar’s hidebound religious curriculum scandalized ^Abduh’s colleagues, but inspired a new generation of Egyptian intellectuals (including Taha Husayn, on whom see below). Another prominent Arab academic, Luwis Shaykhu (Le Père Louis Cheikho, 1859–1927), a Lebanese Jesuit and professor at the University of Saint-Joseph, Beirut, played a greater role in preserving the classical canon than any other figure of al-Nahda. Shaykhu collected manuscripts and published critical editions of an amazing range of medieval texts, many of which are still used today. His Kitab shu^ara al-Nasraniyya (“Anthology of Christian Poets,” 1890) was an early (and contentious) study of Christian ‘identity literature.’ In Europe, Arabic studies were overshadowed by biblical and classical studies. The limited number of orientalists who did research in Arabic were rarely specialists, and many were adventurous amateurs rather than academics. Arabic was generally taught as if it were a dead language. Arabic studies did not coalesce into an institutionalized field of study until the end of the century (see Johann Fück, Die arabischen Studien in Europa, 1955; and Victor Chauvin, Bibliographie des ouvrages arabes et relatifs aux Arabes publiées dans l’Europe chrétienne de 1810 à 1883, 4 vols., 1892–1909.) Only a handful of medieval Arabic texts had been adequately edited and published before the 19th century, and few linguistic resources were available

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in Europe. Orientalists of the first half of the century laid much of the groundwork for further study, including a series of reliable grammars and various dictionaries and lexica. Gustav Flügel (1802–1870) edited a number of valuable sources for literary history, including Hajji Khalifa’s massive 17th-century bibliography of oriental manuscripts, Kashf al-zunun (in Latin translation as Bibliographicum et Encyclopaedicum, 1835–1858), an edition of Ibn al-Nadim’s 10th-century bibliography Kitab al-Fihrist (1871–1872) and a concordance to the Qur#an (Concordantiae Corani arabicae, 1842). One of the towering figures of late 19th- and early 20th-century orientalism was Ignaz (Ignác) Goldziher (1850–1921), best known for his groundbreaking work in Islamic studies (Muhammedanische Studien, 2 vols., 1888–1890, rpt. 1961), but also a pioneer in the study of Arabic literature (Abhandlungen zur arabischen Philologie, 2 vols., 1896–1899). Although an ever increasing number of literary texts were available to orientalists by the end of the century, aesthetic appreciation of medieval Arabic literature was often subordinated to philological interests and broad ethnographic generalizations. On one extreme, literary works were viewed as little more than sources of raw linguistic data, or, at best, as pedagogical aids (e.g. de Sacy’s Chrestomathie arabe, 1806; and two editions of Alf layla wa-layla, “The Thousand and One Nights” [designated Calcutta I (1814–1818) and Calcutta II (1839–1842)], both intended for linguistic study). On the other extreme, the idea that the study of Arabic literature represented a means of understanding ‘Oriental’ manners and customs exercised great appeal in the 19th century. This ethnographic approach had been introduced by Barthélémy d’Herbolet in his Bibliothéque orientale (1697), an early and largely anecdotal encyclopedia of Middle Eastern culture and history that was widely read in the 18th century. In the 19th century, this approach was adopted in such works as Edward Lane’s detailed study of culture and everyday life in Egypt, Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836), and the notes to his translation of Alf layla wa-layla (later published separately under the title Arabian Society in the Middle Ages, ed. Stanley Lane-Poole, 1883). For the most part, both Arab and Orientalist scholars of the 19th century were guided by the tastes of medieval critics and anthologists, and evinced a similar reverence for the medieval canon. One interesting case of divergent evaluation deserves special notice. The variable assortment of Märchen collected under the title of Alf layla wa-layla (“The Thousand and One Nights,” often translated as “The Arabian Nights”) had been regarded as an entertaining but ultimately frivolous and sub-literary work in the Arab world. In Europe, a French translation by Antoine Galland was published between 1704 and 1717 (Les Mille et une nuits), and immediately captured the public

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imagination. What began as exoticist curiosity in the 18th century turned into a mania in the 19th. Several editions were published (including the Bulaq edition, 1822), along with numerous translations (the best known are Edward Lane’s bowdlerized and compulsively annotated translation, The Thousand and One Nights, 3 vols., 1838–1841; and Richard Burton’s eccentric and bawdy translation, The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, 10 vols., 1885). As a result of all of this attention, “The Arabian Nights” remains the most famous work of medieval Arabic literature in the West. (On its history and reception, see Robert Irwin, The Arabian Nights: A Companion, 1995; and The Arabian Nights Encyclopedia, ed. Ulrich Marzolph and Richard van Leeuwen, 2 vols., 2004.) D. The 20th Century: Revolution and Re-evaluation 19th-century scholarship produced a sizable body of linguistic reference works and reliably edited literary texts. By the turn of the 20th century, Arabic literature had come to be recognized as an isolated object of study. Two watershed events of the 20th century, Taha Husayn’s challenge to the traditional canon and Edward Said’s postcolonial critique of Orientalism, helped to define the field and open the way for a variety of critical perspectives and methodologies. Both in Europe and the Arab world, literary history dominated the early part of the century. Notable surveys include Reynold Alleyne Nicholson, A Literary History of the Arabs, 1907; Jurji Zaydan, Tarikh adab al-lugha al-^arabiyya (“The History of Arabic-language Literatures”), 4 vols., 1911; Ignaz (Ignác) Goldziher, Arab irodalom rövid történte, 1912 (translated as A Short History of Classical Arabic Literature, 1966); Clément Huart, Histoire de la literature arabe (1923); Sir Hamilton Gibb, Arabic Literature, An Introduction, 1926; Carlo Nallino, La littérature arabe des origines à l’époque de la dynastie umayyade, 1950; Régis Blanchère, Histoire de la littérature arabe des origines à la fin du XVe siècle de J-C, 3 vols., 1952–1966). Two especially ambitious projects of this sort are Shawqi DAYF’s, Ta#rikh al-adab al-^Arabi (“The History of Arabic Literature,” 10 vols., 1960–1995); and the Cambridge History of Arabic Literature (commonly abbreviated CHAL), consisting of six volumes, each composed of articles by experts in particular subjects and sub-disciplines: Arabic Literature to the End of the Umayyad Period, ed. A. F. L. Beeston et al., 1983; ^Abbasid BellesLettres, ed. Julia Ashtiany et al., 1990; Religion, Learning and Science in the ^Abbasid Period, ed. M. J. L. Young et al., 1990; Modern Arabic Literature, ed. M. M. Badawi, 1992; The Literature of Al-Andalus, ed. Maria Rosa et al., 2000; and Arabic Literature in the Post-Classical Period, ed. Roger Allen, 2006. Other relatively recent contributions are Wolfhart Heinrichs, ed., Neues Handbuch

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der Literaturwissenschaft, vol. 5: Orientalisches Mittelalter, 1990; and Roger Allen, The Arabic Literary Heritage, 1998. In Europe, this interest in literary history coincided with a broader Orientalist project, the compilation of The Encyclopaedia of Islam, edited by Martin Theodor Houtsma and Arent Jan Wensinck, 4 vols., 1913–1938, printed in English, French, and German (now abbreviated EI1). This became a landmark reference work for Orientalists in a variety of fields, though it placed greater emphasis on Islamic history and civilization than on literature. The Encyclopaedia of Islam represented a major international effort, but Arab and Muslim contributors were largely excluded. The project was later repeated on an even grander scale with The New Encyclopaedia of Islam (EI2), 1954–, which remains one of the central reference texts for Arabists. Another important reference project was Carl Brockelmann’s Geschichte der arabischen Literatur (GAL) (2 vols., 1898–1902, 3 supplementary vols. 1937–1942, rev. ed. 1943–1949), a master catalog of books and manuscripts in Arabic, mostly culled from European manuscript catalogs, with brief biographical entries. Brockelmann’s work has since been supplemented by Fuat Sezgin, Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums (GAS), 12 vols., 1967–2000. Along with surveys of Arabic literature came specialized studies of particular periods, authors, and genres. Most of these were still fairly descriptive and conventional, with a strong philological emphasis. In Europe, one area that received special attention was Sufi mystical poetry (e.g., Reynold Alleyne Nicholson, Studies in Islamic Mysticism, 1921; and Louis Massignon’s highly eccentric and largely discredited study La passion d’al-Hallaj martyr mystique de l’Islam, 1925). In 1925, the British Arabist D. Samuel Margoliouth disputed the authenticity of pre-Islamic poetry, the cornerstone of the traditional canon of Arabic literature (“Origins of Arabic Poetry,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society [1925]: 417–49). The next year, the Egyptian academic, critic, and author Taha Husayn published his controversial work Fi al-shi^r al-jahili (“On Pre-Islamic Poetry,” 1926), a far more elaborate study that not only contested the origins of pre-Islamic poetry but also questioned the integrity of the Qur#an. The reliability of 8th-century transmitters and collectors of pre-Islamic poetry had long been held suspect, even in the Middle Ages, but no one had suggested that the entire pre-Islamic corpus needed to be reevaluated. Because of the book’s religious implications, it was immediately banned (later to be republished with considerable revisions). Husayn was tried, though not convicted, on charges of apostasy. Husayn approached every topic with gusto and bombast. Few current scholars of Arabic poetry now agree with Husayn’s absolutist iconoclasm,

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although most would admit that it is impossible to determine how much of the pre-Islamic corpus is genuine. Rather than the specific thesis of Fi al-shi^r al-jahili, it was Husayn’s willingness to question received wisdom that had lasting impact, particularly on Arab critics. Taha Husayn was not alone in being both a critic and a litterateur: interpretation and reinterpretation of the classical Arab-Islamic heritage was a cultural project in which artists, poets, academics, and professionals all participated (see David Semah, Four Egyptian Literary Critics, 1974). Some prominent contributors included the Egyptian cultural historian Ahmad AMIN, the Egyptian critic Shawqi Dayf, and the Palestinian critic Ihsan ^ABBAS. By mid-century, Arab critics had begun to experiment in surprising ways. The Egyptian academic and feminist author Suhayr al-Qalamawi wrote one of the first serious Arabic studies of “The Thousand and One Nights” (Alf layla wa-layla, 1943). The Egyptian critic Muhammad al-Nuwayhi applied psychological criticism to the works of one of the most famous ^Abbasid poets in Nafsiyyat Abi Nuwas (“The Psychology of Abu Nuwas,” 1953). Muhammad Ghunaymi Hilal, another prominent Egyptian critic of the 1950’s, introduced comparative literature as an approach to classical Arabic literature, in particular, in comparison with Persian literature. The Egyptian intellectual and chief ideologue of the Muslim Brotherhood, alSayyid Qutb, in his 30-volume exegesis of the Qur^an (Fi zilal al-Qur#an, “In the Shade of the Qur^an” [1966, numerous reprints]), offered sophisticated literary insights in the context of a traditional genre of Islamic scholarship. After World War II, Western scholarship changed in two major ways. First, a significant number of European scholars immigrated to the United States, where Middle Eastern studies began to flourish. Second, interpretive studies of specific aspects of Arabic literature began to replace general, descriptive surveys. Examples include Charles Pellat’s seminal study of the 9th-century essayist al-Jahiz, Le milieu basrien et la formation de Yâhiz,1953; and, a bit later, Andras Hamori’s formalist study, On the Art of Medieval Arabic Literature, 1974; and generic surveys, such as Lois Giffen, Theory of Profane Love Among the Arabs, 1971; and Gregor Schoeler, Arabische Naturdichtung, 1974. The literature of al-Andalus, often considered derivative by Arab critics, received much attention from Western Arabists, who were especially interested in possible Arab-Islamic influence on medieval European conceptions of ‘courtly love’ and the troubadour tradition (Angel González Palencia, Historia de la literatura arábigo-española, 1945; Alois R. Nykl, Hispano-Arabic Poetry and its Relations with the Old Provençal Troubadors, 1946). The publication of the Palestinian-American academic Edward Said’s unabashedly polemical and provocative Orientalism (1978) proved to be an-

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other pivotal moment in the development of Arabic studies in the 20th century. The thesis of Orientalism is that European scholarly, literary, and artistic representations of the ‘orient’ (the Arab world especially) came to constitute a hegemonic discourse that both legitimized and participated in European imperialist projects in the Middle East. It should be noted that Orientalism touches only tangentially on studies of Arabic literature, but as a general indictment of Western scholarship on the Middle East, it prompted much soul-searching and questioning of assumptions. Now considered a foundational text of post-colonialist criticism, Orientalism still inspires bitter controversy (see Maxime Rodinson, La fascination de l’Islam, 1980, a critical review of orientalist scholarship from a Marxist perspective; and a recent, caustic critique of Said: Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 2006). E. Recent Trends The influence of Orientalism has been felt in several ways in Arabic studies. Not only has it forced scholars in a variety of fields, including Arabic literature, to re-evaluate the history of European scholarship on the Middle East and Islam, but it has also raised the question of intellectual agency: how can Western scholars free themselves from the established Orientalist discourse and its Eurocentric premises? One response to this question has been to create a shared scholarly space in an attempt to integrate more Arab scholars into Western academic institutions. Taha Husayn and many of his contemporaries were also ‘cross-over’ scholars in a sense, forming bridges between European and Arabic intellectual communities, but the bulk of their publications were in Arabic, composed for an Arab readership. Now, in Western Europe and especially in the United States, Arabic literature is increasingly interpreted and taught by Arab scholars who publish in both Arabic and European languages. It could be argued that this solution does not fully address the problem of Eurocentrism, in that Arab scholars are still required to relate to the West on its own terms. Be that as it may, ‘cross-over’ scholars have played a key role in facilitating dialogue. With the influx of Arab scholars in the West, Arabic literary studies have experienced a shift in emphasis from the medieval heritage to modern literature. More often than not, early 20th-century literary histories treated Arabic literature as a fixed medieval corpus. The widespread study of modern Arabic literature has led to a breakdown in the perceived barrier between medieval and modern traditions. Many scholars work in both fields. One recent and innovative survey, Roger Allen’s The Arabic Literary Heritage (1998), begins with a polemical challenge to traditional periodization, and is organ-

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ized according to a generic scheme that explores continuities between medieval and modern Arabic literature. Similarly, the new Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature (ed. Julie Meisami and Paul Starkey, 1998) includes entries on both medieval and modern Arabic literature. The latest volume of The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature (Arabic Literature in the Post-Classical Period, ed. Roger Allen, 2006) examines literary production during ^Asr al-inhiittat, the supposed ‘Dark Age’ that has, in the past, been understudied. Arabic Studies in the West have been slow to incorporate contemporary literary theory. Philological, historical-biographical, and belletrist studies still abound, but since the 1980’s, formalist approaches have prevailed. The profound influence of structuralism, especially, is evident in the frequency of such terms as ‘poetics’ and ‘structural analysis’ in the titles of modern studies. In many cases, structuralist (and post-structuralist) analyses have contributed new perspectives on old topics and debates (prominent examples include Ferial Ghazoul, The Arabian Nights: A Structural Analysis, 1980 [later revised and expanded as Nocturnal Poetics: The Arabian Nights in Comparative Context, 1996]; Fedwa Malti-Douglas, Structures of Avarice: The Bukhala’ in Medieval Arabic Literature, 1985; Abdelfattah Kilito, L’auteur et ses doubles: essai sur la culture arabe classique, 1985; and Stefan Sperl, Mannerism in Arabic Poetry, 1989). Western literary theory has had significant impact on scholarship in the Arab world, predominantly through the influence of Western-educated Arab scholars, but it is also from the Arab world that some radical revisions and re-interpretations of Western theory have emerged. In this respect, the avant-garde Syrian poet and critic Adunis (also: Adonis, the pen-name of ^Ali Ahmad Sa^id) has proven to be one of the most original and challenging modern critics of the Arabic poetic tradition (works include Al-Thabit wa-al-mutahawwil [“The Static and the Dynamic”], 3 vols., 1974; and Muqaddima li-al-shi^r al-^arabi, 1986 [translated as An Introduction to Arab Poetics, trans. by Catherine Cobham, 1990]). Medieval literary criticism and rhetorical theory have long been of interest to Arab scholars (e.g. Muhammad Mandur, al-Naqd al-manhaji ^ind alArab [“Systematic Criticism among the Arabs, 1948]; Ihsan ^Abbas, Tarikh alnaqd al-adabi ^ind al-^Arab [“The History of Literary Criticism among the Arabs,” 1971]; and Kamal Abu Deeb, Al-Jurjani’s Theory of Poetic Imagery, 1976). Although Vincente Cantarino’s Arabic Poetics in the Golden Age, 1975, and Wolfhart Heinrich’s “Literary Theory: The Problem of Its Efficiency” (in Arabic Poetry: Theory and Development, ed. G.E. von Grunebaum, 1973, 19–69) represent two fairly early European studies, Western interest in medieval poetics largely coincided with the rising theoretical awareness of the 1980’s and 1990s (e.g., G. J. H. van Gelder, Beyond the Line: Classical Arabic

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Literary Critics on the Coherence and Unity of the Poem, 1982; Suzanne P. Stetkevych, Abu Tammam and the Poetics of the ^Abbasid Age, 1991; and Margaret Larkin, The Theology of Meaning: ‘Abd al-Qahir al-Jurjani’s Theory of Discourse, 1995). Select Bibliography Among the most important developments in the study of medieval Arabic literature is a new disruption of traditional assumptions regarding canon. Classical prose, traditionally overshadowed by poetry, has received more notice (see Stefan Leder and Hilary Kilpatrick, “Classical Arabic Prose Literature: a Researchers’ Sketch Map,” Journal of Arabic Literature 23 [1992]: 2–26), as have formerly taboo subjects, such as homoerotic literature (Homoeroticism in Classical Arabic Literature, ed. Jerry W. Wright and Everett K. Rowson, 1997). Contemporary scholars have begun to explore areas almost wholly ignored by medieval critics and anthologists, such as popular drama and theater (Shmuel Moreh, Live Theatre and Dramatic Literature in the Medieval Arabic World, 1992) and folk-epics (see Dwight Reynolds’s study of the modern epic tradition, Heroic Poets, Poetic Heroes: The Ethnography of Performance in an Arabic Oral Epic Tradition, 1995; and M. C. Lyons, The Arabian Epic, 3 vols., 1995). Alf layla wa-layla, the object of so much European fascination, now enjoys serious study from Arab scholars as well (in addition to works mentioned above: Muhsin MAHDI’s critical edition, The Thousand and One Nights (Alf layla wa-layla) from the Earliest Known Sources, 2 vols., 1984; and Muhsin Jasim MUSAWI, Mujtama^ Alf layla wa-layla [“The Society of the Thousand and One Nights”], 2000). Compositions in colloquial dialects have also received more attention, especially the zajal, a form of popular strophic poetry that developed in al-Andalus that has become the center of a modern debate over Arabic and European cultural influences in Muslim Spain (see Samuel Stern, Hispano-Arabic Strophic Poetry, 1974; Federico Corriente, El Cancionero hispanoárabe, 1984; and James T. Monroe, “Which Came First, the Zajal or the Muwa ˇs ˇsaha?” Oral Tradition 4 [1989]: 38–64).

Mark Pettigrew

Archeology and History of Art in Pre-Islamic Iran and Central Asia A. Historical Introduction During late antiquity, the vast area corresponding to Iran and Central Asia was very different from its present composition not only from the political point of view but also ethnically and culturally. In fact, before the coming of Islam, the territory from Mesopotamia to the border with China was inhabited by Iranian-speaking peoples who professed local forms of a religion commonly known as Zoroastrianism (or Mazdeism) and whose holy scripts

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are collected in the Avesta. In modern political terms, that area covered the territories of Iran (or Persia), Afghanistan, the ex-Soviet republics of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kirgizistan and southern Kazakhstan and also some parts of the Uighur Autonomous Province of Xinjiang (China) corresponding to the Tarim Basin (the “Western Regions” of Chinese authors). The Tarim Basin was inhabited by Iranians in Khotan and Tumshuk, and also by Tokharians (a population related to Indo-European peoples): they all adopted Buddhism and left important artistic and literary traces before the coming of the Uighur Turks and islamization. The Amu Darja (or Oxus for the Greeks) always constituted a natural border between the area traditionally controlled by Persia and Transoxiana, that is to say, the land beyond the Oxus or, for the Arab authors, Ma Wara al-Nahr (“what is beyond the river”). Persia constituted certainly the main state entity ruled by the powerful Sasanian Dynasty (226–642) that was continuously at war with the RomanByzantine Empire on the western border and the nomads along its oriental fringes (Touraj Daryaee, “Sasanian Persia (ca. 224–651 C.E.),” Iranian Studies 31, 3–4 (1998): 431–61; Touraj Daryaee, Sasanian Iran (224–651 CE): Portrait of a Late Antique Empire, 2008; Touraj Daryaee, Sasanian Persia: The Rise and Fall of an Empire, 2009; Richard Nelson Frye, “The Political History of Iran under the Sasanians,” The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 3 (1): The Seleucid, Parthian and Sasanian Periods, ed. Eshan Yarshater, 1986, 116–80; Michael Moroni, “Sasanians,” The Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. IX, ed. Clifford Edmund Bosworth, E. van Donzel, W. P. Heinrichs, and G. Lecomte, 1997, 70–83; Klaus Schippmann, Grundzüge der Geschichte des Sasanidischen Reiches, 1990; Joseph Wiesenhöfer, La Persia antica, 2003; Beate Dignas and Engelbert Winter, Rome and Persia in Late Antiquity: Neighbours and Rivals, 2007). The Central Asian regions mentioned above represent historico-geographical terms rather than political ones and, in fact, they have never been unified as it happened for Persia. For some time the Sasanians controlled part of Central Asian such as Margiana (in modern Turkmenistan), Bactriana-Tokharestan (between southern Uzbekistan and Tajikistan and northern Afghanistan) and Sogdiana (between southern Uzbekistan and western Tajikistan), but, apparently, not Chorasmia (corresponding to the Autonomous Region of Karakalapkistan, in northern Uzbekistan) although they were continuously open to the invasions of the nomads coming from the steppe. Archeological investigations in the first two regions have revealed a strong presence of Buddhism, too, while Chorasmia and Sogdiana mainly followed the local form of Zoroastrianism (exactly like in Persia). The invasions of the mysterious Kidarites and Hephtalites from the steppes from the 4th to the 6th

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centuries caused great loss to the Sasanian Empire which managed to re-conquer those oriental territories only during the reign of Khosrow I Anoshirwan (531–579) (Frantz Grenet, “Regional Interaction in Central Asia and Northwest India in the Kidarite and Hephtalite Periods,” Indo-Iranian Languages and People, ed. Nicholas Sims-Williams, 2002, 203–24). This Sasanian sovereign was Justinian’s main antagonist and also the initiator of a sort of “Persian Renaissance.” He not only started a series of fiscal and monetary reforms in order to give stability to the kingdom but also secured the frontiers by continuously fighting the Sasanians’ main enemies along the western and the eastern borders (Andrea Gariboldi, Il regno di Xusraw dall’anima immortale: Riforme economiche e rivolte sociali nell’Iran sasanide del VI secolo, 2006). His apogee was reached with the victory over the Hepthalites, achieved together with his new allies, the Western Turks, who soon turned into yet another menace for Persia. The Turks controlled most of Central Asia and, in the end, conquered also Bactriana-Tokharestan. The hegemony over Sogdiana allowed the Turks to control the so-called “Silk Road” since the Sogdian merchants were the main traders active on the caravan routes between Persia and China (Étienne De La Vaissière, Histoire des merchands sogdiens, 2002). During the war with Byzantium for the control of the caravan and maritime trade routes, Khosrow I even extended a Sasanian protectorate over Yemen (Janos Harmatta, “The Struggle for the ‘Silk Route’ Between Iran, Byzantium and the Türk Empire from 560 to 630 A.D,” Kontakte zwischen Iran, Byzanz und der Steppe im 6.–7. Jahrhundert, ed. Csanád Bálint, 2000, 249–52; Paul Yule, Himyar: Late Antique Yemen, 2007, 45–55) while most of the eastern Arabian Peninsula was already under his jurisdiction (Derek Kennet, “The Decline of Eastern Arabia in the Sasanian Period,” Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy, 18.1 [2007]: 86–122). With the coming of the Tang Dynasty (618–906), the whole of the Turkish domain soon fell into Chinese hands while Khosrow II Parvez (590–628) could extend the Sasanian Empire at the maximum of its length invading Byzantine and Turkish territories on both western and eastern fronts. Initially his relationships with the Byzantines were good since Emperor Maurice (582–602) had helped him against the rebel general Bahram Chobin between 590–91. After the assassination of Maurice and his family by the rebel Phocas (602–610), Khosrow II invaded the Byzantine Empire with two armies led by the Sasanian generals Shahvaraz and Shahin who directed themselves towards Egypt and Anatolia respectively, although the sources are very enigmatic on this point (Matteo Compareti, “Presenza sasanide in Africa,” Intorno all’iranica fenice/samand: un progetto di sintesi per il volo del Pegaso iranico tra Ponto, Alessandretta e Insulindia, ed. Gianroberto Scarcia and Matteo

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Compareti, 2003, 39–51, for an electronic version in English see http:// www.transoxiana.com.ar/0104/sasanians.html). He also sought to annex to Persia the Lakhmid kingdom (southern Iraq), after the imprisonment and execution of its last king: al-Numan III (Daniel T. Potts, The Arabian Gulf in Antiquity, vol. II, 1990, 252–53). In the meantime, the Sasanian general of Armenian origins Sambat defeated the enemies of Persia in the east incorporating into the Sasanian Empire the regions which had once belonged to the Hephtalites and Turks (called in Armenian sources indistinctively Kushans). The enthronement of Heraclius (610–641) at Byzantium produced some changes in the conduction of the war against the Sasanians and, in fact, peace was declared after the assassination of Khosrow II by one of his sons in 628. In that period, the borderline between the two empires was established more or less as it was before the long war which had exhausted both antagonists. After the death of Khosrow II no other Sasanian Emperor could rule on a unified territory until the enthronement of Yazdigard III (632–651) who, however, was defeated by the Arabs and forced to abandon Persia. The last representatives of the Sasanians lived exiled at the Tang court where they were received friendly by the Chinese Emperor (Matteo Compareti, “The Last Sasanians in China,” Eurasian Studies, II/2 [2003]: 197–213). The relatively quick invasion of the Arabs in Persia and Transoxiana between the 7th and 8th centuries radically changed the cultures of those regions which slowly started to be converted to Islam and became almost completely turcized (Parvaneh Pourshariati, Decline and Fall of the Sasanian Empire: The Sasanian-Parthian Confederacy and the Arab Conquest of Iran, 2007). Such historical facts are now well-known especially regarding Sogdiana (Yuri Karev, Samarcande et le Sughd au début de l’Islam (VIIe–IXe siècle): histoire politique et transformations sociales, forthcoming). With the islamization of Iranian lands local authors also started to write about their ancient history which could be reconstructed mainly through external sources, the archeological investigation and the study of numismatics (Carlo G. Cereti, “Primary Sources for the History of Inner and Outer Iran in the Sasanian Period,” Archivum Eurasiae Medii Aevi 9 [1995–1997]: 17–71). B. Art History and Archeological Investigation Despite the scarcity of direct written sources, the artistic production of Iran under the Sasanians and pre-Islamic Central Asia is quite well-known for different reasons. The history of research has been magisterially presented by L. Vanden Berghe, regarding Sasanian monuments, and by S. Gorshenina and C. Rapin for Central Asia (Luis Vanden Berghe, “Historique de la découverte et de la recherche,” Catalogue Bruxelles, 1993, 13–18; Svetlana

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Gorshenina and Claude Rapin, De Kaboul à Samarcande: Les arquélogues en Asie centrale, 2001). Monumental rock reliefs and architectural remains particularly concentrated in the region of Fars (south-western Iran) constitute undeniable evidence of the grandeur of Iran under the Sasanians (Remy Boucharlat, “L’architecture sassanide,” Catalogue Paris, 2006, 47–50; Luis Vanden Berghe, “La sculpture,” Catalogue Bruxelles, 1993, 71–88; E. Haerinck, “Les reliefs rupestres,” Catalogue Paris, 2006, 35–8; Dietrich Huff, “Architecture sassanide,” Catalogue Bruxelles, 1993, 45–61). Unfortunately, most of the relics newly found in Iran come from fortuitous recoveries or from the antiquary market and not from scientific excavations which have come to a stop after the Revolution of 1979 and have only very recently started to be reconsidered by local archeologists. On the other hand, the remarkable pieces of information about Central Asia in Late Antiquity are mostly due to archeological activity which continued practically uninterrupted from the Soviet period to present days. An enormous amount of publications on such topics has already been presented and this is not the place to reconsider them in detail. Here, all we can do is mention some important titles. Furthermore, two great European exhibitions in 1993 (Catalogue Bruxelles, 1993: Splendeur des Sassanides. L’empire perse entre Rome at la Chine [224–642], curator Bruno Overlaet) and 2006 (Catalogue Paris, 2006: Les Perses sassanides. Fastes d’un empire oublié [224–642], curator Françoise Demange) have been entirely dedicated to the Sasanians and, especially, to their artistic production. The bibliography given in those two catalogues should be integrated with excellent entries published in the Encyclopaedia Iranica by Dietrich Huff (“Archaeology. iv. Sasanian,” Encyclopaedia Iranica, vol. II, 1987, 302–8; Dietrich Huff, “Architecture. iii. Sasanian,” Encyclopaedia Iranica, vol. II, 1987, 329–34) and Prudence Oliver Harper (“Art in Iran. v. Sasanian,” Encyclopaedia Iranica, vol. II, 1987, 585–94), although something more can now be added both from the point of view of monumental and minor arts. In fact, a new Sasanian rock relief attributed to Shapur I (241–72), has recently been discovered at Rag-e Bibi, in western Afghanistan (Frantz Grenet, “Nouvelles découvertes sur la période sassanide en Afghanistan,” L’art d’Afghanistan de la préhistoire à nos jours. Nouvelles donnais, 2007 85–94) and also some new pieces of Sasanian stone statues and figurative capitals have been found in Iran (Matteo Compareti, “Iconographical Notes on Some Recent Studies on Sasanian Religious Art (with an Additional Note on an Ilkhanid Monument by Rudy Favaro),” Annali di Ca’ Foscari, XLV, 3 (2006) 163–200; Matteo Compareti, “Fragmentary Sasanian Sculptures Recently Found in Iran,” Papers in Honour of Professor Biancamaria Amoretti Scarcia’s 65th Birthday, ed. Daniela Bredi and Leonardo Capezzone, 2008, 9–19).

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Monumental art of the Sasanian period received particular attention by Iranian scholars who published remarkable studies, such as the book on ancient Iranian bridges (also those traditionally attributed to Roman prisoners) by Muhammad-Ali Mokhlessi, written in Persian (Pol-ha-ye Qadimi-e Iran [Ancient Bridges of Iran], 1998). Massoud Azarnoush managed to publish the results of several studies which had been initiated before the Revolution in Iran. Two of the most interesting publications are dedicated to the excavations of Hajiabad (The Sasanian Manor House at Hajiabad, Iran, 1994) and the monumental temple of Kangavar (Massoud Azarnoush, “Kangavar: Un temple séleucide d’Anahita deviant un monument sassanide,” Dossiers d’archéologie. Empires perses: d’Alexandre aux Sassanides, 243 (1999), 52–53). An important volume which comprises a list of the caravanserais in Iran, in some cases, also dated to the Sasanian period, has been compiled by Muhammad Y. Kyani and Wolfgang Kleiss (Iranian Caravanserais, 1994). A Polish archeological team led by Barbara Kaim recovered a sacral building which could be attributed to the Sasanian period at Mele Hayram, in the southern part of today’s Turkmenistan (“Un temple du feu sassanide découvert à Mele Hairam (Turkménistan Méridional),” Studia Iranica, 31, II, 2002, 215–30). These temples belong to the “fire temple” typology which is not yet very well-known from the archeological point of view, even though numerous hints can be found in Classical literature on Persia. Strangely enough, wallpaintings did not receive the deserved consideration in the above-mentioned catalogues although – at least according to some Classical authors – they should have had a relevant role in Sasanian art. Probably, this attitude was due to the extremely fragmentary state of all those paintings which could be attributed to the Sasanian period. The recent discovery of Sasanian wall paintings at Gor (Fars) and their first analysis by the well-known archeologist D. Huff will probably change such an attitude after their publication (Dietrich Huff, “Formation and Ideology of the Sasanian State in the Context of Archaeological Evidence,” The Sasanian Era: The Idea of Iran, vol. 3, ed. Vesta Sarkhosh Curtis and Sarah Stewart, 2008, 48–49). In any case, an excellent article by A. de Waele now provides all information on this aspect of Persian art already considered by experts like Boris Marshak (Boris I. Marshak, “Pre-Islamic Painting of the Iranian Peoples and Its Sources in Sculpture and the Decorative Arts,” Peerless Images: Persian Painting and Its Sources, ed. Eleanor Sims, with Boris I. Marshak and Ernst J. Grube, 2002, 7–19; An de Waele, “The Figurative Wall-Painting of the Sasanian Period from Iran, Iraq and Syria,” Iranica Antiqua XXXIX [2004]: 339–81). Information about Sasanian mosaics (displaying strong Hellenistic elements) can also be found in the two catalogues already mentioned. Beautiful figu-

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rative stucco panels – possibly dating from the 5th century – have been found during agricultural works in Bandyan (northern Khorasan). Despite their fragmentary state, the panels are among the most interesting Sasanian stucco ever recovered: the scenes represented there have been identified as hunts and battles against the Hephtalites (Medi Rahbar, “Découvert d’un monument d’époque sassanide à Bandian, Dargaz (Nord Khorassan). Fouilles 1994 et 1995,” Studia Iranica 27.2 [1998]: 213–50). The excavations at Bandyan have recently shown more interesting results since a fire altar and graffiti were discovered there. A field which yielded very interesting results is represented by inscribed seals and sealings (or bullae) belonging to relevant people of Sasanian upper classes although, once more, only few of them were recovered in Iran in controlled excavations around Shiraz. The best introduction to Sasanian seals was published by R. Gyselen in the two catalogues mentioned above. Recently, the same author has presented a collection of seals and sealings embellished with armored cavalrymen very similar to the one in the great grotto at Taq-e Bostan. The study of their inscriptions revealed that their owners were important military chieftains who served the Sasanian sovereigns. Written sources of the Islamic period reported about the division of the Persian Empire into four quadrants and the seals are even more important since they are contemporary to the Sasanians (R. Gyselen, The Four Generals of the Sasanian Empire: Some Sigillographic Evidence, 2001). Another aspect of Sasanian production which can partly compensate for the lack of direct sources is represented by numismatics. The investigations by R. Göbl are still valid although the project of publication of a systematic catalogue will soon give a more detailed idea of Sasanian coinage. Up to now, the catalogue focuses on the first sovereigns. M. Alram has offered a view of the situation on early Sasanians numismatics introducing also a new type of coin which shows Shapur I receiving the homage of the defeated Roman Emperor as it can be observed in his rock reliefs (Michael Alram, Maryse Blet-Lemarquand, and Prods O. Skjærvø, “Shapur, King of Iranians and Non-Iranians,” Des Indo-Grecs aux Sassanides: Données pour l’histoire et la géographie historique. Res Orientales, XVII, 2007, 11–40; M. Alram, “Early Sasanian Coinage,” The Sasanian Era: The Idea of Iran, vol. 3, ed. Vesta Sarkhosh Curtis and Sarah Stewart, 2008, 17–30). Several monuments mentioned above represent the periphery of the Sasanian Empire while, as it is now clear, the court exerted a monopoly on the production of some luxury items, exactly as it was the case in Byzantium. Metalwork always constituted an important good among ancient Iranians who used it for diplomatic exchanges, as their recovery together with the rich outfits of those peoples in contact with the Sasanians, Bactrians and Sogdians, seems to suggest. Once

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more, archeological excavations can rarely give an idea of the Sasanian central production. The main collections of Sasanian metalwork and also the list of those few plates recovered during archeological excavations are collected now in a richly-illustrated article by Prudence Oliver Harper, certainly the main scholar in the field of ancient Persian toreutic (“Sasanian Silver Vessels: The Formation and Study of Early Museum Collection,” Mesopotamia and Iran in the Parthian and Sasanian Periods: Rejection and Revival c. 238 BC-AD 642: Proceedings of a Seminar in Memory of V. G. Lukonin, ed. John Curtis, 2000, 46–56). Most likely, textile manufactures were also directly controlled by the court but we do not yet have a clear idea about Sasanian taste since all the previous studies were based on the observation of the repertoire at Taq-e Bostan which, unfortunately, cannot be considered a typical Sasanian monument (Karel Otavsky, “Zur kunsthistorische Einordnung der Stoffe,” Entlang der Seidenstraße: Frühmittelalterliche Kunst zwischen Persien und China in der Abegg Stiftung, ed. Karel Otavsky, 1998, 119–214). From the iconographical point of view just one linen and wool fragment kept in the Benaki Museum (Athens) could be considered Sasanian, although, once more, it is a textile coming from the antiquary market (Matteo Compareti, “A Possible asanian Textile Fragment in the Benaki Museum (Athens),” Scritti in Onore di Giovanni M. D’Erme, ed. Michele Bernardini and Natalia Tornesello, 2005 289–302; Matteo Compareti, “Sasanian Textile Art: An Iconographic Approach,” Studies on Persianate Societies 3 [2005]: 143–63. See also: David H. Bivar, “Sasanian Iconography on Textiles and Seals,” Central Asian Textiles and Their Contexts in the Early Middle Ages, ed. Regula Schorta, 2006, 9–21). Unfortunately, the few data about Sasanian potteries which had to rely on Japanese excavations at Daylaman (Northern Iran, see: Namio Egami, Shinji Fukai, and Seiichi Masuda, Dailaman, vol. II, 1966; Toshihiko Sono and Shinji Fukai, Dailaman, vol. III, 1968), French ones at Susa (Miriam Rosen-Ayalon, La poterie islamique, 1974) and Italian ones at Ctesiphon (in Iraq, not far from Baghdad, see: Roberta Venco Ricciardi, “Pottery from Choche,” Mesopotamia 2 (1967): 93–104; Roberta Venco Ricciardi, “Sasanian Pottery from Tell Mahuz (North Mesopotamia),” Mesopotamia 5/6 [1970–1971]: 427–82) did not help much and their analysis still only shows partial results (Robert Wenke, “Imperial Investments and Agricultural Developments in Parthian and Sasanian Khuzestan: 150 BC to AD 640,” Mesopotamia 10/11 [1975/1976]: 31–221; John Alden, “Excavations at Tal-i Malyan. Part I. A Sasanian Kiln,” Iran 16 [1978]: 79–86; Maurer Trinkaus, “Pottery from the Damghan Plain, Iran: Chronology and Variability from the Parthian to the Early Islamic Periods,” Studia Iranica 15.1 [1986]: 23–88).

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In conclusion, in accordance with what P. Harper and G. Scarcia have recently said about Sasanian art, there was never a rupture between the past and the artistic production of Late Antiquity Iran (Prudence Oliver Harper, In Search of a Cultural Identity: Monuments and Artifacts of the Sasanian Near East, 3rd to 7th Century AD, 2006; Prudence Oliver Harper, “Image and Identity: Art of the Early Sasanian Dynasty,” The Sasanian Era. The Idea of Iran, vol. 3, ed. Vesta Sarkhosh Curtis and Sarah Stewart, 2008, 71–87; Gianroberto Scarcia, “La Persia dagli Achemenidi ai Sasanidi 550 a.C.–650 d.C.,” Gianroberto Scarcia and Giovanni Curatola, Iran: L’arte persiana, 2004, 9–125). On the contrary, monumental art and also minor arts continued and renewed ancient Iranian traditions already known by the Parthians (and rooted in the much more ancient culture of Mesopotamia) with the clear borrowings of Roman-Byzantine elements, especially in the last part of the Sasanian period. This has been observed by some scholars some of which have come to very curious conclusions: Philip Lozinsky, for example, even claimed that Sasanian art did not exist at all (“The Phoenix Mosaic from Antioch: a New Interpretation,” Fifth International Colloquium on Ancient Mosaics, 1995, 135–42). As it is now well-known, Sasanian culture exerted a deep influence on the whole artistic production of the Islamic world and had an echo also in Byzantium, “barbaric” Europe and the Caucasus (Klaus Schippmann, “L’influence de la culture sassanide,” Catalogue Bruxelles, 1993, 131–41). Among the typical Sasanian elements which received great attention abroad, one should mention the so-called Senmurv or “winged dog with peacock tail.” According to most recent investigations such a composite monster would instead represent the royal glory of the Sasanians bestowed by Ahura Mazda (Matteo Compareti, “The So-Called Senmurv in Iranian Art: A Reconsideration of an Old Theory,” Loquentes linguis: Linguistic and Oriental Studies in Honour of Fabrizio A. Pennacchietti, ed. Pier Giorgio Borbone, Alessandro Mengozzi, and Mauro Tosco, 2006, 185–200). In fact, as an expression of a divine concept, it was later largely adopted by Muslims and Byzantines, too. Another typical Sasanian decorative element mainly used as a pedestal supporting human busts or other subjects is the beribboned spread wings. Scholars have concentrated especially on its origins and on the fact that, most likely, it is a borrowing or a development of something which pre-dates the Sasanians. On the crowns of Sasanians sovereigns and in some other places (like on the textile of the Benaki Museum), spread wings are used to support astronomical elements: this is particularly clear in the coins (Andrea Gariboldi, “Astral Symbology on Iranian Coinage,” East and West 54.1–4 (2004): 31–53. Among the Christians of the Sasanian Empire, especially concentrated in the Caucasus, beribboned spread wings very often

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support the cross. This suggests that, most likely, the astronomical elements on Sasanian crowns could be associated with the Zoroastrian religion followed at court (M. Compareti, “Tra il Palatino e Limburgo: considerazioni su alcune stele armene di età pre-islamica,” Acculturazione e Disadattamento, ed. Daniele Guizzo, forthcoming 2009). Regarding the situation in Central Asia at the dawn of the Arab invasion, the archeological data mostly relate to Sogdiana while Margiana, BactriaTokharistan, Chorasmia and the Tarim Basin are better known during earlier periods. Cooperation of local archeological teams with Russian, French, Italian, German, Japanese and Australian colleagues will certainly (and hopefully) result in interesting findings which, at least at the moment, mainly focus on the period between the end of the Parthian and the beginning of Sasanian dominion. In any case, the best publication still remains a collective study (in Russian) by several scholars who have worked on the field since the 1950s (Srednjaja Azija i Dal’nij Vostok v epohu Srednevekovyja: Srednjaja Azija v rannem srednevekov’e, 1999). This volume should be consulted together with related entries in the Encyclopaedia Iranica (Guitty Azarpay, “Art in Iran. vi. Pre-Islamic Eastern Iran and Central Asia,” Encyclopaedia Iranica, vol. II, 1987, 595–603; Victor M. Masson, “Archaeology. v. Pre-Islamic Central Asia,” Encyclopaedia Iranica, vol. II, 1987, 308–17; Galina A. Pugachenkova, “Architecture. iv. Central Asia,” Encyclopaedia Iranica, vol. II, 1987, 334–39) and with Boris A. Litvinskij’s most recent book in French (La civilisation de l’Asie Centrale antique, 1998). The results of French excavations mainly in Uzbekistan together with papers by Russian authors are now collected in a great volume (Les arts de l’Asie centrale, gen. ed. Pierre Chuvin, 1999). More curious readers can find a great selection of Central Asian sites and topics organized as entries in an excellent Italian publication edited by Ciro Lo Muzio, the Enciclopedia dell’arte antica classica ed orientale. Secondo supplemento 1971–1994. Central Asian paintings have also been carefully studied in a more recent Italian volume with special focus on the Sogdian production (Chiara Silvi Antonini, La pittura dell’Asia Centrale da Alessandro Magno all’Islam, 2003). Bamyan was certainly one of the main Buddhist centers of today’s Afghanistan, and Sasanian elements can be observed especially in paintings which were, unfortunately, lost in great number (Deborah Klimburg-Salter, The Kingdom of Bamyan, 1989). In the area where the great Buddhas once stood, very promising archeological excavations have started under the coordination of Z. Tarzi, Afghanistan’s main archeologist whose expertise also comprises the study of Chinese sources on Bamyan (Zemaryalai Tarzi, “Les résultats des fouilles du ‘monastère oriental’ à la fin de la IIIe campagne en 2004,” L’art d’Afghanistan de la préhistoire à nos jours: Nouvelles

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donnais, 2007, 98–124). A complete catalogue of items from the National Museum of Kabul is now available (Francine Tissot, Catalogue of the National Museum of Afghanistan 1931–1985, 2006). Many old pictures constitute an invaluable help to observe even those objects now irreparably destroyed during the terrible last years in the history of that tormented country. Sogdiana main sites dating from the 7th and 8th centuries are Penjikent (Western Tajikistan), Afrasyab (ancient Samarkand), Varakhsha and Paykand (not far from Bukhara). Unfortunately, the recent passing away of the two leaders of the archeological mission at Penjikent and Paykand and distinguished scholars, B. I. Marshak and G. L. Semenov, caused not only a loss for the whole scholarly community, but also a stop in the field work, which, as it has recently been announced, will be continued by another team of archeologists. Penjikent has received the name of “Pompei of Central Asia,” especially for the numerous wall paintings discovered there whose main scenes represent Rostam legendary adventures, religious scenes and also tales from Esopos’s repertoire and the Panchatantra (Boris I. Marshak, Legends, Tales, and Fables in the Art of Sogdiana, 2002). The site of Paykand, in the western part of historical Sogdiana, has been studied especially from the urban and architectural point of view although some paintings belonging to different periods have been recovered (Gregori L. Semenov, “Dwelling Houses of Bukhara in the Early Middle Ages,” Eran ud Aneran. Studies presented to Boris I. Marshak on the Occasion of His 70th Birthday, ed. Matteo Compareti, Paola Raffetta, and Gianroberto Scarcia, 2006, 555–69, for the electronic version see http://www.transoxiana.org/EranArticles/semenov.html). Not far from Bukhara there is the big site of Varakhsha, possibly a fortified mansion of the Bukhar Khudat (“Lord of Bukhara”) during the pre-Islamic period. There, archeological investigations have not been carried out for a long period of time which is a pity, bearing in mind the remarkable findings of the last century. Very recently, A. Naymark wrote a stimulating paper on the site and suggested a new interpretation of its wall paintings (Aleksandr Naymark, “Returning to Varakhsha,” The Silk Road Newsletter, 1/2 (2003): 9–22, for the electronic version see http://silkroadfoundation.org/newsletter/december/ varakhsha. htm). Among the sites of that region, Afrasyab has probably received the greatest attention by scholars of Sogdian art in the last years since new studies reopened the problem of the interpretation of the scenes represented on the walls of the so-called “Hall of the Ambassadors.” As it is now almost universally accepted, the four walls represent important festivities connected with calendrical matters of the Sogdians, Chinese, Indians and, possibly, Turks. The artists who realized those paintings, probably around 660 AD, must clearly have had in mind concepts about calendrical calcu-

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lation and the culture of neighboring kingdoms in contact with Sogdiana just before the coming of the Arabs, when the whole of Transoxiana was (mainly nominally) under Tang protectorate. Several papers on Afrasyab “Hall of the Ambassadors” are now collected in the proceedings of a conference focusing on those paintings (Royal Nauruz in Samarkand: Proceedings of the Conference Held in Venice on the Pre-Islamic Paintings at Afrasiab, Suppl. 1 to Rivista degli Studi Orientali LXXVIII, ed. Matteo Compareti and É de La Vaissière, 2006). It is not improbable that the Uzbek-French archeological team working on the site of Afrasyab will increase our knowledge about the site in the near future (Paul Bernard, Frantz Grenet, and Massud Isammidinov, Fouilles de Samarkand et de Sogdiane, vol. I: Travaux de la Mission Archéologique Franco-Ouzbèke à Afrasiab. 1989–2007, 2009. Other Sogdian sites are at present investigated thanks to the cooperation of local authorities and experts with foreign expeditions. A German team under the supervision of M. Mode and S. Stark is currently investigating another promising site in Ustrushana (northern Tajikistan), an historical region of Sogdian language and culture. The main focus of the mission is to come to a better understanding of the passage from the pre-Islamic to the Islamic period with great attention to Chinese sources (Markus Mode, “Archaeological Glympses of Ustrushana,” electronic version at: http://www.orientarch.uni-halle.de /sfbs86/c5/ustru/ indexe.htm). Also, an Italian mission supervised by M. Tosi is collaborating with the Uzbeks at the castle of Kafir Kala where numerous Sogdian bullae, seals and coins have been discovered in the last years. Kafir Kala is a very promising site since it might have been the residence of the king of Samarkand known in Islamic sources as Revdad. Among the numerous findings, the sealings of Kafir Kala represent a unique corpus within Central Asian archeology but, unfortunately, a complete publication is not yet available (Sara Cazzoli and Carlo G. Cereti, “The Sealings of Kafir Kala: Preliminary Report,” Ancient Civilizations from Schytia to Siberia 11.1–2 (2005): 133–64). A presentation of the project and its goals can be found on the following website: http://www3.unibo.it/archeologia/ricerca/scavi/caauzbekistan/ uzbe.htm. Seals, together with coins, always represent an important source of direct information. Unfortunately, their study is not as well coordinated as it is the case for Sasanian numismatics and seals. Among the few sealings one could mention Kanka, that is to say, the area of ancient Tashkent (G. I. Bogomolov and J. I. Burjakov, “Sealings from Kanka,” In the Land of the Gryphons: Papers on Central Asian Archaeology in Antiquity, ed. Antonio Invernizzi, 1995, 217–37). Studies on Central Asian coins are numerous and mainly in Russian, although some interesting papers have recently appeared in English (Joe Cribb, “Money as a Maker of Cultural Continuity and

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Change in Central Asia,” After Alexander: Central Asia before Islam, ed. Joe Cribb and Georgina Hermann, 2007, 333–75). Much attention has been devoted to Central Asian textiles mainly from private collections and antiquary markets. Many specimens are considered to be Sogdian products since very similar decorations appear on the robes worn by Sogdian people on mural paintings from Penjikent. Few fragments have been found during the excavations in Sogdiana itself while other textiles considered to be the product of Sogdian weavers who lived abroad have been found in great quantity in the Tarim Basin, in what is now Xinjiang Autonomous Province (China). The Abegg-Stiftung Textil Museum at Riggisberg (Switzerland) has on display one of the main collections of Central Asian textiles and has already published most of its material on two occasions (Entlang der Seidenstraße: Frühmittelalterliche Kunst zwischen Persien und China in der Abegg Stiftung, ed. Karel Otavsky, 1998; Central Asian Textiles and Their Contexts in the Early Middle Ages, ed. Regula Schorta, 2006). The region of the Tarim Basin has always been a matter of Chinese archeology although in the last years there have been some initiatives by European and Japanese teams. Among the most interesting results there are the excavations by a Swiss team supervised by Christopher Baumer which led to the discovery of previously unknown 7th-century Buddhist wall paintings at Dandan Oylyk, in the area of ancient Khotan. Those paintings are particularly interesting for the mix of local, Indian, and Iranian (most likely Sogdian) iconographical elements used in the depiction of some problematic divinities (Christopher Baumer, Southern Silk Road: In the Footsteps of Sir Aurel Stein and Sven Hedin, 2000). Even though the artifacts in the huge area corresponding to Central Asia mainly come from scientific excavations, there is still a big gap in the comprehension of that region as a whole unity. Future investigations might facilitate a different approach to the study of one of the most important regions of the Eurasian continent for its role as a crossroad of cultures and civilizations during the very problematic period of late antiquity. In the last years some publications devoted to Tarim Basin archeological investigations have appeared, but the presentation of the material is almost entirely in Chinese (A Grand View of Xinjiang’s Cultural Relics and Historical Sites, 1999). Among the most interesting archeological discoveries of the last years one must not forget to mention the 6th-century funerary monuments that belonged to important Sogdians which have been found in the area around Xi’an (China). Although they reflect in all probability the production of Chinese artists for rich Sogdian immigrants, their decorative elements include many Zoroastrian themes extremely useful for the understanding of similar images found in Central Asia. Further, they present in many cases inscrip-

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tions in Chinese and the respective languages of the deceased ones revealing more interesting information (Les Sogdiens en Chine, ed. Éric Trombert and É. de La Vaissière, 2005; Boris I. Marshak, “La thématique sogdienne dans l’art de la Chine de la seconde moitié du VIe siècle,” Comptes rendus de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres 1 (2001): 227–64; Judith A. Lerner, Aspects of Assimilation: The Funerary Practices and Furnishings of Central Asians in China, 2005). The site where they were found used to be, most likely, a cemetery for foreigners: more than forty graves have been localized, and future investigations will surely offer fresh material for the study of ancient Central Asian civilizations in contact with China in late antiquity. Select Bibliography Guitty Azarpay, Sogdian Painting: The Pictorial Epic in Oriental Art (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1981); History of Civilizations of Central Asia, vol. II: The Development of Sedentary and Nomadic Civilizations: 700 BC to AD 250, ed. János Harmatta (Paris: Unesco, 1994); History of Civilizations of Central Asia, vol. III: The Crossroads of Civilizations: AD 250 to 750, ed. Boris Litvinsky (Paris: Unesco, 1996); Les Perses sassanides: Fastes d’un empire oublié (224–642), Françoise Demange (curator) (Paris: Paris Musée: Suilly-la-Tour and Findakly, 2006); Splendeur des Sassanides: L’Empire perse entre Rome at la Chine [224–642], Bruno Overlaet (curator) (Brussels: Musées Royaux d’Art et d’Histoire, 1993); Srednjaja Azija i Dal’nij Vostok v epohu Srednevekovyja: Srednjaja Azija v rannem srednevekov’e (Moscow: Nauka, 1999); Les arts de l’Asie centrale, gen. ed. Pierre Chuvin (Paris: Citadelles et Mazenod, 1999); Emires Perses d’Alexandre aux Sassanides, Dossiers d’Archéologie, 243, may 1999.

Matteo Compareti

Classical Persian Literature A. General Introduction Classical Persian literature only developed as a written medium in the 10th century C.E. Pahlavi or Middle Persian had been the written language of the Sasanian Empire. However, when the Arabs conquered its territories in the 7th century C.E., written Pahlavi was only maintained by the Zoroastrian clergy and by clerks and scribes employed by the Arabs to maintain the state records. For more than two hundred years, the Persian literary tradition ceased, as Persian writers wrote in Arabic. During this two hundred year hiatus, numerous Persian works from different genres were translated into Arabic.

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A slow process of Arabization and Islamization took place after the Arab conquest of Persia. Arabic vocabulary made its way into spoken Persian and gradually the Arabic script was adopted and adapted to accommodate all the sounds of Persian. Although this “New Persian” (Dari) emerged as a new medium of communication, it was not accepted as a serious alternative to Arabic, which was the lingua franca of the Islamic Empire. Arabic retained its preeminence as the major written medium. Paradoxically, the Arab conquests had played a major role in promoting this New Persian, which in the Arab East or Greater Khurasan (eastern Persia, Khurasan and Transoxiana) became the preferred language, overshadowing Sogdian and Khwarazmian. This linguistic phenomenon was initially confined to the east and it only gained currency at a much later date in western Iran. Written Persian only began to be commonly used in the second half of the 9th century in Greater Khurasan. Persian prose was deemed suitable only for propaganda and amusing stories. However, poetry was promoted and patronized at court. B. Persian Poetry The mechanics of Persian poetry strictly conformed to the rules of Arabic prosody. It can be divided into two forms: narrative and lyrical. Narrative poetry manifested itself in the form of the mathnavi (rhyming couplet), a form that was known to the Arabs but little used by them, due to their love of the monorhyme. The Persians developed this form for a number of purposes and themes, but utilized it especially for epics, romances and later, for didactic mystical works. Although mathnavis were first written in the 10th century, the most memorable mathnavis were not written until the 11th century during the Ghaznavid dynasty. Firdawsi’s Shahnama, the national epic poem of Persia, recounts the tales of the kings of Iran from the earliest times. It was completed in 1010 A.D. This was followed by Asadi Tusi’s Garshasp-Nama and other epics. The mathnavi popularized many romances such as Warqa va Gulshah, Wis va Ramin and the famous romances popularized by Niãami (1140–1209), such as Layli va Majnun, Khusraw va Shirin and Haft Paykar. Sana’i (d. 1130) was the first to use the mathnavi as a means of mystical teaching. The use of the mathnavi by the great sufi masters became standard practice as demonstrated by Farid al-Din ’Attar’s (1140–1230) The Conference of the Birds, Jalal al-Din Rumi’s (1207–1273) famous Mathnavi, and Jami’s (d. 1492) Haft Awrang and a multitude of others. Lyric poetry began by imitating the formal ode or the qaæida of the Arabs. The qaæida was often a panegyric to a patron but was also used for eulogies, elegies, satires, and religious instruction. One of the earliest masters of the

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qa#ida was Rudaki (d. 941). The 11th century is considered the period for the perfection of the Persian qa#ida, by the master poets Manuchirhi (d. 1040), Farrukhi (d. 1038) and ’Unsuri (d. 1050). The Sufi masters Sana’i, ’Attar and Rumi also used them later for their mystical poetry. The lyric ghazal replaced the qa#ida in popularity in the 13th century. The ghazal was a monorhymed shorter ode of between 5 and 15 lines. Its theme was primarily on earthly or divine love. Sa’di (d. 1292) and Hafiz (d. 1390) both from Shiraz are considered the masters of this form. The quatrain or ruba’i (ruba’iyyat pl.) with the rhyme pattern of AABA is the only true purely Persian poetic form. It is epigrammatic and lends itself well to political satire. This form was popularized by Fitzgerald’s translations of the ruba’iyyat of ’Umar Khayyam. A much larger variety of poetic forms exist in Persian poetry but the main forms are the mathnavi, qa#ida, ghazal and ruba’i. Classical Persian poetry before the modern era produced three distinctive styles (sabk) in its development: Khurasani, ’Iraqi and Hindi. The earliest Khurasani style is distinct for it use of simple and pure language almost devoid of Arabic loan words. Cultural and linguistic borders diffused with the advent of the ’Iraqi style. Poetry acquired a new technical dexterity and artifice that utilized a greatly expanded vocabulary with many Arabic loan words. By the 15th century, the Hindi style had evolved into a very aestheticized and highly stylized form. C. Persian Prose During the Samanid period (875–999) in Greater Khurasan Persian was adopted as the official language of government. By the mid-10th century, a number of Persian translations of Arabic works were commissioned. The Ghaznavids (977–1186) succeeded the Samanids in the early 11th century. In the court of Sultan Mahmud of Ghazna (998–1030), Persian poetry flourished but Arabic prose dominated. A number of Persian histories were written during this period, such as the anonymous History of Sistan and the histories of Bayhaqi and Gardizi. Also for the first time a sufi manual, the Kashf-i Mahjub was written in Persian by Hujviri. While new Persian was adequate to tell narrative stories and to relate history, most scholars and the educated elite still found Persian inadequate to clearly and precisely articulate their ideas. Arabic remained supreme. However, early efforts were made to write scientific and philosophical works in Persian, but one of the major obstacles to this was the lack of a standardized vocabulary. The great physician and polymath Ibn Sina [Avicenna] (d. 1037) wrote the majority of his works in Arabic but he helped further the development of Persian scientific prose by writing a number of works in Persian.

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Under the Saljuq Turks (1038–1194) the Persians of the Iranian plateau, Khurasan and Transoxiana were reunited for the first time in centuries and enclaves were established in Anatolia, where Persian culture and poetry flourished at court. This political union facilitated the standardization of classical Persian in western Iran at the expense of local dialects. It also coincided with the beginnings of a period that fused Khurasani and Iraqi cultures. Persian prose borrowed anything that it could from Arabic and became very ornate and full of repetitive rhyming. With the passing of the 12th century, Persian emerged fully developed, having adopted the stratagem of allowing one hundred percent of the Arabic language to be used in prose writings. As stated earlier, in the 8th century a large number of Middle Persian works were translated into Arabic. These stories were fictional frame stories, written for the elite and were very popular at court. These stories now re-entered the body of Persian literature, slightly altered and skewed to Islamic values written in a new Persian. The most notable of this genre are the animal tales of Kalila va Dimna that were originally taken from the Sanskrit Panchatantra. Later a number of romances and heroic tales such as the Sindbad-Nama and Bakhtiyar-Nama emerged, as did collections of anecdotes such as Muhammad ’Awfi’s Jawami’ al-Hikayat. Additionally popular stories traditionally told by storytellers orally were preserved in prose and often translated into other languages such as Turkish. This article has limited itself to the classical Persian literary tradition, primarily in Persia and Central Asia. However, Persian flourished in the early period of the Ottoman Empire before the emergence of Ottoman Turkish. In the 16th century, the Mughals established themselves in India, where Persian was the court language. A very large literary tradition continued on for centuries and produced many famous poets, litterateurs and historians. British India maintained Persian as the administrative language. D. History of Research Western Scholars Critical modern scientific methodologies for the study of classical Persian literature first emerged in Europe. Unfortunately space restrictions allow only a handful of contributors to be mentioned here. Sir William Jones (1746–1794). Sir William was a brilliant philologist who studied law and then moved to British India, where he was appointed to the Supreme Court of Bengal. He is credited with being one of the first influential pioneers in comparative linguistics and Indo-European Studies. Based in Calcutta, Jones was instrumental in founding the Asiatic Society of

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Bengal in 1784. The Society exists to this day and has published thousands of articles and monographs on virtually every subject. The Society’s journal and publications provided a forum for discussion and a place to publish. The press in Calcutta published a large number of Persian works even before presses became prevalent in Persia. While Jones translated a number of Persian works into English, his major contribution to the study of Persian was the establishment of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. Edward G. Browne (1862–1926) became the first professor of Persian at Cambridge University. Prior to his appointment, he traveled to Persia to buy books and manuscripts for the university. Subsequently, he wrote the four volume Literary History of Persia (1902, 1906, 1920 and 1924), which was the first modern work of its kind. Browne’s work has remained the definitive work; however, other surveys such as those published by Jan Rypka, Allesandro Bausani and Zabih Allah. Safa have supplemented it and included new information. His study was the most comprehensive, but Browne was very subjective in some of his judgments of Persian literature. For example, later poetry was judged as being too ornate and/or florid for Western tastes. Reynold A. Nicholson (1868–1945) was a colleague of Browne at Cambridge and was noted for his interests in Islamic Studies. He specialized in Sufism. While he wrote equally on Arabic literature, including a Literary History of the Arabs (1907), in the field of Persian literature his studies of the works of Jalal al-Din Rumi are considered to be a major contribution to the field. He produced the first critical edition of the Mathnavi (1925–1940) and his eight-volume translation and commentary were the first of their kind in English. Gilbert Lazard (1920–) was a professor of Iranian languages at the Sorbonne and then the Director of Iranian Studies. He has made many major contributions to the study of Iranian languages. He has emerged as one of the world authorities on the “New Persian Renaissance.” His works on the first Persian poets of the 9th and 10th centuries were groundbreaking and his collaborations with major scholars such as Zabih Allah Safa, Henri Massé and Roger Lescot to create an anthology of Persian poetry from the 11th to the 20th centuries has been of major importance. Additionally he has translated many Persian works and revised major translations such as J. Mohl’s Shahnama (1846–1848). Iranian Scholars Four Iranian scholars pioneered modern scientific methods and began to produce critical textual editions for the first time. They were Muhammad Qazvini, Muhammad ’Ali Furughi, Sayyid Hasan Taqizada and ’Ali

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Akbar Dihkhuda. The combined scholarly contributions of these four men were enormous and built a firm foundation for scholarship. However, Qazvini was one of the prime movers. Muhammad Qazvini (1877–1949) was a ground breaker in methods of textual editing and criticism and had a major influence on these distinguished scholars: Malik al-Shu’ara’ Bahar, Badi’a al-Zaman Furuzanfar, Muhammad Taqi Mudarris Razavi, Muhammad Parvin Gunabadi and Mahmud Farrukh. In 1904, he was invited by his brother to England to see the great museums and manuscript collections. He stayed in Europe for 36 years. He edited a number of important Persian works that expanded scholars understanding of Persian poetics and the early classical literary movement. His collected articles comprised more than ten volumes. ’Abbas Iqbal (1896–1955). He was sent to Paris at the age of 28 where he studied at the Sorbonne and met Qazvini. When he returned to Iran he taught at the University of Tehran. He authored more that 200 articles and 45 books on literature, history and geography. He was instrumental in establishing Yad-i gar (1944–1949) as a serious research journal. Ibrahim Pur Daud (1886–1968) translated the Avesta (1964) in 9 volumes and researched and taught ancient Iranian customs, languages and history at the University of Tehran. A large number of outstanding scholars studied under him. Muhammad Taqi Bahar (Malik al-Shu’ara Bahar) (1886–1951) sought to research unknown areas in Persian history and literature. He was one of the best poets of 20th-century Iran but also became the most outstanding scholar of Persian literary historiography. His seminal three-volume work Stylistics (Sabk shinasi [1942]) meticulously traced the development of Persian prose writing from the earliest times up until the 20th century. Bahar’s study essentially documents the evolution of the written language from one that was purely Persian through a process of Arabization. He breaks this development down into four historical periods and into six distinct prose styles. Besides this work and his own poetry, his critical edition of the anonymous History of Sistan (Tarikh-i Sistan [1935]) was one of the first of a multitude of critical editions of important literary works to be published in Iran. Parviz Natal Khanlarli (1913–1990): He wrote numerous works on Persian literature and language such as Sh’ir va hunar (1967), Tarikh-i Zaban-i Farsi (1970) and Dastur-i Zaban-i Farsi (1972). He was a poet in his own right. He served as the Director of the Shahnama Foundation and the Iranian Cultural Foundation and was instrumental in establishing the Iranian Academy of Arts and Literature of Iran.

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Zabih Allah Safa (1911–1999) was an influential professor at Tehran University and will be remembered for his famous and monumental eightvolume literary history of Iran (Tarikh-i adabiyat dar Iran [1956–1991]). Muhammad Reza Shafi’i Kadkani (1939–) remains one of the most outstanding Iranian literary critics, and expert on Sufism whose in-depth studies in poetics, genres, and imagery continue to inspire aspiring scholars. A few of his works are Suvar-i khayal dar sh’ir-i Farsi (1971), Guzidah-yi ghazaliyat-i Shams (1974), Avaz-i bad va baran (1998) and Chashidan-i ta’m-i vaqt (2006). E. Past Trends in Scholarship In Iran the manuscript tradition had thrived. Large numbers of scribes were employed to copy texts. Because of the large numbers of people engaged in this activity and their varied degrees of education and expertise, the quality of the subsequent copies varied greatly. Similarly, because manuscripts were largely commissioned, they did not necessarily include a text or work in its entirety. Additionally, there was nothing that compelled a scribe to remain totally faithful to the text. For example, a line of poetry might be omitted or replaced because it was considered too sexually explicit. Textual changes often occurred for sectarian reasons and differences between Sunni and Shi’i Muslims. This practice led to adding curses after the names of certain individuals, who were often reviled by extreme Shi’ites. Specialized texts presented major difficulties for those unfamiliar with the subject matter and /or the vocabulary. It has only been one hundred years since critical textual editing of classical texts began. This movement was at odds with existing publishing practices that often took inexcusable liberties with the texts. The list of scholars and medievalists who have made lasting contributions to Persian literature is truly too long to list. In the past two centuries, the prevailing views of both Europeans and Iranians have been that the rise of Persian literature had its roots in the nationalistic desires of the Persian peoples to throw off the yoke of their Arab oppressors. This fit well with the 19th-century European understanding of nationalism. In the early 20th century, the Iranians experienced the Constitution period, where nationalism, independence and democratic government were major concerns. Iranians studied abroad before the establishment of modern universities in Iran and learned scientific research methods while at the same time studying their ancient languages and literatures in foreign universities. In the 1930’s after the establishment of Tehran University, the Faculty of Literature graduated scores of excellent scholars. Muhammad Reza Shah, the last Shah of Iran

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worked diligently to instill a sense of nationalism in the population. Huge sums of money were invested in projects, which promoted Persian culture and literature. As a result of this legacy, the predominant view of the development of Persian has been one focusing on nationalism and things deemed Persian. F. Current Trends The Iranian revolution in late 1979 has influenced the study of classical Persian literature. A reaction against the former Shah’s policy of secularization and a reemphasis of Islam, Arabic, and specifically Shi’i Islam has changed the direction of government funding. While Persian literature remains important, projects focusing on religious themes receive more funding. Iran’s political isolation has adversely affected scholarly intellectual exchanges. Travel and study opportunities have decreased. Because of these situations, scholarly studies published in Iran are less available than in the past and some important research has gone unnoticed. However, the political isolation of Iran has had a positive effect on other aspects of the study of classical Persian literature. It has sparked an increase in the study of the Persian literature of Mughal India and also in Central Asia. Currently, the study of modern Persian literature is the fastest growing area. This includes Iranian writers along with an ever-growing body of authors belonging to the Iranian diaspora. As mentioned earlier, the study of classical Persian literature has and has had too many outstanding scholars to list separately. Scholarship has concentrated on firmly defining the characteristics of both poetry and prose during the various historical periods and analyzing the linguistic development of the literature. A number of surveys of Persian literature have been published since Browne’s Literary History. They have tried to update omissions, mistakes and discoveries made since Browne’s time but have little to offer by way of interpretation or analysis. Studies on particular poets, litterateurs or genres have been published, as have many definitive critical editions with insightful analysis. Scholars and bibliographers such as Iraj Afshar have worked unceasingly to describe and produce catalogues of newly catalogued manuscripts. Many lesser known periods and poets have come to light in detailed studies in specialized areas, such as in Isma’ili Studies. There is a need to produce more studies that are interdisciplinary and interpretive but this appears to be the growing trend. Additionally, there is a great need for better translations of the classic poets. In this area Dick Davis’s translations of the Shahnama and other works serve as an inspiration to others.

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Select Bibliography Arthur J. Arberry, Classical Persian Literature (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1958); Malik al-Shu’ara, Muhammad Taqi Bahar, Sabk-Shinasi, ya Tarikh-i Tatavvur-i Nashr-i Farsi baray-i Tadris dar Danishkadah-i va Dawrah-i Duktur-i Adabiyat, 3 vols. (Tehran: Chapkhanah-i Khudkar, 1958); Edward G. Browne, A Literary History of Persia, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1902, 1906, 1920, and 1924); Gilbert Lazard, Les premiers poètes persans (IXe-Xe siècles): Fragments rassemblés, édités et traduits, 2 vols. (Tehran: Institut franco-iranien; Paris: Librairie d’Amérique et d’Orient, 1964); Gilbert Lazard, Roger Lescot, and Zabih Allah Safa, Anthologie de la poésie persane XIe-XXe siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1964); Julie Meisami, Structure and Meaning in Medieval Arabic and Persian Poetry: Orient Pearls (London and New York: Routledge Curzon, 2003); Reynold A. Nicholson, The Mathnawi of Jalalu’ddin Rumi, 8 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1925); Antonio Pagliaro and Allesandro Bausani, Storia della letteratura persiana (Milan: Nuova Accademia Editrice, 1960); Jan Rypka, Iranische Literaturgeschichte (Leipzig: Otto Harassowitz, 1959); Zabih Allah Safa, Tarikh-i Adabiyat dar Iran, 5 vols. (Tehran: Kitabfurush-i Ibn Sina, 1954–1984).

Mark David Luce

Islamic Philosophy A. Introduction Muslim philosophy has a history that precedes of ten odd centuries the interest devoted to it from Western academic practices. If its very name testifies the alien origin of the notion, it is nonetheless true that Muslims partially relinked it to indigenous sources. As a matter of fact, Muslim philosophy, while sharing a great deal of features with its Greek ancestor, has developed along specific lines, so that it is easy for Muslim thinkers to watch at their philosophical tradition as no less than an influential branch of Islamic religio-intellectual building. As pointed out by Henry Corbin (Histoire de la philosophie islamique, 1964), the source of Muslim philosophical meditation is two-fold: Greek and Quranic. On the one hand, theoretical questions were raised at the beginning of Islam, when early Muslims and companions used to address the Prophet asking for explanations on religious and practical matters. On the other hand, early conquests brought Muslims into contact with alien civilizations, bearers of different forms of knowledge, of whom ruling classes promptly became admirers, giving birth to a wide translation movement that represented one of the most remarkable cultural phenomena of the 9th and

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10th centuries (Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early ^Abbasid Society, 1988). This encounter exerted an inestimable influence on the developement of Islamic philosophy, in all its aspects. If the first philosophers of the Muslim world (albeit not all confessionally Muslim) were basically Neoplatonicists, endorsing a particular Platonic spiritualism nurtured in Aristotelian logic (although some thinkers were not devoid of influences arising from Greek scepticism), the contribution of meditation on the fact of divine Revelation added their methodology a specific gist. Throughout Islamic history, the terms used to define philosophy and their meaning varied from one period to another, and also depending on the environment in which the debates occurred. The most common terms, used with a slight semantic difference, had always been hikma (literally meaning “wisdom”), and falsafa, a calque from the original Greek. Not strictly relegated in philosophical practice, methodology of philosophy entered other intellectual areas, such as dialectic theology (kalam), jurisprudence (fiqh), grammar, historiography and Sufism. Meanwhile, as the term falsafa has always been quite limited in use, in that it is referred to the practice of dialectical reasoning, hikma is often related to many kinds of wisdom, be it that of the Sufis, theologians, or philosophers, etc. Following Seyyed Hossein Nasr’s classification (The Meaning and Concept of Philosophy in Islam, 2001), the definitions of Greek origin most common among Islamic philosophers are: 1) The knowledge of all existing things qua existents (ashya’ al-mawjuda bi-ma hiya mawjuda); 2) The knowledge of divine and human matters; 3) Taking refuge in death, thus love of death; 4) The arts of arts and science of sciences; 5) Love for wisdom. But beside these definitions, one should not forget the religious nature of Muslim philosophy; the neat distinction between philosophy and theology originated in the West on the grounds of a “secularization” that is largely unknown to the world of Islam. Thus, searching for a determinate boundary separating mystical speculation, spiritual experience, and prophetic philosophy, would inevitably result in a frustrating and pointless enterprise. Classical Western handbooks on Islamic philosophy had long referred to the matter in terms of Arabic philosophy. Heir to medieval scholastic tradition, this wording must be definitly rejected, and no serious Islamicist, nor

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informed historian of philosophy, uses it any longer. As a matter of fact, not only early Muslim philosophers were not homogeneously Arabs, but a number of leading medieval thinkers composed their works completely in Persian. If one observes that even major philosophers such as Ibn Sina (Avicenna for the Latin Middle Age) composed many remarkable works in the language of Iran, the above mentioned inconsistency becomes even more evident. Several subdivision patterns have been proposed for Islamic philosophy that emphasize local priorities, confessional elements, or typological considerations. But all of these tend to focus on particular aspects and, lacking a whole encompassing view, underplay or don’t consider at all characters and themes whose importance and centrality cannot be ignored. Subdivisions of macro-periods seem to be more effective in providing a reliable picture. The first period extends from the origins to the death of Averroes (Ibn Rushd, d. 1198). It is, after all, the most studied and best known period of Muslim philosophy. The death of Averroes seals the era of the classical philosophy in Islam, marking the decline of philosophical theorization in the Western lands of Islam, and the subsequent eclipse of the Latin Avicennism in Europe. Meanwhile, hailing from the Easten lands of the Arab world, having Syrian cities as main centers, a renaissance of mystical Avicennism was radiating in the direction of non-Arab East. It is the period of the “metaphysics of Sufism,” i. e., the attempt (that actually represented a great success and a momentous epistemological turn in the history of Islamic thinking) to express in a systematic fashion the details of the mystical path toward God, and the knowledge of self as knowledge of God. It is, this second period, the time of the diffusion of Akbarian metaphysics in Persia and, therefrom, in the Indian Subcontinent, by the Persian pupils of its originator, Muhyi al-Din Ibn ‘Arabi (d. 1240). The third and the fourth perisods overlap, if not in nature of the discourse, at least in time. The former coincides with the Safavid philosophical renaissance. In 1501, a chiliastic military-religious order moving from Azerbaijan entered Iran and, after conquering the major cities, declared Twelver Shi’ism to be the official religion of the newly-instituted Safavid reign, named after Safi al-din Ardabili (d. 1334), the founder of the order. The new rule attracted scholars and theologians that animated schools and theological seminaries, that eventually became major centers of propagation and discussion of the post-Akbarian mystical philosophy. It is the period of the great summa of Mulla Sadra Shirazi (d. 1641), whose influence spread to the Qajar era and up to the last decades of the 20th century.

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The last period is that of the modern philosophy, resumed as an intellectual weapon in all the Muslim world against the influence of the West. After the decolonization and in the midst of the globalization era, Muslim thinkers partially abandoned third-worldist and nativist rhetoric and began introducing in their discourse the key-elements of democracy, secularism, postmodernism, human rights. B. History Given the particular position of Muslim philosophy in transmitting Greek philosophical knowledge to the Latin Middle Ages, modern academic interest in it bears some similarities – and up to quite recent times, even a number of its flaws – with that of the European first translators and commentators. In the contest of medieval transmission of Islamic thought, several stages can be observed. The interest began during the 12th century, as a taste for Islamic matters was rather common in Europe. It is the time of the translations of Gerard of Cremona and his colleagues at the cathedral of Toledo. This wave testifies a marked interest in Neoplatonic cosmology and psychology, with the translations of works by Al-Farabi, the Brethern of Purity (Ikhwan al-safa’), and other important Muslim Neoplatonicists. Later, Western scholastics desired to understand Aristotle in the translation by Ibn Rushd. Translations carried out during the Renaissance, when a fresh interest in Arabic emerged anew, represent the link between medieval scholastic translations and the rise of a modern academic scholarship. The first European chair in Arabic was established in Paris in 1535, and was assumed by Guillaume Postel, while in 1584 an Arabic press was set up in Rome and a second chair in Arabic appeared at the beginning of the 17th century in Leiden. By and large, the most important personality in the field of Islamic philosophy was the English Arabist Edward Pocock (1604–1691), who collected original manuscripts and published, among other noteworthy works (about which see Hans Daiber, “The Reception of Islamic Philosophy at Oxford in the 17th Century,” 1994), Ibn Tufayl’s philosophical novel Hayy ibn Yaqzan (1671). Pocock’s editions remained standards until the 19th century. The rise of Islamic philosophy as a modern topic of inquiry and teaching in Western universities at the end of the 18th century also marked the end of a period in which Muslim thinkers were regarded as central as the Greeks in the culture of humanity. As a matter of fact, while the Western areas of the Muslim world were facing the lower point of their decline and, in confronting with colonial enterprises were developing the first embryo of modernist and reformist religious thinking, contemporary Persian Neoplatonicism was prospering almost ignored by European acedeme.

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While editorial activity grew in quantity and quality, a certain number of scholars began being known as experts in European, Jewish, and Islamic medieval philosophy, but by far the most important character was Ernest Renan (1823–1892), whose ideas about the relative conceptual independence of Muslim thinking, although often driven by prejudice, represented a fresh look. It is also the age of the Orientalist erudition, with the systematic recording of material for research carried out by, among others, German Orientalists such as Gustav Flügel and Ferdinand Wüstenfeld. Illuministic tendencies, with all the implications in terms of ethnocentrism and historical evolutionism, came to a more moderate approach by the end of the 19th century, while the amount of primary sources made available through critical editions and translations allowed fairly good introductory texts being written, published, and achieving wide circulation, as in the case of Ignaz Goldziher’s compendium Die islamische und die jüdische Philosophie (1909). From this time on, academic knowledge of Islamic philosophy has found a remarkable expansion, both in terms of edition of fundamental texts and of publication of original interpretive and introductory studies. In Daiber’s phrasing, “European and Arab-Islamic secondary literature […] has now become too extensive to keep track of” (Bibliography of Islamic Philosophy, 1999, XXV). Most major universities around the world, both in Europe and in the Americas, has established chairs in History of Islamic or Muslim Philosophy, and the second half of the 20th century witnessed an impressive increase of excellent works, by then dissociated from the antiquated idea of the end of philosophy in the Muslim world coinciding with the death of Averroes. C. Research As already stated, Muslim philosophy scholarship didn’t begin in a proper fashion before the 19th century. The first important work in the field is Amable Jourdain’s Recherches critiques sur l’âge et l’origine des traductions d’Aristote et sur les documents grecs ou arabes employés par les docteures scholastique (1819). However, scholars usually mention Ernest Rénan’s classic Averroês et l’averroïsme (1852) as the most influent text in the field, at least until Goldziher’s seminal study, Beitrag zur Geschichte der muhammedanischen Theologie (1884), which represented – as the rest of his publications – a very competent and insightful research, for that period quite an advanced work. Coeval of Goldziher, another standard compendium of Islamic philosophy is Tjitze J. de Boer’s Geschichte der Philosophie in Islam (1901), translated into English two years later.

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About two decades later, an ambitious study written by the German Orientalist Max Horten was published in Munich: Die Philosophie des Islam in ihren Beziehungen zu den philosophischen Weltanschauungen des westlichen Orients (1924). Unfortunately, this study is even more dated than its predecessors, in that Horten’s attempt to render Islamic philosophical notions and categories with the ideas of late-medieval scholasticism and contemporary philosophy, results in a distorted picture of its object. The influence of the late 19th century, expecially of Nietzsche, and of the phenomenalism of Edmund Husserl, is too evident to prevent Horten’s study from ending up in obscuring original texts. However, the overall state of the field was by far more healthy than one might argue by the dated work of Horten. In fact, the number and quality of general introductions and learned monographs was flourishing. But it was not before end of the Second World War that major contributions were published and knew wide circulation. Miguel Cruz Hernandez’s Historia de la filosofia española: Filosofia hispano-musulmana appeared in 1957, and though concerned first of all with Islamic philosophy in Spain, it is nonetheless informative in other areas. Another classic and still influential work is W. Montgomery Watt’s Islamic Philosophy and Theology (1962), but a major turning point, both in methodology and in scope, was Henry Corbin’s History of Islamic Philosophy. Written in collaboration with Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Osman Yahya and published in 1964 by Franch major publisher Gallimard, it has been translated into a number of languages (including Arabic and Persian). The project was completed by Corbin alone in a somewhat abridged version that gives account of the later Eastern tradition of Islamic philosophy. The approach is quintessentially phenomenological and reflects the particular taste for Twelver Shi’ism of the author. Though very popular, this major work is not void of flaws, specially in the overemphasis of the mystical attitude of Shi’ism. It is anyhow true that the project of the French philosopher was not limited to the narrow universe of Islamologists: his aim was to put again in a fruitful “operational” communication the two worlds of living Islamic Neoplatonicism and Western philosophy. One other unappreciable result of Corbin’s effort with Muslim philosophy, carried on also by the series Bibliotheque Iranien, published in Tehran and Paris by the French Research Institute of Tehran, is that it caused a rebirth of research and academic study of philosophy in Iran itself, accompained by a flourishing of insightful and high quality publications. Meanwhile, general introductions continued to be published (a full list is provided in Daiber’s 1999 bibliographical study; see below); among them, possibly the most often cited and used in university classes is Majid

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Fakhri’s A History of Islamic Philosophy (1970), also translated into various languages and republished in a 1983 revised and updated version. By the 1980s, Islamic philosophy was already an important subject of inquiry, whose momentum is testified by chapters devoted to Islamic philosophers in works on medieval thought and in encyclopedias. In spite of this, as recognized by most scholars, there is still a great deal of work to be done, especially in editing unpublished works and bringing to light manuscripts still buried in libraries and private collections, notably those of the Subcontinent. In recent years, following the development of the discipline, important contributions have been added to the specialist literature. Among them, a voluminous bibliographical study that is bound to become standard tool for resaerch in the field is Hans Daiber’s Bibliography of Islamic Philosophy (1999). Its two volumes provide an impressive list of publications (articles, monographs, translations, critical editions, etc.) both in alphabetical and thematic order, accompained by insightful remarks. Another general work that must be mentioned and explained in some detail is History of Islamic Philosophy, ed. Seyyed Hosseyn Nasr and Oliver Leaman (1996). It encompasses general introductory essays on the origins, influences, concepts, and schools of the early Islam, followed by a section on individual philosophers of the East and the West of Muslim world. The list is as follows: (Eastern) Al-Kindi, Al-Farabi, al-Razi, al-^Amiri, the Ikwan al-Safa’, Ibn Sina (plus an article by Nasr in his “Oriental philosophy”), Ibn Mishkawayh, al-Ghazzali; (Western) Ibn Masarrah, Ibn Bajjah (the Latin Avempace), Ibn Tufayl, Ibn Rushd, Ibn Sab^in, and Ibn Khaldun. The fourth section is devoted to the mystical tradition and the reciprocal interplay between Sufism and philosophy. The section devoted to the later Islamic philosophy presents contributions on the major philosophers that were ignored in the early academic literature: Nasir al-din al-Tusi, the “school of Esfahan” (Mir Damad and Mulla Sadra), and Shah Waliullah of Delhi. The work includes an important and groundbreaking section on Jewish philosophy, added as a pivotal interlocutor to medieval Islam. The second part of the work (pp. 783–1180) enumerates the articulations of Muslim philosophy (metaphysics, logic, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, etc.), and attempts to present some later interpretations. A geographical criterion is also adopted in the chapters (pp. 1037–1142) devoted to Islamic philosophy in the modern Islamic world and to some interpretations in the West.

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D. Conclusion To draw a satisfactory picture of the state of the art in the study of Islamic philosophy is a difficult, if not simply impossible, task; the variety of approaches, the multiplicity of schools, methodologies, and interpretations, and the fluid state of research – all this give an uncomfortable sense of fuzziness to those who whish to keep track of the lines of the progress. Nevertheless, some sort of description may be attempted by looking at the past tendencies and the paths of continuity and change. During the Middle Ages, Islam in general was referred to as the archenemy of Christianity, but the attitude of medieval Europe toward it was ambivalent. This ambivalence was fostered by the centrality of “the Arabs” in the transmission of ancient knowledge. As demonstrated by Italian historian Franco Cardini in his The Invention of the Enemy (L’invenzione del nemico, 2006), the relation was one of attraction/repulsion: during the 12th century, in some respects, taste for Arabism was even somewhat fashionable, and the “Saracens” were considered as good-hearted fellows deceived by a false and evil religion. It is difficult to deny that these obscuring and partial views had influenced most Western modern scholars until recently. Despite this, the same urgency to understand Muslim thought, along with the humanist cry ad fontes!, later merged with the Neo-Thomist approach, fostered the efforts by some excellent scholars, like Louis Massignon (Opera minora, 1969), Etienne Gilson (Le philosophe et la théologie, 1960), Louis Gardet (L’islam, religion et communauté, 1967; with Georges Anawati, Introduction à la theologie musulmane, 1948), Giulio Basetti Sani, (Per un dialogo cristiano-musulmano, 1969) and others. Spain, dominated for seven centuries by Muslim rulers, had one more reason to be concerned with Islam, and in fact the same Catholic inspiration, corroborated by a sense of “Spanish identity,” is evident in the work of such Spanish scholars as Miguel Asin Palacios (La escatologia musulmana en la ‘Divina Comedia’, 1919; El Islam cristianizado: Estudio del sufismo a través de las obras de Abenárabi de Murcia, 1931) Missionary concerns (today milded by a genuine urgency for religious dialogue) animate on the other hand the Jesuites revolving around the Pontificia Università Gregoriana and the PISAI (Pontificial Institute for Arabic and Islamic Studies). This shows that a Catholic academic school is still active, even though not as influential as in the past. The other relevant and somehow long standing influence, albeit not referable to as a “school” by its own right, is that played by outstanding scholars of Jewish origin (Ignaz Goldziher, Saul Horovitz, Georges Vajda, Paul Kraus, Richard Walzer, and others), as such working indipendently from mainstream Christian school. The whole of these influences is noticeable along

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all academic production on Islamic philosophy, even if not explicitly recognized. As remarked by Oliver Leaman (“Orientalism and Islamic Philosophy,” History of Islamic Philosophy, ed. Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Oliver Leaman, 1996, 1143–48), one major turning point was the publication of Edward Said’s seminal study Orientalism (1978). Even if a central stream of scholars in Islamic philosophy (notably the traditionalists influenced by René Guénon and the French school of Corbinian phenomenologists, who sought to study Islam from within, many also becoming Muslims), had already rejected Orientalist views and approaches as biased and incoherent, Said’s argument projected the problematization of the Western discourse about the Other in a wider arena, working out a critical appoach that exposed to criticism the whole history of modern Western rationality. By the end of the 1980s, new epistemologies in approaching Islamic philosophy were not limited to the somehow elitist (even if quite influential) environment of traditionalists. A few words must be said in some detail about the influence of Henry Corbin’s in the field of Islamic philosophy. It has already been observed how the editorial and scholarly effort he carried out in Iran contributed to the reawakening of the study of traditional philosophy in that country. The activities of the Imperial Academy of Philosophy (suppressed after the 1979 Revolution and reopened under the name of Institute of Hikma and Philosophy – Anjoman-e hekmat wa falsafe), lead by Corbin’s associate Sayyed Hossein Nasr – a Muslim philosopher himself – succeded in giving the theories of the philosophia perennis of the other Nasr’s mentor Fritjhof Schuon a sound academic standing, thus providing traditionalist epistemology (for many reasons opposed by Corbin) a more solid ground. But the originality of Corbin’s approach to Islamic philosophy is not limited to the role he played in connecting different universes. As pinpointed by the chapter devoted to him by Pierre Lory in Nasr and Leaman’s edited work (“Henry Corbin: His Work and Influence,” 1996, 1149–55), besides having instituted a new scholarly paradigm in interpreting Muslim philosophical texts, he proposed original reflections on themes scarcely focused on by scholars both in Muslim world and in the West. Hermeneutical emphasis on such themes as angeology and “imaginal” dimension of existence, prophetology, the “suffering God,” and the paradox of religious monotheism, figures among his achievements and provides useful material for further discussion. Although his influence must not be overemphasized, and the core of his personal project (providing Western philosophers with modern philosophy to reflect on and giving Islamic modern Neoplatonism a protagonist role in the scene of

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world philosophy) may be considered partially failed, it is nevertheless true to say that, through his work, Muslim philosophy has not remained unknown to many contemporary famed philosophers, notably, for example, Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben. A late rediscovery of Islamic philosophy occurred also among political philosophers, as is the case with Leo Strauss’s and his school’s somewhat biased use of Al-Farabi thought (see his essay “Farabi’s Plato,” Louis Ginzberg Jubilee Volume: On the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday, ed. Saul Lieberman et al., 1945, 357–93, and Muhsin Mahdi’s Alfarabi and the Foundation of Islamic Political Philosophy, 2001). An idea of the variety of approaches and the range of academic study of Islamic philosophy might be obtained by looking at Nasr and Leaman’s edited work: it is easy to notice how this field has grown from the time of the first general introductions, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Scholars from all over the world, employing different methodologies and drawing from various experiences, participate in the discourse, and scholars from different Muslim countries are represented quite well. To end with, it is not useless to hint at new media and the coming of the “fast age.” As all fields of knowledge, Islamic philosophy and its study are not exempted from the possiblities and the risks implied by the fast growth of the internet and the increasing availability of specialized literature in the web. Even though the time when a serious and rigorous research can be carried out by simply relying on electronic resources is still to come, and web-based knowledge suffers a dramatic lack of authoritativeness, it is undeniable that the web is already an indispensable tool of work for most scholars, and not only of the new generation. Websites containing high-quality information (like www.muslimphilosophy.com), permanent seminaries or annual conferences (as www.mullasadra.org), personal pages and blogs of scholars (www.mullasadra. blogspot.com; www.uga.edu/islam/philosophy/html) and electronic libraries providing direct access to major works of Muslim philosophers, both in the original languages and in translations, are quickly and steadily growing. The importance of these is bound to encounter a rapid and progressive growth in the next years. Select Bibliography Roger Arnaldez, Averroes: A Rationalist Islam (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000); David B. Burrel, Knowing the Unknowable God: Ibn Sina, Maimonides, Aquinas (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986); Arabic Philosophy and the West: Continuity and Interaction, ed. Therese-Anne Druart (Washington, DC: Georgetown University, 1988); Majid Fakhry, A History of Islamic Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); Dimitri Gutas, Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradition (Leiden: Brill, 1988); Oliver Leaman, An Introduction to Medieval Islamic Philos-

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ophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Oliver Leaman, An Introduction to Classical Islamic Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Jules L. Janssens, An Annotated Bibliogrphy in Ibn Sina (1970–1989) Including Arabic and Persian Publications and Turkish and Russian References (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1991); Parviz Morewedge, Neoplatonism and Islamic Thought (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1992); Seyyed Hosseyn Nasr, An Introduction to Islamic Cosmological Doctrines (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1993); William Montgomery Watt, Islamic Philosophy and Theology. An extended Survey (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1985); Harry A. Wolfson, The Philosophy of the Kalam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976).

Alessandro Cancian

Islamic Theology A. General Definition Islamic theology, which is one of the branches of Islamic religious sciences, is mostly referred to as ^ilm al-kalam (the science of kalam), and in short kalam. Kalam is usually translated as “theology,” although this rendering does not express well its scholastic methods. The term “speculative theology” conveys in a better way the nature of the theological discussions of the mutakallimun (doctors of Kalam), who used logical argumentation in order to prove some of the principles of religion (Georges C. Anawati, “kalam,” The Encyclopedia of Religion, XIII [1987], 231–42). Kalam is only one of the two major trends in Islamic theology. The other trend is that of traditionalist theology (^ilm al-usul, the science of theological principles). Since the scholastic methods of kalam had a tremendous impact on medieval thinkers within the circles of traditionalist Islam, and also on Jewish and Christian thinkers (Harry Austryn Wolfson, Repercussions of the Kalam in Jewish Philosophy, 1979) this survey dedicates its lion’s share to kalam. Nevertheless, the difference between kalam and Islamic traditionalist theology is also addressed here, since the boundaries between these two trends were never definite, especially after the emergence of the Ash^ari school in the first half of the 10th century. The terms kalam and traditionalist Islam refer to Sunni Islam, which is the main body of opinion in Islamic thought. Unless otherwise stated, the schools of kalam and the main thinkers mentioned in this survey are Sunnis (Louis Gardet, “^ilm al-kalam,” EI, 2nd ed., vol. III [1971], 1141–50). The use of discursive arguments is Kalam’s salient feature, which is mostly reflected in the discussions on the existence of God and the creation of

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the world. In these questions the kalam uses the proof from accidents, which is based on the doctrine of atoms (the major works on these questions are Shlomo Pines, Beiträge zur islamischen Atomenlehre, 1936; id., trans. Michael Schwarz, Studies in Islamic Atomism, 1997; Herbert A. Davidson, Proofs for Eternity, Creation and the Existence of God in Medieval Islamic and Jewish Philosophy, 1987). Kalam has also a lot to do with apologetics. Influenced by Hellenistic philosophical and theological thought, it uses various rationalistic tools in order to defend Islamic doctrines and uproot what it perceives as heretical concepts, infiltrated Islamic thought (D. D. de Lacy O’Leary, Arabic Thought and Its Place in History, 1939). Thus, it is tightly connected to the term ^aqida (pl. ^aqa#id), which stands for belief, creed or article of faith (William Montgomery Watt, Islamic Creeds, 1994). The goals of kalam, as the mutakallimun themselves define it in a report given by the Ash^ari theologian Al-Ghazali (d. 1111), are “to grasp the unity of God, and study the essence of God and His attributes” (Ihya# ^Ulum al-Din [The Revival of Religious Sciences], I [n.d.], 25). The theologian al-Jurjani (d. 1413) expands kalam’s definition to dealing with divine justice and eschatology (Kitab al-Ta^rifat, [The Book of Definitions], ed. Gustav Flügel, 1969 [photocopy of the Leipzig 1845 ed.], 194). Thus, kalam aims to back up various articles of faith, whose origins are to be found in the Qur#an and hadith (i.e. prophetic traditions), by using analytical methods. B. The Origins of Kala¯ m The common use in the Arabic language of the word kalam is word, words, or speech. How this term came to indicate Islamic speculative theology is an issue not fully revealed or discovered. There is an almost general agreement within the ranks of modern scholarship, that the dialectical technique of kalam was borrowed from early Christian theology (Carl Heinrich Becker, “Christliche Polemik und islamische Dogmenbildung,” Zeitschrift für Assyriologie und verwandte Gebiete 27 [1912]: 175–95; rpt. in: id., Islamstudien, 1924–1932, 432–49, trans. Mark Muelhaeusler, “Christian Polemic and the Formation of Islamic Dogma,” Muslims and Others in Early Islamic Society, ed. Robert Hoyland, 2004, 241–58; Josef van Ess, Anfänge muslimischer Theologie: zwei antiqadaritische Traktate aus dem ersten Jahrundert der Hipra, 1977; id., “The Beginnings of Islamic Theology,” The Cultural Context of Medieval Learning, ed. J. E. Murdoch and E. D. Sylla, 1975), while pointing out Greek (Josef van Ess, “The Logical Structure of Islamic Theology,” Logic in Classical Islamic Culture, ed. Gustav E. von Grunebaum, 1970; Ibrahim Madkour, “La Logique d’Aristote chez les mutakallimun,” Islamic Philosophical Theology, ed. Parviz Morewedge, 1979, 58–70) and Syriac (Michael A.

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Cook, “The Origins of Kalam,” BSOAS 43 [1980]: 32–43) texts as possible sources of inspiration (Francis Edward Peters, “The Origins of Islamic Platonism: the School Tradition,” Islamic Philosophical Theology, ed. Parviz Morewedge, 1979, 14–45; Louis Gardet, “Aux débuts de la réflexion théologique de l’Islam,” ibid., 46–59). In the same vein, it has been suggested that kalam was used to translate into Arabic the different meanings of the Greek terms logos or dialexis (Harry Austryn Wolfson, The Philosophy of the Kalam, 1976) or the Syriac memra (Frithiof Rundgren, “Über den griechischen Einfluß auf die arabische Nationalgrammatik,” AUU 2.5 [1976]: 119–44). C. The Exponents of Kala¯ m The exponent of kalam was called mutakallim (lit. speaker, pl. mutakallimun). The mutakallimun are described by both Latin and Hebrew medieval thinkers. The Hebrew designation ha-medabberim and the Latin loquentes were derived from the literal meaning of mutakallim (Lawrence V. Berman, “kalam,” EJ, 1st ed. X [1971]: 701–03). The mutakallimun were engaged not only in articulating the fundamentals of Islam in an analytic language, but also in polemics of both political and religious nature (Shlomo Pines, “A Note on an Early Meaning of the Term Mutakallim” IOS 1 [1971]: 224-40; rpt. in: id., Studies in the History of Arabic Philosophy, 1996). The first mutakallimun did not belong to a specific school. Their teachings, if they had ever been written, did not survive, and only fragments of their views have been preserved, mostly in the rich Arabic heresiographical literature written from the 9th century onward. The early mutakallimun were very cautious in not revealing the foreign sources of their doctrines. Later mutakallimun, when citing the views of their predecessors, did not actually know the foreign roots of their doctrines (Richard M. Frank, “Remarks on the Early Development of the Kalam,” Atti del terzo congresso di studi arabi e Islamici, Ravello 1–6 settembre 1966 [1967], 315–29). D. The Schools of Kala¯ m In the end of the 7th century emerged a group of mutakallimun, who were adherents of the principle of free will, as opposed to the strict predestinarian view, which was held by traditionalist theologians. This group, the Qadariyya (Carlo Alfonso Nallino, “Sul nome dei Qadariti,” RSO 7 [1918]: 461–66), was the forerunner of the Mu^tazila, which is the most known kalam school (Joseph van Ess, “Kadariyya,” EI, 2nd ed., IV [1974]: 368–72; Henri Laoust, Les Schismes dans l’Islam, 1965). The Mu^tazila (Carlo Alfonso Nallino, “Sull’origine del nome dei Mu^taziliti,” RSO 7 [1918]: 429–54) flourished as two separate schools in

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Basra and Baghdad from the first half of the 8th century until the middle of the 11th century (Louis Gardet and M. M. Anawati, Introduction à la théologie musulmane, 1948). The Mu’tazili theses survived in Zaydi-Shi^i Islam until the present day, but not in Sunni Islam (Wilferd Madelung, Der Imâm al-Qâsim ibn Ibrâhim und die Glaubenslehre der Zaiditen, 1965). The rival school of the Mu^tazila is the Ash^ariyya, founded in Basra in the first half of the 10th century. The eponym of the Ash^ariyya, Abu al-Hasan alAsh^ari (d. 935) was a former Mu’tazili, who used the rationalistic tools of the Mu^tazila in order to defend the doctrines of traditional Islam and to defeat the Mu^tazila (Ahmad AmIn, Duha al-Islam [The Forenoon of Islam], I–III, 1952; id., Fajr al-Islam [The Dawn of Islam], 1978; William Montgomery Watt, The Formative Period of Islamic Thought, 1973). Another important theological school is the Maturidiyya-Hanafiyya, established as a definite school in central Asia in the 11th century. Its eponym is Abu Mansur al-Maturidi (d. 944) from Samarqand (Wilferd Madelung, “al-Maturidi,” EI, 2nd ed., VI [1991]: 846–47). The heresiographic literature, written from the 11th century mainly by Ash^ari theologians, mentions a great number of other kalam schools, whose existence is questionable (Michael Schwarz, “Can We Rely on Later Authorities for the Views of Earlier Thinkers?” IOS 1 [1971]: 241–48). E. Kala¯ m and Traditional Theology Most of the activity of the mutakallimun was in the inner circles of Islam, mainly against Sunni traditionalist theologians. Kalam’s dialectical discourse, which gives precedence to human reason in the process of perceiving God and the world, is supposedly antithetical to Islamic traditional theology, which declares to draw its authority solely from Divine revelation, prophetic traditions and the teachings of the ancestors of the Muslim community. These epistemological questions were discussed by both the mutakallimun and the traditionalist theologians. Further points of dispute between the two trends were the question of God’s unity, the nature of Divine attributes, anthropomorphism, predestination and free will (William Montgomery Watt, Predestination and Free Will in Early Islam, 1948; Daniel Gimaret, Théories de l’acte humain en théologie musulmane, 1980), theodicy (Eric L. Ormsby, Theodicy in Islamic Thought, 1984), eschatology, the status of prophecy and the essence of the Qur#an as God’s uncreated speech (Jan R. T. M. Peters, God’s Created Speech, 1976). The division between mutakallimun and traditionalist theologians never was clear-cut, since kalam’s methods had a huge impact upon traditionalist theologians. Consequently, the latter embraced rationalistic argumen-

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tations in their works and public debates (Binyamin Abrahamov, Islamic Theology- Traditionalism and Rationalism, 1998). Among traditionalist theologians, the group called Hanabila after their eponym Ahmad ibn Hanbal (d. 855) is the most conspicuous (Henri Laoust, “Ahmad ibn Hanbal,” EI, 2nd ed., I [1960]: 272–7; id., “Hanabila,” EI, 2nd ed., III [1971], 158–62). F. Theology and the Qur#a¯n The Qur#anic text inspired the molding and refining of theological notions and formulae elaborated not only in theological treatises and kalam manuals but also in Qur#an exegeses (tafsir pl. tafasir), written by prominent theologians such as Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (d. 1210) and Ibn al-^Arabi (d. 1240). The Qur#an exegete Ibn Kathir (d. 1372) based his tafsir on the theological and jurisprudential teachings of Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328). The main theological themes in the Qur#an are surveyed and discussed in research on Qur#anic studies (Fazlur Rahman, Major Themes of the Quran, 1980; Tilman Nagel, “Theology and the Qur#an,” EQ V [2006]: 256–75; Binyamin Abrahamov, “Theology,” The Blackwell Companion to the Qur’an, ed. Andrew Rippin, 2006, 420–33). Among the theological concepts refined from the Qur#anic text are predestination and free will (Toshihiko Izutsu, God and Man in the KoranSemantics of the Koranic Weltanschauung, 1964), human responsibility (Andrew Rippin, “Desiring the Face of God,” Literary Structures of Religious Meaning in the Qur#an, ed. Issa Boullata, 2000), creation (Husam Muhi Eldin alAlousi, The Problem of Creation in Islamic Thought – Qur#an, Hadith, Commentaries and Kalam, 1968), anthropomorphism (Binyamin Abrahamov, Anthropomorphism and Interpretation of the Qur#an in the Theology of al-Qasim ibn Ibrahim, Kitab al-Mustashrid, 1996), and ethics (Daud Rahbar, God of Justice: a Study in the Ethical Doctrine of the Qur#an, 1960). G. Theology and H. adı¯ th Hadith literature, which is the narrative of the Prophet Muhammad’s life and practices, contains numerous statements of Muhammad and some of his Companions (sahaba), serving as a starting point for theological debates. While traditionalist theologians used hadith literature as a locus of their religious thought (Livnat Holtzman, “Human Choice, Divine Guidance and the Fitra Tradition – The Use of Hadith in Theological Treatises by Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya,” Ibn Taymiyya and His Times, ed. Yossef Rapoport and Shahab Ahmed (2010), the credibility of this literature was questioned by rationally inclined theologians who tended to discredit this literature (Roger Arnaldez, Grammaire et théologie chez Ibn Hazm de Cordoue, 1956). Hadith literature covers almost every topic in theological thought,

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such as God’s transcendence and anthropomorphic depictions of God (Daniel Gimaret, Dieu à l’image de l’homme: les anthropomorphismes de la sunna et leur interprétation par les théologiens, 1997), predestination and free will (Joseph van Ess, Zwischen Hadi© und Theologie: Studien zum Entstehen prädestinatianischer Überlieferung, 1975; Louis Gardet, Dieu et la destinée de l’homme, 1967; Geneviève Gobillot, La Fitra – La Conception originelle – ses interprétations et fonctions chez les penseurs musulmans, 2000; Helmer Ringgren, Studies in Arabian Fatalism, 1955), ethics (Majid Fakhry, Ethical Theories in Islam, 1991), creation (Ernst Behler, Die Ewigkeit der Welt – Problemgeschichtliche Untersuchungen zu den Kontroversen um Weltanfang und Weltunendlichkeit im Mittelalter, 1965; Iysa Bello, The Medieval Islamic Controversy Between Philosophy and Orthodoxy, 1989), eschatology (David Cook, Studies in Muslim Apochalyptic, 2002) and the nature of the Qur#an (Wilfred Madelung, “The Origins of the Controversy Concerning the Creation of the Koran,” Orientalia Hispanica 1 [1974]: 504–25). H. Kala¯ m and Philosophy Kalam is not based on philosophical speculation per se, in spite of the resemblance of kalam’s set of conceptions and areas of interest to that of Muslim philosophy (falsafa). It has been claimed, however, that kalam should not be disregarded as an apologetic discipline, since it shares areas of interest with Islamic philosophy (Richard M. Frank, “Kalam and Philosophy: A Perspective from One Problem,” Islamic Philosophical Theology, ed. Parviz Morewedge, 1979, 71–95). Kalam accepts the Islamic dogma. Thus, the mutakallimun challenged the philosophers, among other groups within Islam, and labeled them as heretics. The most famous attempt to attack philosophy is the Ash^ari theologian al-Ghazali’s (Algazel, d. 1111) Tahafut al-Falasifa (The Incoherence of the Philosophers, ed., trans. and annot. Michael Marmura, 2000). A rebuttal of al-Ghazali’s argumentation is Ibn Rushd’s (Averroes, d. 1198) Tahafut al-Tahafut (The Incoherence of the Incoherence, ed., trans. and annot. Simon van den Bergh, 1978). I. History of Research The history of research in the field of Islamic theology is in many senses similar to the history of Islamic studies in general. The study of kalam is a sub-discipline of the studies of Islamic history and philology. The interest of European scholars in Islamic theology dates as early as the establishing of the University of Leiden in 1575. The earliest scholarly efforts at studying Islam were characterized by comparing and judging Islamic doctrines in the light of Christian doctrines (Robert Caspar, A Historical Introduction to Islamic Theology, 1998). In other words, the study of Islam was not perceived as a scholarly

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field in its own right. The change occurred in the early 19th century along with the scholarly efforts taken by European and Muslim scholars in cataloguing, classifying, and publishing Arabic manuscripts in critical and uncritical editions. As the publication of manuscripts of heresiographical works and theological treatises advanced, kalam was dealt not only in general surveys on Islam (Ignaz Goldziher, Vorlesungen über den Islam, rev. 2nd ed. 1925, trans. Andras and Ruth Hamori, Introduction to Islamic Theology and Law, 1981; Alfred von Kremer, Geschichte der herrschenden Ideen des Islams, 1868), but also in the frame of monographs, thus shaping the study of Islamic theology as an independent discipline. Research on Islamic theology in the late 19th century and the early th 20 century is characterized by a reliance on heresiographic literature, whose nature (see “sources”) dictates a descriptive historical approach. The European researchers, trained for the most part in philology and history and not in philosophy and theology as such, tended to deal more with the history of theological trends and less with the teachings of Islamic theologians. The historical approach is well reflected, for example, in the works of Julius Wellhausen (Das arabische Reich und sein Sturz, 1902, trans. Margraet Graham Weir, The Arab Kingdom and its Fall, 1927; Die religiös-politischen Oppositionsparteien im alten Islam, 1901, trans. R. C. Ostle and S. M. Walzer, The Religio-Political Factions in Early Islam, 1975). All the relevant entries of the first edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam, published between 1913–1936, reflect the historical approach, which dominated Western research in the field of Islamic theology (Duncan Black Macdonald, “Kadariya”; id., “kalam”; id, “al-Maturidi”; Arent Jan Wensinck, “al-Ash^ari”; Ignaz Goldizher, “Ahmad ibn Hanbal”; Henrik Samuel Nyberg, “Mu^tazila” – all available in the convenient version: Shorter Encyclopaedia of Islam, ed. H. A. R. Gibb and J. H. Kramers, 1995). The relevance of these early studies is defied time and again, although their importance as introductory works to the study of the history of Islamic theology still exists. Research approaches still relevant today are those focusing on a methodological close reading of theological texts. A representative example is Harry Austryn Wolfson’s comprehensive work on the origins of kalam (Harry Austryn Wolfson, The Philosophy of the Kalam, 1976). Wolfson’s method of conjecture and verification, which he called “a hypotheticodeductive method,” paved the way to researches concentrating on the theological texts, in which references to political developments, if they exist at all, are provided merely as an aid of understanding the developments in theology. The definitive study of the early phase of the formation of Islamic theology is Josef van Ess, Theologie und Gesellschaft im 2. und 3. Jahrhundert

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Hidschra: Eine Geschichte des religiösen Denkens im frühen Islam, 1991–1995 (6 vols.). All the relevant entries of the second edition of EI, published between 1960–2004 (also as an online electronic version), reflect a close reading of a wider variety of published manuscripts than was available to the contributors of the first version. It has been claimed that the lion’s share of studies of Islamic theology from the second half of the 20th century was dedicated to the earliest period of kalam, while fewer studies were dedicated to theologians of the 11th century onward, with the one exception of the thought of the Ash^ari theologian Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (Algazel, d. 1111), whose works have been studied by Western scholarship for more than a century (Daniel Gimaret, “Pour un Rééquilibrage des études de la théologie musulmane,” Arabica 38 [1991]: 11–18). Nevertheless, from the 1980s, the tendency in research is to focus on the thought of theologians of the 11th century onward. The work of researchers of Islamic theology, although not specifically subjected to the harsh criticism pointed to Orientalists in general (Edward E. Said, Orientalism, 1978), should be understood and evaluated within the frame of European Orientalism with its faults and virtues (Jean Jacques Waardenburg, “Mustashrikun,” EI, 2nd ed., VII [1993]: 783–93). J. Sources The study of Islamic theology, as other branches of the Islamic religious sciences, depends upon the publication of original manuscripts in critical and uncritical editions. The two fundamental works in this area (Carl Brockelmann, Geschichte der arabischen Literatur, 1902–1942; Fuat Sezgin, Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums, 1967) list manuscripts of Islamic Arabic works, theological works included, while providing essential biographical details on the authors of these works. Even today the task of publishing manuscripts of theological works is a major feature of research. Every newly published theological work often incites the interest of scholars to pursue the investigation in the direction which that work offers, while it sheds light on unknown aspects, trends, and ideas in Islamic theology. For example, in 1962 William Montgomery Watt wrote: “the earliest extant works of Sunnite theology in the strict sense are those of al-Ash^ari (d. 935)” (Islamic Philosophy and Theology, xii). Two years later, in 1964, Morris Seale published the first translation of Ahmad b. Hanbal’s (d. 855) al-Radd ^ala al-Jahmiyya wa-’l-zanadiqa (Responsa to two heretic sects), a theological work which precedes the works of al-Ash^ari in a century, thus contradicting Watt’s categorical statement quoted above (Morris S. Seale, Muslim Theology, 1964). This example demonstrates that the field of Islamic theology is far from being exhausted.

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Until the discovery of several original Mu^tazili works, heresiographic works dated as early as the 10th century were the main source for researchers in the 19th and 20th centuries to study the earlier trends of kalam and traditional theology. The major overviews on Islamic theology and particularly Mu^tazili theology written in the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century were based solely on heresiographic literature (for example, Israel Friedlaender, “The Heterodoxies of the Shi^ites in the presentation of Ibn Hazm,” JAOS 28 [1907]: 1–80; 29 [1909]: 1–183). The heresiographers, mostly Mu^tazili and Ash^ari mutakallimun, organized their works so that they were compatible with a tradition attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, in which he prophesied that the Muslim community would be divided into seventy-three sects, seventy-two of them inheriting Hell, and the surviving group going to Heaven. The heresiographers strove in finding seventy-three Islamic sects, thus counting as separate sects groups of people whose views differed only slightly from one another (Hellmut Ritter, “Philologika III: Muhammedanische Häresiographen,” Der Islam 18 [1929]: 34–59). A recognition of the mishaps of heresiography, a literature which provides only a partial picture of the teachings of theological trends as well as of their historical development, led to a pioneering attempt to study the molding of traditionalist theology based on the first Sunni ^aqa#id (creeds, articles of faith), dated from the 8th century (Arent Jan Wensinck, The Muslim Creed, 1932, re-ed. 1965). Nevertheless, only the discovery of original theological works or the reconstruction of such works based on later sources, enabled Western research to validate the biased descriptions of trends and thinkers as they appear in heresiographical literature (See the above-mentioned works of M. Cook and J. van Ess; Richard M. Frank, “The Neoplatonism of Pahm b. Safwân,” Museon 78 [1965]: 395–424) While numerous extant texts of the two major kalam trends in Islam, the Mu^tazila and the Ash^ariyya, enable scholars to depict Islamic scholastic tradition during the period of the Abbasid caliphate (750–1258 C.E.), the beginnings of that tradition during the Umayyad age (661–750 C.E.) are much harder to establish. The authenticity of a few epistolary texts and fragments belonging to the reign of Caliph ^Abd al-Malik (685–705 C.E.) (Joseph van Ess, “The Beginnings of Islamic Theology,” J. E. Murdoch and E. D. Sylla, eds. The Cultural Context of Medieval Learning, [1975], 87–111), has been challenged. It has been argued that these writings were pseudepigrapha from the late Umayyad times, some fifty years after the reign of ^Abd al-Malik (Michael Cook, Early Muslim Dogma, 1981).

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K. Mu^tazila Many researchers were drawn to deal with the Mu^tazila from the second half of the 19th century, and it is by all means the most studied theological school in Western research. The attraction to the Mu^tazila can be explained by the fact that several European scholars favored some of the views of this school. In 1865, Heinrich Steiner spoke of them as “the free-thinkers of Islam” (Heinrich Steiner, Die Mu^taziliten oder die Freidenker im Islam, 1865). This concept, enhanced by the views of prominent scholars like Ignaz Goldziher, and duplicated in dozens of works (for example, Henri Galland, Essai sur les Mo^tazélites: Les rationalistes de l’Islam, 1906; George Fadlo Hourani, Islamic Rationalism: the Ethics of ^Abd al-Jabbar, 1971), has dominated Western scholarship for decades. The image of Mu^tazilis as free-thinkers was mainly based on heresiographic literature. Nevertheless, in the late 1920s Henrik Samuel Nyberg, who discovered and edited Kitab al-Intisar (The Book of Triumph) by the Mu^tazili al-Khayyat (d. 912) a genuine Mu^tazili work, which remained the solely-known Mu^tazili work for decades, challenged this concept (Henrik Samuel Nyberg, “Zum Kampf zwischen Islam und Manichaismus,” Orientalistische Literaturzeitung 32 [1929]: 425–41). Henceforth, Mu^tazilis were portrayed as theologians and not as philosophers. Furthermore, the discovery of a large quantity of Mu^tazili sources in the 1960s, contributed to a considerable progress in studies relating the Mu^tazila. Nevertheless, studies written before that time and previously considered as corner-stones in the field, are now considered as outdated (for example, Albert N. Nader, Le système philosophique des Mu^tazila, 1956). The entry in The Encyclopaedia of Islam indeed provides an excellent overview of the updated approaches in research (Daniel Gimaret, “Mu^tazila,” EI, 2nd ed.,VII [1993]: 783–93) L. Ash^ariyya Although the Ash^ariyya (or Asha^ira) is the most important orthodox theological school, its history and origins have been little studied. This lacuna in research is opposed to the numerous published writings of Ash^ari theologians and the Ash^ari rich heresiographical literature. Researches based on Ash^ari material, mainly focus on themes and doctrines rather than on the history of the school. An indication to the little known on the history of the Ash^ari school is the very short entry in the Encyclopaedia of Islam (William Montgomery Watt, “Ash^ariyya,” EI, 2nd ed., I [1960]: 696). In this entry Watt summarizes the dominating view in Western research, according to which the Ash^ariyya was the dominant, if not the official, theological school in the 8th–14th centuries. This view appeared in a number of studies (Duncan

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Black Macdonald, Development of Muslim Theology, Jurisprudence and Constitutional Theory, 1903; Arthur Stanley Tritton, Muslim Theology, 1947; Louis Gardet and M. M. Anawati, Introduction à la théologie musulmane, 1948; W. Montgomery Watt, The Formative Period of Islamic Thought, 1973), and was contested in the works of George Makdisi (“Muslim Institutions of Learning in Eleventh-Century Baghdad,” BSOAS 24 [1961]: 1–56; id., “Ash^arî and the Ash^arites in Islamic Religious History,” SI 17 [1962]: 37–80; 18 [1963]: 19–39; The Rise of Colleges, 1981). M. Ma¯turı¯ diyya- H. anafiyya Not much was known on the Maturidiyya-Hanafiyya before the discovery of Abu Mansur al-Maturidi’s Kitab al-Tawhid (The Book of Unity) (by Joseph Schacht, “New Sources for the History of Muhammadan Theology,” SI 1 [1953]: 23–42; the manuscript was published by Fathallah Kholeif in 1970, and the authenticity of the manuscript was challenged by Daniel Gimaret, Théories de l’acte humain en théologie musulmane, 1980 and discussed by M. Sait Özrevali, “The Authenticity of the Manuscript of Maturidi’s Kitab al-Tawhid,” Turkish Journal of Islamic Studies 1 [1997]: 19–29). Western research perceived this school as parallel to the Ash^ariyya (Ignaz Goldziher, Vorlesungen über den Islam, 1925; Arthur Stanley Tritton, Muslim Theology, 1947; Louis Gardet and M. M. Anawati, Introduction à la théologie musulmane, 1948), however without sufficient collaborating textual evidences. Different aspects in al-Maturidi’s thought are discussed in several researches (J. Meric Pessagno, “Intellect and Religious Assent: the view of Abu Mansur al-Maturidi,” MW 69 [1979]: 18–27; id., “Irada, Ikhtiyar, Qudra, Kasb – The View of Abu Mansur al-Maturidi,” JAOS 104,1 [1984]: 177–91; id., “The Uses of Evil in Maturidian Thought,” SI 60 [1984]: 59–82). N. H. ana¯bila The traditionalist Hanbali school has been neglected for years by western research, although the life and personality of its eponym, Ahmad ibn Hanbal, were discussed in length for more than a century (Walter Melvil Patton, Ahmad ibn Hanbal and the Mihna, 1897; Michael Cooperson, Classical Arabic biography. The Heirs of the Prophets in the Age of al-Ma#mun, 2000; Nimrod Hurvitz, The Formation of Hanbalism: Piety into Power, 2002; Chistopher Melchert, “The Adversaries of Ahmad ibn Hanbal,” Arabica 44 [1997]: 234–53). The Hanabila who, according to their own avowal in numerous writings, had given precedence to the Quranic text and the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad, and rejected the excessive use of rationalistic methods, were perceived by Western scholarship as ultra-conservative or worse, as a

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mob (Goldziher, op. cit.; Macdonald, op. cit.; Henri Lammens, L’islam: croyances et institutions, 1926; trans. E. Denison Ross, Islam: Beliefs and Institutions, 1968). An insufficient treatment of Hanbali manuscripts and an exclusive reliance on Ash^ari heresiography contributed to that unjustified image. The pioneering work of Henri Laoust (Essai sur les doctrines sociales et politiques de Taki-d-Din Ahmad b.Taimiya, 1939) has paved the way for researches on the Hanabila, revealing a theological system combining logical kalam argumentations with the traditional sources (George Makdisi, “Hanbalite Islam,” Merlin L. Swartz ed., Studies on Islam, 216–274, Daniel Gimaret, “Theories de l’acte humain dans l’école Hanbalite,” Bulletin d’Etudes Orientales 29 [1977]: 157–78; Binyamin Abrahamov, “Ibn Taymiyya on the Agreement of Reason with Tradition,” MW 82.3–4 [1992]: 256–73; Wesley Williams, “Aspects of the Creed of Imam Ahmad ibn Hanbal: A Study of Anthropomorphism in Early Islamic Discourse,” IJMES 34 [2002]: 441–63; Jon Hoover, Ibn Taymiyya’s Theodicy of Perpetual Optimism, 2007). O. The Thought of Prominent Thinkers The most conspicuous developments in the field of Islamic theology are in reevaluation and reassessment of the thought of prominent theologians. It is far beyond the scope of this entry to introduce the entire research done on dozens of medieval Islamic theologians, and we shall have to do with three examples demonstrating the progress made in research with regard to the thought of prominent thinkers. Research on the Ash^ari theologian Abu al-Ma^ali al-Juwayni (d. 1085), known primarily as the teacher of Abu Hamid al-GhazalI (d. 1111), has progressed immensely with the publication of critical editions of his works (Abu al-Ma^ali al-JuwaynI, al-Irshad, trans. Jean-Dominique Luciani, 1938), translations (Léon Bercher, trans., Les Fondements du Fiqh, 1995; Paul Walker [trans.], A Guide to Conclusive Proofs for the Principles of Belief, 2000) and researches (Helmut Klopfer, Das Dogma des Imâm al-Haramain al-Djuwainî und sein Werk al-Aqîda al-nizâmîya, 1958; Tilman Nagel, Die Festung des Glaubens, 1988; Mohammed Moslem Adel Saflo, Al-Juwayni’s Thought and Methodology, 2000). These and other works established al-Juwayni’s unique contribution to the field of rational argumentations. In the case of Abu Hasan al-Ash^ari (d. 935), the eponym of the Ash^ari school of theology, whose works have been studied for more than a century (Wilhelm Spitta, Zur Geschichte Abu’l Hasan al-A ˇs^ari’s, 1876; Duncan Black Macdonald, Development of Muslim Theology, Jurisprudence and Constitutional Theory, 1903; Arthur Stanley Tritton, Muslim Theology, 1947; Louis Gardet and M. M. Anawati, Introduction à la théologie musulmane, 1948),

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the whole scope of his thought and its repercussions is far from being fully revealed (Binyamin Abrahamov, “A Re-examination of al-Ash^ari’s Theory of Kasb according to Kitab al-Luma^,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 1–2 [1989]: 210–21; Daniel Gimaret, La doctrine d’al-Ash^ari, 1990; Richard M. Frank, “Bodies and Atoms: the Ash^arite Analysis,” Islamic Theology and Philosophy, ed. Michael E. Marmura, 1984, 39–53, 287–293, just to mention a few. Al-Hasan al-Basri (d. 728), an ascetic whose views on free will were investigated at length (Hans Heinrich Schäder, “Hasan al-Basri- Studien zur Frühgeschichte des Islam,” Der Islam 14 [1925]: 1–75; Hellmut Ritter, “Studien zur Geschichte der islamischen Frömmigkeit: I. Hasan el-Basri,” Der Islam 21 [1933]: 1–83; Julian Obermann, “Political Theology in Early Islam: Hasan al-Basri’s Treatise on Qadar,” JAOS 55 [1935]: 138–62; Michael Schwarz, “The Letter of al-Hasan al-Basri,” Oriens 22 [1967]: 15–30), is considered to be a mile stone in Islamic theology, although the authenticity of teachings attributed to him has been questioned recently (Suleiman Ali Mourad, Early Islam between Myth and History: al-Hasan al-Basri and the Formation of his Legacy in Classical Islamic Scholarship, 2006). Select Bibliography Binyamin Abrahamov, Islamic Theology: Traditionalism and Rationalism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998); Robert Caspar, Traité de théologie musulmane (Rome: PISAI, 1987), trans. Penelope Johnstone, A Historical Introduction to Islamic Theology (Rome: PISAI, 1998); Josef van Ess, Theologie und Gesellschaft im 2. und 3. Jahrhundert Hidschra: Eine Geschichte des religiösen Denkens im frühen Islam (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1991–1995); Livnat Holtzman, “kalam,” EJ, ed. Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik, 2nd ed., XI (2006), 729–31; Tilman Nagel, The History of Islamic Theology: From Muhammad to the Present [Geschichte der islamischen Theologie von Mohammed bis zur Gegenwart], trans. from German by Thomas Thornton, (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2000 [Munich: C. H. Beck, 1994]); Gustav Pfannmüller, Handbuch der Islam-Literatur (Berlin and Leipzig: Walter de Gruyter, 1923); William Montgomery Watt, The Formative Period of Islamic Thought (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1973); Id., Islamic Philosophy and Theology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1962); Harry Austryn Wolfson, The Philosophy of the Kalam (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976).

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Natural Sciences in the Islamic Context

Natural Sciences in the Islamic Context A. Introduction and Terminology Islamic civilization provides a rich field for the historian of science. History of Islamic science is a relatively young field, having developed only since World War II, with new discoveries being made regularly. Discussions of science in Islam in the past, and still to a certain extent within the generalist literature, have suffered from the shortcomings of the Orientalist paradigm, which holds as axiomatic the following: Islam is an inferior religion and culture to that of the Judaeo-Christian, and now secular West; and Islamic civilization was merely an intermediary between the classical Greeks and the Renaissance, then Enlightenment West. The consequences of this paradigm for scholarship are exemplified by the following untenable assertion that still appears, in one form or another, in the literature: science in Islam declined beginning in the 11th century and eventually died out, either due to the forces of religious conservatism, or to Mongol invasions, or both. The present historical outline, which re-addresses these and other conclusions, owes much to George Saliba (Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance, 2007), the most recent overall re-assessment of the subject. How to designate the science of Islamic civilization in English is a problem. The Arabic word for “science” ‘ilm means an intellectual discipline generally, much like German Wissenschaft. Several terms have been employed by scholars to designate the scientific tradition of Islamic civilization, among them: “Arabic science” and “Islamic science.” The former has the advantage of referring to the linguistic tradition, but which ignores important works written in Persian; the latter, preferred by the present author, emphasizes the dominant culture and civilization within which these scientific activities took place. B. Historical Outline An Islamic scientific tradition began during the period of the 7th-century conquests, as Muslims came into closer contact with Byzantium and Iran. The translation of the administrative apparatus from Greek and Persian into Arabic and the displacement of the former bureaucratic class, which began during the reign of caliph ‘Abd al-Malik (r. 685–705), precipitated social factors that drove the pursuit of science for centuries, and led to the epochal Graeco-Arabic translation movement of the early Abbasid period (Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture, 1998; George Saliba, Islamic Science, 2007).

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The early Abbasid period (mid-8th to 10th c.) presented increased opportunities for scientists to be useful to the needs of society. The presence of three astrologers assisting in the founding of Baghdad (762 C.E.) attests to the existence of an established astronomical tradition by that time, as astrology required advanced technical ability in applied mathematical astronomy. Progress in the sciences was motivated by competition for positions at court. A climate of scrutiny was fostered, which encouraged scientists to be as precise as possible, and even affected translations into Arabic. For example, the translation of Ptolemy’s Almagest involved a critical reading and correction of the text, updating it to then current observations and methods, such as the substitution of the newly invented trigonometric functions for Ptolemy’s chord tables. The concentration of wealth in Baghdad and the motivation of the regime to possess the fruits of science and technology ensured the presence of the best scientists at the capital. Among them were the Banu Musa, three brothers (“Sons of Musa”), who used their positions and fortunes to advance the sciences, both through patronizing translations from accomplished translators such as Hunayn ibn Ishaq (d. 873), who commanded large fees, and through original research. By the mid-9th-century, Islamic scientists had attained a level of competence that enabled them to devise wholly new disciplines and sub-disciplines. Astronomers distanced themselves from the astrological aspects of their field, redefining the discipline as a purely descriptive science (‘ilm al-hay’a “the science of the configuration [of the heavenly bodies]”). Focusing on physical structure alone made the physical inconsistencies of the Ptolemaic system obvious, the solution of which became a major concern of Islamic astronomers for several centuries, described below. In mathematics, Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi (d. ca. 850) devised the science of algebra, which was advanced much farther by Ghiyath al-Din Jamshid ibn Mas’ud al-Kashi (d. 1429) and Omar Khayyam (d. 1131). The practical needs of navigation and religion, in determining prayer times and the direction of Mecca, led to the invention of spherical trigonometry. Astronomical instruments, such as the astrolabe, were developed. A portable analog computer containing a model of the heavens, the astrolabe was used for a variety of calculations, including timekeeping, astrological horoscopes, and the sighting of stars. Following a long period of critique, Islamic astronomy began to reach maturity in the late 13th century at the Maragha observatory in northwestern Iran. Nasir al-Din al-Tusi (d. 1274), Mu’ayyad al-Din al-‘Urdi (d.1266) and several other scientists revised planetary models in the course of their observations. The tradition of reform continued down well past the 15th century,

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and some of the mathematical models developed in this tradition by Ibn alShatir (d. 1375) and others found their way into the work of Nicholas Copernicus (d. 1543). Islamic physicians, though based in Greek medicine, made original contributions to medical thought, and exerted a formative influence on the European medical tradition. Greek humoral pathology in the Hippocratic and Galenic traditions became dominant, reaching its fullest expression in the Canon of Ibn Sina (Avicenna) (d. 1037). The Canon was attractive both to Islamic and Western medical scholars, because it presented essentially Galenic medicine in an easier to use format than that of the ancient Master. Although originating in Christendom, under Islam the hospital became a more sophisticated institution, a place of treatment of the sick and wounded, an asylum for the mentally ill, a hospice for the dying, and a facility for medical instruction. One of the most enduring examples was the Mansuri hospital of Cairo, established in 1284 and which functioned through the 19th century. The translations from Arabic to Latin were especially important for the creation of a medical curriculum in late medieval and Renaissance Europe. The major translation centers were in Salerno and Toledo. The Canon eventually became central to medical instruction in the Italian universities. Nancy Siraisi has shown that the Canon continued to be used in the Italian universities well after Greek medical texts had become available, and after the new medical discoveries as part of the scientific revolution (Avicenna in Renaissance Italy: The Canon and Medical Teaching in Italian Universities After 1500, 1987). In the earlier period of the Arabo-Latin translations (11th–12th c.), the Latin West benefited not only from Arabic versions of ancient Greek scientists and philosophers, but also directly from the translated contributions of scientists such as Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen) (d. 1039) and Ibn Sina (d. 1037) and philosophers such as al-Ghazali (Algazel) (d. 1111) and Ibn Rushd (Averroës) (d. 1198). C. History of the Discipline The discipline of history was important to Muslim scholars from the early period of Islam, since they understood their civilization to be the heir to the empires of the ancient world and to their intellectual legacies, especially that of the Greeks. They further understood the Christian Greeks to be special rivals of Islam, since the still powerful Byzantine Empire was the greatest political and ideological obstacle for Islam. Therefore, the appropriation of Greek science was seen as a kind of victory for Islam, in particular since the Byzan-

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tines – then wracked by theological controversy and economic upheaval – had little interest in it (Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture, 1998). Although credit for the invention of history of science as a discipline is given to the modern West, scholars within Islam from early times recognized the epochal significance of their science, and attempted to account for it historically. The Islamic tradition of scholarship about its own science is rich and sophisticated, but has remained largely unknown to non-specialists. Beginning toward the end of the Graeco-Arabic translation period, when a scientific culture was already flourishing in Islam, works of intellectual biographies of prominent scientists and thinkers began to appear in Arabic. The development of this genre is related to that of the biographies used by the Traditionist scholars to verify reports about the Prophet for the use of jurists in applying Islamic Law. The Fihrist of Ibn al-Nadim (d. 995) toward the end of the translation era, and the ‘Uyun al-anba’ fi tabaqat al-atibba’ of Ibn Abi ‘Usaybi’a (d. 1269), well into the supposed era of decline, for example, were biographical encyclopedias of the intellectuals active in their eras, which provide modern scholars with rich insight into the development of scientific activity in Islam. The number of lives and works recorded shows that during the lifetimes of these authors there was already a critical mass of practicing scientists and physicians that they could write about. This fact is strong evidence in favor of the existence of a true scientific culture in Islamic civilization. An example of a mature Islamic historical self-consciousness is found in the works of Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406). In the introduction to his History, he outlines a sociological and economic approach to historical analysis (The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, trans. Franz Rosenthal, 1958). The work contains lengthy discussions of the sciences and their place within Islamic civilization, a fact that reflects the importance he placed on these activities, which he characterized as the epitome of the activities of civilized man, whom God has created and endowed with the gift of rational thought. The pseudo-sciences of astrology and alchemy he refutes, primarily because they are not open to public scrutiny. He understood that science can exist only in sedentary cultures, and that it is disrupted when urban centers have been disturbed by war or famine. Regarding the decline of science in the Islamic world, Ibn Khaldun observed that science had declined in some regions such as Baghdad, which he attributed to its destruction by the Mongols (1258). However, he left open the possibility that decline might occur at different times and for different reasons, suggesting that there was no uniform decline of science in Islamic civilization.

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D. Criticisms of Greek Science Scientific research in Islam was driven by a sophisticated historical consciousness, the product of a well-developed scientific tradition. This began as a critique of the Greek sciences and ultimately led to advances in the sciences far beyond the Greek legacy. The competitive climate of Baghdad encouraged this critical stance, as each scientist sought to outdo his rivals. In time, the critique became more clarified and precise, resulting in many new discoveries. In connection with the critique, there arose a genre called shukuk “doubts” (cf. dubitationes), that first appeared in the treatise Doubts about Galen, by Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi (Rhazes) (d. 925), in which he attacked Galen’s medical doctrines. The shukuk genre was a register of doubts and difficulties with scientific works of the past, which provided practicing scientists with a place to begin fresh approaches to old problems, without repeating the mistakes of their predecessors. This genre implies the existence of a continuous high-level scientific culture and tradition. In the astronomical tradition, about a century later, Abu ‘Ali al-Hasan ibn al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen) (d. 1039) wrote his Doubts about Ptolemy, in which he catalogued all the elements of Ptolemaic astronomy that were physically inconsistent or impossible, among other aspects of Ptolemaic science. Ibn al-Haytham’s work led directly to the greatest reform of Ptolemaic astronomy, in the Maragha tradition, mentioned earlier. The tradition of criticism of Greek medicine has been less studied than astronomy, perhaps because it provides less clear-cut examples than the exact sciences. Nevertheless, there are scattered examples of observations by Islamic physicians that disagree with Galen’s doctrines. For example, ‘Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi (d. 1231), observing many human skeletons during a famine in 1200, failed to find the features of the lower jaw and sacrum bones that Galen had described. The Syrian physician Ibn al-Nafis (d. 1288) working in Cairo, failed to find the porosity of the cardiac septum described by Galen, through which the blood was supposed to pass from the venous to the arterial systems. He proposed instead the “pulmonary transit” whereby blood passes between systems via the lungs. It is too much to conclude, as some modern scholars have done, that this discovery is a direct precursor to William Harvey’s discovery of the circulation (1628) or to Michael Servetus’s earlier theological musings (1553) (Nancy Siraisi, Medieval & Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice, 1990, covers both Islamic and medieval European medical traditions. Peter E. Pormann and Emilie Savage-Smith, Medieval Islamic Medicine, 2007, is the most recent discussion of the Islamic medical tradition).

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E. Modern Scholarship Although Western scholars have been interested in Arabic scientific writings as part of their own research agendas, from the 11th century down through the Renaissance, a systematic effort to study the history of science in Islam per se did not begin until the 20th century. The pioneer researcher in the history of this subject was George Sarton (d. 1956), who was also the founder of the history of science in general as a modern academic discipline. Sarton made the scholarly world aware of the work of Arabic scientists, and he provided an initial rough chronology of the subject. Although Sarton’s monumental Introduction to the History of Science (1927–1948; 3 vols.) is, on the whole, an outdated survey, it facilitated many subsequent discoveries. History of Islamic science became a respected field in the post-WWII era through the researches of Edward S. Kennedy (Studies in the Islamic Exact Sciences, 1983), Abdelhamid I. Sabra (see below), David A. King (see below), Willy Hartner (Oriens-Occidens: Ausgewählte Schriften zur Wissenschafts- und Kulturgeschichte, 2 vols., 1968–1984), George Saliba, and others. For a broadranging survey of the various sub-fields of Islamic science, see Roshdi Rashed (Encyclopedia of the History of Arabic Science, 1996). The discipline began with a surprise: Edward S. Kennedy’s accidental discovery in the 1950’s of the debt of Copernicus to Islamic predecessors, as well as subsequent research by Hartner and others, awakened scholars to a wealth of new material in the period of the supposed “decline” of Islamic science, although their announcement was greeted in the West by some with hostility. The very idea that Copernicus might have derived a crucial idea from Islamic thinkers is rejected by many without giving the evidence a hearing. It is very likely that Byzantine émigré scholars in Italy who contributed to the Western Renaissance brought key ideas of Islamic science with them, including knowledge of Ibn al-Shatir’s work in astronomy, on which Copernicus’s astronomy is partly based. These Byzantine scholars, products of the Palaeologan Renaissance that was partly inspired by contacts with the Islamic world, most likely derived their knowledge of Islamic astronomy from men such as Gregory Chioniades (d. 1302), who traveled into Muslim lands to study astronomy, then returned and established an astronomical research center at Trebizond. David Pingree, Maria Mavroudi, and others have begun to investigate Islamic-Byzantine connections. (David Pingree, The Astronomical Works of Gregory Chioniades, 2 vols., 1985, 1986; Maria Mavroudi, A Byzantine Book on Dream Interpretation: The Oneirocriticon of Achmet and Its Arabic Sources, 2002). There are multiple facets to the history of Islamic science, and many of the founding scholars of the discipline are still living. Those active in the

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study of scientific instruments are mainly David A. King and his students, including François Charette and Benno van Dalen (François Charette, Mathematical Instrumentation in Fourteenth-Century Egypt and Syria: The Illustrated Treatise of Najm al-Din al-Misri, 2003; From China to Paris: 2000 Years Transmission of Mathematical Ideas, ed. Benno van Dalen, 2002). David King’s monumental two volume survey of Islamic scientific instruments has recently appeared (In Synchrony with the Heavens: Studies in Astronomical Timekeeping and Instrumentation in Medieval Islamic Civilization, 2005). Abdelhamid I. Sabra has written extensively about Islamic optics, as well as about science in Islam generally (The Optics of Ibn Al-Haytham: Books i-iii: On Direct Vision. 2 vols., trans. Abdelhamid I. Sabra, 1989). One of his students, F. Jamil Ragep, published an edition and study of the important Tadhkira of al-Tusi (Nasir al-Din al-Tusi’s Memoir on Astronomy (al-tadhkira fi ^ilm al-hay’a), 2 vols., 1993). Another, Elaheh Kheirandish, has published on the tradition of optics in Islam (The Arabic Version of Euclid’s Optics (Kitab Uqlidis fi Ikhtilaf al-Manazir), 2 vols., 1999). David Pingree made groundbreaking contributions to the study of Islamic astrology, and has shown important interconnections between Greek, Sasanian, Indian, Byzantine, and Arabic sources (“Indian Reception of Muslim Versions of Ptolemaic Astronomy,” in Ragep, ed., Tradition, Transmission, Transformation, 1996, 471–85). One of the pioneer historians of Islamic astronomy was Aydin Sayili, whose The Observatory in Islam: And Its Place in the General History of the Observatory (1960, rpt. 1981) is a classic in this field. George Saliba has devoted his career to the study of planetary theories in Islam, and the transmission of Islamic science to Europe (A History of Arabic Astronomy: Planetary Theories During the Golden Age of Islam, 1994). His students Ahmad Dallal and Robert G. Morrison have written about Islamic planetary theory, and the latter has also written about the connection between astronomy and religion (Ahmad S. Dallal An Islamic Response to Greek Astronomy, 1995; Robert G. Morrison, Islam and Science: The Intellectual Career of Nizam al-Din al-Nisaburi, 2007). Another student of Saliba’s (and of D. Gutas’s also), the author of the present article, is a Graeco-Arabist active in the study of the transmission of medicine and astronomy between the Greek and Arabic traditions (Glen M. Cooper, Galen’s Critical Days in the Graeco-Arabic Tradition, Ashgate, forthcoming). George Saliba’s major contribution has been to present a fresh scenario about the beginnings of science in Islam and its later transmission to the West, which can explain more than predecessor theories (Saliba, Islamic Science, 2007). One of George Saliba’s key insights is the role of the nonArabic-speaking diwan administrators, displaced after ‘Abd al-Malik’s re-

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forms, mentioned earlier, who sought to restore their lost positions by using their knowledge of the sciences along with their native fluencies in the older languages (Syriac and Persian) to acquire even greater competence in these sciences in order to make themselves indispensable to the government. Thus he has shown that scientific expertise became a means to powerful court positions, such as personal physician or astrologer to the caliph himself. Roshdi Rashed, J. Lennart Berggren, and Jan P. Hogendijk have published extensively and made important discoveries about Islamic mathematics. Sonja Brentjes has written about Euclid’s Elements in Islam (J. Lennart Berggren, Episodes in the Mathematics of Medieval Islam, 1986; Roshdi Rashed, Les mathématiques infinitésimales du IXe au XIe siècle, vol. V: Ibn al-Haytham: Astronomie, géométrie sphérique et trigonométri, 2006; Jan P. Hogendijk, Ibn al-Haytham’s Completion of the Conics, 1985. Sonja Brentjes, “An Exciting New Arabic Version of Euclid’s Elements: MS Mumbai, R.I.6,” Revue d’histoire des mathématiques 12, fascicule 2 (2006): 169–97). In Islamic medicine, there are several recent important studies. Nancy Siraisi has written about the influence of Islamic medicine in Europe in the late medieval and early Renaissance period (Nancy Siraisi, Medieval & Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice, 1990). A selection of this scholarship includes: Manfred Ullmann, Die Medizin im Islam, 1970; Gotthard Strohmaier, Von Demokrit bis Dante: Die Bewahrung antiken Erbes in der arabischen Kultur, 1996; Emilie Savage-Smith, “The Practice of Surgery in Islamic Lands: Myth and Reality,” The Year 1000: Medical Practice at the End of the First Millennium, ed. Peregrine Horden and Emilie Savage-Smith, 2000, 308–21; Michael Dols, Majnun: The Madman in Medieval Islamic Society, Oxford 1992; Françoise Micheau and Danielle Jacquart, La médecine arabe et l’Occident médiéval, 1990. Bernard R. Goldstein and Y. Tzvi Langermann have written about Islamic science in the Hebrew and Judaeo-Arabic tradition. Charles Burnett’s subjects deal with subjects that include astrology and the transmission of Islamic science into Latin. Juan Vernet, Julio Samsó, Merce Comes, and others have researched science in Islamic Spain. Donald R. Hill wrote a fundamental text on Islamic technology and engineering. S. Nomanul Haq has studied the alchemical tradition in Islam, especially the figure of Jabir ibn Hayyan (Geber). (Bernard R. Goldstein, The Astronomy of Levi ben Gerson (1288–1344), 1985; Y. Tzvi Langermann, The Jews and the Sciences in the Middle Ages, 1999; Charles Burnett, Scientific Weather Forecasting in the Middle Ages: The Writings of Al-Kindi (with Gerrit Bos), 2000; Juan Vernet, Historia de la ciencia española, 1975; Julio Samsó, Islamic Astronomy and Medieval Spain, 1994; Donald R. Hill, Islamic Science and Engineering, 1994;

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S. Nomanul Haq, Names, Natures, and Things: The Alchemist Jâbir ibn Hayyân and His Kitâb al-Ahjâr (Book of Stones), 1994). The Graeco-Arabic translations are being studied as an historical phenomenon (Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture, 1998), and in lexical detail (Gerhard Endress and Dimitri Gutas, A Greek and Arabic Lexicon (GALex): Materials for a Dictionary of the Mediaeval Translations from Greek into Arabic, 1992–present). One of Dimitri Gutas’s insights in these publications is a reassessment of the translation movement. His careful attention to the sources ruled out the special role that Western scholarship has often attributed to the caliph al-Ma’mun (r. 813–833 AD) such as single-handedly beginning the Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement and sponsoring science in response to a dream about Aristotle, or as part of his rationalist theological pet project, Mu‘tazilism. Furthermore, there are journals and a newsletter that publish research. For example, Michio Yano publishes a journal, SCIAMVS: Sources and Commentaries in Exact Sciences, that includes articles about the exact sciences. SUHAYL: Journal for the History of the Exact and Natural Sciences in Islamic Civilization is published by the University of Barcelona. F. Jamil and Sally Ragep maintain a bulletin (http://islamsci.mcgill.ca/) for the Commission on History of Science & Technology in Islamic Societies, part of the International Union of the History and Philosophy of Science, which provides a great service to the field, keeping scholars informed of conferences and research. Scholars publish in the following journals, among others: Arabic Sciences and Philosophy, Early Science and Medicine, Journal for the History of Arabic Science, and Journal for the History of Astronomy. F. Current Issues and Future Trends, Challenges Once the obstacle of the outmoded paradigm about the rise and decline of Islamic science has been superseded, the major challenge to scholarship in this subject is the inaccessibility of source texts. Primary sources were written in languages, such as Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, which, most still in manuscript form, are scattered in libraries and private collections all over Europe and the Muslim world. Finding aids, such as Fuat Sezgin (Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums, 1967–1984, 9 vols.), are a great help in locating extant manuscripts, but occasionally new manuscripts come to light and mistakes in existing catalogues are discovered, and there does not yet exist an effective way to share this information between scholars. Furthermore, the most useful of these, Sezgin’s, is rendered less useful in that it does not extend past 430 AH (1038–1039 C.E.). The decision to end there was perhaps influenced at the outset by the former paradigm of decline of Islamic science,

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which seems odd, for even Sarton much earlier was aware of significant scientific activity in the Islamic world during the period after this cutoff date, described above. However, by the time volume 6 appeared (1978), Sezgin had become aware of the creative science in the later period, of Maragha and the new planetary models. A new paradigm has appeared, arguing that scholars ought to view the sciences not by isolated language or culture, but in an entire region of sibling cultures, as part of an “Islamo-Christian” civilization (Richard W. Bulliet, The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization, 2004). The increasingly obsolete designation “Judaeo-Christian civilization,” although acknowledging the debt to Jewish civilization, inaccurately excludes Islam from the historical scenario. Bulliet’s useful paradigm enables one to understand the varied transformations of science in the greater Mediterranean region as part of a long intercultural tradition, with various collateral descendants – language, cultural, religious, and political differences notwithstanding. Earlier scholars, eager to find connections on the basis of superficial evidence, were hindered by what is now referred to as the “Myth of Gondeshapur” (Arabic: Jundaysabur). The narrative is as follows: Gondeshapur in southwest Iran had become an outpost of Hellenism, a haven for intellectual and religious refugees from the persecutions of Emperor Justinian (d. 565) and other Christian Roman emperors. There these intellectuals – so the narrative proceeds – established an academy of translation, hospitals, libraries, etc. The Abbasid caliph al-Ma’mun (d. 833) then engaged the services of one of the Syrian Bakhtishu^ family of physicians, who brought all of this knowledge and tradition to Baghdad, where the Hellenistic tradition then continued. This Western scholarly reconstruction was an attempt to account for the transmission, by providing a ready resource for the Graeco-Arabic translations. The problem with this account is that it is based on one late source; there is no other evidence except supposition. Another tendentious antiChristian account, by the philosopher al-Farabi (d. 950), tries to show how the sciences, persecuted by Christian empire, found a home and intellectual freedom only under Islam. The reality is somewhat more complex, and infinitely more interesting (Saliba, Islamic Science, 2007). G. Science and Religion Islamic civilization provides a rich source for the study of the relationship between science and religion in society. The usual Western view is that science and religion necessarily are in conflict, for which the notorious “Galileo affair” is cited as an example. Islamic civilization, on the other hand, offers many examples of non-antagonistic, even constructive relationships

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between scientists and the religious establishment. The old Western paradigm of Islamic science suggested that science had lost the battle against the religious forces, and eventually died out in Islam. While it is true that religion forced some Greek-derived disciplines such as astronomy to redefine themselves, more often scientists served religion, as for example religious scholars – many of the scientists were also legal scholars or theologians, or time-keepers of the mosque, a famous example being Ibn al-Shatir (d. 1375), of Damascus. And it is also clear that science never completely died out as claimed, and that there was a continuous, though perhaps uneven, tradition down well into Ottoman times. There have been a few recent studies of the connection between knowledge and religion in Islam, such as Morrison (Islam and Science: The Intellectual Career of Nizam al-Din al-Nisaburi, 2007). H. The End of the Sciences in Islam? A major question that has been asked by some scholars since the study of Islam began in earnest in the 19th century, and one that continues to be of interest to the public is this: If there were so many leading scientists in Islamic civilization during the “golden age” of Islamic civilization, and then science vanished – how and why did it disappear? The early Western orientalists proposed reasons for the failure of the Islamic world to sustain its lead in the sciences: Ernest Renan (1823–1892), Max Weber (1864–1920), Gustave E. von Grunebaum (1909–1972) advanced essentializing, reductive, or simply racist reasons for the ultimate failure of Islam to maintain its lead in science. More sophisticated (but still essentializing and reductive) scenarios have been advanced since, including: 1) the conflict between science and the religious establishment; 2) the negative influence of al-Ghazali’s (d. 1111) devastating attack on Greek thought; 3) the inherent inferiority of the Islamic religion; and, 4) the dominance of the non-rational aspects of Islam, etc. In the West, the trend has been (and still is to some degree) to apply methods and paradigms derived from the issues and particulars of Western society and its history to Islam (Michael Mitterauer, Warum Europa? Mittelalterliche Grundlagen eines Sonderwegs, 2003). The results have often been distortions, if not caricatures of their subject, for example, in the application of Weber’s theories to Islam. The Orientalist-inspired paradigm of decline has implications beyond the Western academy as well: some contemporary scholars from the Muslim world, having been educated in the West and having been imbued with the earlier distorting paradigms about science, have written about their native scientific traditions in the terms bequeathed them

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from the West. Careful attention to the scholarship of George Saliba (Islamic Science, 2007) and his colleagues can help to reverse this trend. There were, in fact, major changes in the Islamic world in the several centuries since the beginning of the supposed decline in the 11th century, and the period of these Orientalists in the 19th century. It has become increasingly known, beginning in the 1950’s through the pioneering work of Kennedy (Studies in the Islamic Exact Sciences) and others, that original science continued to be produced well into the 16th century, and probably beyond. Furthermore, many pre-colonial era Western scholars knew this to have been the case, since, due to the research of Saliba, it is now understood that several European thinkers were reading the works of Arabic scientists and philosophers well into the Renaissance and beyond, searching for useful material for their own research. They or their agents scoured the Middle East in search of scientific texts in which they expected to find material to assist them in their own scientific projects, not unlike the manner in which 9th-century Arabic translators sought out Greek texts (Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture, 1998). No less a figure than John Locke studied the works of Ibn Tufayl (d. 1185), and early aspects of his own epochal philosophy was formatively influenced thereby (Gül A. Russell, “The Impact of the Philosophus Autodidactus: Pocockes, John Locke and the Society of Friends,” The ‘Arabick’ Interest of the Natural Philosophers in Seventeenth-Century England, ed. G. A. Russell, 1994, 224–65. See also Gül A. Russell, The Mind as a ‘tabula rasa’: John Locke and the Arabic Philosophus Autodidactus, forthcoming). Furthermore, it is now better understood how the economics of a society are interconnected with the extent of scientific practice that a given society can support. Some reasons for the decline in Islamic science must be sought outside of that civilization, in the significant economic changes that have occurred in the West after the Renaissance – changes that dramatically altered the balance of technology, trade and intellectual exchanges between these societies. Two of the most important of these events – discussed by Saliba – were, first, the discovery of the New World and, next, the discovery of a direct water route to the actual Indies. The former produced, through the exploitation of human and natural resources, tremendous wealth in Europe that was used to drive a scientific and technological revolution. The latter adversely affected the economy of the Middle East, which had long benefited from overland trade along the Silk Route, and was now mostly cropped out of the picture. The history of science in Islam is an exciting young field, attracting talented scholars. There are formidable challenges as is the case with all new disciplines, but the field is wide and ripe for the scholarly harvest, provided

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one is equipped with the proper tools. This field forces scholars to jettison old and cherished stereotypes of European cultural (or racial) superiority or uniqueness. It forces all scholars to confront their own intellectual heritage in fresh ways that reveal the inter-cultural nature of the great scientific movements and discoveries of the past. Select Bibliography Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early ‘Abbasid Society (2nd–4th/8th–10th Centuries) (London and New York: Routledge, 1998); Jan P. Hogendijk and Abdelhamid I. Sabra, ed., The Enterprise of Science in Islam: New Perspectives (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003); Tradition, Transmission, Transformation: Proceedings of Two Conferences on Pre-Modern Science Held at the University of Oklahoma, ed. F. Jamil Ragep, Sally P. Ragep, and Steven Livesey (Leiden: Brill, 1996); Encyclopedia of the History of Arabic Science, ed. Roshdi Rashed, 3 vols. (London and New York: Routledge, 1996); George Saliba, Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance (Cambridge, MA, and London: The MIT Press, 2007); Fuat Sezgin, Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums, 9 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1967–1984); Manfred Ullmann, Die Medizin im Islam, ed. B. Spuler, Handbuch der Orientalistik (Leiden and Cologne: E. J. Brill, 1970).

Glen M. Cooper

Qur’anic Studies A. Introduction Qur’anic Studies refers to the post-Enlightenment historical-critical study of the Qur’an qua text as well as, beginning in the mid-20th century, critical reflection upon the text’s relationship, meaning and possible significance to broader issues concerning Islamic history, historiography, the development of intellectual and religious traditions (especially law) in Islam’s formative period (7th through 9th centuries) and, with the contemporary postmodern turn in the humanities, its relevance for larger questions concerning the interpretation of issues related to what might properly be described as sociocultural history. After a brief terminological definition, this entry covers, in a necessarily broad manner, the history, development and major trends in this field from its inception in mid-19th-century Germany to the middle of the first decade of the 21st century, the latter of which has witnessed the publication of a work of major significance for Qur’anic Studies, the Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an

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(ed. Jane Dammen McAuliffe, 6 vols., 2001–2006; hereafter EQ). Given both its broad topical range and bibliographical thoroughness, it is with the EQ that any inquiry into the history of research in Qur’anic Studies should begin. As such, this entry assumes that it would be superfluous to reference other sources concerning the development of the field beyond the relevant entries in the EQ. B. The Qur’an The Qur’an, literally ‘recitation’, refers to the fixed, orally preserved, and written text understood by Muslims to be the ipsissima verba of God revealed piecemeal to the historical founder of Islam, Muhammad ibn ‘Abdullah (570–632), in and around the cities of Mecca and Medina (Yathrib) in the northwestern littoral of the Arabian peninsula from around 610 until shortly before his death in 632. Unarguably the preeminent unifying force among Muslims across time and space, both historically and phenomenologically speaking, the Qur’an has stood at the center of Islam as a religious system and, followed by the Hadith and various institutional, textual, and learned traditions associated with the activities of the corporate body of Muslim religious scholars, has served as the basic source and reference for matters of law and theology, of state and polity, of ritual, social, and cultural life in uniquely far-reaching and historically significant ways. Beyond the well-attested practice of memorization and oral transmission among Muhammad and his companions, although the Islamic sources admit traditions concerning the written transcription of portions of the Qur’anic text via dictation during his lifetime as well as the compilation of privately circulated codices shortly following his death, generally the Muslim tradition has maintained that the consonantal text of the Qur’an as known today was codified about two decades following the death of Muhammad during the latter half of the reign of the Caliph ‘Uthman (r. 644–56). Compiled in order to quell disputes over variant readings of the text which had broken out between various troop contingents stationed outside of the Arabian peninsula, along with the official promulgation of this new codex (copies of which were sent to the newly established Iraqi garrisons of Kufa and Basra as well as to Damascus with one copy being kept in Medina) the Caliph ordered all competing codices destroyed. While descriptions of competing redactions are preserved in classical Muslim Qur’anic scholarship, by both fact of history and force of convention any reference to the “Qur’an” is necessarily a reference to the ‘Uthmanic text, the textus receptus, ne varietur. Roughly about the length of the Greek New Testament, the Qur’an is organized into 114 sections or chapters (Ar. sura), each of which is further

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subdivided into a varying number of verses (Ar. aya), with the exception of the opening chapter the suras being arranged in more-or-less decreasing order of length. Cast in an elevated, rhymed Arabic prose, the Qur’an is not marked by a straightforward thematic or narrative arrangement, but rather weaves together eschatological monitions, theological pronouncements, terse narratives concerning previous prophets, words of consolation to Muhammad and his community, admonitions and polemics directed against their enemies and prescripts concerning moral, cultic and civil matters. Its substantive content mirrors themes found in the normative Biblical tradition and the apocryphal and midrashic writings of Judaism and Christianity as well as topics associated with the non-scriptural tribal religion(s) of preIslamic Arabia. Written in a considerably defective orthography, by the first half of the 10th century a standard number (seven, ten, or fourteen) of variant systems of reading came to be applied to the basic consonantal skeleton of the ‘Uthmanic text, one of which in particular, that of the Kufan scholar ‘Asim (d. ca. 744) as transmitted by his student Hafs (d. ca. 805–06), came to enjoy particular prestige (see further, Frederik Leehmuis, “Readings of the Qur’an,” EQ 4 [2004], 353–63). It is this reading which served as the basis for the so-called Egyptian Standard edition, or Royal Egyptian edition, of the Qur’an printed under the patronage of King Fuad I in 1923–1924, the edition which not only quickly became the standard for the overwhelming majority of printed Qur’ans in the modern Muslim world (a second, slightly amended edition appeared in 1952) but also, a few exceptions aside, within western scholarship where it came to supplant the edition prepared earlier by the German Arabist Gustav Flügel (Corani textus arabicus, 1834; rev. in 1841 and 1858). While discussed prior to the outbreak of the Second World War (on which see, Frederik Leehmuis, “Codices of the Qur’an,” EQ 1 [2001], 350) a critically edited text of the Qur’an has yet to be prepared, although scholarly resources exist to do so and steps have recently been taken to realize such a project (on which see, Andrew Rippen, “Tools for the Scholarly Study of the Qur’an,” EQ 5 [2005], 294–95). At present, nothing even remotely approaching a textus criticus of the likes of the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia or the Nestle-Alands’ Novum Testamentum Graece has been attempted for the Qur’an.

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C. Qur’anic Studies The origins of Qur’anic Studies as a distinct area of scholarship in Islamic studies (in which it has always played a significant role) is directly traceable to the researches of 19th-century continental Semitic philologists. Although emerging from the same milieu, however, in comparison to its sister field of Biblical criticism the disciple of Qur’anic Studies has developed at a considerably slower pace, being comparatively so tardigrade that even a brief account of developments in the field must take into account scholarship of a vintage normally baulked at in others. Although there are antecedents connected with the rise and development of Arabic studies in the major European universities during the 17th and 18th centuries (on which see Jane Dammen McAuliffe, “Preface,” EQ 1 [2001], vi–viii; and, Hartmut Bobzin, “Pre-1800 Preoccupations of Qur’anic Studies,” ibid. 4 [2004], 245–51), in large part both the methodological framework and much of the topical agenda of modern Qur’anic Studies were determined by the work of German scholars such as Abraham Geiger (Was hat Mohammed aus dem Judenthum aufgenommen, 1833; English trans. as Judaism and Islam, 1898), Gustav Weil (Historisch-kritische Einleitung in den Koran, 1844; id., Mohammed der Prophet, 1843) and, much more significantly, by the Semiticist Theodor Nöldeke in his still oft-referenced Geschichte des Qorans (1860), normally cited in its much belated 2nd edition rewritten and expanded by Freidrich Schwally in two volumes (1909, 1919), the second of which dealing mainly with questions concerning the collection of the Qur’an, to which was eventually added a third by Gotthelf Bergsträsser and Otto Pretzl (1938) which, among other things, takes up issues related to known variant readings of the Qur’anic text (rpt. 3 vols. in 1, 1961; hereafter GQ). It is in this body of work where many of the major topics of subsequent scholarship in Qur’anic Studies make their first systematic appearance, three areas receiving particular attention. First, questions regarding the structure and arrangement of the text in relation to its Sitz im Leben, meaning attempts to assign a probable chronology to the individual suras of the Qur’an based, in broad outline at least, on the biography of the Prophet as found in the classical Muslim sources. Second, a largely source-critical concern with the substantive content of the text in terms of its relation to larger religious patterns, trends, and traditions associated with the eastern Mediterranean oikumene on the eve of Islam and, more importantly, its position vis-à-vis the religious milieu of the Arabian peninsula in the late 6th and early 7th centuries. That is to say, an attempt to identify, uncover, or determine the probable sources, especially Jewish and Christian, for the Qur’an’s substantive content as well as the relationship of such content to the specifically Arabian

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milieu from which it emerged. Third, although less so than among future generations of scholars, there was a concern with questions pertaining to the redaction history of the text itself, something which was necessarily connected with a wider body of questions of interest to Comparative Semitics. In a sense, all of these concerns were firmly grounded in the methodological and interpretive strategies associated with higher criticism as applied to the Hebrew Bible. Although not always directly building upon the work of Abraham Geiger (d. 1874), Gustav Weil (d. 1889), or Theodor Nöldeke (d. 1930), a major concern in scholarship on the Qur’an in the latter 19th century concerned the vexed question of the chronology of individual suras. Among a range of solutions proposed, those of William Muir (The Life of Mahomet, 1858–1861; id., The Coran, its Composition and Teaching, 1878), Hubert Grimme (Mohammed, 1895) and Hartwig Hirschfeld (New Researches into the Composition and Exegesis of the Qoran, 1902) figured most prominently. Whereas Nöldeke, following Weil and in agreement with the traditional Muslim understanding of recognizing suras as either Meccan (610–622) or Medinan (622–632), had differentiated between three Meccan periods and one Medinan based primarily on style and content, Muir proposed a six-period solution, five Meccan and one Medinan, Grimme two Meccan and one Medinan based almost solely on doctrinal characteristics, and Hirschfeld a sequence based on the differences, in individual passages rather than suras, between what he identified as the six major rhetorical modes of Qur’anic discourse. Shortly following the initial publication of GQ, the English churchman J. M. Rodwell published a translation of the text in which he rearranged the suras largely according to the scheme of Nöldeke, while also speculating on the possibility of analyzing single passages chronologically over and against entire suras as the Qur’an’s basic chronological unit (The Koran, 1861; 2nd rev. ed., 1876). In most cases, such chronological reconstructions were based almost solely on stylistic and linguistic features while virtually ignoring the vast tradition of Muslim Qur’anic scholarship, something undoubtedly a result of both a simple lack of access to texts and the perceived irrelevance of such literature for establishing a fixed chronological order for the suras in any case. Although issues of chronology and textual integrity continued to be discussed, Qur’anic Studies in the first few decades of the 20th century was marked by a shift in focus to the interrelationship between linguistic and substantive aspects of the Qur’anic text. Here, questions concerning the specificities of Qur’anic vocabulary or the original language of the ‘Uthmanic codex were especially prominent. Although still very much rooted in

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the atomizing procedures of continental philology, the pioneering study of Charles C. Torrey on the Qur’anic use of commercial terminology and its relationship to the mercantile milieu of early 7th-century Mecca (The Commercial-Theological Terms in the Koran, 1892) and that of Arthur Jeffery on the non-Arabic vocabulary of the Qur’an and the significance of likely routes of transmission for understanding the text’s original Sitz im Leben (The Foreign Vocabulary of the Qur’an, 1938; on which in general see, Andrew Rippen, “Foreign Vocabulary,” EQ 2 [2001], 226–37) are representative of this trend. As evinced by Martin R. Zammit’s recent work on lexical interrelationships between Qur’anic vocabulary and a number of geo-historically proximate Semitic languages (A Comparative Lexical Study of Qur’anic Arabic, 2002), however, many of the conclusions of scholars working at this time do not stand up to contemporary standards of linguistic theory. Much the same can be said regarding research on the language of the Qur’an. From the confessional perspective of classical Muslim exegetes, the Arabic of the Qur’an was understood to have been that of Muhammad himself, meaning the regional dialect of the Hejaz, or more specifically the tribal dialect of the Quraysh. This description has been challenged by western Arabists in a rather vigorous debate initiated by Karl Vollers in his seminal Volkssprache und Schriftsprache im alten Arabien (1906) in which he argued that the Qur’an was initially promulgated, orally, in a non-inflected colloquial Arabic, whereas the ‘Uthmanic text was the product of the efforts of later Muslim philologists to make it conform to the language used by the ancient Arab poets which, quite unlike the common language, was a poetic koinè distinguished from the vernacular by its use of a full system of grammatical inflection (Ar. i‘rab). Few exceptions aside, recent research has seemed to settle upon the idea that the original language of the Qur’an as preserved in the ‘Uthmanic recension is indeed reflective of an intra-tribal poetic koinè, although bearing traces of the dialect associated with Mecca, but Vollers’s model of a diaglossic linguistic situation in pre-Islamic Arabia has largely been replaced with a polyglossic model based, in part at least, on both the ever increasing availability of data in Arabic studies as well as substantial theoretical advances made in the field of sociolinguistics in general (see further, Claude Gilliot and Pierre Larcher, “Language and Style of the Qur’an,” EQ 3 [2003], 109–35). Alongside this linguistic turn, Qur’anic Studies at this time witnessed what Marco Schöller rightly characterized as “the true novelty of early twentieth-century scholarship on the Qur’an … research into the supposed Jewish or Christian roots of early Islam” (“Post-Enlightenment Academic Study of the Qur’an,” EQ 4 [2004], 194). Following the lead of earlier works

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such as those of Abraham Geiger or Hartwig Hirschfeld (esp. the latter’s Jüdische Elemente im Korân, 1878) of tracing Biblical, Talmudic, and Midrashic parallels in the Qur’an, scholars such as Wilhelm Rudolph (Die Abhängigkeit des Korans von Judentum und Christentum, 1922), the aforementioned Charles C. Torrey (The Jewish Foundation of Islam, 1933), Heinrich Speyer (Die biblischen Erzählungen im Qoran, 1931), and Richard Bell (The Origins of Islam in Its Christian Environment, 1926) framed a field of inquiry which, in its attempt to trace and situate a larger range of Jewish and Christian elements in the Qur’anic text, has continued, with different foci, unabated from the post-war era of the 1950s – in the case of, for example, the work of Denise Masson (Le Coran et la révélation judéo-chrétienne: études comparées, 2 vols., 1958; 2nd rev. ed. as Monothéisme coranique et monothéisme biblique: Doctrines comparées, 1975) – up to present such as in the recent collective volume Bible and Qur’an: Essays in Scriptural Intertextuality (ed. John Reeves, 2004). While certainly informed by both theoretical and interpretive shifts characteristic of the post-war western academic study of religion in general, in large part the difference between pre- and post-war scholarship in this area of Qur’anic Studies is the general recognition of the historical complexity of the range of borrowings and intersections between Jewish, Christian and other socio-religious or sectarian trends and currents converging in, on, or around the immediate historical context of the Arabian peninsula in the late 6th and early 7th century. The essays in the aforementioned Bible and Qur’an are particularly instructive in this regard. At the same time, issues of chronology continued to be treated during the first part of the 20th century as well, especially in the case of what turned out to be the most elaborate effort to date in reconstructing the Qur’anic text on the basis of its chronology, that of the Scottish Arabist Richard Bell in his The Qur’an, Translated with a Critical Rearrangement of the Surahs (2 vols., 1937, 1939). Based on an elaborate hypothesis which posited that the text was the result of a complex, and by no means transparent, process of redaction in which individual suras were collated with one another in such a manner that the individual leaves or sheets on which they were actually written, in some cases both recto and verso, came to be confused and intermixed in such a way that parts of one sura were mistakenly inserted into another, Bell “critically rearranged” individual suras into short passages, verse groupings, or single pericopes. Based on an elaborate three-phase hypothesis of the development of the Qur’an from simple homiletic elocutions to a book proper, the main novelty was its positing that the final ‘Uthmanic textus receptus was redacted solely from written documents. Further notes and explanations on Bell’s work have recently been made available in the posthumously published

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A Commentary on the Qur’an culled from materials left in his estate (ed. C. Edmund Bosworth and M.E.J. Richardson, 2 vols., 1991), although the publication of these notes have garnered little notice because of the generally dismissive view taken of Bell’s hyper-atomistic theories (on this, see Andrew Rippen, “Reading the Qur’an with Richard Bell,” JAOS 112.4 [1992]: 639–47). It should be noted that Bell went far beyond the mere chronological rearrangement of his predecessors in that his aim was ultimately that of textual emendation, something which the American Arabist James Bellamy dealt with beginning in the 1970s in a series of seminal studies which propose emendations to difficult passages in either the ‘Uthmanic text or to its pointing based on the identification of likely scribal errors (see id., “Textual Criticism,” EQ 5 [2005], 237–52). Qur’anic Studies in the latter half of the 20th century was marked by a number of significant developments which, while never wholly displacing the basic concerns of the foundational scholarship of the 19th century, witnessed the emergence of new methodologies and areas of inquiry which would set a much expanded agenda for the discipline over the rest of the century. First, it should be noted that the post-war period witnessed a certain type of stocktaking in the form of the publication of a number of monographic attempts to synthesize the state of the western academic study of the Qur’an, in particular Arthur Jeffery’s The Qur’an as Scripture (1952), Richard Bell’s Introduction to the Qur’an (1953; rev. William Montgomery Watt, 1970), and, of greater significance, the substantial introduction of Régis Blachère to his French translation of the Qur’an (Le Coran, 3 vols., 1947–1949), later published separately in a slightly updated 2nd edition (Introduction au Coran, 1959). In addition to these works, a synthesis, and vast contribution to previous scholarship is also to be found in Rudi Paret’s pioneering German translation of the Qur’an (Der Koran, 1962–1966) which, when coupled with his extremely valuable addenda parenthetically inserted into the translation, along with his Kommentar und Konkordanz (1971; 2nd rev. ed., 1982) is commonly acknowledged to be a major monument of 20th-century Western scholarship on the Qur’an. Despite their individual shortcomings, each of these works has typically been considered (alongside Nöldeke’s revised and expanded GQ) essential for those working in the field, and no serious student of the Qur’an is without them. It remains to be seen, however, how the publication of the EQ might effect scholarly perception and use of these materials, especially on account of the sheer scope of its collective bibliographical apparatus. Second, the post-war period witnessed a flurry of activity related to issues and concerns that, either directly or indirectly, resonated with larger

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methodological and interpretive trends associated with the burgeoning discipline of Religionswissenschaft (History of Religions / Comparative Religion). As a discrete, yet topically diffuse, Euro-American scholarly enterprise which looked kindly upon the generation of comparative data, it was in such a context where the mid-20th century interest in the theological and ethical content of the Qur’anic text is best situated, especially as preserved in the works of scholars such as Thomas O’Shaughnessy (The Koranic Concept of the Word of God, 1948), M. A. Draz (La Morale du Koran, 1951), or Daud Rahbar (God of Justice, 1960). At the same time, this period also witnessed the publication of the pioneering researches of the Japanese polymath, and scholar of Comparative Religion, Toshihiko Izutsu on the semantic world of the Qur’anic text, namely his The Structure of Ethical Terms in the Koran (1959; later rewritten as Ethico-Religious Concepts in the Qur’an, 1966) and God and Man in the Koran (1964). In treating the Qur’anic text semantically rather than through the largely non-contextual assumptions framing the traditional historicocritical philological approach, Izutsu’s work inaugurated a new chapter in the field, and has influenced the research of no small number of scholars of Qur’anic Studies in the latter part of the 20th century. Such influence can be seen, for example, in the equally pioneering work of Angelika Neuwirth (Studien zur Komposition der mekkanischen Suren, 1981; résumé in ead., “Form and Structure of the Qur’an,” EQ 2 [2002], 245–66) whose careful microstructural analysis of relations between elemental verse groups of the Meccan suras (following the chronology proposed in GQ) finds the text to be originally liturgical or oral in nature, or, with a shift in emphasis, in that of Daniel Madigan (The Qur’an’s Self-Image: Writing and Authority in Islam’s Scripture, 2001) wherein Qur’anic notions of the significance of the “book,” or lack thereof, and the idea of revelation are explored through a painstaking semantic analysis which in the end argues for a much less significant role given to writing in the Qur’an than previously thought, something which challenges the idea of the Qur’an as a text which initially identified itself as a scripture in the sense of the Torah or the Gospels. Third, in contradistinction to the penchant of 19th- and early 20th-century scholarship in Qur’anic Studies to ignore the vast body of traditional Muslim exegetical literature, in the early 1970s a number of scholars began to re-evaluate the relationship between the critical study of the text and the critical study of its confessional exegesis. In many ways, this linking parallels scholarship done in Islamic studies concerning the development of Islamic jurisprudence wherein both text and the dynamics of communal constitution are seen to exist in an historically complex interrelationship which inevitably calls into question received notions regarding the historical devel-

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opment of basic Islamic institutions during its first two centuries, something expressed nowadays in the lively debate on “Islamic origins” (on which, see Method and Theory in the Study of Islamic Origins, ed. Herbert Berg, 2002). As applied to Qur’anic Studies, two works, both published in 1977 (as was the classic work in the “Islamic origins” debate, Patricia Crone and Michael Cook’s controversial Hagarism), stand out as seminal: John Wansbrough’s Quranic Studies: Sources and Methods of Scriptural Interpretation and John Burton’s The Collection of the Qur’an, especially since they reach diametrically opposing conclusions. Both, however, do so through questioning the historicity of traditional accounts largely accepted as accurate since the time of Nöldeke concerning the origin(s) of the ‘Uthmanic text. Employing a methodology which in Biblical criticism would be called form-criticism (Formgeschichte), for Wansbrough the Qur’anic canon emerged very late (i.e., at the end of the 8th and into the 9th century) simply because the need for it also emerged late. In essence, he saw the text as the organic result of a juridical and polemical need for an authoritative scripture which, in a highly charged sectarian context, was addressed by the production of a text collected out of a mass of previously independent Near Eastern prophetic logia and other materials which had been circulating among various proto-Muslim communities for some time later blended together, as was the “salvation history” (Heilsgeschichte) of the traditional biography (sira) of the Prophet, in the context of sectarian monotheistic polemic in Iraq so as to legitimate Arab political domination throughout the region (résumé in Charles Adams, “Reflections on the Work of John Wansbrough,” MTSR 9.1 [1997]: 75–89). It should be noted that in his work, Wansbrough was careful to state that his reconstructions were little more than working hypotheses, and that he saw many of the same processes at play in the genesis of both Christianity and rabbinic Judaism. For his part, Burton argued for the existence of a fixed canon at a much earlier date: at the time of Muhammad’s death, interpreting traditions concerning the production of an ‘Uthmanic recension as a device invented by later Muslim jurists to ground their own positions, often in variance with the apparent rulings contained in the ‘Uthmanic text, in the authority of the Qur’an through anachronistically projecting support for the critical juridical doctrine of abrogation (Ar. naskh; in this case the doctrine of naskh al-tilawa duna ’l-hukm, “deletion of a [Qur’anic] verse without the abrogation of its legal status” as related to both the circulation of varying codices and the prophetic sanction of variant readings) back into an invented past when, in fact, the Qur’an had already been codified by the Prophet himself, something which would, of course, militate against the acceptability of the doctrine of abrogation in the first

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place (résumé in John Burton, “The Collection of the Qur’an,” EQ 1 [2001], 351–61). D. Recent Developments In addition to the stimulating effect which the revisionist theories of Wansbrough and Burton have had on the continued development of Qur’anic Studies from the late 1970s to the present, new questions have also established themselves as significant research trajectories in the field at the beginning of the 21st century. Although much of this work has focused on issues related to the significance of the Qur’an in Muslim life and thought in modern and contemporary contexts, such as ethnographical studies on the cultural and religious significance of socially regulated systems of Qur’anic recitation in modern Muslim societies (e.g., Kristina Nelson, The Art of Reciting the Qur’an, 1st ed.,1985, 2nd rev. ed., 2002; or, Anna Gade, Perfection Makes Practice: Learning, Emotion, and the Recited Qur’an in Indonesia, 2004), within the ambient of medieval studies a similar shift to what would be called in the context of Biblical studies reader-response criticism (Rezeptionsästhetik) has emerged as a promising area of research. The work of the American scholar of Islam William Graham (Beyond the Written Word: Oral Aspects of Scripture in the History of Religion, 1987) and, more forthrightly, that of the Iranian-German scholar Navid Kermani (Gott ist schön: Das ästhetische Erleben des Koran, 1999) are excellent examples of what is clearly a reaction against the traditional historical-philological approach dominant in much previous scholarship. Working from the perspective of reception history, Kermani’s research in particular demonstrates that, historically speaking, the significance of the Qur’an has been primarily rooted in its status as a pre-eminently oral/aural phenomenon, its historical import laying not in the midst of its reputed origins, but rather in the ways in which its origins have been imagined in the context of the collective Muslim “cultural memory” (das kulturelle Gedächtnis). He argues that this should be the primary object of scholarly inquiry on the Qur’an and not, as the late Canadian scholar of Islam Wilfred Cantwell Smith himself argued nearly twenty years earlier, the scripture’s origins in the positivistic sense (“The True Meaning of Scripture: An Empirical Historian’s Nonreductionist Interpretation of the Qur’an,” IJMES 11.4 [July, 1980]: 487–505). In many ways, this new direction in Qur’anic Studies has been inspired by a wider postmodern dismissal of the monologic search for meaning or coherence as a meaningless endeavor in and of itself. It should be noted, however, that at the same time concerns of earlier generations of scholars over basic source-critical issues do still make an ap-

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pearance in the field, although in no small number of cases such work seems to be irretrievably situated in an overtly polemical context tied to larger geopolitical dynamics characteristic of the late 20th century. The recent study of a comparative Semiticist writing under the name of Christoph Luxenberg (Die syro-aramäische Lesart des Koran: Ein Beitrag zur Entschlüsselung der Koransprache, 2000) is perhaps the best example. While the issue of Syriac borrowings have long been discussed in literature, Luxenberg, following in the spirit of the earlier polemical work of the German Protestant theologian Günter Lüling (Über den Ur-Qur’an: Ansätze zur Rekonstruktion vorislamischer christlicher Strophenlieder im Qur’an, 1974; English trans. A Challenge to Islam for Reformation, 2003) attempts to emend difficult passages in the ‘Uthmanic text by positing an original Syro-Aramaic-Arabic “Urtext” which he hypothesizes emerged in the linguistic and religious context of an originally Aramaized Christian settlement (Mecca) whose Syro-Aramaic liturgical book (later the ‘Qur’an’ proper) was at some point recast into a particular form of the Arabic language so as to be comprehensible to the Arabs who, for reasons unclear, became heirs to a developing tradition which would eventually configure itself into Islam proper. Among scholars working in the field, Luxenberg’s work has met with a mixed reception, from cautious support of his overall methodology (e.g., Claude Gillot and Pierre Larcher, op. cit., 130–32) to charges of outright dilettantism (e.g., François de Blois, “Review of Die syro-aramäische Lesart des Koran,” JQS 5.1 [2003]: 92–97; cf. Marco Schöller, op. cit., 201–02). As the field looks into the future, there is little doubt that the publication of the EQ, described by its general editor as the result of both “the desire to take stock of the field of Qur’anic Studies at the turn of the century and an interest in seeing this field flourish in the new millennium” (Jane Dammen McAuliffe, op. cit., ix), will serve as a major impetus for continued developments. In addition, the establishment in 1999 of the first journal dedicated solely to Qur’anic Studies, the Journal of Qur’anic Studies (JQS) will undoubtedly contribute to this task as well. With its editorial office housed at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and under the general editorship of the Cambridge trained Egyptian scholar of the Qur’an M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, JQS not only simultaneously publishes academic research on the Qur’an in English and Arabic by both non-Muslim and Muslim scholars, but has also been associated with sponsoring a number of international academic conferences devoted to furthering the field. Taken together, both the EQ and JQS well capture the emerging dynamics of Qur’anic Studies as it begins to define, or perhaps redefine, itself at the beginning of the 21st century.

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Select Bibliography The bibliographical reach of individual entries of the EQ as a whole both encompasses and supersedes all previous summaries of the history and development of Qur’anic Studies. Although the relevant entries have been cited above, special attention should be given to Marco Schöller, “Post-Enlightenment Academic Study of the Qur’an,” EQ 4 (2004), 188–208.

Erik S. Ohlander

Shi ism A. Definition Shi ^ism represents the numerically most relevant minority of Islam, generally distinct from Sunni Islam for its stress on the legitimacy of the succession of the members of the family (ahl al-bayt) of the Prophet Muhammad at the head of the Muslim state after his death. Presently no precise statistics are available, but according to most reliable sources Shi^a Muslims should range from 10 to 15 % of the whole world Muslim population. While a detailed definition of Shi ^ism through history is above the scope of the present article, some important points need to be stressed on. The name is the ellyptical form of shi ^a ^Ali, that is the group of supporters of ^Ali b. Abi Talib (d. 662), whose claims to the right of being the only legitimate Caliph after Prophet Muhammad were staunchly opposed by the Meccan traditional ruling elite. As pointed out by Jafri (Origins and Early Development of Shi ^ism, 1979), Muhammad was linked to the most prominent sacerdotal family of Mecca, the clan of the Hashimites, or Banu Hashim, and according to the pre-Islamic custom in fact of political authority, the leadership had to remain in that line. As head of the Hashimites was generally recognized ‘Ali, on the grounds of his kinship with the Prophet, his marriage to Fatima and his undisputed religious knowledge and ascetic spirituality. Nonetheless, a (later disputed) election established Abu Bakr (d. 634) as leader of the newborn community, and the close associates of ‘Ali followed him in refusing to pledge allegiance to the first Caliph. ‘Ali was not the only member of the Hashimite family to be given preference, but his standing as the closest associate of Muhammad was supported by a number of testimonies and eventually led to a wider recognition during the first years of Umayyad rule.

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Soon the majority of the legitimist opposition to the rule of the Banu Umayya, whose centers were Medina and even more the new city of Kufa, shifted its stress from the Hashimites to the ‘Alid line of the family, through Hasan b. ‘Ali and his brother Husyan. The latter, slaughtered along with some eighty supporters in the plan of Karbala by a vanguard of the army of Yazid b. Mu‘#awiy ya, second Umayyad ruler then based in Damascus, on 680 a.D. had to become the main charachter in the tragedy that soon turned into one of the most powerful foundative metaphor of the Shi ^ite ethos. Messianic and chiliaistic doctrines that had always accompanied ‘Ali’s feelings passed through the decades on the religious line of the lineage of Husayn, up to his 9th successor in the time of the early ‘Abbasid rule, Hasan al-‘Askari, later recognized as the 11th Imam, who gave birth to the 12th and last Imam recognized by the principal branch of the Shi ^as, later to become the so called “twelver Shi ^is”. According to their doctrine, the 12th Imam known as the mahdi (“right guided”) never died and entered a state of occultation in the year 940, to come back only at the end of times to deliver universal justice to the whole world. Around the theme of the absence of the Imam, twelver Shi ^as had developed along centuries a rich philosophy, a subtle theology and a complex, yet not univoque, system of political thought. While the first culminated in the 17th century with the influential summa of the Persian philosopher Sadr al-Din Shirazi (d. 1640), which synthesized the ishraqi philosopy of Suhrawardi and the visionary neoplatonism of Ibn Sina (Avicenna), and the second was a substantial re-arrangement of Mu ^tazilite rationalist kalam in Imami terms, the latter – after some four centuries of travail – brought to the endorsement of the theory of the Islamic State, worked out in practice by Imam Khomeini’s principle of the government of the Islamic jurisprudence scholar (Wilayat al-Faqih). The elementary articles of faith based upon the belief in five “pillars” (arkan al-din) – that is oneness of God (tawhid), Justice of god (^adala), prophecy (nubuwwa), imamate (imama), and judgment (qiyama) –, though not incorrect in principle, must be considered a later development, stressed on as a consequence of confrontation with the Sunni’s “five pillars.” This codification in any case does not date back to the time of the Imams. Shi ^ism itself is divided into branches, following the recognition of the authority of one or another of the Imam of ^Ali’s lineage, the most importants of which nowadays are Ismailis, Zaydis, and Alawites (the latters being recently absorbed, at least as to what concerns official juridic recognition, into the mainstream of Imami twelver Shi ^ism), who maintain the bulk of their followers respectively in the Indian subcontinent, Yemen, and the costal areas between Syria and Turkey. Detailed account of history and doctrines of

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the sects mentioned and of the others either numerically esigue or disappeared along centuries, falls beyond the scope of this introductory outlook, but the interested reader may begin looking the the relevant entries in EI2, EIr, and the works mentioned above. Needless to say, Shi ^ites did not escape the broadening of geographical landscape that interested, at the end of 20th century, all the traditional religious and cultural groups, this being a major epistemological turn in the definition of the object of Islamic studies, that today must relocate their focus both on Muslim countries and diasporic cultures. B. History of Research The history of the study of Shi ^ism suffered the fate of being approached as a matter merely tangential to that of mainstream Sunni Islam. The scarce accessibility of primary sources that affeced research up to the second half of the 20th century has certainly contributed to the backwardness of academic awareness on history and doctrine of Shi ^ism; nevertheless, Sunni prejudice – vehiculated by eresiographers such as al-Baghdadi, Ibn Hazm, and alShahrastani – by the means of wich most scholars of Islamic studies approached the theme, had been central to their understanding of that important branch of Islam, and must not be downplayed. Accordingly, many early scholarly overviews have been made either taking into account biased sectarian perspectives or considering Shi ^ism as a minor chapter in the history of Islam, also given the difficulties faced by scholars wishing to obtain Shi ^i manuscripts in Sunni countries. Thus the picture of Shi ^ism that has emerged is one of a political and economic-based movement degenerated into a religious millenaristic heresy. In the Middle Ages, scanty information on Shi ^ism, particularly gathered in encounters with Fatimid Ismailis, were provided by Crusader writers such as William of Tyre and Jaques de Vitry (see Etan Kohlberg, “Western Studies of Shi#a Islam,” Shi#ism, Resistance and Revolution, ed. Martin Kramer, 1987, 31–44,), but were marred by prejudice and distortion. After the Crusades, Shi ^ism remained largely unknown in Western academic circles. Even after the establishment of the Safavid empire, in the 17th century, those European Islamicists who engaged in the study of Arabic as an extension of the study of Hebrew and theology, paid no or little attention to the accounts of diplomats, missionaries and merchants based in Imamite Persia. An exception can be found in the well-informed and somehow pre-postmodern writings of the eclectic diplomat Joseph Arthur comte de Gobineau, whose Trois ans en Asie (1859), Religions et philosophies de l’Asie centrale

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(1865), and Histoire des Perses (1896) proved to be rather impartial accounts about Iranian Shi ^ism, quite an oddity for his times. Pioneering academic undertakings and publications devoted to Shi ^ism, such as Garcin de Tassy’s edition and translation of a “Shi ^i” chapter of the Qur#an (1842), Ignaz Goldziher’s Beiträge zur Literaturgeschichte der Shi#a und der sunnitischen Polemik (1874), G. Browne’s relevant chapters in A Literary History of Persia (published in 1969), and Dwight M. Donaldson’s The Shi#te Religion (1933), must be evaluated considering their over-dependence on polemical works (whose echoes continue affecting scholarship even in later literature). The only works comparable to that of Goldziher for the brand of robust scholarship are those authored by the German scholar Rudolph Strothmann, among whose writings, the book Die Zwölfer-Schi#a (1926), and several entries for the first edition of the Encyclopédie de l’Islam, provide excellent samples of early scholarship on Imamism, Zaydism and Ismailism. One major turning point in the availability of primary sources, both for Western and native academics of Shi ^ism, has been the publication between 1934 and 1978 of the most comprehensive list of writings by Imami religious scholars, collected in 25 colossal volumes by Aqa Buzurg Tihrani (Al-dhari ^a ila tasanif al-shi ^a, 1353–1398). Anyhow, an even superficial overview of the first volume of Parson’s Index Islamicus, the main bibliographical index for Islamic studies, covering the years 1906–1955, can give an idea of the paucity of works dedicated to the matter. The key character in the passage from the first Orientalist and Sunnioriented scholarship on Shi ^ism to a more aware and informed research has been the French scholar Louis Massignon. Serving as military officer in Iraq and thereby providing an unusual and pioneering critique of the then dominating Orientalist discourse, Massignon contributed to the development of the study of Shi ^ism by first outlining important aspects of the mystical-oriented ethos of Shi ^ism (see Opera Minora, vol. 1, articles: “Die Ursprünge und die Bedeutung des Gnostizismus im Islam;” “Der gnostische Kult der Fatima im Shiitischen Islam;” “La Mubahala de Médine et l’hyperdulie de Fatima;” “La notion du voeu et la dévotion musulmane à Fatima,” 1963), and – not less relevant – by tutoring Corbin’s first steps in the world of ithna ^ashariyya (“Twelver”) mysticism. A pupil of Etienne Gilson and Jean Baruzi, Heideggerian philosopher Henry Corbin, once having been in touch with Iranian Shi ^ism at the Sorbonne as a young phenomenologist, then with first-hand sources in Istanbul while working at the local French Institute, and finally in Tehran as the director of the French Institute of Iranian Studies and founder of the series Bibliothèque iranienne, never abandoned

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his spiritual and scholarly attachment to Iran and Shi ^ism, devotedly collecting, editing, and translating some of the most important works of Shi ^ite theology, philosopy, and gnsosis (^irfan). By the time Henry Corbin was completing his monumental magnum opus about Iranian Islam, devoting volumes I and II of En Islam iranien: Aspects spirituels et philosophiques (1971–1972) respectively to twelver Shi ^ism and to the Esfahan’s and Shaykhi’s schools of thought, social protest against the despotic rule of the Shah Reza Pahlavi, led by the clergy of Qom, was erupting in the streets of Tehran, and eventually ended in the last revolution of the 20th century. The religious nature of the new political order drew international attention to Shi ^ism, and prompted an unprecedented impetus for examination of the phenomenon by Western scholars, whose interest in political science, sociology and anthropology of Iranian Shi ^ism was paralleled by a corresponding resurgence in religious studies. C. Articulation and Main Issues The history of the study of Shi ^ism might be functionally divided in the two broad categories of religion and social sciences. The first is referred to the scholarly tradition that may be considered heir to the lineage of classical Oriental studies, yet taking into account a great deal of internal differentiation and the introduction of the critique of orientalist discourse, which is commonplace after the publication of Edward W. Said’s momentous Orientalism in 1978. The second, different in scope, methodologies, and foci, encompasses those works whose concern have more to do with contemporary problems enacted in social and cultural practices than with hair-splitting philological and textual matters. The two approaches are getting more and more overlapping and interrelated, so that it is not unusual for authors to shift from one to the other with ease. Therefore, this diadic conceptual structure has to be considered functional and fuzzy. The above-mentioned 1874 study of Ignaz Goldziher was not followed by a corresponding flow of studies on Shi ^ism, and up to the publication of En islam iranien, research about Shi ^ism was desultory and intermittent both diachronically and synchronically. Nonetheless, a number of landmark works were produced in different research centers around the world, are worth being mentioned. Italian historians Sabino Moscati (“Per una storia dell’antica Shi#a,” 1955, 251–67) and Laura Veccia Vaglieri (“Sul ‘Nahj al-balagha’ e il suo compilatore ash-Sharif ar-Radi,” 1958, 1–46) provided informed contributions on various aspects of early Shi ^ism. Most studies on Shi ^ism were, however, carried out by mainstream islamologists working on the history of early Islam, such as in the case of the articles of

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W. Montgomery Watt (among which “Shi ^ism under the Umayyads,” 1960, 158–62; “The Rafidites: A Preliminary Study,” 1970, 110–21), and worldacclaimed historian Marshall G. S. Hodgson (“How Did the Early Shi ^a Become Sectarian?,” 1955, 1–13); one exception may perhaps be found in the seminal works of one of the pupils of the renowned Islamicist Alessandro Bausani, Gianroberto Scarcia (“A proposito del problema della sovranità presso gli Imamiti,” 1957, 95–126; “Intorno alla controversia tra Akhbari e Usuli presso gli Imamiti di Persia,” 211–250 1958; “L’eresia musulmana nella problematica storico-religiosa,” 1962, 63–97). Different is the case of the Soviet islamologist W. Ivanow who, beginning from the 3rd decade of the 20th century, had devoted his whole scientific endeavor to the study of the Ismaili religious phenomena, editing and studying an impressive amount of first-hand works (Studies in Early Persian Ismailism, 1948). Meanwhile, Corbin was training a generation of scholars that would eventually vivify international debate on Shi ^ism both in Iran and in Western academia, and his contribution to the development of studies on Shi ^ism, though not void of methodological oddities (at least for standard Islamic studies; after all he was a phenomenologist philosopher by training), can hardly be overestimated. His intellectual circle, linked to the broader and prestigious milieu of European phenomenologists meeting on a regular basis at the Eranos sessions in Ascona, haunted by, among others, Mircea Eliade, Carl Gustav Jung, and Gershom Scholem. Famed Iranian intellectual Seyyed Hossein Nasr, a prolific traditionalist scholar still active and presently based in North America, besides writing a number of best selling general surveys about Shi ^ism and Sufism, authored significant contributions to the knowledge of Imami philosophy (“Le shi#isme et le soufisme: leur relations principelles et historiques,” 1970, 215–33; Sadr al-Din and His Transcendent Theosophy, 1978; Shi#ism: Doctrines, Thought, and Spirituality, 1988), but his major achivement was the foundation of the Imperial Academy of Philosophy in Tehran (after the Revolution renamed Anjuman-i hikmat wa falsafa, Institute for [the study] of Hikma and Philosophy), that eventually became, besides the French Institute of Iranian Studies directed by Henry Corbin, the second research center of attraction for those academics, Iranian and foreigners alike, interested in the study of Imami Shi ^ism. Outside of Iran, two major centers were involved in Corbin’s effort to vivify traditional Iranian philosopy. The first was of course the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes at the Sorbonne, where Corbin used to teach dense courses related to his pioneering research in Iran (Itineraire d’un enseignement, 1993); the second was McGill’s University Institute of Islamic

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Studies, founded in 1954 by Wilfred Cantwell Smith and whose Professor of Islamic Thought was, from 1964, Corbin’s close associate Hermann Landolt. Other important public intellectuals and researchers that shared a common path with Corbin’s pupils play a pivoltal role in Iranian internal debate today, and their names are well-known: Dariush Shayegan, based in Paris and Tehran, where he teaches courses on comparative religions, and author of widely acclaimed and best-selling essays on Iranian religious culture; Reza Davari Ardakani, a conservative philosopher, famous for his controversy with the leading progressive intellectual ^Abdolkarim Sorush; Nasrollah Pourjavady (Kings of Love, 1978, with Peter Lamborn Wilson), whose books and articles on Imami Sufism are widely read both in Iran and abroad. More than tangential to the main characters of this environment were the contributions of revered Imami clerics, most notably the late ^Allama Tabataba#i, author of the renowned introductory essay Shi ^a dar Islam (1962, English trans. by Seyyed Hosseyn Nasr, Shi#ite Islam, 1972), and whose importance is testified by his conversations and correspondences with Henry Corbin (Shi ^a, 1960). The situation changed for the better at the end of the 1960s, when one major event occured in marking the passage of the study of Shi ‘ism from a small circle of practitioners to a broader audience of specialists and readers, that is the 1968 Colloque de Strasbourg, a round table about Shi ^ism attended by the then leading specialists of Imamism plus a representation of the old generation of Islamicists that had done research on this topic. Worth noting is the participation of Henry Corbin, G. Vajda, Seyyed Hosseyn Nasr, Francesco Gabrieli, Wilfred Madelung, and the leading Lebanese cleric Musa Sadr, whose paper never reached the editors and is thus missing from the proceedings. Starting from the end of the 1970s, a number of excellent monographs have appeared, marking the new course of interest that experienced a determinant acceleration due to the imminent revolution. Among these, Seyyed Husayn M. Jafri’s The Origins and Early Development of Shi#a Islam (1979), provides an interesting account of the ideological substratum preparing the ground for the formation of Imami doctrines; Mojan Momen’s An Introduction to Shi ^i Islam (1985), provides a general and well-informed overview, and Heinz Halm’s Die Schia (1988) gives a well-grounded solid sample of scholarship on Imamism. Furthermore, Farhad Daftary’s writings on Ismailism (especially The Isma#ilis: Their History and Doctrine, 1992), represents an indispensable reference for those interested in this branch of Shi ^a Islam.

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D. After the Revolution in Iran and the Rise of Social Sciences Applied to Shi ism Besides those academics investigating Shi ^ism on the religious and historical level, the revolution fueled another quite fruitful research line, which isthat of the social sciences, notably anthropology, political science and sociology. Earlier enterprises, like the fieldwork conducted by Bryan Spooner in Iran during the 1960s (“The Function of Religion in Persian Society,” 1963, 83–95) proved to be isolated undertakings. It was carried out on the grounds of a solid training in anthropology but without a deep awareness of the textual tradition of Shi ^ism. Following the political concerns that arose in the West due to the revolution, research centers began to produce a generation of specialists with solid training in Islamic Studies but at the same time more and more interested in contemporary matters. Modern and contemporary history (Nikki Keddie, Religion and Politics in Iran: Shi ^ism from Quietism and Revolution, 1983), at times viewed from a rigorous religious historical perspective (Hamid Algar, Religion and State in Iran 1785–1906: The Role of the Ulama in the Qajar Period, 1969), sociology (Said Amir Arjomand, Farhad Khosrokhavar), anthropology (Micheal J. Fischer, Mehdi Abedi, Oliver Beaman), social history (Roy P. Mottahedeh), came to be well represented as academic disciplines encompassing several sides of the Shi ^ite religious phenomenon. On the other hand, interest in Iran happened to awake an innovative stream of scholarship in contemporary Shi ^ism in other geographical settings, namely Iraq, Syria, and the Sub-continent. In addition to this, debate around themes critical to the understanding of Shi ^ism as an autonomous spiritual reality, as sketched out by Corbin and his associates, continued providing the academe with exceptional scholars, such as Wilfred Madelung, Ethan Kohlberg, Andrew J. Newman, Todd Lawson, Juan Cole, Norman Calder, Robert Gleave and others, while a brilliant generation of native academics based in outstanding Western research centers, like Mohammad Ali Amir-Moezzi, Hossein Modarresi Tabatabai, Abdulaziz Sachedina, succeeded in animating the landscape by introducing a significant deal of fresh ideas and expertises. They represent at present the backbone of the academic study of Shi ^ism around the world, and their capacity to share their knowledge through a transnational network makes the perspectives for further development of the field decidedly stimulating and multifaceted in approaches, methodologies and views. In the last years, renewed academic interest of Shi#ites in their own religion gave birth to the publication of basic research tools like specialistic encyclopedias. Those who read Arabic or Persian use regularly these often well-written and peer reviewed (even if not void of bias) works as start up

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tools for their research. One such work is the Persian Da#irat al-ma^arif-i tashayyu^ (2001). E. State of Reaserch and Perspectives Scholars hailing from the two above mentioned offsprings (i.e., those heirs to Corbin’s experience in Iran and those continuing the “classical” orientalist positivist approach), together with the well represented new generation of native scholars endowed with either religious or academic background, enhanced significantly the quantity and quality of research on Shi ^ism during the nineties and up to the first decade of the 21st century. As for Twelver Shi ^ism, research has achieved relevant goals in better assessing the crucial terms of the phenomenon as an independent chapter of the spiritual history of Islam, ponting out the esoterical peculiarities of ‘Alid religion as emerging from a detailed analysis of the early sources. This is in particular the case with the work of one of the most influential scholars of Shi ^ism, Mohammad Ali Amir-Moezzi, who inherited the phenomenological gist of Corbin, merged with a more rigorous brand for methodological accuracy. His Le guide divin dans le shi ^isme originel (1992) no doubt represents a milestone in determining the exact nature of the first historical manifestations of Imamism, presented as a religion grounded on the initiation into divine secrets and essentially depicted as a mystical doctrine. As Amir-Moezzi puts it, critical to the understanding of Shi ^ism is the evolution from a non-rational esoterical doctrine to a rationalist and politically engaged movement, centered on the expansion of the prerogatives of the ulemas during the absence of the Imam. Complementary to Amir-Moezzi’s work, are the studies of Etan Kohlberg on the historical process that led to the definition of the Twelver orthodoxy (see Belief and Law in Imami Shi ^ism, 1991). Crucial to all these discourses is in fact the very theme of the a ^lamiyya (the quality of the “most learned,” a ^lam) and of its social and political implications, once relegated to the Imams and their designed representatives, and shifted along history to an organized class of religious professionals, a theme of momentous importance for the modern Shi ^ite political thought. Thus, the so called “Imamology,” – so deeply investigated by Amir-Moezzi in a series of articles, published separately in various specialistic journals between 1992 and 2005 and recently collected in one volume (La religion discrète: Croyances et pratiques spirituelles dans l’Islam shi#ite: Aspects de l’imamologie duodécimaine, 2006) – devoid of the figure of the legitimate Imam, becomes the justification for the institution of the rationalist imitation (taqlid) of the “most learned” and the management of political power by its ultimate theorization, the marja ^al-taqlid (lit. “source of the imitation”), discussed in depth in The Most Learned of the Shi ^a: The Institution of the

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Marja ^Taqlid, ed. Linda S. Walbridge, 2001. Another well represented area of scholarship is that of the Esfahan school of philosophy, be it or not connected to jurisprudence theories of any relevance to political actuality (for an example of both, see respectively A. J. Newman’s “Towards a Reconsideration” (1986, 165–99), and Christian Jambet, Se rendre immortale, 2001), subject of a scholarly renaissance even in Iran as a consequence of Corbin’s rediscovery, and its mystical implications. International symposia on Mulla Sadra and his school are held on a regular basis in Iran. Needless to say, the revolutionary elite’s interest in, and appreciation of, the subject matter is not unrelated to the success of Mulla Sadra and his school of thought in his motherland after the revolution. Whatever the political implications of the study of Mulla Sadra in Iran, outstanding works on him and his school were recently published (one example is Sajjad Rizvi, Mulla Sadra Shirazi: His Life, Works and Sources for Safavid Philosophy, 2007). Closely intertwined with the issue of the authority of the marja ^, one of the main object of scholarly analysis, is that of the internal intellectual and juristic debate among Shi ^ite religious scholars. In this sense, the conflict between the akhbaris (traditionalists) and the usulis (rationalist “fundamentalists”) represents one of main lines of research, object of close scrutiny by a number of scholars (see for instance Andrew J. Newman, “The Nature of the Akhbari/Usuli Dispute in late Safawid Iran,” 1992, 21–51, and 250–61). Obviously Islamic Republic of Iran, being nominally a Shi ^i theocracy, lies on the backgronund of most areas of the scholarly discourse on Shi ^ism, and provides live material (such as the problem of Islam and democracy, Muslim reformism, relations between religion and politics, and so on) to the specialists, even those who are not directly involved in modern political history. In recent years, some high-quality introductions to Shi ^ism have been written andpublished, such as Juan Cole’s Sacred Space and Holy War (2002), Amir-Moezzi and Christian Jambet Qu’est-ce que le shi#isme (2004), and Marco Salati e Leonardo Capezzone, L’islam sciita: storia di una minoranza (2006). Khomeini’s theory of the “guardianship of the jurist” (wilayat-i faqih) is also a much debated matter and does not cease to be at the center of scholarly production, having among Muslim scholars few overt supporters (as Hamid Algar, author of The Roots of Islamic Revolution, 1983 and Christian Bonaud, author of L’Imam Khomeini, un gnostique méconnu du XXe siècle. Métaphisique et théologie dans les œuvres philosophiques et spirituelles de l’Imam Khomeyni, 1997) and many detractors. The abrupt rush of the theme on the international scene had as a consequence a retroactive inspection of the history of the notion, and recently the vibrant debate on the legitimacy of the theory culminated in West-

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ern academia reporting the most outstanding and controversial voices and themes of the dispute, as in Ziba Mir-Hosseini and Richard Tapper, Islam and Democracy in Iran. Eshkevari and the Quest for Reform, 2006. To grasp an idea of the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of today’s Shi ‘ite studies, it is useful to refer to Colin Turner and Paul Luft’s Shi ‘ism (2007) which provides a collection of studies on Shi ‘ism written over the last 50 years. Indicative of the lively status of the subject at large is the proliferation of initiatives, research groups, conferences and scholarly publications (one in particular, the Journal of Shi ^i Islamic Studies, is entirely devoted to the study of Shi#ism in its full complexity). At present, even though Iran and Twelver Shi ^ism remain to a great extent the most crowded topics in academic enquiry on Shi ^ism, the state of research on either lesser religious sects or ethnic realities is significatively active, if one notices that one of the most prestigious and qualified institution of the study of Shi ^ism is the London based Institute for Ismaili Studies, which is vocated for (even if not only) the academic study of Ismailism, and gives voices to the views of ethnic minorities. Another quite promising research subject is the rising theme of the articulate structure of relations and conflict between tradition/religion, in this case Shi ^ism, and democacy, a debate that engages at a high degree many high-rank religious intellectuals in Iran and abroad. Projects, conferences, and centers focusing on Shi ^is in general or on specific aspects of Shi ^ism are proliferating particularly in the UK. One telling example is the British Academy-funded project on the “Authority in Shi ^ism” (www.thehawzaproject.net), which aims to create a broad network of scholars working on the theme and improve the status of research on Shi ^ism. The rise of the internet as a research tool has introduced in the arena of the academic study of Shi ^ism a wave of novelty. Even if authoritative validation criteria are not yet commonplace in the use of electronic public resources, most present-day scholars non only use the internet as a quick basic search tool, but also have implemented personal or instuitional web pages – like the resource list of the University of Georgia (USA), http://www.uga.edu/ islam/shiism.html – (even excellent up-to-date weblogs) that constitutes valuable databases for students and scholars. One such example is the Institute of Ismaili Studies website (www.iis.ac.uk), whose Academic Publications sections provides a useful list of high-quality academic writings. Another relevant example is the personal page of University of Michigan’s Professor Juan R. I. Cole (http://www-personal.umich.edu/ jrcole/), also providing a quite good selection of his academic papers dealing with Shi#ism. A major epistemological shift has occurred in Religious Studies (and thus in the Study of Islam and Shi ^ism), with the rise of the internet: old

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encyclopedias, even scholarly and specialistic, usually failed in giving voice to their “object of inquiry” and resulted in rather monophonic approaches. Today every student has the possibility to have a glance at a plethora of resources directly written and published in the net (often in a great variety of languages) by religious foundations, charities, research institutes and the like. This kind of resources (such as the good Twelver Shi ^a-run www.al-islam.org, providing an impressive number of primary sources, links, scholarly and non-scholarly articles and e-books) offers a stimulating challenge for traditional academic approaches to Shi#ism, overcoming the risk of one-way academic interpretations. Select Bibliography Mohammad Ali Amir-Moezzi, La guide divin dans le shi ^isme originel: au sources de l’ésotérisme en Islam (Paris: Veridier, 1992); Mohammad Ali Amir-Moezzi and Christian Jambet, Qu#est-ce que le shi#isme? (Paris: Fayard, 2004); Henry Corbin, En islam iranien: Aspects spirituels et philosophiques, 4 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1971–1972); Michael M. J. Fischer, Iran: From Religious Dispute to Revolution (Cambridge Ms. & London: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Syed M. Jafri, Origins and Early Development of Shi#ism (London: Longman, 1978); Farhad Khosrokhavar, Anthropologie de la révolution iranienne. Le rêve impossible (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997); Ethan Kohlberg, The Formation of Classical Islamic World: Shi ^ism (Burlington: Ashgate, 2003); Heinz Halm, Die Schia (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1988); Le Shi#isme imamite. Colloque de Strasbourg (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1970); Yitzakh Nakash, The Shi ^is of Iraq (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Mojan Momen, An Introduction to Shi ^I Islam: The History and Doctrines of Twelver Shi ^ism (Oxford: Geroge Ronald, 1985); Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Hamid Dabashi, and Seyyed Reza Vali Nasr, Shi#ism: Doctrines, Thought, and Spirituality (New York, SUNY Press, 1988); Abdulaziz Sachedina, The Just Ruler in Shi ^ite Islam: The Comprehensive Authority of the Jusrist in Imamite Jurisprudence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); ^Allama Tabataba#i, Shi ^a dar Islam (Tehran: Nashr-e Sherkat-e Enteshar, 1348); Liyakatali Takim, The Heirs of the Prophet: Charisma and Religious Authority in Shi ^ite Islam (Albany: State University of New York, 2006).

Alessandro Cancian

Archaeology in Medieval Studies A. Definition Medieval archaeology is the study of the material culture of the Middle Ages in all its forms, but especially as evidenced through the systematic processes of survey, excavation and interpretation common to the wider archaeologi-

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cal discipline. The study of this archaeological evidence allows researchers to uncover aspects of medieval culture and history which our written sources are unable to reveal. Consequently, medieval archaeology can contribute significantly to our knowledge and understanding of the Middle Ages and should hold an important place within the interdisciplinary field of Medieval Studies. It should be stated at the outset, however, that ‘medieval archaeology’ as such is something of a false appellation. From a methodological point of view, there is nothing that separates the study of the archaeology of the Middle Ages from the study of the archaeology of any other period for which there survives written as well as material evidence. Medieval archaeology must therefore be considered to constitute one part of ‘historical archaeology’ in general (Anders Andrén, Between Artifacts and Texts: Historical Archaeology in Global Perspective, 1998). The degree to which archaeological research is united with other avenues of enquiry into the Middle Ages is, however, largely dependent on the historical development of the discipline within individual countries and regions and its position within modern university faculties or departments. Medieval archaeology is, for example, closely connected with classical studies in Italy, with art-history and architecture in France and with prehistory in Scandinavia, while in North America archaeology in general is considered a sub-discipline of anthropology, within which field the archaeology of the Middle Ages receives limited attention. Furthermore, the periodization and chronological terminology of the ‘Middle Ages’ differ from country to country, and often between the historical and archaeological disciplines within countries (for a run-down of some of the different chronologies used throughout Europe see The Archaeology of Medieval Europe, vol. 1, ed. James Graham-Campbell, 2007, 17–18). Such regional differences in approaches to and conceptions of archaeology often affect the degree of contact and discussion between medieval archaeologists and those scholars who study the Middle Ages from other perspectives. Despite this variation in development and focus, however, medieval archaeology has nevertheless developed in recent years into a cohesive, independent branch of the historical sciences, and many universities in Europe now offer both graduate and undergraduate-level programmes of study in medieval archaeology (The Study of Medieval Archaeology, ed. Hans Andersson and Jes Wienberg, 1993). At the same time, the recent rise of Medieval Studies as an interdisciplinary field of inquiry has resulted in an increased dialogue between medieval archaeologists and other scholars concerned with the Middle Ages.

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B. Development of the Discipline The roots of medieval archaeology can be found in the antiquarian interests of the early modern period and the Middle Ages themselves. Although cases like the reputed discovery of King Arthur’s tomb at Glastonbury Abbey in 1191 or the frequent exhumations of saints and their relics throughout the Middle Ages could be interpreted as some of the earliest archaeological activity directed at medieval material culture (Christopher Gerrard, Medieval Archaeology: Understanding Traditions and Contemporary Approaches, 2003), it was in the centuries associated with the European Renaissance that scholars with a humanistic rather than ecclesiastical bent began to collect books, record inscriptions and make sketches of ancient art and architecture (A History of Archaeological Thought, 1989, 2nd ed. 2006, by Bruce Trigger gives a thorough account of the development of archaeology in relation to underlying intellectual currents). The work of such figures as Ciriaco de’ Pizzicolli (1391–1452) and Flavio Biondo (1392–1463), whose subjects included some medieval monuments, are early examples of this new interest in the material culture of the past. This enthusiasm was, however, for the most part directed at classical antiquity, and the term ‘media aeva’ itself, first coined in this period, is indicative of the somewhat dismissive attitude that existed towards the period ‘in between’ classical civilization and modernity. Nevertheless, this apparent shift in historical consciousness opened the way for the study of the Middle Ages from both documentary and material perspectives. A focus on classical culture was especially strong in the south of Europe, where a strong sense of cultural continuity with ancient Greece and Rome was felt and actively promoted through a reverence for and imitation of ancient art and architecture. This fascination with the classical past spread throughout Europe, but, in the countries of northern Europe, antiquarians also turned their attention to more local historical traditions, including those of the prehistoric and medieval periods. In these countries, as in Italy, interest in the material past was closely aligned with issues of local, national and religious corporate identity. Antiquarians like John Aubrey (1626–97) made detailed descriptions of prehistoric monuments described by medieval chronicles, including Avebury and Stonehenge, which are both included in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain (Christopher Gerrard, Medieval Archaeology, 2003, 10–15; Bruce Trigger, A History of Archaeological Thought, 1989; 2nd ed. 2006, 45–48). The Scandinavian countries, meanwhile, quickly extended an enthusiasm for the medieval records and folklore of their countries to an interest in their physical monuments, including the Viking age tombs at Uppsala, Sweden, which were excavated in the 17th century by Olof Rudbeck (1630–1702) using what were at the time relatively

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novel archaeological methods. Rudbeck carried out the excavations by cutting trenches into the tombs and making drawings of the vertical sections. In this manner he was able to arrive at a relative chronology for the burials within each tomb, even hypothesizing roughly how much time had passed since the act of burial based on the relative thickness of the sod on top (Ole Klint-Jensen, A History of Scandinavian Archaeology, 1975). Most early excavations were, however, little more than treasure-hunting expeditions, with enthusiasts removing artefacts from the earth with little in the way of documentation or regard to their context. Artefacts were valued as objets d’art or, in some cases, simply for their material value. Many significant artefacts from this early stage of archaeology, such as the grave-goods of the Frankish King Childeric, whose grave was first excavated in Tournai, Belgium, in 1633, have since been stolen and we know about them only from fortuitously surviving sketches and written descriptions (Stéphane Lebecq, Les Origines franques, 1990). In the 18th and 19th centuries, breakthroughs in the natural sciences led to a newfound awareness of the antiquity of both the earth and humanity, and to a conviction that these issues could and should be studied scientifically. At the same time, driven by a pervading atmosphere of Romantic nationalism, many archaeologists employed these new approaches in their efforts to anchor burgeoning national identities in past ages (see Nationalism and Archaeology in Europe, ed. Margarita Díaz-Andreu and Timothy Champion, 1996; The Myth of Nations, by Patrick Geary, 2003; and Bruce Trigger, A History of Archaeological Thought, 1989; 2nd ed. 2006). Throughout the 19th and the first half of the 20th century, high profile discoveries such as the Gokstad and Oseberg ship burials in Norway (excavated in 1880 and 1904 respectively) and the Sutton Hoo ship burial in England (excavated in 1939) fuelled this Romantic enthusiasm for archaeological exploration by tracing apparent links with early medieval literature (in the case of Sutton Hoo, apparent similarities with the Old English poem Beowulf). Archaeology came to be viewed as a solution to the dearth of written evidence for Europe’s ‘Dark Ages’ and the dim origins of the modern nation-states. This nationally oriented archaeology was given scientific justification through figures such as Gustaf Kossinna (1858–1931), a philologist turned prehistorian for whom prehistory (whether investigated through archaeology or literature) was an “eminently national discipline” (Díaz-Andreu and Champion, 173). It was Kossinna who pioneered the culture-historic school of archaeology which asserted that styles of artefacts (e. g., pottery types or jewellery designs) could be tied to specific ethnic groups. This approach heavily influenced archaeologists studying the ‘barbarian migrations’ of late antiquity and the

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early Middle Ages, and some archaeologists continue to uncomplicatedly conflate material culture with categories such as ethnicity or language. It has been in the years since WWII, however, that medieval archaeology has truly come into its own as a discipline. Excavations of large-scale settlements, most notably Novgorod in Russia and Bergen in Norway, demonstrated the research potential of carefully planned, thoroughly documented investigations (Michael Welman Thompson, Novgorod the Great, 1967; and Helen Clarke, “Asbjørn Herteig: Archaeologist and Pioneer,” Archaeology and the Urban Economy, ed. S. Myrvoll and A.E. Herteig, 1989, 23–27). Developments in technology, various kinds of cultural heritage legislation, a greater attention to theory and methodology and an increasing public interest all contributed to the rise of medieval archaeology as an independent discipline in the second half of the 20th century. C. Archaeology and Science Scientific and technological innovations have changed the way that all archaeological research is conducted. Absolute (as opposed to relative) dating techniques such as radiocarbon dating and dendrochronology (i. e., tree-ring dating) now allow researchers to date organic materials and associated nonorganic artefacts and features with relative certainty. Geophysical methods of subsurface detection allow archaeologists to build maps of subsurface anomalies such as walls or ditches over large geographical areas. The development of the ‘Harris Matrix’ method of excavating and recording distinct archaeological layers has vastly increased the potential for post-excavation interpretation as well as the ability to carefully dig complexly layered urban sites (Edward Harris, Principles of Archaeological Stratigraphy, 1979; 2nd ed. 1989). Since the 1980s, computers have had an increasingly essential role to play in the cataloguing and analysis of data, and are now being used for mapping and reconstructing archaeological sites. Satellite imaging and GPS systems are increasingly being used and are eliminating the need for costly aerial survey. Ancillary disciplines such as archaeozoology, archaeobotany, and biomolecular archaeology are now seen as integral parts of archaeological research. Just a few recent examples of the application of new scientific methods of analysis to medieval archaeology include: the detailed reconstruction of local medieval diets in Viking age Scotland based on stableisotope analysis of human bone; the detection of the rise of hop-gardens in Denmark through archaeobotanical analysis; and the detection of gendervariegated degenerative joint disease in Germany based on bone analysis (James Barrett et al., “Diet and Ethnicity During the Viking Colonization of Northern Scotland: Evidence from Fish Bones and Stable Carbon Iso-

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topes,” Antiquity 75 [2001]: 145–54; Karl-Ernst Behre, “The History of Beer Additives in Europe: A Review,” Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 8 [1999]: 35–48; Wolf-R. Teegen and Michael Schultz, Geschlechtsabhängige Arbeitsverteilung in slawischen Gräberfelden nach Aussage der Gelenkerkrankungen, 2005). The Journal of Scientific Archaeology (1974 onwards) focuses on the scientific aspects of archaeological research. D. Theory and Archaeology Against the backdrop of scientific and technological innovation within the field, a new theoretically oriented approach to archaeology emerged throughout the 1950s and 60s. The American archaeologist Lewis Binford became the leading figure of ‘processual archaeology’, publishing a series of papers advocating a more scientific approach to the study of the material past (Lewis Binford, An Archaeological Perspective, 1972). Essentially, Binford felt that archaeology was capable of more than simply classifying and cataloguing pot shards: that it could have explanatory power with regards to social and cultural phenomena. The ‘New Archaeology’ as it came to be called, advocated the development of ‘Middle Range Theory’ “a distinct body of ideas to bridge the gap between raw archaeological evidence and the general observations and conclusions to be derived from it” (Brian Fagan, Archaeology: Theories, Methods, and Practice, 2004, 13–16). Processual archaeology exerted its strongest influence in North America and in the field of prehistoric archaeology, however, and had little impact on medieval archaeology. For archaeologists of the Middle Ages, the written record continued to provide a more fruitful interpretive paradigm than the more generalist theories of the processual school. Throughout the 1980s and 90s, however, there was a strong reaction to the processual school, and this movement had a definite impact on medieval archaeology. The main proponent of this ‘post-processual’ movement was Ian Hodder, a British prehistorian whose views are summarized in his Reading the Past (1986; 3rd ed. 2003; for a summary of the theoretical debates within different European countries see also Archaeological Theory in Europe: The Last Three Decades, ed. Ian Hodder, 1991). Inspired by post-modernism, Hodder and other post-processualists criticized what they perceived as processualism’s positivist approach and advocated a more relativistic and varied understanding of the archaeological record. Fundamentally, post-processualists argued that material culture should be ‘read’ as a text, acknowledging the role of the researcher’s own biases and interpretations in every step of the archaeological process. The debate has since cooled, but has left an im-

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pression on all areas of archaeological research, including medieval archaeology. From the Baltic to the Black Sea: Studies in Medieval Archaeology, ed. David Austin and Leslie Alcock (1990) was a collection of archaeological research on various subjects that grappled with many of post-processualism’s concerns about identity and structures of power. Perhaps the greatest influence of post-processualism on medieval archaeology has had to do with the proper relationship between archaeological and written evidence. In 1935, the famous British archaeologist Sir Mortimer Wheeler asserted that “the historian and the archaeologist of the Dark Ages are very like two men clutching each other in mid-air to prevent themselves from falling” (London and the Saxons, 1935). Recently, however, a number of archaeologists have made strenuous arguments in favour of detaching archaeological research from “the tyranny of the historical record,” as Timothy Champion has put it, in order that archaeologists might act with more agency in setting a research agenda specifically suited to the archaeological discipline’s own methods and types of evidence (Timothy Champion, “Archaeology and the Tyranny of the Historical Record,” From the Baltic to the Black Sea, 1990; John Moreland, Archaeology and Text, 2001). John Moreland specifically argues that archaeology’s relegation to matters of economy and subsistence is the result of the privileging of the written word over the physical object. Others, however, have argued for a rapprochement between archaeology and history (Martin Carver, “Marriages of True Minds: Archaeology with Texts,” Archaeology: The Widening Debate, ed. Barry Cunliffe, 2002, 465–96). Regardless, the written record will continue to play an essential role in informing archaeological research, while medieval historians are making increasing use of the growing body of archaeological evidence for life in the Middle Ages. E. Current Trends Medieval archaeology has benefited over the past several decades from its increasing coherence as a scholarly discipline, its employment of new scientific techniques, and the widening of its geographical focus to include regions beyond the countries of the traditional medieval Latin West. A number of recent major works dealing with the Middle Ages have raised the profile of archaeological evidence, including Michael McCormick’s Origins of the European Economy (2001), Bryan Ward-Perkins’ The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (2005), Chris Wickham’s Framing the Early Middle Ages (2005) and the series of books published under the aegis of The European Science Foundation’s project, The Transformation of the Roman World. These works and others like them are typical of the medieval archaeology of recent

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years, tackling old problems from new perspectives and combining archaeological data and interpretive methods with written evidence, all resulting in more comprehensive and nuanced understandings of the medieval world. One of the leading figures of recent medieval archaeology has been Richard Hodges, whose research has focussed primarily on trade and towns in the early medieval period. Some of Hodges’ important works include: Dark Age Economics (1982, and revised 1989); Mohammed, Charlemagne and the Origins of Europe (1983 with David Whitehouse); The Anglo-Saxon Achievement (1989); Towns and Trade in the Age of Charlemagne (2000); and the essay collection, Goodbye to the Vikings? (2006). Hodges has also worked on the earliest large-scale monastic complex in western Europe at San Vincenzo al Volturno in southern Italy (Light in the Dark Ages, 1997). Hodges’s work has been fundamental in both advocating for the consideration of archaeological evidence within the field of medieval studies and in setting the research agenda of medieval archaeologists, especially for the early Middle Ages (see, however, Grenville Astill’s critique of Hodges’ early work, “Archaeology, Economics and Early Medieval Europe,” Oxford Journal of Archaeology 4.2 [1985]: 215–31). Commerce and Travel: One of the areas which has benefited most from the recent surge in archaeological investigation has been that of trade and commerce. The traditional historical interpretation of the end of the Roman economy was set out by the famous Belgian Historian Henri Pirenne in his book Mahomet et Charlemagne (1937). The so-called ‘Pirenne Thesis’ proposed that the essential structure of the Roman imperial economy survived the collapse of Roman administration and only disappeared in the face of the Arab conquest, which choked shipping lanes and cut off trade between east and west. New archaeological evidence and analysis has, however, drastically changed this picture, giving a far more nuanced impression of late antique trade in the Mediterranean. Evidence from the distribution of coins (Arab as well as Byzantine), African Red Slipware (a distinctive ceramic often used in long distance trade) and ship-wrecks illustrate an economic world already beginning to stagger in the 5th century and, after a brief recovery, crumbling entirely by the late 6th. Archaeological evidence has forced scholars to view the Arab conquest as “the consequence rather than the cause of the catastrophe” (Richard Hodges and David Whitehouse, Mohammed, Charlemagne and the Origins of Europe, 1983; also see Hodges’ other works as well as McCormick’s Origins of the European Economy, 2005). Continuing research, meanwhile, is pushing outwards our evidence of long-distance trade networks and the Arab role in the medieval economy. New evidence suggests

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that by the 11th century, cane sugar may have been making its way from New Guinea to Cyprus, Sicily, and beyond (Marie Louise Wartburg, “Production du sucre de canne à Cypre: un chapitre de technologie médiévale,” Coloniser au moyen âge, 1995, 126–130). In northern Europe, meanwhile, large-scale excavations carried out over the last several decades have uncovered trading ports around the North Sea and Baltic on a scale which had not been previously considered. Regularly laid out and equipped with numerous docks and jetties, these ‘emporia’ made up a sophisticated northern European trade-network (See Hodges’ Dark Age Economics and most of his other works as well as McCormick’s Origins of the European Economy, 2005; Søren Sindbæk makes use of cooperative research between physics and archaeology in “Networks and Nodal Points: the Emergence of Towns in Early Viking Age Scandinavia,” Antiquity 81, [2007]: 119–32; Søren Sindbæk, “The Small World of the Vikings: Networks in Early Medieval Communication and Exchange,” Norwegian Archaeological Review 40 [2007]: 59–74). Merchants based out of Dorestad and Quentovic in the Frankish kingdoms, Hamwic in England, and Birka, Hedeby and Kaupang in the Scandinavian countries – to name a few examples – traded in stone, metals, wine and other commodities from northwest Europe, as well as luxury goods from the Arab and Byzantine worlds and slaves from eastern Europe. Archaeology has revealed a complex northern economy on a hitherto unthought-of scale These early towns served not only as trading centres, but also as central places in which religious and royal influence could be concentrated (Franz Theuws, “Exchange, Religion, Identity and Central Places in the Early Middle Ages,” Archaeological Dialogues 10.2 [2004]: 121–38). Settlements, Rural and Urban: There has been a wealth of archaeological research conducted on settlements, both urban and rural. Helena Hamerow’s recent book, Early Medieval Settlements (2002), provides an overview of the subject for the early medieval period, while Chapelot and Fossier’s Le village et la maison au Moyen Âge (1980), although 30 years old and written before a huge surge in rural archaeology, provides an overview for the whole of the Middle Ages. As discussed above in the section on trade and commerce, the discovery of the North Sea emporia has forced a rethinking of urban development in northern Europe (Richard Hodges and Brian Hobley, ed., The Rebirth of Towns in the West, AD 700–1050, 1988 andWics: The Early Medieval Trading Centres of Northern Europe, ed. David Hill and Robert Cowie, 2001). Improved methods of stratigraphic excavation have made possible the effective investi-

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gation of complexly layered urban sites such as those uncovered in Dublin and York (Patrick F. Wallace, The Viking Age Buildings of Dublin, 1992, and Richard Hall, Viking Age York, 1994). No urban centers within Western Europe, however, rivaled the cities of Muslim Spain and recent urban excavations have confirmed their size and complexity; Cordoba is thought to have had a population of over 100,000 in the 10th century (John Schofield, “Urban Settlement, Part 1: Western Europe,” The Archaeology of Medieval Europe, vol. 1, 2007, 111–29). Overall, recent research has focussed on variegated modes of town development and the role that urban centres played as ‘central places’, becoming hubs for economic, religious, royal and other social functions. See also David Nicholas, The Growth of the Medieval City: From Late Antiquity to the Fourteenth Century (1997) and Urban Europe, 1100–1700 (2003). Despite the growing importance of towns in the Middle Ages, however, the vast majority of the population continued to live in rural, agricultural environments. Rural archaeology has, nevertheless, been slow to develop and there are few comprehensive overviews of the topic. The abovementioned studies by Hamerow and by Chapelot and Fossier offer considerations of the topic, while results of the Ruralia Association’s biennial conferences are published as Ruralia (1996 onwards). Much of this recent research has focussed on the long-term development of settlements and building traditions, as well as interactions with the surrounding environment. Ancillary archaeological disciplines, including archaeozoology and archaeobotony, play important roles in the analysis of ecofacts such as seeds, bones and other naturally occurring substances that might yield information about human activity (Archäologische und naturwissenschaftliche Untersuchungen an ländlichen und frühstädischen Siedlungen im deutschen Küstengebiet vom 5. Jahrhundert v. Chr. bis zum II. Jahrhundert n. Chr., ed. Georg Kossack, Karl-Ernst Behre, and Peter Schmid, 1984). The discovery and excavation of many deserted medieval villages from the later Middle Ages have produced an abundance of evidence concerning architectural traditions, standards of living and changing patterns of land use (Maurice Beresford and John Hurst, Deserted Medieval Villages, 1971, and Wharram Percy: Deserted Medieval Village, 1990). Buildings: Buildings archaeology concerns the study of in situ structures using archaeological methods (Richard Morris, The Archaeology of Buildings, 2000). The construction and development of medieval buildings is of foremost importance within this archaeological subfield, but also the role they fulfilled within social contexts (Jane Grenville, Medieval Housing, 1997; Richard Morris, Churches in the Landscape, 1989; 2nd ed. 1998). Churches and castles, the largest and most conspicuous buildings surviving from the

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Middle Ages, have long been studied and their various architectural developments are well-documented (Charles McClendon, The Origins of Medieval Architecture, 2005; John Thompson, The Decline of the Castle, 1987, and id., The Rise of the Castle, 1991). Modern excavations have, however, uncovered some surprises, such as the huge monastic complex at San Vincenzo al Volturno, Italy. The site is roughly contemporary with the 9th century plan of St. Gall, an architectural blueprint of the ideal Carolingian monastery which was formerly thought to be absurdly precocious. The excavation of San Vincenzo has forced a reassessment of the standards of material culture and the scope of architectural ability in the early medieval period (Richard Hodges, Light in the Dark Ages, 1997; for the plan of St. Gall, see Walter Horn and Ernest Born, The Plan of St. Gall, 3 vols., 1979; and Studien zum St. Galler Klosterplan, ed. Peter Ochsenbein and Karl Schmucki, 2002). The ideological meaning of architecture has become an important topic in recent years as scholars have begun to focus more and more on the role that buildings played in legitimizing political and religious authority (Jerrilynn D. Dodds, Architecture and Ideology in Early Medieval Spain, 1990; Dale Kinney, “Roman Architectural spolia,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 145 [2001]: 138–50). The archaeology of buildings from before the year 1000 is, however, extremely limited compared to our knowledge of castles, cathedrals and churches from the later Middle Ages, a time when large-scale stone architecture flourished. Research on domestic architecture has concentrated on architectural continuity or lack thereof with the Roman heritage, growing social differentiation and division of space and the influence of religious and secular institutions on housing design and construction throughout the medieval period (The Rural House from Migration Period to the Oldest Still Standing Buildings, ed. Jan Kláp st ˇ e, ˇ 2002; Geoff Egan, The Medieval Household: Daily Living c.1150–c.1450, 1998; Gwyn Meirion-Jones and Michael Jones, Manorial Domestic Buildings in England and Northern France, 1993). Burials: Burials, as cemeteries or individual graves, constitute a vitally important yet problematic source of archaeological evidence. The excavation and study of human remains can sometimes offer hints at the population, the demography and the lives and deaths of medieval people. New techniques in palaeo-demography and palaeo-pathology are helping medieval archaeologists investigate questions about population, life-span and disease more accurately than in the past (Reconstructing Past Population Trends in Mediterranean Europe, ed. John Bintliff and Kostas Sbonias, 1999; Jesper L. Boldsen, “Analysis of Dental Attrition and Mortality in the Medieval Village of Tirup, Denmark,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 126 [2005]:

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169–76). Grave goods and burial customs, meanwhile, can offer some kind of clue as to group and/or individual identity. Throughout antiquity and the early medieval period, individuals were normally buried with some of their personal belongings. Such belongings are often indicators of status, gender, occupation or religion, though their interpretation can be problematic (see Guy Halsall’s criticisms of using grave-goods to infer ethnicity in Early Medieval Cemeteries: An Introduction to Burial Archaeology in the Post-Roman West, 1995 and his review article “Movers and Shakers: The Barbarians and the Fall of Rome,” Early Medieval Europe, 8.1 [1999]: 131–45). In the later Middle Ages, these grave-goods were generally replaced by more generic symbolic items such as crosses or vessels (Thomas Meier, “Inschrifttafeln aus mittelalterlichen Gräbern: Einige Thesen zu ihrer Aussagekraft,” Papers of the ‘Medieval Europe Brugge 1997’ Conference 2: Death and Burial in Medieval Europe, ed. Guy de Boe and Frans Verhaeghe, 1997, 43–53). The careful investigation of cemeteries as unified archaeological sites can meanwhile yield valuable information about social differentiation in the treatment of the dead within and across time periods. The re-excavation of the English royal cemetery site of Sutton Hoo in the 1980s and early 90s by Martin Carver, for example, located a special section for the burial of executed individuals (Martin Carver, Sutton Hoo: Burial Ground of Kings?, 1998), while infant burials are commonly separated from the rest of the dead at cemeteries throughout medieval Europe. Climate and Environment: The interaction between humans and their environment has always been a subject of archaeological investigation. The growing importance of environmental archaeology as a bona fide sub-discipline as well as the rise of ‘environmental history’ has, however, caused a new emphasis to be placed on situating the material culture of the Middle Ages within the context of its natural environment (Glynis Jones, Environmental Archaeology, 2002). Archaeobotany and archaeozoology have made significant contributions to our understanding of daily human interaction with the medieval environment. Human adaptation to and effects on the natural world are currently studied from ecological, economic and socio-political perspectives (Lech Leciejewicz, La nuova forma del mondo: La nascita della civilità europa medievale, 2004). The effects of climate and the environment on food production, disease and demographics have always been acknowledged, as in the medieval period’s ‘little ice age’. The recent drilling of glacial cores by palaeoclimatologists have allowed scholars to speculate about the effects of climate even on the minutiae of socio-political events (Michael McCormick, Paul Edward Dutton and Paul A. Mayewski, “Volcanoes and the

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Climate Forcing of Carolingian Europe, A.D. 750–950,” Speculum 82 [2007]: 865–95). Further collaborations between archaeologists, historians and scientists will surely yield new and exciting results in the arena of human interaction with the medieval environment. Scholars who study the Middle Ages can no longer afford to ignore the evidence provided by archaeological research. Archaeology’s successes over the last decades in both corroborating and debunking the historical record have proven its value, while new kinds of evidence gleaned through archaeozoology, archaeobotany, and meticulous excavation are opening windows on aspects of medieval life that would otherwise have remained obscure: The cooperation of historians, archaeologists and scientists will surely yield even greater returns in the future, while increased international cooperation will help address questions on a far broader scale than the nationally-focussed research agendas of the past (The Cross Goes North: Processes of Conversion in Northern Europe, AD 300–1300, ed. Martin Carver, for example, offers a collection of interdisciplinary essays concerning the question of conversion in the North across Celtic, Germanic and Slavic areas by authors from across northern Europe). The fruits of the archaeological research, which has concentrated far more on the early Middle Ages, will hopefully be more generally applied to the later medieval period. F. Resources The main journals in the field are: Medieval Archaeology (1957 onwards), Archéologie Médiévale (1971 onwards), Zeitschrift für Archäologie des Mittelalters (1973 onwards), and Archeologia medievale (1974 onwards). Antiquity (1927 onwards), a general archaeological journal with a wide-ranging and mainly prehistoric focus, often carries research which is related to the medieval period as well as methodological debates which are of significant interest. The huge number of volumes published under the aegis of British Archaeological Resources (or BAR) covers an incredible span of time periods, regions and topics, including many publications on various aspects of the archaeology of medieval Europe. Select Bibliography Medieval Archaeology: An Encyclopedia, ed. Pam J. Crabtree (New York: Routledge, 2001); The Archaeology of Medieval Europe, ed. James Graham-Campbell, vol. 1 (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2007; the second volume of which on the later Middle Ages is expected shortly). Some more recent region-specific studies can be found in: Neil Christie, From Constantine to Charlemagne: An Archaeology of Italy, AD 300–800 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006); Lloyd Laing, The Archaeology of Celtic Britain and Ireland 400–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Günter P. Fehring, The Archaeology of Medieval Germany (London and New York: Routledge, 1991). Christopher Gerrard,

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Medieval Archaeology: Understanding Traditions and Contemporary Approaches (London and New York: Routledge, 2003; this volume serves as an excellent introduction to the archaeological study of the later Middle Ages in Britain). Works of more general archaeological interest include: Colin Renfrew, Archaeology: Theories, Methods, and Practice (London: Thames and Hudson, 2004); Colin Renfrew and Paul Bahn, Archaeology: A Brief Introduction (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1999); and The Oxford Companion to Archaeology, ed. Brian Fagan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).

Christopher Landon

Art History A. General Definition Art history is the scholarly study of visual culture, the intellectual pursuit of knowledge pertaining to works of art, their creation, their meanings, and their reception. Historians of medieval art generally focus on western European, Byzantine or Islamic art; their expertise may lie anywhere between the third and the fifteenth centuries. The first comprehensive work on medieval art appeared in 1823: Jean Baptiste Louis Georges Seroux d’Agincourt’s six-volume study entitled Histoire de l’art par les monumens, depuis sa décadence au IVe siècle jusqu’à son renouvellement au XIVe (see Daniela mondini, Mittelalter im Bild: Seroux d’Agincourt und die Kunsthistoriographie um 1800, 2005). Two important things should be noted about d’Agincourt’s work: the title, which, in the tradition of Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s 1764 Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums, takes as a given that the quality of art declined in the Middle Ages; and the structure of the study itself, completed in the tradition of the Roman school of Christian archaeology (W. Eugene Kleinbauer, “Introduction,” Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline, ed. Helen Damico, 2000, vol. 3, 215–29, at 216). In Austria, Rudolf von Eitelberger von Edelberg founded the Vienna School of Art History, which ushered in the reign of positivism in the history of medieval art; the eighteen-volume publication Quellenschriften für Kunstgeschichte und Kunsttechnik des Mittelalters und der Neuzeit, which von Edelberg co-edited with Albert Ilg, gathered between its covers a selection of various medieval texts relevant for the study of medieval and Renaissance art (Kleinbauer, “Introduction,” 2000, 217). It was from this Viennese school that Franz Wickhoff and Alois Riegl emerged (for an essay on Riegl’s scholarship as well as for a comprehensive bibliography of his work,

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see Margaret Olin, “Alois Riegl (1858–1905),” Medieval Scholarship, 231–44). Wickhoff’s main contribution lay in his passionate defense of the study of periods other than the Renaissance; he argued for the continuity between Roman and (incorrectly dated to the second and third centuries) Christian painting (see Roman Art: Some of Its Principles and Their Application to Early Christian Painting, 1900, translation of Wickhoff’s introduction to his commentary written for Die Wiener Genesis, 1895).The importance of riegl’s Die spätrömische Kunstindustrie, the work that established the term Kunstwollen (“artistic volition”), lies in the fact that, in dealing both with fine and applied arts, it traces the development – not the decline – of fine arts from late antiquity to the eighth century (1901). In Germany, two late nineteenth-century art historians – Wilhelm Vöge and Adolph Goldschmidt – completed work that was highly influential in developing various methods of inquiry into medieval art (Kathryn Brush, The Shaping of Art History: Wilhelm Vöge, Adolph Goldschmidt and the Study of Medieval Art, 1996). Goldschmidt in particular is to be credited for his contributions to the development of objective formal analysis and his scrupulous methods of classification of works of art (Kathryn Brush, “Adolph Goldschmidt (1863–1944),” Medieval Scholarship, 245–58, at 253); his focus on illuminated manuscripts and ivories yielded the four volumes of Die Elfenbeinskulpturen (1914–1926) and the two-volume Die deutsche Buchmalerei (1928) on Carolingian and Ottonian book illumination. In France, scholars formulated the positivist methodology called archaéologie médiévale, which approached medieval churches as written documents that stood witness to stages of construction and were used to attribute a given building to a particular “school” from a particular region (Kleinbauer, “Introduction,” 2000, 221). Arcisse de Caumont proposed seven such regional schools (further on de Caumont, see Arcisse de Caumont (1801–1873): érudit normand et fondateur de l’archéologie française, ed. Vincent Juhel, 2004). On the other hand, de Caumont’s contemporary, Adolphe Napoléon Didron, and his intellectual successor Émile Mâle, focused on an iconographic approach to medieval art. Still classic, Mâle’s three volumes (L’art religieux du XIIIe siècle en France: étude sur l’iconographie du Moyen Age et sur ses sources d’inspiration, 1898 [corrected edition 1902]; L’art religieux de la fin du Moyen Âge en France: étude sur l’iconographie du Moyen Âge et sur ses sources d’inspiration, 1908; and L’art religieux du XIIe siècle en France; étude sur les origines de l’iconographie du moyen âge, 1922) explore the meaning of medieval objects through the lens of literary texts. It is important to note that this approach was influential in the study of Byzantine as well as of western art, seen especially in the work of André Grabar (on Grabar’s work see, most recently,

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Drevnerusskoe iskusstvo: Vizantiia i Drevniaia Rus: k 100-letiiu Andreia Nikolaevicha Grabara [1896–1990], ed. A.L. Batalov et al., 1999). If Goldschmidt wrote about Carolingian and Ottonian art, the prolific Henri Focillon limited his definition of medieval architecture to Romanesque and Gothic buildings. Unlike Mâle, Focillon was a formalist, but his focus lay in the study of monumental edifices and architectural sculpture: this is evident in Art d’Occident (1938), which has been called “the most comprehensive statement of Focillon’s views on the art of the Middle Ages” (Walter Cahn, “Henri Focillon [1881–1943],” Medieval Scholarship, 259–71, at 261). Focillon’s student, Louis Grodecki, continued the study of Gothic architecture, and made a particular contribution to the examination of stained glass; a number of his studies appeared in the Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi series, among them the monumental Les vitraux de Saint-Denis: étude sur le vitrail au XIIe siècle, 1976. American scholarship is immensely indebted to the work of German ex-patriots, Richard Krautheimer and Erwin Panofsky among them. Krautheimer, an authority on early Christian and Byzantine art, who worked in the iconographic tradition, stressed the importance of considering socio-historical contexts in the study of medieval buildings, and inquiring into the roles of patrons who were directly associated with these buildings (“Introduction to an ‘Iconography of Medieval Architecture,’” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Studies 1942, discussed in Kleinbauer, “Introduction,” 2000, 223). Panofsky, who wrote on medieval, Renaissance and Baroque art, drew a sharp distinction between medieval and Renaissance sensibilities. A brilliant iconographer, he continues to inspire contemporary scholarship; among his key works on medieval art are Renaissance and Renascenses in Western Art (2nd ed. 1965), Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St.-Denis and Its Art Treasures (1946), and Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (1951). Panofsky is also to be credited with the formulation of the iconological approach, which, much like later work that would involve reception theory, emphatically separates intent from content: Panofsky urged art historians to engage with symbolic values of a work of art, which “may even emphatically differ from what [the artist] consciously intended to express” (Studies in Iconology, 1939, 8). Two American-born scholars, Charles Rufus Morey and Arthur Kingsley Porter, contributed greatly to the enrichment of the discipline. Morey, the founder of the Index of Christian Art, was a specialist in early Christian art who was particularly interested in the plasticity of ancient themes continued and transformed into early Christian motifs (see Early Christian Art: an Outline of the Evolution of Style and Iconography in Sculpture

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and Painting from Antiquity to the Eighth Century, 1942). Porter specialized primarily in Romanesque art: his ten-volume study Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads (1923) and the four-volume Lombard Architecture (1915–1917) are still among the classics of the discipline; he is said to have “singlehandedly launched the study of medieval architecture and sculpture in the United States as a serious discipline” (Linda Seidel, “Arthur Kingsley Porter [1883–1933],” Medieval Scholarship, 2000, 273–86, at 283). Although formal and iconographic analyses continue to form important bases for the discipline of art history, and object catalogues (such as those compiled by Goldschmidt) continue to provide extremely useful information, a number of other methods of inquiry emerged in the study of medieval art. For instance, the Lithuanian-born Meyer Schapiro (1904–1996), a Marxist, ventured to define socio-political contexts for medieval objects and to explore the interaction between the religious and the secular; in the preface to the third volume of his selected papers entitled Late Antique, Early Christian and Medieval Art, Schapiro writes: “I have assumed that religious art, like religious cult, is not just an expressive representation of sacred texts and a symbolizing of religious concepts (largely mâle’s thesis – E.G.); it also projects ideas, attitudes and fantasies shaped in secular life and given concrete form by imaginative, I may say, poetic minds” (1980, XV). In shifting the focus from text to image, Schapiro paved the way for scholars like Michael Camille who, in his The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (1989), argued that images themselves constructed various ideologies and generated meaning. Close scrutiny of images as generators of meaning, of course, is impossible without the study of political, social, literary and religious histories. Hence, semiotics, along with theories of narrative and reception, form the basis for recent approaches to medieval art: in addition to Camille’s work, see the writings of Suzanne Lewis (such as Reading Images: Narrative Discourse and Reception in the Thirteenth-Century Illuminated Apocalypse, 1995) or Kathryn A. Smith’s Art, Identity and Devotion in Fourteenth-Century England: Three Women and their Books of Hours (2003). Smith’s book not only highlights the importance art historians afford to studying patronage as an integral part of a work’s creation, but also points to the recent interest in a feminist approach to the history of medieval art and in a visual history of medieval women: among the important work published in this field are Jeffrey Hamburger’s The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany (1998), as well as Madeline Caviness’s Visualizing Women in the Middle Ages: Sight, Spectacle and Scopic Economy (2001). That Caviness’s book engages with Lacanian theory points to the fact that psychoanalysis played an important role in the development of art his-

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torical scholarship. From early works, such as Ernst Kris’ “A Psychotic Artist of the Middle Ages” (in Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art, 1952, 118–27), grew the interest in the history and psychology of perception as well as in the nature of representation (see, e. g., Ernst Gombrich, “Meditations on a Hobby Horse or the Roots of Artistic Form,” Aspects of Form, a Symposium on Form in Nature and Art, ed. Lancelot Law White, 1951, 209–24). The recentlypublished Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance: Seeing as Others Saw (ed. Robert Nelson, 2000) examines the idea of visual perception, of the act of seeing and of its importance to the study of artistic production; especially useful for the student of medieval art are the contributions by Nelson (“To Say and to See: Ekphrasis and Vision in Byzantium”), Cynthia Hahn (“Visio Dei: Changes in Medieval Visuality”), and Michael Camille (“Before the Gaze: the Internal Senses and Late Medieval Visuality”). The connection between the visual and the cognitive within the contexts of visionary and contemplative discourses has been recently explored in Mary Carruthers’s The Book of Memory: a Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (1990) and The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric and the Making of Images, 400–1200 (1999). In addition to studying the style, the content, and the cultural context of a work of art, and in addition to scrutinizing the creator of the work and its patron, art historians are interested in the beholder of the work as well. So, in “Reception of Images by Medieval Viewers,” Caviness writes about the need to “contextualize the medieval experience of a work of art by constructing […] a group [of viewers] that might have had a shared experience of the work” (A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, ed. Conrad Rudolph, 2006, 1–43). Such analyses, especially when they concern visual imagery accompanied by words, often explore the visual and the textual literacy of the viewer (see Camille, “Seeing and Reading: Some Implications of Medieval Literacy and Illiteracy,” Art History 8 [1985]: 26–49). Recently, the definition of “performative reading,” in which “the mise en images shaped the reader’s reception and visualization of the […] text,” and “the images were conceived to facilitate a specific kind of reading of the text, either by individuals or in small groups,” was put forth by Pamela Sheingorn and Robert Clark (“Performative Reading: The Illustrated Manuscripts of Arnoul Gréban’s Mystère de la Passion,” European Medieval Drama 6 [2002]: 129–54, esp. 129–30). “Performative reading,” which considers play manuscripts, signals scholarly interest in exploring the relationship between medieval performance and visual representation (see Richard K. Emmerson, “Visualizing Performance: The Miniatures of Besancon MS 579 (Jour de Jugement),” Exemplaria 11 [1990]: 245–72, on manuscript illumination, and Elina Gertsman, “Pleyinge and Peyntinge: Performing the

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Dance of Death,” Studies in Iconography 27 [2006]: 1–43, on murals and largescale panels). The study of the history of medieval art is multifaceted: it is engaged with the study of forms and symbols, codes and signs, words and images; it inquires into the history of ideas; it examines social, political and religious contexts; it comprises gender and cultural studies, feminist and Marxist theories; informed by the work in psychoanalysis, reaching out to the field of performance studies, it moves beyond the study of the object to inquire into the histories of patronage and reception, and beyond the confines of the field in quest of interdisciplinarity. B. History of Research The discipline of art history as we understand it now is fairly young, and historiographic studies of medieval art have only recently come to the fore. One of the key historiographic sources is Eugene Kleinbauer’s introduction to Part III of Medieval Scholarship (2000, 215–229); although his essay centers on the six art historians to be discussed in the edited volume, Kleinbauer also provides a thorough context for the emergence of those scholars. The choice of the scholars – Alois Riegl (1858–1950), Adolph Goldschmidt (1863–1944), Henri Focillon (1881–1943), Arthur Kingsley porter (1883–1933), Louis Grodecki (1910–1982) (discussed by Caviness) and Sirarpie Der Nersessian (1896–1989) (a scholar of Armenian Byzantine art discussed by Nina G. Garsoian) – was dictated by the fact that their work, in Kleinbauer’s own words, “typif[ies] a number of truly major developments in the discipline of medieval art history as it has emerged over the past one hundred and ten years” (227). These developments receive a clear, brief, and sophisticated treatment in his introduction, while a fuller narrative that embraces art history as a discipline in general, but includes generous material on the Middle Ages in particular, is fleshed out in Kleinbauer’s introduction to the edited volume entitled Modern Perspectives in Western Art History (1989; 1971, 1–105); in addition, see Wayne Dynes’ “Tradition and Innovation in Medieval Art,” published in James M. Powell’s Medieval Studies: An Introduction (1976; 313–2); Paul Frankl’s The Gothic: Literary Sources and Interpretations through Eight Centuries (1960); Panofsky’s Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (1960); Harry Bober’s introduction to Mâle’s Religious Art in France: The Twelfth Century, A Study of the Origins of Medieval Iconography (1978); and Tina Waldeier Bizzarro’s Romanesque Architectural Criticism: A Prehistory (1992). These and other sources are cited in the latest essay to date that provides an in-depth historiographic overview of the field: Conrad Rudolph’s intro-

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duction to his edited volume, A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe (2006), which collects thirty essays that address the history and theory of medieval art. Rudolph’s essay is a sweeping account of developments in the study of medieval historiography. He begins his account with what he terms the “pre-history” of the study of medieval art, and locates it in “the formation and continuation of the authority of Classical art” (2). He briefly considers the role of Giorgio Vasari’s Le vite de più eccellenti architetti, pittori, et scultori (1550, revised in 1568) in the formation of the discipline, noting Vasari’s “naturalistic and biographical paradigms and cyclical model of stylistic development” (5) and therefore his perception of the Middle Ages as an epoch of decline. The section entitled “Reformation and its Aftermath” inquires into the work of John Leland (1506–1552) and other English antiquarians such as William Camden (1551–1623) and Robert Bruce Cotton (1571–1631), and discusses the development of the art market on the Continent and the advent of collecting; it is followed by the discussion of Enlightenment views on Gothic architecture in England, Germany, and France, and the introduction to Winckelmann’s work. In exploring nineteenth-century developments, Rudolph considers Romantic reactions to medieval art as well as the then new scholarly focus on “periodization, dating, regionalism, and the use of exegesis in interpretation” (21). For the rest of his introduction, Rudolph zeroes in on the work of scholars who are considered to be instrumental in the development of the study of medieval art (from Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc [1814–1879] to Schapiro [1904–1996]) and describes the establishment of seminal organizations, journals and indices, encyclopedias, catalogues and corpora. He concludes with a discussion of the “new art history,” and the “adoption of interdisciplinary theories and methodologies that have transformed other areas of the humanities and social sciences” (36), from literary criticism to social art history. Rudolph’s volume contains a number of valuable contributions to the historiography of medieval art (for a thorough evaluation of the book see Smith’s review on the College Art Association Web site [http://www.caareviews.org/reviews/1188; last accessed on Feb. 21, 2009]). A different approach is taken by Herbert Kessler, who, in his essay “On the State of Medieval Art History” (Art Bulletin 70, 2 [1988]: 166–87), provides a survey of the main concerns and themes in medieval art; current – along with long-established – research on these themes is cited in the footnotes. The essay, which eventually gave rise to Kessler’s Seeing Medieval Art (2004), therefore provides less of a historiography of medieval art study per se than a review of various developments in the art of the Middle Ages, accompanied

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by extensive bibliography (subsections of Kessler’s essay are telling: “Periodization,” “The Medieval Art Object,” “Production,” “The Place of Art” etc); for a critique of this approach by Lucy Freeman Sandler (who points out that Kessler’s essay does not specifically address current research in the field, and characterizes it instead as “a historical survey of the period from late antiquity to the beginning of the Renaissance” [506]) as well as Kessler’s rebuttal, see “An Exchange on ‘the State of Medieval Art History’” (The Art Bulletin 71.3 [1989]: 506–07). In addition, a number of historiographic studies that focus on specific media or particular approaches to and topics in medieval art, have appeared in the past two decades; two essays in the JEGP (2006) are particularly useful: Eric Palazzo’s “Art and Liturgy in the Middle Ages: Survey of Research (1980–2003) and Some Reflections on Method” (170–84), and Richard K. Emmerson’s extremely useful overview of recent research on interdisciplinary approaches to illuminated manuscripts in “Middle English Literature and Illustrated Manuscripts: New Approaches to the Disciplinary and the Interdisciplinary” (118–36). For a discussion of the application of the iconographic method of inquiry to medieval architecture, see Paul Crossley, “Medieval Architecture and Meaning: The Limits of Iconography” (The Burlington Magazine 130, no. 1019, Special Issue on Gothic Art [1988]: 116–21); for an essay that reviews literature on Romanesque studies, see Ilene H. Forsyth, “The Monumental Arts of the Romanesque Period: Recent Research” (The Cloisters: Studies in Honor of the Fiftieth Anniversary, ed. Elizabeth C. Parker with Mary B. Shephard, 1992, 3–25). Finally, “Medievalisms Old and New: The Rediscovery of Alterity in North American Medieval Studies” by Paul Freedman and Gabrielle M. Spiegel (AHR 103.3 [1998]: 677–704) must be noted: the essay probes into a peculiarly twentieth-century American concept of the Middle Ages – specifically, what authors see as “the recent revival of interest in strange and extreme forms of belief and behavior now perceived as characteristic of medieval civilization” (677). Two review studies, which appeared in 1996 and 1997, focus on approaches to medieval art that isolate early medieval and Byzantine art from the rest of the medieval “canon.” Lawrence Nees’s introduction to the special issue of Speculum (72. 4 [1997]: 959–69), entitled “Approaches to Early-Medieval Art,” addresses the state of early medieval art history, and discusses “romanticized historiographical emphasis on the ‘wandering peoples’ in the discussion of early-medieval culture in general and art in particular” (964). One of the effects of such an approach, Nees concludes, which implies ethnically-based divisions in the early medieval visual culture, is the emphatic separation of Byzantine art from the general developments in medieval art

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at large (Nees finds particular fault with art history survey texts, such as Gardner’s Art through the Ages, which was at the time edited by Fred S. Kleiner and Richard G. Tansey, 1996). Robert S. Nelson’s “Living on the Byzantine Borders of Western Art” (Gesta 35,1 [1996]: 3–11) surveys texts written between the mid-nineteenth and the end of the twentieth century and concludes that “the alterity of Byzantine art and the denial of its coevalness with Western medieval art have been features of general histories of art for 150 years” (8). An effective historiographic survey of Byzantine art, Charles Barber’s “Art History” (ed. Jonathan Harris, 2005, 147–56), canvasses a variety of developments in and provides a variety of references for the study of the art of Byzantium. Barber cites both printed and online resources for research (such as the Byzantinische Zeitschrift, the Reallexikon zur byzantinischen Kunst, the catalogue of the Dumbarton Oaks Library and the Index of Christian Art), and outlines the crucial survey texts available to the student of Byzantine culture, from Nikodim Kondakov’s Histoire de l’art byzantin considéré principalement dans les miniatures (2 vol., 1886–1891) to Robin Cormack’s Byzantine Art (2000). He proceeds to point out the importance of primary text collections (such as Cyril Mango’s The Art of the Byzantine Empire, 312–1453: Sources and Documents, 1972), as well as exhibitions and museum and exhibition catalogues (such as Byzantium: Faith and Power [1261–1557], edited by Helen C. Evans or Nezih Firatli’s La sculpture Byzantine figurée au Musée Archéologique d’Istanbul, 1990) for the study of Byzantine art. Barber subsequently considers monographs on church architecture and its decoration (e. g., Robert Ousterhout, The Architecture of the Kariye Camii in Istanbul, 1987; The Kariye Djami, 4 vol., ed. Paul Underwood, 1966–1975; Otto Demus, The Mosaics of San Marco in Venice, 1984), literature on illuminated manuscripts in general (from the aforementioned study by Kondakov to Kurt Weitzmann’s Illustrations in Roll and Codex: A Study of the Origin and Method of Text Illustration, 1947 and John Lowden’s The Octateuchs: A Study in Byzantine Manuscript Illustration, 1992, which questions Weitzmann’s approach) and select manuscripts in particular (Suzy Dufrenne and Paul Canart, Die Bibel des Patricius Leo: Codex Reginensis Graecus I B, 1988); on icons (e. g., Leonid Ouspensky and Vladimir Lossky, The Meaning of Icons, 1952, 2nd ed., 1982); and on sculpture (André Grabar, Sculptures byzantines de Constantinople [IVe-Xe siècle], 1963 and Sculptures byzantines du Moyen Age [XIe–XIVe siècle], 1976). Finally, Barber points out that while extensive work has been done on early and especially middle Byzantine periods, the late Byzantine period has not yet generated enough scholarship. Because of the constraints of space, this entry provides, per force, a limited introduction to the historiography of medieval art. Nonetheless, it is

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perhaps prudent to note the obvious: that the concerns, methods, theories, problems and issues that occupy historians of medieval art are not necessarily unique to their particular field of study. For an excellent series of essays that engage topics relevant to medievalists and others, see Critical Terms in Art History (ed. Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff, 1996, 2nd ed., 2003) and the anthology of critical texts in the history of art from Vasari to Oguibe entitled Art History and Its Methods: a Critical Anthology, ed. Eric Fernie, 1995). Finally, for a discussion of whether “the academic discipline of art history no longer disposes of a compelling model of historical treatment,” see Hans Belting, The End of the History of Art? (1987) translated from the second edition of Das Ende der Kunstgeschichte? (1984). Select Bibliography Charles Barber, “Art History,” Palgrave Advances in Byzantine History, ed. Jonathan Harris (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 147–156; Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline, vol. 3, ed. Helen Damico (New York: Garland Publishing, 2000); Modern Perspectives in Western Art History: An Anthology of 20th-Century Writings on the Visual Arts, ed. W. Eugene Kleinbauer (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971, rpt. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989); A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, ed. Conrad Rudolph (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006).

Elina Gertsman

Astronomical Instruments A. Introduction Over 150 astronomical instruments have survived from the European Middle Ages (In this article we are dealing with the period from ca. 950 to ca. 1500). The European tradition is closely related to that of the Islamic Middle Ages (see David King, In Synchrony with the Heavens, vol. 2, 2005), and, in many cases, instrument-types and even individual instruments are directly or indirectly inspired by these. For both European and Islamic instrumentation, the associated textual traditions are important, not least for instrument-types of which no examples survive. By far the most common medieval instrument is the astrolabe – a two-dimensional model of the three-dimensional heavens that one can hold in one’s hand. The celestial part or rete – for the sun and the stars – can rotate over a terrestrial part, a set of plates for different latitudes –

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with markings for the meridian, the horizon, and altitude circles up to the zenith. The astrolabe was used primarily for timekeeping, and this holds for the other principal instruments, the horary quadrant and sundial. For computing the positions of the sun, moon and planets, either astronomical tables or an instrument known as the equatorium could be used. Other less common instruments intended for observational purposes include the armillary sphere and the torquetum. B. Instruments No comprehensive overview of medieval European instruments exists; indeed, there are no published descriptions of the majority of such instruments. Numerous instruments of different kinds preserved in Oxford have been surveyed by Robert Gunther (Early Science in Oxford, 5 vol., vol. 2, Astronomy, 1923), and later the same scholar published close to 40 medieval astrolabes (The Astrolabes of the World, 2 vol., dealing respectively with Eastern and European pieces [1932, rpt. 1976]). Most of the instruments discussed by Gunther have not been investigated again since his time, and not because his descriptions were exhaustive or without fault. Brief but useful introductions to medieval instrumentation are by Francis Maddison (“Early Astronomical and Mathematical instruments: A Brief Survey of Sources and Modern Studies,” History of Sciences 2 [1963]: 17–50) and Emmanuel Poulle (“Les instruments astronomiques de l’Occident latin aux XIe et XIIe siècles,” 15 [1972]: 27–40). A more thorough overview of instrument-types with a survey of makers and their works from Germany and the Netherlands was presented by Ernst Zinner (Deutsche und niederländische astronomische Instrumente des 11.–18. Jahrhunderts, 1956, rpt. 1972), although the descriptions of individual instruments are restricted to a few lines. The same author published a survey of European fixed sundials (Alte Sonnenuhren an europäischen Gebäuden (1964), of which only very few are medieval. Zinner’s works are still unsurpassed. On transmission from the Islamic world to medieval Europe see Astronomical Instruments in Medieval Spain: Their Influence in Europe, ed. Juan Vernet and Julio Samsó (1985); David King, “Islamic Astronomical Instruments and some Newly-Discovered Example of Transmission to Europe,” Mediterranean: Splendour of the Medieval Mediterranean: 13th–15th Centuries, ed. Elisenda Guedea, 2004, 400–23 and 606–07); also various studies on the elusive Jeber (Jâbir ibn Aflah) by Richard Lorch (Arabic Mathematical Sciences: Instruments, Texts, Transmission [1995]). Certain medieval instrument types have recently been shown to be Islamic in origin, although no Islamic examples survive, and we must rely on the textual tradition. Thus, for example, the

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popular quadrans vetus, a universal horary quadrant with movable cursor is an early Islamic invention (King, “A Vetustissimus Arabic Treatise on the Quadrans Vetus,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 33 [2002]: 1–19, also King, In Synchrony, 2005, pt. XIa). No such conclusive evidence is available for the elusive medieval English navicula de Venetiis, a universal device for timekeeping by the sun, although we have a 9th-century Arabic text on a more complicated universal device for timekeeping by the stars (King, “14th-Century England or 9th-Century Baghdad? New Insights on the Origins of the Elusive Astronomical Instrument Called the Navicula de Venetiis,” Centaurus 45 [2003]: 204–26, also King, In Synchrony, 2005, pt. XIb). C. Texts on Instruments The texts on different unusual kinds of instruments by a single individual, in this case, the early 14th-century English scholar Richard of Wallingford, have been published in an exemplary study by John North (Richard of Wallingford: An Edition of His Writings with Introductions, English Translation and Commentary, 1976). Likewise exemplary is a detailed account of all medieval equatoria and related texts by Emmanuel Poulle (Les instruments de la théorie des planètes selon Ptolemée: Équatoires et horlogerie planétaire du XIIIe au XVIe siècle, 2 vols., 1980). A new edition of Chaucer’s treatise on the astrolabe is now available in A Variorum Edition of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, vol VI, The Prose Treatises, pt.1, A Treatise on the Astrolabe, ed. Sigmund Eisner (2002). Yet no survey of all medieval English astrolabes in the Chaucerian tradition exists because scholars prefer texts to instruments and think that the former are more important than the latter. Because of certain features – such as the widespread quatrefoil decoration on astrolabe retes and the lack of place-names on astrolabe plates for different latitudes – it is often difficult to attribute a particular instrument to a specific geographical location; there are, for example, pieces that could be Spanish or French or Italian. Various centres of instrumentation arose in which the attribution is not problematic; the school of Jean Fusoris in Paris (ca. 1400) has been studied by Emmanuel Poulle (Un constructeur d’instruments astronomiques au 15e siècle: Jean Fusoris, 1963) and some 45 instruments surviving from the school of 15th-century Vienna have been listed by David King (Astrolabes and Angels, Epigrams and Enigmas: From Regiomontanus’ Acrostic for Cardinal Bessarion to Piero della Francesca’s Flagellation of Christ, 2007, 234–58). Reliable catalogues of the major collections with detailed descriptions of individual instruments are few in number and serve Greenwich (Koenraad van Cleempoel et al., Astrolabes at Greenwich: A Catalogue of the Astrolabes in the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, 2005); London British Museum (F. A. B. Ward, A Catalogue of Scientific Instruments in the …

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British Museum, 1981; based on information previously recorded by Derek J. de Solla Price); Munich (Burkhardt Stautz, Die Astrolabiensammlungen des Deutschen Museums und des Bayerischen Nationalmuseums, 1999); and Nuremberg (David A. King, “Die Astrolabiensammlung des Germanischen Nationalmuseums,” Focus Behaim-Globus, ed. Gerhard Bott, 2 vols., 1992, I, 101–14, and II, 568–602). Often only astrolabes are catalogued and other related instruments, particularly quadrants and pocket sundials, are overlooked. Numerous other catalogues could be mentioned in which Islamic or Renaissance European instruments predominate, there being so few surviving medieval European examples. Thus, for example, of the two dozen astrolabes discussed in careful detail by Salvador García Franco (Catálogo crítico de los astrolabios in España, 1945), not a single one can be classified as medieval; the only surviving Catalonian and Spanish instruments just happen to be preserved in collections outside Spain. The potential of astronomical instruments as historical sources has been stressed by David King (“Astronomical Instruments between East and West,” Kommunikation zwischen Orient und Okzident, ed. Harry Kühnel, 1994, 143–98; and id., In Synchrony, Pt. XIIIa; the latter dealing with astrolabes). Some individual instruments of particular historical interest have now been studied in exhaustive detail. Thus, for example, we have lengthy descriptions of the earliest European astrolabe from late-10th-century Catalonia (collected articles in The Oldest Latin Astrolabe, ed. Wesley Stevens, Guy Beaujouan and Anthony J. Turner, Physis: Rivista di storia della scienza, N. S. 32:2–3,1995, 189–450; with several contributions of doubtful value); an astrolabe from Catalonia datable ca. 1300 (David A. King and Kurt Maier, “The Medieval Catalan Astrolabe of the Society of Antiquaries, London,” From Baghdad to Barcelona: Studies in the Islamic Exact Sciences in Honour of Prof. Juan Vernet, ed. Josep Casulleras and Julio Samsó, 2 vol., 1996, II, 673–718); a non-functional 14th-century Italian astrolabe copied from a highly sophisticated Islamic prototype (King, In Synchrony, 2005, pt. XIIId); a 14th-century Spanish astrolabe with inscriptions in Hebrew, Latin and Arabic (King, In Synchrony, 2005, pt. XV); an astrolabe, probably made in Erfurt, commissioned by the treasurer of the Stiftskirche in Einbeck (King, “An Astrolabe from Einbeck datable ca. 1330,” to appear in a Festschrift for Menso Folkerts, ed. Andreas Kühne, Paul Kunitzsch, and Richard P. Lorch); a 14th-century Picard astrolabe with numbers written in monastic ciphers (King, The Ciphers of the Monks: A Forgotten Number-Notation of the Middle Ages, 2001, 131–51 and 391–419); an early-14th-century astrolabic quadrant (Elly Dekker, “An Unrecorded Medieval Astrolabe Quadrant from ca. 1300,” Annals of Science 52 [1995]: 1–47); and the remarkable astro-

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labe presented by the astronomer Regiomontanus to his patron Cardinal Bessarion in 1462 with a complex acrostic in its dedication (King, Astrolabes and Angels, Epigrams and Enigmas, 31–46 and 259–74). A catalogue of the entire corpus of surviving medieval instruments, still mainly unpublished, and a survey of the related literature, also mainly unpublished, is a desideratum for the future. Since this would be such a monumental international project (previous ventures by Derek Price and David King did not achieve a publishable handlist or a catalogue, respectively), regional overviews (say, detailed descriptions of all medieval English instruments, or all Fusoris astrolabes, or all 15th-century Vienna instruments) or surveys of all examples of a specific instrument-genre (say, all naviculas, or all torqueta) would be more feasible undertakings. In all cases, the associated textual tradition should not be overlooked. Select Bibliography Robert T. Gunther, The Astrolabes of the World, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1932; rpt in 1 vol., London: The Holland Press, 1976; long out of date but still the major work on medieval European astrolabes); David A. King, “Astronomical Instruments between East and West,” Kommunikation zwischen Orient und Okzident, ed. Harry Kühnel (Vienna: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1994), 143–98; David A. King, In Synchrony with the Heavens: Studies in Astronomical Timekeeping and Instrumentation in Medieval Islamic Civilization, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 2004–05; although mainly dealing with Islamic instruments, this work contains substantial new material on the medieval European tradition); John North, Richard of Wallingford: An Edition of His Writings with Introductions, English Translation and Commentary, 3 vols. (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1976); Ernst Zinner, Deutsche und Niederländische astronomische Instrumente des 11.–18. Jahrhunderts (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1956, rpt. 1972).

David A. King

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B Bakhtinian Discourse Theory, Heteroglossia A. Introduction Љ Miha“loviљ Љ BAHTiЉ N) (born NoMikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (Mihail vember 17, 1895; died March 7, 1975) was not a medievalist per se. However, the theories of discourse and the novel that he composed in the 1930s and 40s have found significant reception among medievalists since the early 1980s with appearance of Michael Holquist’s and Caryl Emerson’s translation The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin (1981) and the subsequent wider reception of Hélène Iswolsky’s translation of Rabelais and His World (1968). Dialogic Imagination is based on a collection of Bakhtin’s essays written during the 1930s and 40s, which appeared together for the first time in Russian as Questions of Literature and Aesthetics (Vopros« literatur« i Њste tiki) in 1975; thus placing the full emergence of Bakhtinian studies in the early 1980s is not unique to the English speaking world. Dialogic Imagination contains the four essays, “Discourse in the Novel” (“Slovo v romane,” 1934–1935), “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel” (“Form« vremeni i hronotopa v romane,” 1937–1938), “From the Pre-History of Novelistic Discourse” (“Iz pred«storii romannogo slova,” 1940), and “Epic and Novel” (“Ѓpos i roman,” 1941). These essays, along with Rabelais and His World (Tvorљestvo Fransua Rable i narodnaѕ kulцtura sredneve kovцѕ i Renessansa, 1965), contain the five key concepts of Bakhtinian discourse theory most relevant to medieval studies: dialogism, heteroglossia, the chronotope, the carnivalesque, and the grotesque. It is important to note, however, that Bakhtin had limited access to medieval texts and only really glances the medieval period as he explores the development of the novel, which culminates, in Bakhtin’s theoretical oeuvre, with the work of Dostoyevsky. B. Theory of the Novel Bakhtin seeks “the authentic spirit of the novel” in texts that “anticipate the more essential historical aspects in the development of the novel in modern times” (“Epic and Novel,” 22). He identifies two lines of stylistic development in the move from monologic to a fully dialogic novelistic discourse,

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that of the First and Second Line novel (“Discourse in the Novel,” 366–76). Bakhtin locates the courtly romance as the site of transition between these two stylistic lines and his theory has, therefore, become a focus of medieval studies. He asserts that the novel emerged out of a gradual development from single-voiced (monologic) to double-voiced (dialogic) literary discourse in Western literature (“Discourse in the Novel,” 259–422). Monologic discourse is the language of First Line novels and dialogic discourse is the language of Second Line novels. Bakhtin’s theory holds that only one cultural code or one voice operates within the monologic text. The novel, on the other hand, is double-voiced or dialogic. Bakhtin locates the beginnings of the First Line of novelistic development in the novellas, satires, biographies and autobiographies of late antiquity. He explicates Lucius Apuleius’s The Golden Ass (ca. 160 C.E.) as an example of the First Line of the development of novelistic discourse. He also places the medieval vitae and some courtly epics in this category, the works of Chrétien de Troyes, Hartmann von Aue, and Gottfried von Straßburg, for instance. Bakhtin employs the term heteroglossia to characterize the multiple voices and various cultural codes interacting with one another in the novel. Some courtly romances contain heteroglossic and dialogic discourse and are regarded as novels. First Line novels have dialogic or heteroglossic elements like word plays or parodies but more advanced forms of heteroglossic discourse, like the inclusion of non-literary discourses, such as the language of medical science or animal husbandry, remain outside of the narrative. Bakhtin then concludes that the dialogical discourse functions in the background of First Line novels, where the idealizing language of the narrative and the everyday language of the world in which the narrative emerges conflict (“Discourse in the Novel,” 376). According to his theory, the Second Line of novelistic development produces the full-fledged dialogic and heteroglossic novel. Bakhtin describes heteroglossia as “another’s speech in another’s language, serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way” (“Discourse in the Novel,” 324). Heteroglossia denotes language alien to a given context, which is employed to express intentions that conflict with what might be generally understood by the communication. The language of this discourse is double-voiced. It serves two speakers at once and expresses their conflicting intentions. In the same word or expression, the literal meaning articulated by the fictional characters in the work collides with the covert intentions of the author. The dialogic utterance expresses two voices, two meanings and two perspectives simultaneously. These voices charge the dialogic expression and react to one another within that expression (“Discourse in the Novel,” 324–25). Hetero-

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glossia and dialogic discourse differ therein that the double-voiced word or dialogic expression provides a space in which conflicting discourses collide to produce one word or expression with two possible meanings. Heteroglossia simply denotes the concurrence of conflicting discourses not their interaction. The arrangement of heteroglossic and dialogic elements expresses authorial intention. Bakhtin’s author intentionally subverts her/his own intentions. That is, Bakhtin’s author consciously activates dialogic discourse and crafts a language whose meaning strays intentionally beyond his/ her control. The author provides the reader with an “interruptive,” a word or expression which points to the plurality of its meaning. The resulting instability of meaning in the text remains, to a certain degree, under the control of the author and his text cannot be conceived as something totally subject to the whims of the reader. Bakhtin notes that the literary consciousness of the authors and audience of the courtly romances formed during a period of extensive cultural exchange. Individual European cultures began assimilating elements of foreign languages and cultures into their own. The exchange between the French and the Germans exemplifies this process. Bakhtin asserts that this cultural assimilation impacted on the literary production of the period and produced a new literary consciousness: “Translation, reworking, re-conceptualizing, re-accenting – manifold degrees of mutual orientation with alien discourse, alien intentions – these were the activities shaping the literary consciousness that created the chivalric romance” (“Discourse in the Novel,” 377). Bakhtin regards Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival as the first truly dialogic novel and one of the earliest examples of a Second Line “real” novel. According to Bakhtin, Wolfram’s particular brand of heteroglossia, a language that revels in the mixing of high and low discourses, inaugurated the predilection for this type of discourse in the German literary tradition (“Discourse in the Novel,” 324–25). C. The Chronotope Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope represents the third equally important contribution to literary theory discussed here. He uses the term chronotope to describe the phenomenon of the organization and interaction of time and space in a given text (“Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes toward a Historical Poetics,” 84–85). Arthur Groos (“Dialogic Transpositions: The Grail Hero Wins a Wife,” Chrétien de Troyes and the German Middle Ages, 1993, 257–76.) describes the chronotope as “the differentiation of discourse through the articulation of time and space” (“Dialogic Transpositions,” 262). The degree of chronotopic complexity, as with the notion of

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single and double-voiced discourse, depends on the genre and line of development. Single-voiced or monologic forms have very simple and distinctly separate chronotopic levels. Bakhtin identifies the adventure as the most common chronotope. During an adventure the rules of time and space change. The site of the adventure is enchanted and unfamiliar. The events that occur in this space are of an indeterminate duration. Pure chance usually governs the switch from the “realistic” stable chronotopes of the narrative (the court) to the adventure chronotope (the wilderness) (“Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” 87–92). D. The Carnivalesque In his essay “Epic and the Novel” Bakhtin distinguishes the novel further by ascribing an intrinsically subversive element to it. The novel differentiates itself from epic, in that epic relies on the notion of past and tradition as sacred, where as the novel continually functions to destabilize such notions (“Epic and Novel,” 15). Continuing in this vein, Bakhtin develops the notion of the carnivalesque, “In the world of the carnival the awareness of the people’s immortality is combined with the realization that established authority and truth are relative” (Rabelais and his World, 10). Like the novel, for Bakhtin the “Carnival was the true feast of time, the feast of becoming, change and renewal. It was hostile to all that was immortalized and complete” (Rabelais and his World, 109). The carnivalesque unfolds as class struggle with lower elements of society, discourse, and the body itself. The latter aspect being central to Bakhtin’s notion of the grotesque, also developed in his work on Rabelais, in which the body itself, particularly the body in a state of openness, expulsion or transformation such as during eating, drinking, copulating, defecating, urinating, menstruating, birthing and dying and all of the fluids associated with these activities become expressions of class struggle and social anxiety. Bakhtin characterizes the literary mode which describes these activities as grotesque realism, and ascribes to it an essentially socially transgressive quality. E. Critical Reception Thomas J. Farrell observes that “Bahktin hovers around medieval topics, he usually stops at the threshold” (Bakhtin and Medieval Voices, 1995). As useful as Bahktinian theory is for exploring medieval literature, there are many gaps to fill and pitfalls to avoid when applying it. Bakhtin constructs the history of the novel from back to front. He begins with narrative strategies specific to Dostoyevsky and then searches for traces of these characteristics elsewhere. Bakhtin mainly looks for a mixing of genres. Heteroglossia is

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the language produced by this pastiche. Heteroglossic language is inherently dialogic, that is, double voiced. Readers of Bakhtin often overlook the fact that discourse does not need to be heteroglossic in order to be dialogized. Moreover, neither of these elements, the heteroglossic nor the dialogic, account for the distinctive evolution of narrative practice that remains far more important for the development of the novel and must play a role in any consideration or definition of novelistic discourse. In “What Bakhtin Left Unsaid” (Romance: Generic Transformation from Chrétien de Troyes to Cervantes, 1985), Cesare Serge points out that “experimental and heteroglot texts constitute, outside the novel’s development but also within it, a discontinuous, frequently interrupted series,” while the romance as narrative form “develops by means of its very transformations, uninterruptedly and coherently to the present day” (26). The fetishization of polyphonic discourse as rigidly defined by modern reception of Bakhtin obscures the larger role that medieval romances play in the development of the novel. Bakhtin’s theory of heteroglossia presumes that the competing discourses arise from the mixing of discursive genres organized according to social stations. The language of the court competes with scientific narrative or the language of peasants, creating multiple perspectives that serve to destabilize one another. This theory, steeped in Marxist ideology, makes too much of the social milieu. The changing perspectives in any text, regardless of the idiolect employed, can generate this heteroglossia, or a web of competing meanings. Moreover, in many “chivalric novels” the generation of dialogic discourse does not result from heteroglossia but rather from the introduction of metonymical symbolic import, which relies on the introduction of time and internal progression in the text. Bakhtin posits his theory of time in the novel, the chronotope, independently of his theory of heteroglossia. Although his theory explores the interrelationship of the generation of multiple meanings and the portrayal of time, too often, critics employing his theories treat these aspects separately. The varying discourses must be inserted into a progression over time in order to activate the social import and context that distinguishes them from one another; simple heterogeneity of discourse does not produce multiple meanings. The formulation of novelistic discourse based on socially or stylistically distinguishable genres of language does not engage the competing medieval literary conceptual models behind the emergence of heteroglossia. Bakhtin fails to consider fully the role of allegory or medieval historiography in the development of the novelistic discourse in the “chivalric novels.” In fact, this omission accounts for the problematic position of chivalric verse narrative in his theory, because these were the very narrative forces informing the ro-

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mances. Recent scholarship has shown that the gradual separation of historical and imaginative literatures in the 12th and 13th centuries was the pivotal moment in creation of both the novel and modern historiography (see for example, Gabrielle M.Spiegel, “Social Change and Literary Language: The Texualization of the Past in Thirteenth-Century Old French Historiography,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 17 [1987]: 149–74.) Moreover, in many medieval texts, the role of time in the generation of a “double voiced” discourse depends on the development of religious and spiritual conceptions. Since Bakhtin’s theory does not account for these impulses, nor even address the Bible as literary text within the framework of his theory, it hardly provides an accurate description of discourse in the romances. Moreover, already in many presumed First Line “novels” the dissolution of the chronotopic boundaries between the various adventure spaces thwart the linear progressive model that Bakhtin applies to them. The most widely applied of Bakhtin’s theories, the carnivalesque, is also the most widely assailed. The assertion of the carnival as social transgressive represents perhaps the weakest aspect of the concept. As Terry Eagleton has pointed out in Walter Benjamin: Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (1981), “Carnival, after all, is a licensed affair in every sense, a permissible rupture of hegemony, a contained popular blow-off as disturbing and relatively ineffectual as a revolutionary work of art. As Shakespeare’s Olivia remarks, there is no slander in an allowed fool” (148). In their work The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (1986), Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, then, seek the transgressive elements of carnivalesque in the grotesque. For medievalists however, the notion of the grotesque has a history that precedes Bakhtin and conflicts with his theory. As John Ganim notes, “Bakhtin’s grotesque, and his Middle Ages, intervene in [a] long history of spurious associations […] his own definition of the medieval was not meant to be historically accurate; instead, it was meant to be itself carnivalesque and dialogic, responding to and parodying definitions which had attempted to repress the anarchic energies he admired” (“Medieval Literature as Monster: The Grotesque Before and After Bakhtin,” Exemplaria 7.1 [1995]: 27–40). Despite these well-considered theoretical objections, the usefulness of Bakhtinian concepts for the analysis of medieval literature continues to be manifest in practice. Select Bibliography Terry Eagleton, Walter Benjamin: Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (London: New Left Books, 1981); John Ganim, “Medieval Literature as Monster: The Grotesque Before and After Bakhtin,” Exemplaria 7.1 (1995): 27–40; Arthur Groos, “Dialogic Transpositions: The Grail Hero Wins a Wife,” Chrétien de Troyes and the German Middle Ages, ed. Martin H. Jones and Roy Wisbey (London: Institute of Germanic Studies, 1993),

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257–76; The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981); Cesare Segre, “What Bakhtin Left Unsaid,” trans. Elise Morse, Romance: Generic Transformation from Chrétien de Troyes to Cervantes, ed. Kevin Brownlee and Marina Scordilis Brownlee (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1985), 23–46; Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986).

Stephen M. Carey

Biblical Exegesis A. Historical Background Medieval Biblical exegesis is greatly indebted to the Patristic period. Some scholars identify two distinct exegetical traditions in ancient Christianity, the Alexandrine tradition, more prone to allegoresis, mainly represented by the Church father Origen (d. 254), and the Antiochene tradition, one more literal, mainly represented by Theodore of Mospuestia (d. 428) (Frances Young, “Alexandrian and Antiochene Exegesis,” A History of Biblical Interpretation, vol. 1, The Ancient Period, ed. Alan J. Hauser and Duane F. Watson, 2003, 334–54). But this distinction is more descriptive of early Christianity in the East than Western (Latin) Christendom. The Western church fathers, such as Jerome (d. 420), Augustine (d. 430), and Gregory the Great (d. 604), all of whose commentaries became foundational for the medieval understanding of Scripture, believed that the spiritual meaning of Scripture was its hidden, but true meaning, only perceptible to those who were initiated into the mysteries of faith. Jerome, in addition to producing the Latin Bible translation that would become basis of the standard Vulgate Bible translation of the Middle Ages, wrote commentaries on almost all books of the Old Testament that would be the source of many medieval commentaries. In the early Middle Ages, scholars like Isidore of Seville (d. 636) built upon the patristic tradition, while providing a great number of allegorical interpretations of Biblical passages that would become standard fare throughout the Middle Ages. Commentaries and Bible glosses of a more “Antiochene” character were produced in monastic foundations by Irish and Anglo-Saxon monks, such as Saint Gall, Werden, and Reichenau (M. L. W. Laistner, “Antiochene Exegesis in Western Europe During the Middle Ages,” Harvard

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Theological Review 40 [1947]: 19–31). Many of these commentaries bear the traces of the scholarly activity of archbishop Theodore (d. 690) and his companion Hadrian, whose arrival in Canterbury in the 7th century marked the beginning of a rich tradition of learning in the British isles (Bernhard Bischoff and Michael Lapidge, Biblical Commentaries from the Canterbury School of Theodore and Hadrian, 1994), which eventually would culminate in the work of the Venerable Bede (d. 735) (Famulus Christi: Essays in Commemoration of the Thirteenth Centenary of the Birth of the Venerable Bede, ed. Gerald Bonner, 1976). On the Continent, the Carolingian period witnessed a proliferation of Biblical commentaries, many of them associated with monastic learning in monastic centers such as Fulda, Auxerre, and Saint Gall (John J. Contreni, “Carolingian Biblical Studies,” Carolingian Essays: Andrew W. Mellon Lectures in Early Christian Studies, ed. Uta-Renate Blumenthal, 1983, 71–98). The aim of the Carolingian commentators was primarily educational: to make the patristic heritage accessible to clergy and monks, by inventorizing and classifying the diverse patristic commentaries, sermons, homilies, treatises, histories, and handbooks, and transforming them into consistent, running commentaries on almost the entire Bible (Bernice M. Kaczinsky, “Edition, Translation, and Exegesis: The Carolingians and the Bible,” The Gentle Voices of Teachers: Aspects of Learning in the Carolingian Age, ed. Richard E. Sullivan, 1995, 171–85). Among these exegetes, Haimo of Auxerre (d. 855), Johannes Scottus Eriugena (d. 877), Paschasius Radbertus (d. 865), and Hrabanus Maurus (d. 856) stand out. For instance, Hrabanus composed commentaries on almost the entire Bible by collecting exegetical opinions of the Church fathers, and he often listed their original authors (PL, 107–112). This way, he created a new genre of Bible commentary, which would have enormous influence on the formation of the 12th-century Glossa ordinaria (E. Ann Matter, “The Church Fathers and the Glossa Ordinaria,” The Reception of the Church Fathers in the West from the Carolingians to the Maurists, ed. Irena Backus, 1997, 83–111). In the High Middle Ages, monasteries continued to be important sites for the composition and collection of Biblical commentaries. The large number of commentaries, and especially sermon series, on the Song of Songs by Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1135), Gilbert of Hoyland (d. 1172), and William of Saint Thierry (d. 1149) attest to this. But in the 12th century, the main focus of medieval learning shifted to the cathedral schools. It was here, and in the other schools of the pre-university era, that the main exegetical works were composed. The greatest exegetical accomplishment of the 12th-century cathedral schools was the compilation of patristic and Carolingian exegesis into a standard gloss on almost all books of the Bible, the Glossa ordinaria.

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This gloss was unique in that it combined the two prevalent formats of Biblical commentary: a marginal commentary that surrounding the central Biblical text, and interlinear glosses featuring short explications. Until the mid-20th century, scholars assumed that the origin of the Glossa ordinaria was Carolingian. But its authorship is more correctly associated with Anselm of Laon (d. 1117) and his brother Ralph of Laon (d. 1133). They were probably the authors of the gloss on Song of Songs, the Gospels, and Romans, while Gilbert of Auxerre (also nicknamed “the Universal”, d. 1134) was the likely author of the gloss on Lamentations, the Twelve Prophets, and possibly Samuel and Kings (Giuseppe Mazzanti, “Anselmo di Laon, Gilberto L’Universale e la ‘Glossa ordinaria’ alla Bibbia,” Bullettino dell’Istituto storico italiano per il medio evo e Archivio Muratoriano 102 [1999]: 1–19). The composition of the gloss was not a planned and uniform process by one author; for example, the Gloss on Psalms went through no less than three successive redactions, by Anselm of Laon, Gilbert of Poitiers (d. 1154), and Peter Lombard (d. 1160) respectively (Mark A. Zier, “Peter Lombard and the ‘Glossa Ordinaria’ on the Bible,” A Distinct Voice: Medieval Studies in Honor of Leonard E. Boyle O.P., ed. Jacqueline Brown and William P. Stoneman, 1997, 629–41). In the 1130s through 1150s, Paris (possibly the collegiate abbey of Saint Victor) became a major center for the production of glossed Bibles (Christopher F. R. De Hamel, Glossed Books of the Bible and the Origins of the Paris Booktrade, 1984; Patricia Stirnemann, “Oú ont été fabriqués les livres de la glose ordinaire dans la première moitié du XIIe siècle?,” Le XIIe siècle: Mutations et renouveau en France dans la première moitié du XIIe siècle, ed. F. Gasparri, 1994, 257–301). The Church fathers already had distinguished between a literal and a spiritual sense of Scripture, while often dividing the latter into a tropological (that is, moral), an allegorical (referring to the life of Christ or the Church), and an anagogical sense (referring to matters pertaining to the future life). Medieval exegetes generally adopted this fourfold scheme (or threefold, since allegory and anagogy were often seen as two different aspects of the same sense). It was not until the late 13th century that the famous mnemotechnic verse was formulated: Littera gesta docet, quid credas allegoria moralia quid agas, quid speres anagogia. (The letter teaches historical facts; allegory what to believe. The moral sense how to act; what to hope for, anagogy.) (Augustinus de Dacia, “Rotulus Pugillaris,” ed. A. Waltz, Angelicum 6 [1929]: 256)

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Ironically, in this period, the strict division between the different senses was fading (if, indeed, it ever existed), and authors started to emphasize the importance and primacy of literal exegesis over allegory. This emphasis on the primacy of the literal sense was developed by Hugh of Saint Victor, in his foundational reformulation of Augustinian hermeneutics in his Didascalicon, basing himself on the theory of signification offered in Augustine’s De doctrina christiana and De magistro (Hugo de Sancto Victore, Didascalicon De Studio Legendi: A Critical Text, ed. Charles Henry Buttimer, 1939). Hugh’s methodology gave the study of literal interpretation, and with it, the study of Hebrew and of Jewish exegesis, a new impetus. We can see his influence not only in Richard (d. 1173) and Andrew of Saint Victor (d. 1175) (Rainer Berndt, André de Saint-Victor[†1175]: Exégète et théologien, 1992; Bibel und Exegese in der Abtei Sankt Viktor zu Paris, ed. Rainer Berndt, 2006), but also in exegetes who had ties to the abbey of Saint Victor, such as Herbert of Bosham (d. after 1189), one of the most accomplished Hebraists of his time (Deborah L. Goodwin, “Take Hold of the Robe of a Jew”: Herbert of Bosham’s Christian Hebraism, 2006), and Peter Comestor (d. 1179), the author of the influential medieval exegetical handbook, the Historia Scholastica (PL, 198). Another contributing factor to the emphasis on the literal sense was the demand for the practical and pastoral training for clerics by the end of the 12th century. The Gregorian Reform had stressed the pastoral responsibilities of the clergy, and schools were offering more practical training as a result. Preaching and confession were seen as the two main purposes for the study of the Bible in the schools, and as a result, Biblical exegesis now emphasized the doctrinal and moral implications of Scripture over the more meditative spiritual exegesis. We can see this development represented in the works of schoolmen like Peter the Chanter (d. 1197) and Alexander Neckham (d. 1217). At the same time, the 12th century brought about a renewed interest in the philological dimension of Scriptural exegesis. Cistercian scholars such as Nicholas de Maniacoria (12th c.) and Stephan Harding (d. 1134) had started the process of correcting the Biblical text against the original Greek and Hebrew (Vittorio Peri, “‘Correctores immo corruptores,’ un saggio di critica testuale nella Roma del XII secolo,” Italia Medievale e Umanistica 20 [1977]: 19–125; and Matthieu Cauwe, “Le Bible d’Étienne Harding,” Revue Bénédictine 103 [1993]: 414–44). This work would be continued in the 13th century in the so-called correctories of Franciscans and Dominicans such as Guillelmus Brito, William de la Mare, and Hugh of Saint Cher (Franz Ehrle, “Die Handschriften der Bibel-Correctorien des 13. Jahrhunderts,” Archiv für Literatur- und Kirchengeschichte des Mittelalters, ed. Heinrich Denifle and Franz Ehrle, 1888, 263–311). The mid-13th century also saw an explosion

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in the commercial production of Bibles of a small format, the so-called Paris Bible. It was innovative in its format, and it offered a portable and accessible Bible for used by the emergent Mendicant orders (Christopher F. R. De Hamel, The Book: A History of the Bible, 2001, 114–39). The Bible was one of the main school texts in the mendicant studia, which prepared students for study at the universities. This was attested by the great number of didactic works meant to facilitate the study and preaching of Scripture: glossaries, such as Marchesinus of Reggio’s Mammotrectus (ca. 1280) and John Balbo’s Catholicon; didactic versifications (such as Petrus Riga’s Aurora); concordances; topical indexes; and Biblical Distinctiones (Louis-Jacques Bataillon, “Intermédiaires entre les traités de morale pratique et les sermons: Les ‘Distinctiones’ bibliques alphabétiques,” Les genres littéraires dans les sources théologiques et philosophiques médiévales, 1982, 213–26). The scholastic practice of reading the Bible cursorie through the first years of theology study also generated a large number of commentaries referred to as Postillae. These Postillae were commentaries on the entire Biblical text that combined textual analysis with moral and doctrinal application (Mariken Teeuwen, The Vocubulary of Intellectual Life in the Middle Ages, 2003, 307–08). They generally abandoned the sharp distinction between literal and spiritual exegesis that had characterized the monastic commentaries. They established the literal sense as the basic and most important interpretation of Scripture, but this literal sense often incorporated the idea that much of the Biblical texts should be regarded as metaphor. The “literal” sense was thus broadened to include a Christological interpretation of most Old Testament passages. These Postillae probably reflected much of the scholastic practice of the medieval universities, with their Aristotelian emphasis on text division as a method of interpretation, and with their incorporation of thematic quaestiones among the more verse-by-verse commentaries. Some of the most important postillators were the Dominicans Nicholas de Gorran (d. 1295) and Hugh of Saint Cher (d. 1263); the latter’s massive commentary was undoubtedly undertaken not by one person, but by a whole team of Dominican exegetes at the friary of Saint Jacques in Paris under the direction of Hugh. The most important Franciscan postillators were Alexander of Hales (d. 1245), William of Meliton (d. 1257), John of Peter Olivi (d. 1298), and especially Nicholas of Lyra (d. 1349), whose Postilla literalis, known for its high standard of Hebrew scholarship, was often printed together with the Glossa ordinaria to provide a standard Bible commentary in the 16th century. The later Middle Ages saw a steady increase in the quantity and volume of Biblical commentaries and sermons, partly as a result of the growth of universities and studia, where these were the staple of academic output. Ironi-

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cally, little scholarly attention has been given to exegesis in this period; scholars have even characterized it as a period of “decline”, partly because it has often been viewed teleologically through the lens of the subsequent Reformation. This false teleology has, for instance, characterized much of the scholarship on John Wycliffe (d. 1384) (Gustav Adolf Benrath, Wyclif ’s Bibelkommentar, 1966). As the work of scholars like Henri of Langenstein (d. 1397), Alonso Tostado (d. 1455), Francis Michele of Padua (d. 1472), and Johannes de Zymansionibus (15th c.) shows, late medieval exegesis was a lively field of scholarship, with more continuities between the late medieval period and the Reformation than has often been assumed (William J. Courtenay, “The Bible in the Fourteenth Century: Some Observations,” Church History 54 [1985], 176–87; Christopher Ocker, Biblical Poetics Before Humanism and Reformation, 2002). Christians were not the only Biblical scholars in medieval Europe. Jewish exegesis in the early Middle Ages produced substantial homiletic commentaries (the Midrashim), which mainly expanded on the narrative to provide moral edification and legal and ritual guidance. In the 11th and 12th centuries, Jewish exegesis in Northern France took a distinctive turn away from this more associative exegesis (Derash), and under Rabbi Solomon b. Isaac of Troyes (Rashi, d. 1105) started to emphasize the “simple”, that is, more literal and direct, meaning of scripture, the Peshat (Menahem Banitt, Rashi: Interpreter of the Biblical Letter, 1985). Rashi’s example was followed by a number of Northern French exegetes, such as his son-in-law R. Solomon b. Meir (Rashbam, d. 1174), Joseph Kara (d. 1170), Eliezer of Beaugency (12th c.), and Rabbi David Kimhi (Radak, d. 1235). Possibly the rise of Hebrew philology, exemplified by the Spanish/Southern French commentator Abraham Ibn Ezra (d. 1164), influenced this Peshat exegesis. It had considerable influence on the Christian exegetes of its time, such as Andrew of Saint Victor, Herbert of Bosham, and Nicholas of Lyra (Gilbert Dahan, Les Intellectuels Chrétiens et les Juifs du Moyen Âge, 1990). At the same time, a reaction against rationalist Aristotelianism and the rise of the mystical movement of Kabbalah produced a completely different kind of commentary; kabbalistic commentaries are best exemplified in the works of Ezra of Gerona (d. 1238) and Moses of Leon (d. 1305) (Geshom Scholem, Origins of the Kabbalah, 1987; Moshe Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives, 1988). B. Research History The outline given by Ceslas Spicq is still considered a classic overview of medieval exegesis. Good general introductions to medieval Biblical exegesis are given in the Cambridge History of the Bible: The West, soon due for a complete

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revision; its French counterpart La Bible au Moyen Âge; and the Italian La Bibbia nel Medioevo. An indispensable reference work on the sources of medieval exegesis is Friedrich Stegmüller’s Repertorium Biblicum (1950–1980), which gives an alphabetical list of medieval exegetes and their works, with a handlist of printed editions and manuscripts. For the Patristic and early medieval period (up to Bede, d. 735), however, the updated version of the Clavis Patrum Latinorum (ed. Eligius Dekkers and Aemilius Gaar, 1995) should also be consulted. Many exegetical texts have recently been edited (such as Andrew of Saint Victor, CCCM, 53–53G, Petrus Comestor, CCCM, 191, and Petrus Cantor, Glossae super Genesim, ed. Agneta Sylwan, 1992). Because the edition of Glossa ordinaria in the Patrologia latina (PL, 113) left much to be desired, Margaret T. Gibson and Karlfried Froehlich oversaw the reprint of the 1480 edition of the Glossa ordinaria (Biblia Latina Cum Glossa Ordinaria. Anastatical Reproduction of the First Printed Edition: Strassburg, c. 1480 [Adolph Rusch?], 1992). The critical edition of the entire Gloss is a massive undertaking, which has been taken up only recently (Glossa ordinaria in Canticum Canticorum, CCCM, 177; Glossa Ordinaria in Lamentationes, ed. A. Andrée, 2005). Good overviews of the textual history of the Vulgate are offered by Samuel Berger (Histoire de la Vulgate pendent les premiers siècles du Moyen Âge, 1893) and P. M. Bogaert (“La Bible latine des origines au moyen âge. Aperçu historique, état des questions,” Revue théologique de Louvain, 19 [1988]: 137–59, 276–314). Two scholars whose work was seminal for the field of Biblical exegesis were Beryl Smalley (The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, 1952; see also The Bible in the Medieval World: Essays in Honour of Beryl Smalley, ed. Katherine Walsh and Diana Wood, 1985) and Henri de Lubac (Exégèse Médiévale: Les quatre sens de l’Écriture, Paris, 1959–1964). De Lubac saw the greatness of medieval exegesis in the monastic, spiritual exegesis, while Smalley’s research emphasized the more “literal” and philological strain of medieval exegesis as a scholastic activity. This same emphasis characterizes the work of Gilbert Dahan (L’Exégèse chrétienne de la Bible en Occident médiéval, XIIe–XIVe siècle, 1999). Most scholarly work of the last decades has been published in conference volumes and anthologies. Some of these emphasize the 12th and 13th centuries (La Bibbia nel Medioevo, ed. Giuseppe Cremascoli and Claudio Leonardi, 1996; La Bibbia nel XIII secolo, ed. Giuseppe Cremascoli and Francesco Santi, 2004); others sum up recent trends in scholarship (Neue Richtungen in der hoch- und spätmittelalterlichen Bibelexegese, ed. Robert E. Lerner and Elisabeth Müller-Luckner, 1996); and yet others emphasize exegesis across religious cultures of Christianity and Judaism (Hebrew Bible / Old Testament, ed. Magne Sæbø, Chris Brekelmans, and Menahem Haran, 2000), or even Islam (With Reverence for the Word, ed. Jane Dammen

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McAuliffe, Barry D. Walfish, and Joseph W. Goering, 2003; Scripture and Pluralism, ed. Thomas. J. Heffernan and Thomas E. Burman, 2005). It was Bernhard Bischoff who first emphasized the importance of Insular exegesis (“Wendepunkte in der Geschichte der lateinischen Exegese im Mittelalter,” Sacris Erudiri 6 [1954]: 189–281), even though his thesis is still very much debated (Michael M. Gorman, “A Critique of Bischoff’s Theory of Irish Exegesis: The Commentary on Genesis in Munich Clm 6302,” Journal of Medieval Latin 7 [1997]: 178–233; Dáibhí O Cróinín, “Bischoff’s Wendepunkte Fifty Years On,” Revue Bénédictine 110 [2000]: 204–37). Bischoff also was the first to “discover” the Biblical glosses from the school of Theodore and Hadrian. These anonymous Bible glosses have now appeared in a comprehensive edition (CCCM, 189A-B). Irish exegesis was the topic of a 1976 conference (Irland und die Christenheit, ed. Próinséas Ní Chatáin and Michael Richter, 1987); much of it focusing on the so-called Bibelwerk, an early medieval collection of various exegetical texts, which appeared in a 2000 edition (CCCM, 173). A recent congress volume edited by Celia Chazelle and Burton Van Name Edwards (The Study of the Bible in the Carolingian Era, 2003) gives a good overview of the current state of studies in Carolingian Biblical exegesis. Various scholastic postillators have been the subject of conferences and anthologies, such as Nicholas of Lyra (Nicholas of Lyra, ed. Philip D. Krey and Lesley Smith, 2000), John of Peter Olivi (Pietro di Giovanni Olivi: Opera edita et inedita, 1999), and Hugh of Saint Cher (Hugues de Saint-Cher, ed. Louis-Jacques Bataillon, Gilbert Dahan, and Pierre-Marie Gy, 2004). Olivi’s exegetical works have appeared in some critical editions (Peter of John Olivi on the Bible, ed. David Flood and Gedeon Gál, 1997; Expositio in Canticum Canticorum, ed. Johannes Schlageter, 1999; Lectura Super Proverbia et Lectura Super Ecclesiasten, ed. Johannes Schlageter, 2003). By contrast, many of the other postillators’ works are still waiting critical editions, such as Nicholas of Lyra (Lyons, 1545), and Hugh of Saint Cher (Cologne, 1621). The classic work on the theory of medieval interpretation and the study of hermeneutics is still that of Hennig Brinkmann (Mittelalterliche Hermeneutik, 1980), but much research has been done to connect medieval hermeneutics with medieval literary theory, often emphasizing the study of the medieval Accessus (Edwin A. Quain, “The Medieval Accessus ad Auctores,” Traditio 3 [1945]: 215–64; Alistair J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship, 1984). A good introduction to the sources of Rabbinical exegesis is offered by Hermann L. Strack in 1887, but updated many times (Einleitung in Talmud und Midrasch, 1982; Günter Stemberger, Introduction to the Talmud and Mid-

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rash, 1991). Erwin I. Rosenthal offers a fine overview and bibliography of medieval Jewish exegesis (“Medieval Jewish Exegesis: Its Character and Significance,” Journal of Semitic Studies 9 [1964]: 265–81). A recent anthology by Michael Fishbane offers a good impression of the state of scholarship on Rabbinical and early medieval Jewish Midrashic exegesis (The Midrashic Imagination, 1993), while the study of 12th-century peshat exegesis owes much to the work of Sarah Kamin (Jews and Christians Interpret the Bible, 1991; see also The Bible in the Light of its Interpreters: Sarah Kamin Memorial Volume, ed. Sara Japhet, 1994, in Hebrew). Especially the exegete Rashi has been the subject of several studies and anthologies (Esra Shereshevsky, Rashi: The Man and His World, 1982; Albert Van der Heide, “Rashi’s Biblical Exegesis: Recent Research and Developments,” Bibliotheca Orientalis 41 [1984]: 292–318; Rashi 1040–1990, ed. G. Sed-Rayna, 1993). Select Bibliography La Bibbia nel Medioevo, ed. Giuseppe Cremascoli and Claudio Leonardi (Bologna: Edizioni Dehoniane, 1996); Gilbert Dahan, L’Exégèse Chrétienne de la Bible en Occident médiéval, XIIe-XIVe siècle, Patrimoines: Christianisme (Paris: Cerf, 1999); Henri De Lubac, Exégèse Médiévale: Les Quatre Sens de l’Écriture, Théologie (Paris: Aubier, 1959–1964); Le Moyen Âge et la Bible, ed. Pierre Riché and Guy Lobrichon (Paris: Beauchesne, 1984); Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Blackwell, 1952, 3rd ed. 1983); Ceslas Spicq, Esquisse d’une histoire de l’exégèse Latine au Moyen Âge (Paris: Vrin, 1944); Friedrich Stegmüller, Repertorium Biblicum Medii Aevi (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Instituto Francisco Suárez, 1950–1980); The West From the Fathers to the Reformation, ed. G.W.H. Lampe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969).

Frans van Liere

Botany A. The Dark Ages of Medieval Botany Knowledge of plants during the late 15th century, which was closely linked to materia medica and therapeutics, was made obsolete by the reintroduction of classical literature (particularly Greek) principally by Ferrara physician Nicolao Leoniceno (1428–1524). In a booklet published in 1492 (De Plinii et aliorum in medicina erroribus), Leoniceno virulently attacked the transformation of botany from antiquity to his days – mainly the influence of the Arabic world –, arguing that patients’ lives were at risk because of the many

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confusions between plants used for therapeutic purposes. He thus promoted to return to ancient literature, principally Dioscorides (1st c. C.E.) whose treatise (De materia medica) he contributed to get published in a critical edition printed by Aldo Manuzio (July 1499). From then on, medieval botany and therapeutic uses of plants were largely ignored in Western scholarly literature, science, and practice, even more so because, at the same time as Leoniceno, the civil authority in Florence requested a commission of physicians to compile a new codex medicamentarius (the Ricettario fiorentino first published in 1499) aimed to replace any anterior receptory. The movement was further amplified with the herbals of those whom the historian of classical botany and medicine Kurt Sprengel (1766–1833) called the ‘German Fathers of Botany’ (Historia Rei Herbariae, 2 vols., 1807–1808), among others Otto Brunfels (ca. 1489–1534) (Eicones vivae herbarum, 1530) and Leonhart Fuchs (1501–1566) (Historia stirpium, 1542). Shortly after, new botanic gardens were created in Pisa and Padua, and the teaching of botany at such medieval university as Montpellier was transformed with the introduction of a teaching based on Dioscorides, field work (herborisation in which François Rabelais [ca. 1494–ca. 1553] participated), and a botanic garden (Louis Dulieu, La médecine à Montpellier, vol. 2: La Renaissance, 1979, passim). Last but far from least, the introduction of plants and drugs from the New World that were unknown in the Old World led to relativize the notion of local flora, and opened the way to a new concept of the vegetal world. As a result, medieval botany had been definitely made obsolete by mid-16th century and almost disappeared from the history of the discipline. In his Bibliotheca Botanica qua scripta ad rem herbariam facientia a rerum initiis recensentur (2 vols., 1771–1772), the Swiss anatomist, physiologist and natural historian Albrecht von Haller (1708–1777) devotes to the Middle Ages only 40 out of the 1.500 pages in the work (vol. 1, 214–54), while he dedicated 170 pages to antiquity (vol. 1, 1–170) and barely more than 40 to the Arabic world (vol. 1, 171–213). Significantly, the chapter on the Middle Ages is entitled Arabistae (vol. 1, 214), whereas the chapter on the Renaissance is entitled Instauratores (vol. 1, 255), and starts with the following statement: Felicitas est seculi XV. quod eo vertente literae in Europa renasci ceperint. Eo enim aevo Graeci Constantinopoli pulsi in Europam confugerunt, & secum codices veterum M.S. adtulerunt […] Ita sensim barbarities Arabum displicuit […].

Coming almost fifty years after Sprengel’s Historia Rie Herbariae, the monumental Geschichte der Botanik in four volumes (1854–1857) by Ernst H. F. Meyer (1791–1858) opened the doors of the history of botany to the Middle Ages, though in a subtle, oblique, and highly biased form. After the entire

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volume 1 (X + 406 pp.) and half of volume 2 (pp. 1–273 out of X + 440 pp.) on antiquity, he discussed together the East and the West in the book covering the period from Julian the Apostate to Charlemagne (that is, 363–800 C.E.) (vol. 2, 274–423). In volume 3, after a long discussion of Arabic botany (preceded, maybe significantly, by an 88-page section on East-Asian, Indian, Persian, and Nabatean peoples), he turned to the Europeo-Christian world from Charlemagne to Albertus Magnus (corresponding to the years 800 to 1280 C.E.). The pre-Salernitan West is briefly dealt with (391–434) and followed by a long chapter on Monte Cassino and Salerno (435–513). Meyer then turned to the transalpine area, France, England, Germany (mainly Hildegard von Bingen [1098–1179]), and Denmark, concluding the volume with a fourpage section on travels to unknown countries (539–42: “Reisen in unbekannte Länder”). Interestingly, in the section on Germany, Meyer included a list of botanical lexica (521–23) “left unused by [his] predecessors” (521: “[…] die zahlreichen botanischen Glossarien des Mittelalters […] die meine Vorgänger noch unbenutzt liessen […]”). Volume 4 is not less significant: it opens with Albertus Magnus (ca. 1200–1280) under the title “Botany under the renewed influence of Aristotelian natural philosophy” (1: “Die Botanik unter dem erneuerten Einfluss der aristotelischen Naturphilosophie”). In this view, Albertus receives 80+ pages (1–84). Short chapters follow, which are more like a series of unavoidable intermezzos: the encyclopedias (84–106), the “botanical knowledge from the countries opened to Christians thanks to the Crusades” (110–14), the travels of Christians to far, non-European countries (114–38), agronomical theory (138–59), medical dictionaries (159–77), and popular books on medicinal plants (177–206). The Renaissance coming then and covering half of the volume (207–444) is a “return to the observation of nature thanks to the study of classical literature” (207: “Rückkehr durch das Studium der klassischen Literatur zur Naturbeobachtung”). The door opened onto medieval literature in Meyer’s history was quickly closed. In 1875, Julius von Sachs (1832–1897), a professor for Botany at the University of Würzburg, published a history of botany, which was translated into English as early as 1906. Although the title announces 1530 as the starting point (that is, the publication of Brunfels’ herbal), the analysis actually starts with the year 1542 (that is, with the first edition of Fuchs’s herbal). The Middle Ages are simply eliminated with such considerations as (p. 3 of the 1906 English translation): […] the corrupt texts of Theophrastus, Dioscorides, Pliny and Galen had been in many respects improved and illustrated […] [by] the Italian commentators of the 15th and of the early part of the 16th century […] a great advance was made by the first German composers of herbals, who went straight to nature, described the

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wild plants growing around them and had figures of them carefully executed in wood. Thus was made the first beginning of a really scientific examination of plants […]

Further on, Sachs explained better his idea about the pre-1530 state of botany (14–5): […] the botanical literature of the middle ages […] continually grows less and less valuable […] the works of Albertus Magnus, as prolix as they are deficient in ideas […] productions of medieval superstitions […] (15) […] botanical literature had sunk so low, that not only were the figures embellished with fabulous additions, as in the Hortus Sanitatis, and sometimes drawn purely from fancy, but the meager descriptions of quite common plants were not taken from nature, but borrowed from earlier authorities and eked out with superstitious fictions […]

Going on, he identified the cause of this in the fact that (15): […] the powers of independent judgment were oppressed and stunned in the middle ages, till at last the very activity of the senses, resting as it does to a great extent on unconscious operations of the understanding, became weak and sickly; natural objects presented themselves to the eye of those who made them their study in grotesquely distorted forms; every sensuous impression was corrupted and deformed by the influence of a superstitious fancy […]

Concluding, he opposed the newly produced herbal of Bock, though “artless,” as an achievement (15) “[…] in comparison with these perversions […]” of the Middle Ages. The two-volume work Les Plantes dans l’antiquité et au moyen âge (1897–1904) by the French Charles Joret (1839–1914) announced a treatment of the Middle Ages of a new type. In the introduction, he described, indeed, his project as follows (vol. 1, XV–XVI): […] je voudrais essayer de retracer l’histoire agricole, industrielle, poétique, artistique et pharmacologique des espèces végétales connues des différentes nations de l’antiquité classique et du moyen âge. Je ne me dissimule pas les difficultés de l’entreprise; elles sont d’autant plus grandes que personne jusqu’ici n’a abordé ce vaste sujet.

It seems, however, that he could not achieve his vast and ambitious program, as the two published volumes (which were the first part, devoted to what Joret called “L’orient classique”) cover only a short segment of the topic: the ancient Near East (actually Egypt, the Chaldeans, Assyria, Judea, and Phoenicia) (volume 1), and Iran and India (volume 2). It is not sure, however, that Joret would have dealt with the Middle Ages with the same depth as he would have for antiquity. In summarizing the contributions of his predecessors in the introduction, he jumped, indeed, from antiquity to modern times, simply dropping the Middle Ages (vol. 1, XVI):

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Two works written during the same period share a similar omission, although they are very different under many aspects: the Landmarks of Botanical History by the botanist Edward Lee Greene (1843–1915), and the epochmaking Herbals by another botanist, Agnes Arber (1879–1960). Greene’s work, which was completed in 1907 but left unpublished until 1983 (2 vol.), was intentionally conceived as a sort of portrait gallery. According to Green himself, indeed, knowledge of the history of botany is almost impossible, because it requires first to have “mastered that science itself” (vol. 1, 89) and, then, to have a “second lifetime” (ibid.). But even so: […] the presentation of a complete and accurate history of botany would remain impossible. Important data wanting, and hopelessly so […] the same is in a measure true of comparatively recent periods […] (ibid.).

This is why he limited himself to a presentation of landmarks, with “some prominence […] given to biography” (vol. 1, 91). Significantly, however, no medieval author appears in this gallery, even though Green himself, who was then a seasoned scientist, recognizes that the work of the German Fathers should be scrutinized as (vol. 1, 90): […] no annalist of a later age seems to have had time or disposition to ascertain how much of the assumed new and original botany of those German Fathers […] was taken out of old manuscripts which, although they may still be extant, later historians have neither consulted nor troubled themselves to enquire after.

As for Arber’s volume (first published in 1912, with several re-editions, some of which revised and augmented), which was the first essay of a young scholar, it had a very specific object, made clear from its full title: Herbals, their Origin and Evolution: A Chapter in the History of Botany 1470–1670. The introductory chapter (1–12) devoted to the pre-printing period (since herbal printing is the focus of the book) and entitled “The Early History of Botany,” falls short from what it announces, as it focuses on Aristotle, Albertus Magnus, Theophrastus, and Dioscorides, that is, the Aristotelian and the classical tradition, omitting the Middle Ages even in the treatment of medicinal botany. Nevertheless, the next chapter (13–37), on early printed herbals, deals with some medieval works, with a major, if not an exclusive, focus on them as printed objects, rather than as scientific achievement. It was the merit of the German botanist Hermann Fischer (1884–1936) to create the field of the history of medieval botany in his book Mittelalterliche Pflanzenkunde (1929). As he put it in the preface ([V]–VI), there was a growing

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interest in the Middle Ages, not only in Europe but also in America. However, only an interest in, and a love for, medieval culture ([V]: “Nur Interesse und Liebe”) could push anybody to penetrate into the domain of medieval plant “systematic” and “scholastic method.” After this opening remark, in which he seems to consider medieval botany as an arcane science requiring uncommon interests, Fischer defined it as a history of plants, which, when applied practically, contributes to the cultural history of peoples ([V]): die mittelalterliche Botanik hauptsächlich Geschichte der Pflanzen bleibt und die angewandte Botanik einen Teil der Kulturgeschichte der Völker bildet.

To research the history of medieval botany, Fischer used the sheer quantity of material that came to light after the publication of the then last history of medieval botany, Meyer’s Geschichte der Botanik. Such material consisted in manuscripts and early printed books with botanical contents, for the further exploration of which Fischer’s book was to serve as a tool to penetrate the scientific thinking and method of work of medieval authors ([V]-VI). With this book, Fischer not only pulled the medieval botany out of the dark ages in which it had been relegated in the early-Renaissance, but also he sketched a new historiography of medieval botany, identified its sources, proposed an agenda and, on this basis, defined appropriate methods. Nevertheless, the concept of Dark Ages of Botany had a long after-life, as the notso-ancient volume by Alan G. Morton, History of Botanical Science: An Account of the Development of Botany from Ancient Times to the Present Day, 1981 shows (see the chapter 4 [82–114] entitled “The Dark Ages of Botany in Europe (200 to 1483)”). Whereas the history of Western medieval botany underwent this slow transformation, botany of the Arabo-Islamic world was gaining increasing attention as the difference in its treatment from Haller to Meyer indicates. As a further example, the French physician and Arabist Lucien Leclerc (1816–1893) started publishing in 1877 a translation of the treatise of medical botany by the Andalusian scientist ibn al-Baytar (d. 1248 C.E.) considered to be the most achieved work of the Arabic world in the field of botany. The real nature of this interest in Arabo-Islamic should not be overestimated, however, as Leclerc emphasizes much the role of Arab and Arabic speaking scientists as intermediaries in the transmission of the Greek heritage. This was already the case in his history of Arabic medicine published one year before, in which Arabic science is presented as an intermediary between Antiquity and the West. Its title makes it plain: “Histoire de la médecine arabe, […] exposé complet des traductions du Grec, […], leur transmission à l’Occident par les traductions latines […].” Not to mention

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the Orientalism so much criticized by Edward Said (1935–2003). Whatever the case, Arabic botany was the only one to be considered in the scholarly community, as Byzantine botany did not retain much the attention, in spite of sporadic mentions in Meyer’s Geschichte der Botanik. B. Beginnings and Institutionalization However programmatic and promising it was, Fischer’s Mittelalterliche Pflanzenkunde was not immediately followed by specific studies on the history of medieval botany. With some exceptions, research in the field started only after World War II, particularly with the late Jerry Stannard (1926–1988), whose major publications have been reproduced in two volumes of collected studies edited by Katherine E. Stannard, and Richard Kay, both published in 1999: Pristina Medicamenta: Ancient and Medieval Medical Botany, and Herbs and Herbalism in the Middle Age and the Renaissance. Jerry Stannard was followed by John Riddle, who specialized more on the history of pharmacy, however. Several of his many publications have been reproduced in a volume of collected studies: Quid pro quo: Studies in the History of Drugs, 1992. Although both have paved the way for new and innovative research, they have not been followed by other scholars, be it in-house or in another institution, nationally or internationally. In the current state, the only real school for historical studies in the field of botany is the School for Arabic Studies (Escuela de Estudios Arabes) of the National Foundation for Scientific Research of Spain (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas) in Granada, specialized, however, on Andalusian botany and agriculture. Also, a program on the history of botany, particularly in the Eastern Mediterranean, with a special focus on medicinal plants, is currently running in the Botany Department of the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., where the collection Historia plantarum specialized on the history of botany is housed. There are individual scholars, however, who work on some topics in the field, in departments of classics, history, history of medicine, or history of medieval languages and literature. With some exceptions, research is rarely of a transdisciplinary nature, taking into account all the components of the topic, from manuscripts and textual tradition to botany stricto sensu and medicine in the case of therapeutic uses of plants. On the other hand, since medicinal plants are currently the object of a renewed interest in contemporary society, there are plenty of micro-studies of a monographic nature on the uses of determined plants made by ethno-botanists and ethno-pharmacologists that include historical data. The historical part of such studies is not

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necessarily based on a direct access to primary sources in the original language, as accurate as a sound historical investigation would require, or done in collaboration by a team of specialists of the several disciplines involved in the research. Finally, there is no scientific journal specifically devoted to the history of botany, no society or formal group either, no conference or meeting of any type, except occasional articles in such journals as the Journal for the History of Biology, Isis, Taxon, Economic Botany, Journal of Ethnopharmacology or Fitoterapia, for example, and occasional panels in conferences organized by such societies as the History of Science Society (of America, but by far and large the most important worldwide), the Renaissance Society of America, or national societies of history of science. C. Primary Sources, Encyclopedias, Bibliographies In spite of this absence of institutionalization, much work was been done during the 20th century. Some primary sources – actually the Greek, viz. Byzantine manuscripts containing anonymous treatises of botany currently preserved at the Bibliothèque nationale de France – have been inventoried as early as 1933 by Margaret Head Thomson, “Catalogue des manuscrits de Paris contenant des traités anonymes de botanique,” Revue des Etudes Grecques 46 (1993): 334–48. In the absence of any other specific inventory of manuscripts, it is still necessary to consult the catalogue of medical manuscripts by Hermann Diels, given the confusion of medical botany and medicine during the Middle Ages. The catalogue lists not only the Greek (viz. Byzantine) manuscripts of Greek medical treatises, but also those of their Latin, Syriac, Arabic, and Hebrew translations, accordingly (Die Handschriften der antiken Ärzte: Griechische Abteilung, 1906, with a supplement in 1908). Since then, some new documents were brought to the attention, a papyrus (Campbell Bonner, “A Papyrus of Dioscorides in the University of Michigan Collection,” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 53 [1922]: 142–68), as well as a manuscript of Dioscorides with color plant representations (Elpidio Mioni, Un ignoto Dioscoride miniato (Il codice greco 194 del Seminario di Padova), 1959, the first part of which was published in Libri e stampatori in Padova. Miscellanea di Studi storici in onore di Mons. G. Bellini, 1959, 345–76, while the color illustrations were published under the title “Un nuovo erbario greco di Dioscoride,” Rassegna Medica. Convivium Sanitatis 36 [1959]: 169–84). Since collections changed location, manuscripts were destroyed or damaged during 20th-century conflicts of all kind, and some codices previously unknown came to light, a new catalogue of Greek medical manuscripts is current being prepared (Alain Touwaide, “Byzantine Me-

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dical Manuscripts: Toward a New Catalogue,” Byzantinische Zeitschrift 101 [2008]: 199–208; ID ., “Byzantine Medical Manuscripts: Towards a New Catalogue, with a Specimen for an Annotated Checklist of Manuscripts Based on an Index of Diels’ Catalogue,” Byzantion 79 [2009]: 453–595). For the Arabic world, there are now the encyclopedic studies published almost simultaneously by Fuat Sezgin and Manfred Ullmann, which, for each author and work, list all the manuscripts known at the time of the publication: Fuat Sezgin, Geschichte der arabischen Schrifttums, vol. 4: Alchimie, Chemie, Botanik, Agrikultur bis ca. 430 H., 1971, and Manfred Ullmann, Die Natur- und Geheimwissenschaften im Islam, 1972. For Latin Pre-Salernitan codices, see the classical inventory by Augusto Beccaria, I codici di medicina del periodo presalernitano (secoli IX, X e XI), 1956. For the late-medieval medical manuscripts in French libraries, see: Ernest Wickersheimer, Les Manuscrits latins de médecine du haut moyen âge dans les bibliothèques de France, 1966. Useful also, the catalogue of incipit of Latin medieval texts by Lynn Thorndike, and Pearl Kibre, A Catalogue of Incipits of Mediaeval Scientific Writings in Latin, 1963 (the work is now available in an expanded and updated digital version identified as eTK, which is accompanied by the so-called eVK, that is, the updated version by Linda Ersham Voigts, and Patricia Deery Kurts, Scientific and Medical Writings in Old and Middle English: An Electronic Reference, CDRom, 2000). In recent times, the range of primary sources for the history of botany has also included remains of plants found in archeological excavations. This archeology of a new genre was developed largely thanks to the late Wilhelmina Feemster Jashemski (1910–2007), who worked on Pompeii (see her 1979 volume The Gardens of Pompeii, Herculanum and the Villas Destroyed by Vesuvius, followed by a more recent synthesis edited in collaboration with Fredrick G. Meyer, The Natural History of Pompeii, 2002). Here are some examples of this new archeology: (Byzantium) Jon G. Hather, Leonor Peña-Chocarro, and Elizabeth J. Sidell, “Turnip Remains from Byzantine Sparta,” Economic Botany 46 (1992): 395–400; (the Arabic world) Natália Alonso Martínez, “Agriculture and Food from the Roman to the Islamic Period in the North-East of the Iberian Peninsula: Archaeobotanical Studies in the City of Lleida (Catalonia, Spain),” Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 14 (2005): 341–61; (the Western Middle Ages) Marta Bandini Mazzanti, Giovanna Bosi, Anna Maria Mercuri, Carla Alberta Accorsi, and Chiara Guarnieri, “Plant Use in a City in Northern Italy during the Late Mediaeval and Renaissance Periods: Results of the Archaeobotanical Investigation of “The Mirror Pit” (14th–15th c. A.D.) in Ferrara,” Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 14 (2005): 442–52. A synthesis on this field is now available: Rowena Gale,

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and David Cutler, Plants in Archeology; Identification Manual of Vegetative Plant Materials Used in Europe and Southern Mediterranean to c. 1500, 2000. History of botany has been included in the several encyclopedias of history of science published during the 20th century (mainly in the form of bio-bibliographical chapters or entries) from George Sarton, Introduction to the History of Science, 3 vols., 1927–1948; and Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science, 8 vols., 1923–1958; to the recent encyclopedia of medieval science Medieval Science, Technology, and Medicine: An Encyclopedia, ed. Thomas Glick, Steven J. Livesey, and Faith Wallis, 2005, including the Neue Pauly, 13 vols. with an index and 5 supplements, 1996–2003, and its English translation Brill’s New Pauly, 16 vols. and 1 supplement (published from 2002) and, most recently, Encyclopedia of Ancient Natural Scientists: The Greek Tradition and its Many Heirs, ed. Paul Keyser, and Georgia Irby-massie, 2008, for all the classical authors and texts that were transmitted to the subsequent periods, Byzantium, the Arabic World and the West. In addition, for Byzantium, there is also Herbert Hunger (1914–2000), Die hochsprachliche profane Literatur der Byzantiner, 1978, vol. 2, 271–76, and the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, 1991. For the Arabo-Islamic world, in addition to Sezgin and Ullmann above, see the entries in the Encyclopedia of Islam (2nd ed.), the Encyclopaedia Iranica (also available on the Internet in open access), and in the most recent encyclopedia, Medieval Islamic Civilization: An Encyclopedia, ed. Josef W. Meri, 2006, 2 vols. In the field of medical botany, an inventory of the literature on materia medica and formulas was compiled by Jakob Büchi, Die Entwicklung der Rezept- und Arzneibuchliteratur, vol. 1: Altertum und Mittelalter, 1982, recently completed by Freyer H.-P. Michael, Europäische Heilkräuterkunde: Ein Erfahrungsschatz aus Jahrtausenden, 1998. For an analysis of botanical data in latemedieval receptaries, see Jerry Stannard, “Botanical Data and Late Medieval Rezeptliteratur,” Fachprosa-Studien: Beiträge zur mittelalterlichen Wissenschafts- und Geistesgeschichte, ed. Gundolf Keil et al., 1982, 371–95 (reproduced in Stannard, Herbs and Herbalism … [above], no. VI). D. Rupture or Continuity? One of the questions about medieval botany is its continuity with the previous period. This is particularly the case for the Arabic world and the West. Among the works on this problem, we can mention here Alonso Martínez, “Agriculture and Food from the Roman to the Islamic Period […]” (above) for the Western Arabic World (al-Andalus), and, for the West: Jerry Stannard, “Medieval Reception of Classical plant Names,” Actes du XIIe Congrès International d’Histoire des Sciences, Paris août 1968, Colloque no 2: Traduc-

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tions médiévales, Communications du 28 août, 1971, 150–62 (published also in Revue de Synthèse 2e série, nos. 49–52 [1968]); and also Innocenzo Mazzini, “Présence de Pline dans les herbiers de l’Antiquité et du haut Moyen-Age,” Pline l’Ancien temoin de son temps. Conventus Pliniani Internationalis, Namneti 22–26 Oct. 1985 Habiti, ed. Jackie Pigeaud, and José Oroz Reta, 1987, 83–94. Most of the research during the 20th century was about texts: inventory of manuscripts, history of the text (including analysis of the manuscripts, some of which have been reproduced in facsimile [below]), critical editions (sometimes also with a translation), and/or analysis from a botanical viewpoint. E. Byzantium For Byzantium, Vilhelm Lundström (1869–1940) published as early as 1904 the lexicon of the 14th-century Constantinopolitan monk, philosopher and probably physician Neophytos Prodromenos (“Neophytos Prodromenos’ botaniska namnförteckning,” Eranos 5 [1903–1904]: 129–55). From 1930, the Belgian philologist Armand Delatte (1886–1964) published several botanical lexica and texts on plants: “Le lexique de botanique du Parisinus Graecus 2419,” Serta Leodiensia ad celebrandam patriae libertatem iam centesimum annum recuperatam composuerunt philology leodienses, 1930, 59–101, and Anecdota Atheniensia et alia, vol. 2: Textes Grecs relatifs à l’histoire des sciences, 1939, passim. It was not until 1955, however, that new editions came to light, thanks to Margaret H. Thomson already mentioned, who published two volumes (Textes grecs inédits relatifs aux plantes, 1955, and Le Jardin symbolique: Texte grec tiré du Clarkianus XI, 1960). More recently Ernst Heitsch edited the so-called Carmen de viribus herbarum, in his work Die griechischen Dichterfragmente der römischen Kaiserzeit, vol. 2, 1964, 23–38; John Riddle focused on 14th-century commentators on Dioscorides (“Byzantine Commentaries on Dioscorides,” Symposium on Byzantine Medicine, ed. John Scarborough, 1985, 95–102 [reproduced in Riddle, Quid pro quo … [above], no. XIII]); and, to quote but a few, Jean Barbaud who offered a synthesis of the research on the alphabetical manuscripts of Dioscorides, De materia medica (“Les Dioscorides ‘alphabétiques’ (à propos du Codex Vindobonensis Med. Gr. 1),” Revue d’histoire de la pharmacie 41 [1994]: 321–30), while Alain Touwaide focused on Byzantine lexica of plant names, of which he gave a list (“Lexica medico-botanica byzantina. Prolégomènes à une étude,” Tês filiês tade dôra. Miscelánea léxica en memoria de Conchita Serrano, 1999, 211–28). Somewhat different, but not less important, is the tradition of Theophrastus’s botany from antiquity to the Renaissance, which has been the

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object of a systematic examination in the context of the Theophrastus Project. The fragments of the several authors quoting Theophrastus have been collected and discussed in Robert W. Sharples, Theophrastus of Eresus: Sources for his Life, Writings, Thought and Influence. Commentary, vol. 5: Sources on Biology, 1994, 124–207. F. The ArabicWorld During the 20th century research on Arabic botanical texts has been more abundant, although it was largely focused on medical botany and on the major Andalusian botanists, al-Ghafiqi (d. ca. 1165), and ibn al-Baitar (ca. 1204–1248). One of the most active scholars before World War II was Max Meyerhof (1874–1945), author, among others, of the following essays in the history of botany: Über die Pharmakologie und Botanik des Ahmad al-Ghafiqi, 1930; Das Vorwort zur Drogenkunde des Beruni, 1932; Sarh asma’ al-‘uqqar (l’Explication des noms de drogues), un glossaire de matière médicale composé par Maïmonide. Texte publié pour la première fois d’après un manuscrit unique, avec traduction, commentaire et index, 1940 (rpt. in Mûsâ ibn Maymûn/Maimonides (d. 1204). Texts and Studies. Collected and Reprinted, vol. 4, ed. Fuat Sezgin, 1996; English translation: Moses Maimonides’ Glossary of Drug Names. Translated from Max Meyerhof ’s French edition by Fred Rosner, 1979). Several botanico-pharmacological articles by Meyerhof were reproduced recently (for some of them, see below; also: Max Meyerhof, Studies in Medieval Arabic Medicine: Theory and Practice, ed. Penelope Johnstone, 1984). The post-World War II period saw two major achievements: one was the first critical edition of an Arabic translation of Dioscorides, De materia medica. The text was edited by César E. Dubler (1915–1966) and Elias Terés (1915–1983) in the second volume of the monumental work by the former, La “Materia Medica” de Dioscórides, 6 vols., 1953–1957 (the second volume was published in Tetuan in 1952, and in Barcelona in 1957). This edition was made on the basis of three manuscripts (Madrid, El Escorial, and Paris). Several more have been brought to the attention since, something that would require to have a new edition of the text. One of the manuscripts (Leiden, Or. 289) has been studied in detail: Mahmoud M. Sadek, The Arabic Materia Medica of Dioscorides, 1983. The other achievement was an inventory of the folios torn out of manuscript Ayasofia 3703 (dated 1224 C.E.) now preserved at the Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi in Istanbul. The leaves appeared on the antiquarian market in the early 20th century (actually, after the exhibition of Muhammadan art, as it was called, in Munich in 1910), and repeatedly changed owner since then; although some had been gradually located, the list was never complete. It was the merit of Ernst J. Grube to publish an almost com-

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plete inventory: “Materialen zum Dioskurides Arabicus,” Aus der Welt der islamischen Kunst: Festschrift für Ernst Kühnel, 1959, 163–94. Since some folios changed owners after the publication, and since Grube’s list appeared to be incomplete, the research has been taken over by Alain Touwaide, who published also a large portion of the body of the manuscripts and almost all the loose folios: Farmacopea araba medievale: Codice Ayasofia 3703, 4 vols., 1992–1993. In addition to these two achievements, a major contribution was the edition of the preserved fragments in several Oriental languages (actually Syriac, Arabic, and Hebrew), together with the Greek and Latin text, of Aristotle, De plantis, in the version of Nicolas of Damas: Hendrik J. Drossart Lulofs, and E. L. J. Poortman, Nicolaus Damascenus “De plantis”: Five Translations, 1989. The original text is lost, as well as its revision by Nicolaus of Damas. The Greek text currently known is a recent retro-version whose authorship has been discussed; see: Bertrand Hemmerdinger, “Le De plantis de Nicolas de Damas à Planude,” Philologus 111 (1967): 56–65; and more recently: Elizabeth A. Fisher, “Manuel Holobolos, Alfred of Sareshel, and the Greek Translator of Ps.-Aristole’s De Plantis,” Classica et Mediaevalia 57 (2006): 189–211. Among the other publications on Arabic botany, several were devoted to ibn al-Baitar whose works were edited: Ibrahim Ben Mrad, Ibn al-Baytar (m. 646 H./1248 J.C.): Commentaire de la “Materia Medica” de Dioscoride, 1990; Ana María Cabo González, Ibn al-Baytar al-Malaqi (m. 646–1248), Kitab al-Yami li-mufradat al-adwiya wa-l-agdiya, Colección de Medicamentos y Alimentos. Introducción, edición crítica, traducción e índices de las letras sad y dad, 2002. Also, the French translation by Lucien Leclerc published under the title ibn al Beithar, Traité des simples, 3 vols., 1877–1883, was reprinted twice: by the Institute du Monde Arabe in Paris (1992), and by Fuat Sezgin, at the Institut für Geschichte der arabisch-islamischen Wissenschaften of the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt am Main (Germany) in 1996. Several studies were also published and included: Rainer Degen, “Al-safarjal: a Marginal Note to Ibn al-Baytar,” Journal for the History of Arabic Science 2 (1978): 143–48; Juan Luís Carrillo, and Maria Paz Torres, Ibn al-Baytar y el arabismo español del XVIII: Edición trilingue del prologo de su “Kitab al-chami,” 1982; S. M. Imamuddin, and S. M. Pervaiz Imam, “Impact of the Spanish Muslim Pharmacologist Ibn al-Baitar,” Hamdard medicus 36 (1993): 116–18; Esin Koahya, “Ibn Baitar and his Influence on the Eastern Medicine,” Actas del XXXIII Congreso Internacional de Historia de la Medicina: Granada-Sevilla, 1–6 septiembre, 1992, ed. Juan Luís Carrillo, and Guillermo Olagüe de Ros, 1994, 401–07.

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Production was not less abundant on al-Ghafiqi: Max Meyerhof, Über die Pharmakologie und Botanik des Ahmad al-Ghafiqi, 1930; Max Meyerhof, and George P. Sobhy, The Abridged Version of “The Book of Simple Drugs” of Ahmad Ibn Muhammad Al-Ghafiqi, by Gregorius Abu-l-Farag (Barhebraeus). Edited from the only known Manuscript with an English Translation, Commentary and Indices, 1932, and Max Meyerhof, The Abridged Version of “The Book of Simple Drugs” of Ahmad Ibn Muhammad Al-Ghafiqi, by Gregorius Abu-l-Farag (Barhebraeus). Edited from the only two known Manuscripts with an English Translation, Commentary and Indices, vol. 2: Letters BA’ and GIM, 1937 (both works have been reprinted as vols. 51 and 57 [1996] of the series Islamic Medicine of the Publications of the Institute for the History of Arabic-Islamic Science, published under the direction of Fuat Sezgin at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University in Frankfurt). Also, three previously published studies on al-Ghafiqi have been reproduced in the same series under the title Ahmad ibn Muhammad al-Ghâfiqî (d. c. 1165): Texts and Studies Collected and Reprinted, ed. Fuat Sezgin, 1996: Moritz Steinschneider, “Gafiki’s Verzeichniss einfacher Heilmittel (1873 and 1881)”; Max Meyerhof, “Über die Pharmakologie und Botanik des Ahmad al-Ghâfiqî (1930)”; Max Meyerhof, “Deux Manuscrits illustrés du Livre des Simples d’Ahmad al-Gâfiqî. (1940–41).” Research on other authors included: Hakim Mohammed Said, al-Biruni’s Book on Pharmacy and Materia Medica, 2 vols., 1973 (vol. 1 contains the text edited with an English translation by H. K. Said; and vol. 2 an introduction, commentary, and evaluation by Sami K. Hamarneh); Rana M. H. Ehsan Elahie, “Sources of Kitab al-Saidana of al-Biruni,” Studies in History of Medicine 1 (1977): 118–21; Max Meyerhof, Das Vorwort zur Drogenkunde des Beruni, 1932; Kamal Muhammad Habib , “The Kitab al-Saidana: Structure and Approach,” Studies in History of Medicine 1 (1977): 63–79; Martin Levey, and Noury al-Khaledy, The Medical Formulary of al-Samarqandi: and the Relation of Early Arabic Simples to those Found in the Indigenous Medicine of the Near East and India, 1967; Max Meyerhof, “Sur Un Glossaire de matière médicale composé par Maïmonide,” Bulletin de l’Institut d’Egypte 17 (1935): 223–35 (reproduced in Mûsâ ibn Maymûn / Maimonides (d. 1204): Texts and Studies. Collected and Reprinted, vol. 4, ed. Fuat Sezgin, 1996). Three further works should be mentioned here as they illustrated the trends in the research about Arabic science and botany: the catalogue of an exhibition that displayed many lavishly illustrated manuscripts, including botany, together with original scientific essays that went beyond the commentary on the pieces on display (À l’ombre d’Avicenne: La Médecine au temps des califes. Exposition présentée du 18 novembre 1996 au 2 mars 1997, Institut du Monde Arabe, 1996); a list of manuscripts that contains a significant number of

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copies of scientific texts, particularly of botany (Marie-Geneviève Guesdon, “Manuscrits et histoire de la médecine: le fonds arabe de la Bibliothèque nationale à Paris,” Maladies, médecines et societies: Approches historiques pour le présent, ed. François-Olivier Touati, 2 vols., 1993, vol. 1, 36–40), and a study on the life sciences in the Arabo-Islamic world (Paola Carusi, Lo zafferano e il geco. Le scienze della vita nella società islamica del Medioevo, 2007). A special case is al-Andalus. Botanical work in the area dated back to the early time of the Arabo-Islamic presence in the peninsula, which included the transfer and naturalization of Eastern plants. Also, in the 10th century, local scientists who had an Arabic translation of Dioscorides, De materia medica, made in Baghdad in the 9th century, were in contact with Byzantine scientists (on this, see Juan Vernet, La cultura hispanoárabe en Oriente y Occidente, 1978 [French translation: Ce que la culture doit aux Arabes d’Espagne, 1985], 81–5; more recently, Julio Samsó, Las ciencias de los antiguos en Al-Andalus, 1992, 110–16). The production of al-Andalus has been abundantly researched as early as Max Meyerhof, who published “Esquisse d’Histoire de la Pharmacologie et Botanique chez les Musulmans d’Espagne,” Al-Andalus 3 (1935): 1–41. However, it is mainly thanks to the school in Granada (above) that research made substantial progress. Several essays were published in the following volumes: Ciencias de la naturaleza en Al-Andaluz, Textos y Estudios, 1–3, ed. Expiración García Sanchez, 1990–1994, and 4–6, ed. Camilo Alvarez De Morales, 1996–2001. It is not possible to mention here all these publications, also because they deal mainly with agriculture (for the Arabo-Andalusian sources on agriculture, see Sezgin, Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums. 4 … [above], and, for a synthetic presentation of the Arabic contribution to this field, including Andalusia, see Toufic Fahd, “Botany and Agriculture,” Encyclopedia of the History of Arabic Science, 3 vols., ed. Roshdi Rashed, and Régis Morelon, 1996, vol. 3, 813–52). Nevertheless, one work needs special mention, because of its originality and innovative method: Julia Ma Carabaza Bravo, Expiración García Sánchez, Esteban Hernández Bermejo, and Alfonzo Jiménez Ramírez, Árboles y arbustos de Al-Andalus, 2004. Although the question is discussed below, it should be mentioned here that, on the identification of the plants mentioned in ancient texts, this work is of a truly interdisciplinary nature. The work on al-Andalus The Legacy of Muslim Spain, ed. Salma KhadraJayyusi, 2 vols., 1994, includes some contributions on, or related to, the history of botany as: Juan Vernet, “Natural and Technical Sciences in al-Andalus” (937–51); Expiración García Sánchez, “Agriculture in Muslim Spain” (987–99); Lucie Bolens, “The Use of Plants for Dyeing and Cloth-

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ing” (1000–15); James Dickie, “The Hispano-Arabic Garden: Notes Towards a Typology” (1016–35). One cannot conclude the review of the work done on Andalusian botany without mentioning the fundamental editions (with translation and commentary) by the late Albert Dietrich (1913–2001), who taught at the University of Göttingen (Germany) and specialized on Arabic botanical lexicology. His three major contributions to this field are (in chronological order of publication): Dioscurides triumphans: Ein anonymer arabischer Kommentar (Ende 12. Jahrh. n. Chr.) zur Materia medica. Arabischer Text nebst kommentierter deutscher Übersetzung, 2 vols., 1988; Die Dioskurides-Erklärung des Ibn al-Baitar: Ein Beitrag zur arabischen Pflanzensynonymik des Mittelalters. Arabischer Text nebst kommentierter deutscher Übersetzung, 1991; Die Ergänzungen Ibn Gulgul’s zur Materia medica des Dioskurides: Arabischer Text nebst kommentierter deutscher Übersetzung, 1993. G. Late Antiquity in the West The area of the Middle Ages that was most studied in our field here is the West. For the sake of clarity, it may be useful to divide its history in three major phases, however artificial and conventional such divisions might be: Late-Antiquity, the Early Middle-Ages, and the Salernitan/Post-Salernitan period. For Late-Antiquity, texts are listed with the references of their editions in Bibliographie des textes médicaux latins: antiquité et haut moyen âge, ed. Guy Sabbah, Pierre-Paul Corsetti, and Klaus-Dietrich Fischer, 1987, with a supplement by Klaus-Dietrich Fischer, Bibliographie des textes médicaux latins: antiquité et haut moyen âge. Premier Supplément 1986–1999, 2000. For the authors of many of such texts (or on the anonymous ones), see the entries to the Neue Pauly/New Pauly, and Keyser and Irby-Massie (above). Botanical texts of this period were mainly the Latin translation(s) of Dioscorides, De materia medica, and its epiphenomena. The “old” Latin translation of Dioscorides identified as Dioscorides Longobardus was edited by Konrad Hofman, and Theodor M. Auracher, “Der langobardische Dioskorides des Marcellus Virgilius,” Romanische Forschungen 1 (1882): 49–105 (Book I); Hermann Stadler, “Dioscorides Longobardus (Cod. Lat. Monacensis 337). Aus T. M. Aurachers Nachlass herausgegeben und ergänzt,” Romanische Forschungen 10 (1897): 181–247 (Book II), and 369–446 (Book III); 11 (1899): 1–93 (Book IV); Hermann Stadler, “Dioscorides Longobardus (Cod. Lat. Monacensis 337),” Romanische Forschungen 13 (1902): 161–243 (Book V); and Stadler, “Dioscorides Longobardus (Cod. Lat. Monacensis 337). Index der Sachnamen und der wichtigeren Wörter,” Romanische

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Forschungen 14 (1903): 601–36. Book I, has been re-edited by Haralambie Mihaescu, Dioscoride Latino, Materia medica, Libro primo, 1938. See also John Riddle, “The Latin Alphabetical Dioscorides,” Actes du XIIIe Congrès International d’Histoire des Sciences, Moscou, 18–24 août 1971, Sections III & IV: Antiquité et Moyen Age, 1971, 204–09 (reproduced in Riddle, Quid pro quo … [above], no. IV), and Arsenio Ferraces Rodríguez, “Notas para la difusión altomedieval de una traducción latina de Dioscórides,” Actas del II Congreso Hispánico de Latín Medieval (León, 11–14 de noviembre de 1997), 1998, vol. 1, 471–81. First among the epiphenomena of Dioscorides, De materia medica, there is the so-called De herbis feminis ascribed to Dioscorides. It was studied as early as Hermann Kästner, “Pseudo-Dioskorides de herbis femininis,” Hermes 31 (1896): 578–636. More recently, see (chronological order of publication): John Riddle, “Pseudo-Dioscorides’ Ex herbis feminis and Early Medieval Medical Botany,” Journal of the History of Biology 14 (1981): 43–81 (reproduced in Riddle, Quid pro quo … [above], no. IX); Arsenio Ferraces Rodríguez, “El Pseudo-Dioscórides De herbis femininis, los Dynamidia e Isidoro de Sevilla, Etym. XVII, 7,9–11,” Tradición e innovación de la medicina latina de la Antigüedad y de la Alta Edad Media, ed. Manuel E. Vázquez Buján, 1994, 183–203; as well as Annalisa Bracciotti, “Un modello greco per l’erba spheritis degli erbari pseudo-dioscoridei latini,” Helikon 38 (1995–98): 419–35; Ead., “Gli erbari pseudo-dioscoridei e la trasmissione del Dioscoride alfabetico nell’Italia meridionale,” Romanobarbarica 16 (1999): 285–315; Arsenio Ferraces Rodríguez, “Le Ex herbis femininis: traduction, réélaboration, problèmes stylistiques,” Les textes médicaux latins comme literature: Actes du VIe colloque international sur les textes médicaux latins du Ier au 3 septembre 1998 à Nantes, ed. Alfrieda and Jackie Pigeaud, 2000, 77–89; Annalisa Bracciotti, “L’esemplare del De herbis femininis usato dal traduttore dell’Erbario antico inglese,” Cassiodorus 6–7 (2001): 249–74; ead., “Osservazioni sulla forma del latino lauer nell’edizione Wellmann di (pseudo)-Dioscoride e nelle edizioni di alcuni erbari latini,” Filologia antica e moderna 26 (2004): 45–55; and Arsenio Ferraces Rodríguez, “Una fuente desconocida del De herbis femininis, la antigua traducción latina del De plantis duodecim signis et septem planetis subiectis atribuido a Tésalo de Tralles,” Latomus 64 (2005): 153–68. Many of the other derivatives from Dioscorides are grouped in the LateAntique corpus that can be qualified as classical and included Antonius Musa, De herba vettonica; the herbal attributed to Apuleius; and Sextus Placitus. It was edited by Ernst Howald, and Henry E. Sigerist, Antonii Musae De herba vettonica liber. Pseudoapulei Herbarius, Anonymi De taxone liber. Sexti Placiti liber Medicinae ex animalibus, 1927. The full text of the corpus as it appears in the codex 296 of the Biblioteca Statale at Lucca has been reproduced and trans-

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lated into Spanish in the volume of commentary that accompanies the recent facsimile reproduction of the manuscript under the title Herbolarium et materia medica (Biblioteca Statale de Lucca, ms. 296), 2007. Since the edition above, the Pseudo-Apuleius was the object of several publications among which: Friedrich W. T. Hunger, The Herbal of PseudoApuleius: from the Ninth-Century Manuscript in the Abbey of Monte Cassino (Codex casinensis 97) together with the First Printed Edition of John Phil. De Lignamine (Editio princeps Romae 1481), 1935; Erminio Caproti, and William T. Stearn (1911–2001), Herbarium Apulei (1481) – Herbolario volgare (1522), 1979 (introduction by E. Caproti with an essay by W.T. Stearn). For the study of the text, see Henry E. Sigerist, “Der Herbarius Apulei,” Janus 29 (1925): 180–82; id., “Zum Herbarius Pseudo-Apulei,” Archiv für Geschichte der Medizin 23 (1930): 197–204; Linda Erhsam Voigts, “The Significance of the Name Apuleius to the Herbarium Apulei,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 52 (1978): 214–27; Maria Franca Buffa Giolito, and Gigliola Maggiulli, L’altro Apuleio. Problemi aperti per una nuova edizione dell’Herbarius, 1996. Among the other texts that have been edited, translated, and/or studied, there was the so-called curae herbarum. The text was edited by Sofia Mattei, “Curae herbarum,” Ph.D. thesis, University of Macerata, 1995, and further studied by Annalisa Bracciotti, “L’apporto della tradizione indiretta per la costituzione di un testo critico delle “Curae herbarum,” Rivista di Cultura Classica e Medioevale 42 (2000): 61–102; Ead., “Nomen herbae selenas: Un passo bilingue delle Curae herbarum,” Il plurilinguismo nella tradizione letteraria latina, ed. Renato Oniga, 2003, 213–53; and Arsenio Ferraces Rodríguez, “Un manuscrito con textos inéditos de las Curae ex animalibus,” Vir bonus docendi peritus: Homenaxe a José Pérez Riesco, 2002, 123–39; and id., “Las Curae herbarum y las interpolaciones dioscorideas en el Herbario del Pseudo-Apuleyo,” Euphrosyne 32 (2004): 223–40. Other texts include the so-called alfabetum Galieni studied by Carmélia Halleux-Opsomer, “Un Herbier médical du haut moyen âge: l’Alfabetum Galieni,” History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 4 (1982): 65–97; and Gargilius Martialis, first analyzed by John Riddle, “Gargilius Martialis as Medical Writer,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 39 (1984): 408–29 (reproduced in Riddle, Quid pro quo … [above], no. X), and recently edited by Brigitte Maire, Gargilius Martialis, Les Remèdes tirés des légumes et des fruits, texte établi, traduit et commenté, 2002; see also the concordance by Brigitte Maire, Concordantiae Gargilianae, 2002. For the inventory of the plants mentioned in these and other texts, see Alexander Tschirch, Handbuch der Pharmakognosie, 4 vols., 1909–1925, vol. 2 (1910), passim, and also Carmélia Opsomer, Index de la pharmacopée de Ier au

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Xe siècle, 2 vols., 1989, with a short description of the research program, and, for each text, a brief characterization, the editions, and, when appropriate, any other relevant literature. Also, for the identification of the plants, see Stirling below. H. The Pre-Salernitan Centuries For the early-medieval or Pre-Salernitan period, the Carolingian world provides much information (see Carmélia Opsomer-Halleux, “The Medieval Garden and Its Role in Medicine,” Medieval Gardens, ed. Elizabeth B. Macdougall, 1986, 93–114, which includes [106–12] a Tentative List of Garden Plants). A significant document is the Capitulare de Villis. Whatever its date (which has been debated), it provides (paragraph 70) a list of 95 herbs supposedly to be cultivated in the villae of the Empire (Opsomer-Halleux, “The Medieval Garden …” [above], 98; edition of the text in Gerhard Schmitz, Die Kapitulariensammlung des Ansegis, 1996). Another important document is the so-called Lorscher Arzneibuch (dating back to ca. 795), which was recently rediscovered (facsimile edition with a volume of commentary under the title Das Lorscher Arzneibuch: Faksimile der Handschrift Msc. Med. 1 der Staatsbibliothek Bamberg, ed. Gundolf Keil, 1989. The volume of commentary contains an introduction and the translation of the text by Ulrich Stoll and Gundolf Keil in collaboration with Albert Ohlmeyer. For a critical edition of the text, with a German translation and a study, see Ulrich Stoll, Das “Lorscher Arzneibuch”: Ein medizinisches Kompendium des 8. Jahrhunderts [Codex Bambergensis medicinalis 1]: Text, Übersetzung und Fachglossar, 1992). This manuscript documents not only the range of plants known in North-West Europe at that time, but also the continuity with previous knowledge and practice, as well as, if not more, the contacts between West and East, that is, between the Carolingian and the Byzantine Worlds. Saint Gall Abbey documents further the botany of the Carolingian period. The so-called Botanicus Sangallensis, which was known since 1928 at least (see Erhard Landgraf, “Ein frühmittelalterlicher Botanicus,” Ph.D. thesis, University of Leipzig, 1928 [reproduced in Kyklos 1 [1928]: 114–46]), was not studied until very recently, however: Monica Niederer, Der St. Galler ‘Botanicus’. Ein frühmittelalterliches Herbar: Kritische Edition, Übersetzung und Kommentar, 2005. The study of the garden is part of the research program conducted at the University of California, Los Angeles, and at the University of Virginia, and consisting, among others, in producing a virtual tri-dimensional reconstructing of the monastery. See Walter Horn, and Ernest Born, The Plan of St Gall: A Study of the Architecture & Economy of, & Life in a Paradigmatic Carolingian Monastery, 3 vols., 1979 (see vol. 2, 175–209 and 300–13 for the garden).

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The next document in a chronological sequence is the Hortulus by Walahfrid Strabo. It was repeatedly studied during the 20th century: Karl Sudhoff, Des Walahfrid von der Reichenau Hortulus: Gedichte über die Kräuter seines Klostergartens vom Jahre 827, Wiedergabe des ersten Wiener Druckes vom Jahre 1510, eingeleitet und medizinisch, botanisch und druckgeschichtlich gewürdigt, 1926; Walahfrid Strabo, Hortulus, translation by Raef Payne; commentary by Wilfrid Blunt, 1966; or, more recently, Hans-Dieter Stoffler, Der hortulus des Walahfrid Strabo: aus d. Kräutergarten d. Klosters Reichenau, 1978. Also, in a volume published on the occasion of the rediscovery of the Lorscher-Arzneibuch (Das Lorscher Arzneibuch: Klostermedizin in der Karolingerzeit. Ausgewählte Texte und Beiträge, 1989), there is (196–98) a list of the plants mentioned in the Hortulus together with their identification. The same volume contains also (199–202) an inventory of the plants in the Würzburg collection, dating back to 840 circa. Of this period are also the many receptaries published by Henry E. Sigerist, Studien und Texte zur frühmittelalterlichen Rezeptliteratur, 1923, and Julius Jörimann, Frühmittelalterliche Rezeptarien, 1925. The many plants they mention are listed in Opsomer, Index de la pharmacopée … (above). I. Salerno and After The translation into Latin of Arabic medical and, particularly, pharmaceutical treatises transformed previous botanical knowledge. Books of medicinal plants circulated in a significantly increased number. Although many texts of this period have already been edited, several are still waiting to be brought to light. This is the aim of the program recently launched on Salerno, aiming to edit as many texts as possible (see the several essays in La Scuola Medica Salernitana: Gli autori e i testi, ed. Danielle Jacquart, and Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, 2007). The texts that have been edited and/or studied include the following: (circa instans) Carmélia Opsomer, Livre des simples medecines. Codex Bruxellensis IV 1024, 2 vols., 1980; and Ead., Book of Simple Medicines, with a preface by William T. Stearn, 2 vols., 1984; Le livre des simples médecines d’après le manuscrit français 12322 de la Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris, 1986, and Le Livre des simples médecines, 2001; Leo J. Vandewiele, Een middelnederlandse versie van de “Circa instans” van Platearius naar de hss Portland, British Museum ms. Loan 29/332, XIVe eeuw, en Universiteitsbiblioteek te Gent Hs. 1457, XVe eeuw. Uitgegeven en gecommentarieerd, [1970]; (Albertus Magnus) Klaus Biewer, Albertus Magnus, De vegetabilibus Buch VI, Traktat 2, lateinisch-deutsch, Übersetzung und Kommentar. Mit einem Geleitwort von Rudolf Schmitz, 1992; and the following three studies by Jerry Stannard, “Identification of the Plants Described by Alber-

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tus Magnus, De vegetabilibus, lib. VI,” Res Publica Litterarum 2 (1979): 281–318; “The Botany of St.Albert the Great,” Albertus Magnus, Doctor Universalis, 1280/1980, ed. Gerbert Meyer, and Albert Zimmerman, 1980, 345–72 (reproduced in Stannard, Pristina medicamenta … [above], no. XIV); and “Albertus Magnus and Medieval Herbalism,” Albertus Magnus and the Sciences. Commemorative Essays 1980, ed. James A. Weisheipl, 1980, 355–77 (reproduced in Stannard, Ibidem, no. XIII); (Arnau de Vilanova) edition of his Latin translation of the Book of Simple Medicines (that is, medicinal plants) by Abu l-Salt Umayya in a volume that contains several texts by different scholars (I reproduce the Latin title from the frontispiece): Arnaldi de Villanova, Traslatio Libri albuzale de medicinis simplicibus. Ediderunt José Martínez Gásquez et Michael R. McVaugh. Abu l-Salt Umayya, Kitab al-adwiya almufrada. Edidit Ana Labarta. Llibre d’Albumesar de simples medecines. Edidit Luis Cifuentes. Praefatione et comentariis instruxerunt Ana Labarta, José Martínez Gásquez , Michael R. McVaugh, Danielle Jacquart et Luis Cifuentes, 2004; (Rufinus) after a first study was published by Lynn J. Thorndike, “Rufinus: A Forgotten Botanist of the Thirteenth Century,” Isis 18 (1932): 63–76, his text was edited by the same, assisted by Francis S. Benjamin, The Herbal of Rufinus, Edited from the Unique Manuscript, 1946; on it, see recently Annalisa Bracciotti, “Osservazioni sull’Erbario di Rufino,” … un tuo serto di fiori in man recando: Scritti in onore di Maria Amalia D’Aronco, ed. Patrizia Lendinara, and Silvana Serafin, 2 vols, 2008, vol. 2, 63–73; (Pierre d’Auvergne) his botanical treatise (in fact, a commentary on Aristotle and Theophrastus) has been recently edited: E. L. J. Poortman, Petrus de Arvernia, Sententia super librum De vegetabilibus et plantis, 2003; (anonymous herbals and receptaries) see for example: Maria Sofia Corradini Bozzi, Ricettari medico-farmaceutici medievali nella Francia meridionale, vol. 1, 1997; Anna Martellotti, I ricettari di Federico II. Dal “Meridionale” al “Liber de coquina,” 2005; Paul Aebischer, and Eugène Olivier, L’herbier de Moudon, un recueil de recettes médicales de la fin du 14e siècle. Notes sur la botanique médicale du moyen-âge, 1938; Stefania Ragazzini, Un erbario del XV secolo. Il ms. 106 della Biblioteca di botanica dell’Università di Firenze, 1983; and the so-called Herbal of Roccabonella, on which, see, for example: Francesco Paganelli, and Elsa M. Cappelletti, “Il codice erbario Roccabonella (sec. XV) e suo contributo alla storia della farmacia,” Atti e memorie della Accademia Italiana di Storia della Farmacia 13 (1996): 111–17. A special case is the transfer of classical botany to England, which has been much studied and discussed (for an overview, see Maria Amalia D’Aronco, “Le traduzioni di testi medico-botanici in inglese antico,” Testo medievale e traduzione, ed. Maria Grazia Cammarota, and Maria Vittoria

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Molinari, 2001, 227–35). At the center of this, there is the manuscript of the British Library, Cotton Vitellius C III, which contains the late-antique corpus above (among others, the Pseudo-Apuleius). It was studied as early as 1864 by Oswald Cockayne, Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft of Early England: Being a Collection of Documents, for the Most Part Never Before Printed, Illustrating the History of Science in this Country before the Norman Conquest, 3 vols., 1864–1866. Vol. 1 includes “Herbarium of Apuleius. Continued from Dioskorides … Medicina de quadrupedibus of Sextus Placitus; all from Brit. mus. ms. Cotton. Vitellius C. III …” The Cotton Vitellius manuscript has been recently reproduced in facsimile by Maria Amalia D’Aronco, and Margaret L. Cameron, The Old English Illustrated Pharmacopoeia. British Library Cotton Vitellius C III, 1998, with a study. One should also mention here such other publications as (selection; chronological order of publication): Walter Hofstetter, “Zur lateinischen Quelle des altenglischen Pseudo-Dioskurides,” Anglia 101 (1983): 315–60; Maria Amalia D’Aronco, “L’erbario anglosassone, un’ipotesi sulla data della traduzione,” Romanobarbarica 13 (1994–1995): 325–66; Annalisa Bracciotti, “L’esemplare del De herbis femininis usato dal traduttore dell’Erbario antico inglese,” Cassiodorus 6–7 (2001): 249–74, and Philip Rusche, “Dioscorides’ De materia medica and Late Old English Herbal Glossaries,” From Earth to Art: The Many Aspects of the PlantWorld in Anglo-Saxon England: Proceedings of the First ASPNS Symposium, University of Glasgow, 5–7 April 2000, ed. Carole P. Biggam, 2003, 181–94. Also, Anne Van Arsdall, Medieval Herbal Remedies: The Old English Herbarium and AngloSaxon medicine, 2002, who suggested a new approach to the text, which may be characterized as ethnobotanical. J. Lexica and inventories of plants In the study of primary sources, a first – and major – problem is the lexicon of plant names. Whereas no other modern reference work is available for the Greek Byzantine world than the 19th-century analytical lexicon by Bernhard A. Langkavel (1825–1902), Botanik der spaeteren Griechen vom dritten bis dreizehnten Jahrhunderte, 1866 (rpt.: 1964), there is now a particularly useful instrument recently published by Johannes Stirling, Lexicon nominum herbarum arborum fructuumque lingua latinae, 4 vols., 1995–1998, for the West. Similarly, vernacular names have been systematically collected by Willem F. Daems (1911–1994), Nomina simplicium medicinarum ex synonymariis Medii Aevi collecta: Semantische Untersuchungen zum Fachwortschatz hoch- und spätmittelalterlicher Drogenkunde, 1993. Some studies have been made on such aspects of the medieval botanical lexicon as the continuity of classical names (Jerry Stannard, “Medieval Re-

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ception of Classical Plant Names,” (above), and the contribution of some medieval scholars to this question (Jerry Stannard, “Bartholomaeus Anglicus and Thirteenth Century Botanical Nomenclature,” Actes du XIIe Congrès International d’Histoire des Sciences, Paris, août 1968, 1971, vol. 8, 191–94 [reproduced in Stannard, Pristina Medicamenta … [above], no. XVI]). Linked with the lexicon is the inventory of plant names in the texts. A pioneering work was the research program THEOREMA, which aimed to inventory all the terms of materia medica – including plant names – in the pharmaceutical literature prior to the 10th century (on which, see in chronological order of publication: Carmélia Halleux-Opsomer, and Louis Delatte, “Ancient Medical Recipes and the Computer: the THEOREMA Project,” Pharmacy in History 23 (1981): 87–9; Carmélia Halleux-Opsomer, “Le traitement informatique des recettes médicales du haut moyen âge,” Actes du Congrès International “Informatique et Sciences Humaines,” 1981, 649–67; and Ead., “Une banque informatisée de pharmacopée ancienne: Pour une histoire quantitative du médicament,” Actes du XXVIIIe Congrès International d’Histoire de la Médecine, 1982, vol. 2, 215–19), which led to the publication of an index by Carmélia Opsomer, Index de la pharmacopée … (above). Another program was launched slightly later, which was presented by Sergio Sconocchia, Programma di concordanze e lessici di autori medici latini, Atti del I Seminario di studi sui Lessici tecnici greci e latini (Messina, 8–10 marzo 1990), ed. Paola Radici-Colace, and Maria Caccamo-Caltabiano, 1991, 311–21. As a result of this research program, several lexica of Late-Antique texts were published in the Alpha-Omega series of Olms. They are listed in 1991, along with other publications, by Alain Touwaide, “L’inventaire des matières médicales dans l’Antiquité et au Moyen Age: des compléments,” Revue d’Histoire de la Pharmacie 291 (1991): 393–97. A similar program dealing with classical and Byzantine Greek texts was presented by Alain Touwaide in 1993: “Towards a Thesaurus of Ancient Materia Medica: a Methodological Analysis for the Constitution of a Computerised Database,” Lingue tecniche del greco e del latino: II, Atti del II Seminario internazionale sulla letteratura scientifica e tecnica greca e latina, Trieste, 4–5 ottobre 1993, ed. Sergio Sconocchia, and Lucio Toneatto, 1997, 227–47. The program is now carried out in the Department of Botany of the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, D.C. K. Identification of Plants The identification of the plants according to current taxonomy is of primary importance. It has been the object of much research in the early 20th century, particularly on the basis of Greek illustrated manuscripts of Dioscorides,

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De materia medica. The literature published on this question from Linnaeus to 1998 has been collected in Alain Touwaide, “Bibliographie historique de la botanique: Les Identifications des plantes médicinales citées dans les traités anciens, après l’adoption du système de classification de Linné (1707–1778),” Centre Jean Palerne – Lettre d’Information 30 (1997–1998): 2–22, and 31 (1998): 2–65. Among the several works of this type, one could quote here: Edmond Bonnet (1848–1922), “Essai d’identification des plantes médicinales mentionnées par Dioscoride, d’après les peintures d’un manuscrit de la Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris (Ms. grec No. 2179),” Janus 8 (1903): 169–77, 225–32, 281–85; id., “Etude sur les figures de plantes et d’animaux peintes dans une version arabe, manuscrite, de la Matière Médicale de Dioscoride, Conservée à la Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris,” Janus 14 (1909): 294–303; Emmanuel J. Emmanuel, “Etude comparative sur les plantes dessinées dans le Codex Constantinopolitanus de Dioscoride,” Journal Suisse de Chimie et Pharmacie/Schweizerische Wochenschrift für Chemie und Pharmazie 50 (1912): 45–50, 64–72; Krikor Jacob Basmadjia (Grigor Pasmachean), “L’identification des noms de plantes du Codex Constantinopolitanus de Dioscoride,” Journal Asiatique 230 (1938): 577–621 (rpt. in Texts and Studies on Islamic Medicine, 1, ed. Fuat Sezgin, 1997, 27–71). In the current state of research, the classical reference work on this point is still Jacques André (1910–1994), Lexique des termes de botanique en latin, 1956, with a revised edition published almost 30 years later under a new title: Les noms de plantes dans la Rome antique, 1985. However useful it is, it does not include any methodological statement. Some works have been devoted to this question (in chronological order of publication): Bernhard Herzhoff, “Zur Identifikation antiker Pflanzennamen,” Vorträge des ersten Symposions der Bamberger Arbeitskreises “Antike Naturwissenschaft und ihre Rezeption (AKAN),” 1990, 9–32; Alain Touwaide, “L’identification des plantes du “Traité de matière médicale” de Dioscoride: Un bilan méthodologique,” Antike Naturwissenschaft und ihre Rezeption, vol. 1 and 2, ed. Klaus Döring, and Georg Wöhrle, 1992, 253–74; James L. Reveal, “Identifying Plants in Pre-Linnean Botanical Literature,” Prospecting for Drugs in Ancient and Medieval European Texts: A Scientific Approach, ed. Bart K. Holland, 1996, 57–90; Giovanni Cristofolini, and Umberto Mossetti, “Interpretation of Plant Names in a Late Medieval Medical Treatise,” Taxon 47 (1998): 305–19. A new approach – of a truly interdisciplinary nature – has been proposed for the trees mentioned in Andalusian agronomic literature by Carabaza Bravo et al., Árboles y arbustos … (above), 2004.

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L. Plants Some plants have been studied in monographic publications (books or articles). Being impossible to mention here all such works, I list some (recent or not so recent), representative of this type of research because of the nature of the plant, the method of the research, or any other significant aspect. Works are listed in alphabetic order of English plant names: (beet) John A. C. Greppin, “The Words for ‘Beet’ in three interrelated Systems: GrecoRoman, Armenian and Arabic,” Byzantion 60 (1990): 145–63; (belladonna) Brigitte Schwamm, Atropa Belladonna: eine antike Heilpflanze im modernen Arzneischatz. Historische Betrachtung aus botanischer, chemischer, toxikologischer, pharmakologischer und medizinischer Sicht unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des synthetischen Atropins, 1988; (betony) Valérie Bonet, “La bétoine et ses noms,” Le Latin médical: La constitution d’un langage scientifique: Réalités et langage de la médecine dans le monde romain. Actes du IIIe Colloque internationale “Textes médicaux latins,” Saint-Etienne, 11–13 septembre 1989, ed. Guy Sabbah, 1991, 143–50; (garlic) John Heinerman, The Healing Benefits of Garlic, 1994 (Spanish translation: El ajo y sus propriedades curativas. Historia, remedios y recetas, 1995); (hellebore) Ferdinand Wick, “Beiträge zur Geschichte von Helleborus und Veratrum,” Ph. D. thesis, University of Basel, 1939; (liquorice) Marielene Putscher, “Das Süssholz und seine Geschichte,” Ph.D. thesis, University of Cologne, 1968; (mandrake) Laurie Gluckman, “Mandragora: its Pharmacology and Superstitions,” Scalpel & Tongs 37 (1993): 58–60; (mistletoe) Hans Becker, and Helga Schmoll, Mistel: Arzneipflanze, Brauchtum, Kunstmotiv im Jugendstil, 1986; (roses) Mia Touw, “Roses in the Middle Ages,” Economic Botany 36 (1882): 71–83; (rue) Antonino Pollio, Antonino De Natale, Emanuela Appetiti, Gianni Aliotta, and Alain Touwaide, “Continuity and Change in the Mediterranean Medical Tradition: Ruta spp. (Rutaceae) in Hippocratic Medicine and Present Practices,” Journal of Ethnopharmacology 116 (2008): 469–82; (saffron) Annick Lallemand, “Le Safran et le cinnamome dans les Homélies sur le Cantique des cantiques de Grégoire de Nysse,” L’Antiquité Classique 71 (2002): 121–30; (silphium) Denis Roques, “Médecine et botanique: Le Silphion dans l’oeuvre d’Oribase,” Revue des Etudes Grecques 106 (1993): 380–399; (thyme) Quentin Seddon, A Brief History of Thyme: From Magical Power to the Elixir of Youth, 1994; (valerian) Mansoor Ahmad, “Valerian, a Drug Ignored by Us,” Hamdard medicus 35 (1992): 80–85. In some cases, such publications cover a group of plants, related or not: Pierre Cuttai, “Beiträge zur Geschichte der officinellen Drogen Semen Lini, Fructus Colocynthidis, Radix Saponariae,” Ph.D. thesis, University of Basel, 1937; Heinrich Lehmann, “Beiträge zur Geschichte von Sambucus nigra, Juniperus communis und Juniperus Sabina,” Ph.D. thesis, University of

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Basel, 1935; Jerry Stannard, “Vegetable Gums and Resins in Medieval Recipe Literature,” Acta Congressus Internationalis Historiae Pharmaciae Bremae MCMLXXV, 1978, 41–8 (reproduced in Stannard, Pristina Medicamenta … [above], no. XVII). Spices constitute a chapter in itself in the history of medieval botany, with a wide range of aspects, from the identification and trade of the substances (among others along the silk-road) to their social and cultural meaning. It will suffice to mention here two works of a different nature recently published: Sami H. Hamarneh, “Spices in Medieval Islam: a Perspective,” Hamdard medicus 35 (1992): 82–90; and Marina Ferrara Pignatelli, Viaggio nel mondo delle essenze, 1991. The cultural values linked with spices have become the object of a dictionary: Hansjörg Küster, Wo der Pfeffer wächst: Ein Lexikon zur Kulturgeschichte der Gewürze, 1987. More recently, spices in the Middle Ages have been analyzed in an essay by Paul Freeman, Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination, 2008. From a more general viewpoint, the history of plants with therapeutic applications has been of particular interest, with a significant transformation from late 19th-century pharmacognosy (which was living its last days, as it was replaced shortly after by pharmaco-chemistry) to the current revival worldwide. Here is a selection of this variety of aspects (works are listed in chronological order of publication): Friedriech A. Flückiger (1828–1894), and Daniel Hanbury (1825–1875), Pharmacographia: A History of the Principal Drugs of Vegetable Origin Met with in Great Britain and British India, 1874; Heinrich Marzell (1885–1970), Alte Heilkräuter, 1926; Pierre Delaveau, Histoire et renouveau des plantes medicinales, 1982; Ernesto Riva, Non far di ogni erba un fascio. Botanica e storia di proprietà farmacologiche di duecento piante medicinali, 1990; Liana Palazzi Mariotti, Il giardino dei semplici: Un itinerario fra le piante aromatiche medicinali velenose esotiche, 1993; Pierangelo Lomagno, Storie di piante medicinali eccellenti, 1994. M. Herbals Books of herbs used for medicinal purposes were also the object of a theoretical analysis on their actual nature, evolution, and transmission. A fundamental work was Arber, Herbals … (above). Later on, Agnes Arber returned to the topic: “From Medieval Herbalism to the Birth of Modern Botany,” Science, Medicine, and History: Essays on the Evolution of Scientific Thought and Medical Practice written in honour of C. Singer, ed. E. Ashworth Underwood, 2 vols., 1953, vol. 1, 317–36. In the meantime, other contributions explored the antique and medieval history of such books.Among them, see, for example: Warren Royal Dawson (1888–1968), “Studies in Medical History, a) the Origin of

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the Herbal, b) Castor-Oil in Antiquity,” Aegyptus 10 (1929): 47–72; Charles Singer (1876–1960), “The Herbal in Antiquity,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 47 (1927): 1–52; Juan Carlos Ahumada (1890–1976), Herbarios medicos primitivos, 1942; Jerry Stannard, “Medieval Herbals and their Development,” Clio Medica 9 (1974): 23–33 (reproduced in Stannard, Herbs and Herbalism … [above], no. III); and Salvatore Pezzella, Gli erbari: I primi libri di medicina (Le virtù curative delle piante), 1993. N. Botanical Science Theoretical notions of botany, its scientific methods, and other aspects of the approach to the world of plants have been little investigated. On the classical background of medieval botanical knowledge, see Alain Touwaide, “La botanique entre science et culture au Ier siècle de notre ère,” Geschichte der Mathematik und der Naturwissenschaften in der Antike, vol. 1: Biologie, ed. Georg Wöhrle , 1999, 219–52. The continuity of the ancient system of classification in a 7th-century Greek manuscript of Dioscorides was ascertained in Annamaria Ciarallo, “Classificazione botanica delle specie illustrate nel Dioscoride della Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli,” Automata 1 (2006): 39–41. A global evaluation of the contribution of Byzantium to botany was made as early as 1939: Félix Brunet (b. 1872), “Contribution des médecins byzantins à l’histoire des plantes et à la botanique médicale en France,” Hippocrates 5 (1939): 524–31. Similarly, Jerry Stannard, “Botany,” Dictionary of the Middle Ages, vol. 2 (1982), 344–49, proposed a synthesis that he further substantiated in such article as “The Theoretical Bases of Medieval Herbalism,” Medical Heritage 1 (1985): 186–98 (reproduced in Stannard, Herbs and Herbalism … [above], no. IV). Other scholars focused more on the scientific method behind the construction of botanical knowledge: Guy Beaujouan (1925–2007), “La prise de conscience de l’aptitude à innover (le tournant du milieu du 13e siècle),” Le Moyen âge et la science: Approche de quelques disciplines et personnalités scientifiques médiévales. Actes du colloque d’Orléans, 21–22 avril 1988, ed. Bernard Ribemont, 1991, 5–14, and, in the same volume, Bernard Ribemont, and Geneviève Sodigne-Costes, “Botanique médiévale: tradition, observation, imaginaire: L’Exemple de l’encyclopédisme,” 153–72. The question of observation was also taken into consideration in the analysis of illustrated herbals as in the following contribution by Giulia Orofino, “Il rapporto con l’antico e l’osservazione della natura nell’illusrazione scientifica di eta’ sveva in Italia meridionale,” Intellectual Life at the Court of Frederick II Hohenstaufen: Proceedings of the symposium sponsored by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, 18–20 January 1990, ed. William Tronzo, 1994, 129–49. Also, the notion

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of observation has been approached from a theoretical viewpoint: Danielle Jacquart, “L’observation dans les sciences de la nature au moyen âge: Limites et possibilités,” Micrologus 4 (1996): 55–75. This set of notions is linked with the concept of nature, which was the object of several studies, among which we can mention here: Franz Gräser, “Die Naturwissenschaften und das Benediktkloster Fulda im VIII. und IX. Jahrhundert,” Die Vorträge der Hauptversammlung der Internationalen Gesellschaft für Geschichte der Pharmazie e. V. während des Internationalen Pharmaziegeschichtlichen Kongresses in Rotterdam vom 17. – 21. September, ed. Georg Edmund Dann, 1965, 61–71; Andreas Speer, “The Discovery of Nature: The Contribution of the Chartrians to Twelfth-Century Attempts to Find a Scientia Naturalis,” Traditio 52 (1997): 135–51; also Vito Fumagalli, L’uomo e l’ambiente medievale, 1992. Research on these aspects also included an investigation on the link between folk lore and learned herbalism: Jerry Stannard, “Folk Medicine, Philosophy and Medieval Herbalism,” Res Publica Litterarum 3 (1980): 229–36, and id., “Folkloristic Elements in Medieval Herbalism,” Actes du XXVIe Congrès international d’histoire de la médecine, Plovdiv (Bulgaria), 20–25 août 1978, 1981, vol. 2, 203–5. Finally, the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance was the object of some studies that included the theoretical aspects (works are listed in chronological order): Jerry Stannard, “Medieval Italian Medical Botany,” Atti del XXI Congresso internazionale di storia della medicina, Siena, 22–28 settembre 1968, 2 vol., 1970, 1554–65 (reproduced in Stannard, Pristina Medicamenta … [above], no. XI); Richard Palmer, “Medical Botany in Northern Italy in the Renaissance,” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 78 (1985): 149–57; and Karen Meier Reeds, Botany in Medieval and Renaissance Universities, 1991. O. Astrology and Symbolism The uses of plants also included astrology and magic as the many manuscripts listed and accurately described in the Corpus Codicum Astrologorum Graecorum (11 vols., 1898–1951) show. Specific studies have been devoted to this aspect of medieval botany, from a general presentation in the Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft (Friedrich Pfister, “Pflanzenaberglaube,” RE XIX, 2 [1938], 1446–56) to the edition and analysis of manuscripts and texts, as for example: Armand Delatte, “Le traité des plantes planétaires d’un manuscrit de Léningrad,” Annuaire de l’Institut de philologie et d’histoire orientales 9 (1949): 145–77; Adalberto Pazzini (1878–1975), Virtù delle erbe secondo i sette pianeti. L’erbario detto di Tolomeo e quelli di altri astrologi (Cod. Vat. 11423), 1959, which analyses a broad range of texts; or, more recently, an edi-

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tion of some fragments: Arsenio Ferraces Rodríguez, “Dos fragmentos inéditos de la antigua traducción latina del De plantis duodecim signis et septem planetis subiectis atribuido a Tésalo de Tralles,” Traditio 59 (2004): 368–82. On magic, see also, and among many others, such study as Jerry Stannard, “Magiferous Plants and Magic in Medieval Medical Botany,” The Maryland Historian 8 (1977): 33–46 (reproduced in Stannard, Herbs and Herbalism … [above], no. V). Such uses of plants were linked with, and implied, the whole discourse on plant symbology, which cannot be presented in detail here, however. We shall mention only the general Cultural History of Plants edited by Ghillian Prance, and Mark Nesbitt, 2005, and the recent synthesis by Marcel De Cleene, and Marie Claire Lejeune, Compendium of Symbolic and Ritual Plants in Europe, 2 vols., 2002. Of interest, also a text edited by Margaret H. Thomson (Le jardin symbolique: Texte grec tiré du Clarkianus XI [above]), and the study by Jean-Pierre Albert, Odeurs de sainteté: La mythologie chrétienne des aromates, 1990, which focused on the Christian discourse of spices. Contributions to this vast sector dealt also with particular plants, among which (to quote just one): Anthony R. Littlewood, “The Symbolism of Apple in Byzantine Literature,” Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Byzantinistik 23 (1974): 33–59. P. Gardens Theoretical botany and plant uses and symbolism combined in the creation of gardens. Much literature has been devoted to the topic of medieval gardens. A collection of essays is Der Garten von der Antike bis zum Mittelalter, ed. Maureen Carroll-Spillecke, 1992. For Byzantium, more specifically, we could mention the classical work by Otmar Schissel (1884–1943), Der byzantinische Garten: seine Darstellung im gleichzeitigen Romane, 1942, now to be replaced (or completed) with the series of essays in the volume Byzantine Garden Culture, ed. Antony Littlewood, Henry Maguire, and Joachim Wolschke-bulmahn, 2002. Other essays should also be mentioned, as for example: Leslie Brubaker. and Anthony R. Littlewood, “Byzantinische Gärten,” Der Garten …, ed. Carroll-Spillecke (above), 212–48; Anthony R. Littlewood, “Gardens of Byzantium,” Journal of Garden History 12 (1992): 126–53; and id., “Gardens of the Palaces,” Byzantine Court Culture from 829 to 1204, ed. Henry Maguire, 1997, 13–38. For the Arabic world, one could select, among the abundant production, the following recent essays, all lavishly illustrated (photos and maps of gardens, reproductions of manuscripts, photos of works of art) (chronological order of publication): Arabesques et jardins de paradis: Collections françaises d’art islamique, Musée du Louvre, Paris, 16 octobre 1989 – 15 janvier 1990, 1989; Il

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giardino islamico. Architettura, natura, paesaggio, ed. Attilio Petruccioli, 1994; D. Fairchild Ruggles, Gardens, Landscape, & Vision in the Palaces of Islamic Spain, 2000; and Yves Porter, and Arthur Thévenart, Palaces and Gardens of Persia, 2003 (first published in French: Palais et Jardins de Perse, 2002). For the Western Medieval world, we could mention Marilyn Stokstad, and Jerry Stannard, Gardens of the Middle Ages, 1983; Dieter Hennebo, Gärten des Mittelalters, 1987; Sylvia Landsberg, The Medieval Garden, 1995; and Sur la terre comme au ciel: Jardins d’Occident à la fin du Moyen Age. Paris, Musée national du Moyen Age – Thermes de Cluny, 6 juin-16 septembre 2002, 2002. Gardens of a special type were the monastic garden (on which see Paul Meyvaert, “The Medieval Monastic Garden,” Medieval Gardens …, ed. Macdougall [above], 23–53) and the garden of medicinal plants (on which see Gundolf Keil, “Hortus Sanitatis, Garten der Gesundheit, Gaerde der Sunthede,” Medieval Gardens …, Macdougall ed. [above], 55–68). The archetype of both is the garden of Saint Gall, which has been the object of an exhaustive analysis: Horn, and Born, The Plan of St Gall … (above), vol. 2, 175–209, and 300–13 for the garden of medicinal plants. At the other end of the chronological spectrum are the Renaissance botanic gardens, the best and earliest examples of which are those of Pisa and Padua. On these gardens, see most recently: Fabio Garbari, Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi, and Alessandro Tosi, Giardino dei Semplici: L’Orto botanico di Pisa dal XVI al XX secolo, 1991, and L’Orto botanico di Padova, ed. Alessandro Minelli, 1995. On the plants in the medieval gardens, whatever their nature, there are several contributions in the volume Byzantine Garden Culture above: AliceMary Talbot, “Byzantine Monastic Horticulture: the Textual Evidence,” 37–67; Costas N. Constantinides, “Byzantine Gardens and Horticulture in the Late Byzantine Period, 1204–1453: the Secular Sources,” 87–103; Robert Rodgers, “Kêpopoiia: Garden Making and Garden Culture in the Geoponika,” 159–75; and John Scarborough, “Herbs of the Field and Herbs of the Garden in Byzantine Medicinal Pharmacy,” 179–88. For the Western medieval garden, see (in chronological order of publication): Jerry Stannard, “Medieval Gardens and their Plants,” Gardens …, ed. Stokstad, and Stannard, (above), 37–69; Penelope Hobhouse, Plants in Garden History, 1992; Miranda Innes, and Clay Perry, Medieval Flowers, 1997; Michel Botineau, Les Plantes du jardin médiéval, 2001; and Deirdre Larkin, “Hortus Redivivus: The Medieval Garden Recreated,” Health and Healing from the Medieval Garden, ed. Peter Dendle, and Alain Touwaide, 2008, 228–41, which offers new insights on this question, as its author grew the plants of medieval medicinal gardens at The Cloisters of the Metropolitan Museum outside New York City.

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Q. Plant Acclimatation The question of the range of the plants in gardens leads to another one: the transfer of plants, and, in the best cases, their acclimatization and naturalization. A methodological essay was published by Alain Touwaide, “The Jujube-Tree in the Eastern Mediterranean: A Case Study in the Methodology of Textual Archaeobotany,” Health and Healing …, ed. Dendle, and Touwaide (above), 72–100. The problem is not only to ascertain that non-native plants mentioned in texts are actually present in a new environment, but also to identify appropriate sources to trace introduced plants. In this sense, Jerry Stannard explored medieval tables of taxes: “Medieval Arzneitaxe and Some Indigenous Plant Species,” Orbis Pictus: Kultur und pharmaziehistorische Studien. Festschrift für Wolfgang-Hagen Hein zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Werner Dressendörfer, and Wolf-Dieter Müller-Jahncke , 1985, 267–72. As for tracing non-native plants, some studies were made (in chronological order of publication): John M. Riddle, “The Introduction and Use of Eastern Drugs in the Early Middle Ages,” Sudhoffs Archiv für Geschichte der Medizin und der Naturwissenschaften 49 (1965): 175–98 (reproduced in Riddle, Quid pro quo … [above], no. II); Jerry Stannard, “Eastern Plants and Plant Products in Medieval Germany,” Actes du XIIIe Congrès International d’Histoire des Sciences, Moscou, 18–24 août 1971, Sections III & IV: Antiquité et Moyen Age, 1974, 220–25; and several studies by Alain Touwaide: “Un manuscrit athonite du Traité de matière médicale de Dioscoride: l’Athous Magnae Laurae  75,” Scriptorium 45 (1991): 122–27; “Arabic Materia Medica in Byzantium during the 11th Century A.D. and the Problems of Transfer of Knowledge in Medieval Science,” Science and Technology in the Islamic World, ed. S. M. Razaullah Ansari, 2002, 223–47; Medicinalia Arabo-Byzantina, 1: Manuscrits et textes, 1997; “Lexica medico-botanica byzantina … [above]”; “Arabic Medicine in Greek Translation. A Preliminary Report,” Journal of the International Society for the History of Islamic Medicine 1 (2002): 45–53; “Magna Graecia iterata. Greek Medicine in Southern Italy in the 11th and 12th Centuries,” Medicina in Magna Graecia: The Roots of our Knowledge, ed. Alfredo Musajo Somma , 2004, 85–101; and “Medicina Bizantina e Araba alla Corte di Palermo,” Medicina, Scienza e Politica al Tempo di Federico II. Conferenza Internazionale, Castello Utveggio, Palermo, 4–5 ottobre 2007, ed. Natale Gaspare De Santo, and Guido Bellingghieri, 2008, 39–55. Such process of transfer of plants had also an impact on botanical lexicon, on wich there are many studies. For an example, see John A. C. Greppin, Bark’ Galianosi: The Greek-Armenian Dictionary to Galen, 1985.

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R. Botanical Illustration Last but far from least, the botanical illustration. Publications are numerous, from coffee-table books and commented color tables from illuminated manuscripts to expensive facsimiles of manuscripts (with a volume of commentary) and specialized studies best represented by such work as Giulia Orofino, “Gli erbari di età sveva,” Gli erbari medievali tra scienza simbolo e magia: Testi del VII Colloquio Medievale, Palermo, 5–6 maggio 1988 [1990], 325–46, and, more recently, Ead., “Ad decus et utilitatem operis. Caratteristiche e funzioni dell’illustrazione scientifica nel medioevo,” Medicina nei secoli 14 (2002): 439–60. This field of study was radically transformed during the 19th century. At its very beginning, indeed, Aubin-Louis Millin de Grandmaison (1759–1818) published an article in which he denied that plant representations in the manuscripts of Dioscorides, De materia medica, had any value: “Observations Sur les Manuscrits de Dioscorides qui sont conservés à la Bibliothèque nationale,” Magasin Encyclopédique/Journal des Sciences, des Lettres et des Arts 2 (1802): 152–16. Nevertheless, the English botanist John Sibthorp (1758–1796), who was the first to describe and identify the Greek flora according to Linnaeus’ system, consulted three illustrated manuscripts of Dioscorides. On his way to Greece, indeed, he stopped in Vienna where he examined the 6th-century manuscript now at the Österreichische National Bibliothek, medicus graecus 1, and the 7th-century copy now in Naples, National Library. He also visited Mount Athos where he inspected a codex of Dioscorides, which might be the mid-11th-century copy in the collection of the Megisti Lavra Monastery ( 75). In 1855, the German bibliographer of the history of medicine Ludwig Choulant (1791–1861) drew the attention of the scientific community to the Vienna and Naples copies of Dioscorides’ treatise and to their use by Western botanists from Rembert Dodoens (1516–1585), author of the famous Cruydeboeck first published in 1554: “Ueber die Handschriften des Dioskurides mit Abbildungen,” Archiv für die zeichnenden Künste 1 (1855): 56–62. In 1883, Henri Bordier (1817–1888) published a systematic census of the illustrations in the Greek codices of the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris, including the medical manuscripts with botanical illustrations: Description des peintures et autres ornements dans les manuscrits grecs de la Bibliothèque nationale, 1883. However, it was only with the magisterial study of the codex Vienna medicus graecus 1, published in 1906 accompanying its first facsimile that the scientific analysis of ancient botanical illustration started: Antonius De Premerstein (1869–1935), Carolus Wessely (1860–1931), and Iosephus Mantuani (1860–1933) De codicis Dioscuridei Aniciae Iulianae, nunc Vindobonensis Med. Gr. 1 historia, forma, scriptura, picturis, ed. Iosephus de Karabacek (1845–1918), 1906.

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Since then, much work has been done. A classical volume is The Art of Botanical Illustration: An Illustrated History by Wilfrid Blunt (1901–1987) with the assistance of William T. Stearn, which was first published in 1950, and has been repeatedly reedited since. The work was followed by The Illustrated Herbal by Blunt, and Sandra Raphael, first published in 1979 (with a revised edition in 1994), and also translated, among others into Italian (1989). Among the many illustrated books in this vein, we could mention the following (of different types, in different languages, and in chronological order of publication): Karl Eugen Heilmann, Kräuterbücher in Bild und Geschichte, 1966; Immagine e natura: L’immagine naturalistica nei codici e libri a stampa delle Biblioteche Estense e Universitaria. Secoli XV XVII, Catalogo della mostra, Modena, 21 marzo-15 maggio 1984, 1984; and Celia Fisher, Flowers in Medieval Manuscripts, 2004. S. Facsimiles of Herbals The study of botanical manuscripts and, by way of consequence, of botanical illustration – has immensely benefitted from the improvement in printing techniques and quality during the last quarter of the 20th century, and, more recently in image technology, which made it possible to produce facsimiles of manuscripts of the highest quality, almost identical to the originals. The most ancient Greek manuscripts of Dioscorides, De materia medica, have been reproduced twice each (also in more common editions), as well as the Greek Nicander of Paris, some Arabic copies of Dioscorides, other botanico-pharmaceutical compilations, many Latin herbals and, also, the splendidly and lavishly 14th-century illustrated copies of the Tacuinum sanitatis. The production of such high-quality and expensive facsimiles is now challenged by the digital reproduction of manuscripts, be it on CDRom or on the Internet, which is much less expensive and open to a larger audience. Many libraries and museums, particularly libraries of botanical gardens and specialized rare-book collections, are currently digitizing all or parts of the herbals in their collections (manuscript and printed). However interesting these reproductions are (as they give a wider access to these documents, usually rare and often of a restricted access), they do not cover the whole sector and do not provide relevant analytical information (especially botanical). This is the objective, instead, of the Web site PLANT (the name of which is the acronym of Plantarum Aetatis Novae Tabulae or Renaissance Botanical Illustrations) created at the Botany Department of the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution, on the site of the Smithsonian Institution Libraries (http://www.sil.si.edu/digitalcollections/herbals). Though devoted to Renaissance botanical illustration, it includes late medieval books.

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Furthermore, it adds original scientific metadata on the authors and their works, the books themselves, and the history of plant representations. Also and no less important it gives the scientific name of the plants, as well as their medieval names in a broad range of languages extracted from the books themselves, and their names in five modern languages (English, French, German, Italian, Spanish). Images can be consulted by author, title, period, and plant name (in all the languages above, including the several medieval ones). A world inventory of medical and natural history manuscripts with scientific illustrations (in all languages) was published by Loren MacKinney (1891–1963), Medical Illustrations in Medieval Manuscripts, 1965. The photographic archive created by MacKinney to compile this list is deposited at the library of the North Carolina State University at Chapel Hill and is accessible via Internet (http://www.lib.unc.edu/dc/mackinney). T. The Classical Pictorial Tradition In spite of the vast quantity of material preserved, research on botanical illustration has focused on some major illustrated herbals, principally De materia medica by Dioscorides and its epiphenomena, particularly in the Latin West, from the Pseudo-Apuleius to late medieval anonymous herbals of all kinds. On Dioscorides, one could single out the following publications in addition to the 1906 epoch-making study edited by de Karabacek above, and the volumes of commentary that accompany the facsimiles. See, for example (in chronological order of publication): Miranda Anichini, “Il Dioscoride di Napoli,” Atti dell’Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Rendiconti della Classe di Scienze morali, storiche e filologiche Serie VIII, n. 11 (1956): 77–104; Ranuccio BianchiBandinelli (1900–1975), “Il Dioscoride napoletano,” La Parola del Passato 11 (1956): 48–51; Herbert Hunger, “Dioskurides,” Reallixikon zur byzantinischen Kunst, vol. 1 (1966): 1191–96; and, more recently, Sergio Toresella, “Dioscoride,” Enciclopedia dell’Arte Medievale, vol. 5 (1994), 655–63. These publications of an introductory or encyclopedic nature can be usefully complemented by the following in-depth analyses of illustrated herbals: [Henri Omont (1857–1940)], Pedanii Dioscuridis Anazarbei De Materia Medica Libri VII: Accedunt Nicandri et Eutecnii Opuscula Medica. Codex Constantinopolitanus saeculo X exaratus et picturis illustratus, olim Manueli Eugenici, Caroli Rinuccini Florentini, Thomae Phillipps Angli, nunc inter Thesauros Pierpont Morgan Bibliothecae asservatus, 2 vol., 1935; Paul Buberl (1885–1942), Die byzantinische Handschriften, 1. Der Wiener Dioskurides und die Wiener Genesis, 1937; Otto Mazal, Pflanzen, Wurzeln, Säfte, Samen. Antike Heilkunst in Miniaturen des Wiener Dioskurides,1981; Alain Touwaide, “Un recueil grec de pharmacologie du Xe siècle illustré au XIVe siècle: le Vaticanus graecus 284,” Scriptorium 39 (1985): 13–56; Emilie

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Leal, “Un manuscrit illustré du traité de matière médicale de Dioscoride le Paris grec 2180,” B. A. thesis, University of Provence, Aix-Marseille, 2 vols., 1997; Alessia Aletta, “Studi e ricerche sul Dioscoride della Pierpont Morgan Library M. 652”, B. A. thesis, University of Rome “La Sapienza,” 2 vols., 1997–1998; Daniela Fausti, “MP3 2095 Erbario illustrato,” Estratto provvisorio dal Corpus dei Papiri Greci di Medicina, 1998, 43–58; Mauro Ciancaspro, Guglielmo Cavallo, and Alain Touwaide, Dioscurides, De materia medica, facsimile edition with a commentary, 2 vols., 1999; and Alain Touwaide, “The Salamanca Dioscorides (Salamanca, University Library, 2659),” Erytheia 24 (2003): 125–58. Many of such publications deal mainly with the tradition of the illustrations, that is, their models and copies, without necessarily considering the macroscopic tradition of botanical illustration. We cannot discuss here the debated question of the origins of botanical illustration (do they go back to Dioscorides or have they been introduced later into the manuscripts of De materia medica?), as it is out of the scope of the present essay (for one of the latest contributions to this question in the current state, see Giulia Orofino, “Dioskurides war gegen Pflanzenbilder,” Die Waage 30 [1991]: 144–49). The major question posed by the representations of plants in medieval manuscripts (whatever the language, Greek, Latin, or Arabic) is their relation with ancient models. This question implies, as a corollary, another one, on the existence or not of periods of artistic revival. The major contributions in this field were by the historians of art Kurt Weitzmann (1904–1993) (see Die byzantinische Buchmalerei des 9. und 10. Jahrhunderts, 2 vols., 1935 [rpt. 1996]; “Das klassische Erbe in der Kunst Konstantinopels,” Alte und Neue Kunst: Wiener kunstwissenschaftliche Blätter 3 [1954]: 41–59; English translation: “The Classical Heritage in the Art of Constantinople,” Studies in Classical and Byzantine Manuscript Illumination, ed. Herbert L. Kessler with an introduction by Hugo Buchthal, 1971, 126–150; and Geistige Grundlagen und Wesen der makedonischen Renaissance, 1963; English translation: “The Character and Intellectual Origins of the Macedonian Renaissance,” Studies … [above], 176–223), and Heide Grape Albers (Spätantike Bilder aus der Welt des Arztes: Medizin. Bilderhandschriften der Spätantike und ihre mittelalterliche Überlieferung, 1977). On this question, see also such work as Diane O. Le Berrurier, The Pictorial Sources of Mythological and Scientific Illustrations in Hrabanus Maurus’ De rerum naturis, 1978. Another corollary of this question of the link between book production and tradition is the problem of personal observation of nature. In an often cited article considered as seminal, Otto Pächt (1902–1988) (author also of “Die früheste abendländische Kopie der Illustrationen des Wiener Dioskurides,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 38 [1975]: 201–14) ident-

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ified the late 13th-century manuscript now in London, British Library, Egerton 747, possibly of Salernitan origin, as the first manifestation of the interest for nature showed by Italian artists (“Early Italian Nature Studies and the Early Calendar Landscape,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 13 [1950]: 13–47). Much of the later production focused on this question of the birth or realism (see, for example, Sergio Toresella, “Il Dioscoride di Istanbul e le prime figurazioni naturalistiche botaniche,” Atti e Memorie dell’Accademia Italiana di Storia della Farmacia 13 [1996]: 21–40, who locates the origin of realism in a 13th-century of the Arabic translation of Dioscorides), and on the Egerton manuscript, traditionally considered as a milestone in the development of scientific botanical illustration (in this sense, see, for example, the recent reproduction of the manuscript, with a study, by Minta Collins, and Sandra Raphael, A Medieval Herbal: A Facsimile of British Library Egerton MS 747, 2003. For a renewed approach to the manuscript, its text and its illustrations, see Jean Givens, “Reading and Writing the Illustrated Tractatus de herbis, 1280–1526,” Visualizing … , ed. Givens, Reeds, and Touwaide, (above), 115–45, and also Iolanda Ventura, “Per un’edizione del Tractatus de herbis manoscritto Egerton 747,” Salerno: Un progetto di paesaggio, ed. Paola Capone, and Pierfranco Galliani, 2002, 129–37). However correct Pächt’s study might be, other manuscripts make it possible to trace earlier signs of observation of nature. On this question of observation in ancient natural sciences, see, in addition to the articles by Beaujouan, “La Prise de conscience …” (above), Ribemont and Sodigne-Costes, “Botanique médiévale …” (above), and Jacquart, “L’Observation …” (above), Orofino, “Il rapporto con l’antico e l’osservazione …” (above), and also Jean Givens, Observation and image-making in Gothic art, 2005. More generally, see also Guy Beaujouan, “Réflexions sur les rapports entre théorie et pratique au Moyen Age, The Cultural Context of Medieval Learning: Proceedings of the First International Colloquium on Philosophy, Science, and Theology in the Middle Ages September 1973, ed. John E. Murdoch, and Edith Dudley Sylla, 1975, 437–84. The recent work by Minta Collins, Medieval Herbals: The Illustrative Traditions, 2000, does not bring any new element (and is largely misleading on numerous points), however lavishly illustrated it is and well documented it might seem. The fact is that the approach to ancient and medieval botanical illustation lacks a semantics of scientific illustration and particularly of natural history illustration in spite of such publications as, for instance, Alfred Stückelberger, Bild und Wort: Das illustrierte Fachbuch in der antiken Naturwissenschaften, Medizin und Technik, 1994. However needed such study is, the most recent research shifted focus from the pictures themselves to their making and the way they translate the perception of nature (rather than the sup-

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posed objectivity of nature itself), in a significant, and probably post-modern way, as is shown, for example, by the several essays in the collection Visualizing …, ed. Givens, Reeds, and Touwaide, (above). Select Bibliography Julia Ma Carabaza Bravo, Expiración García Sánchez, Esteban Hernández Bermejo, and Alfonzo Jiménez Ramírez, Árboles y arbustos de Al-Andalus (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2004); Willem F. Daems, Nomina simplicium medicinarum ex synonymariis Medii Aevi collecta: Semantische Untersuchungen zum Fachwortschatz hoch- und spätmittelalterlicher Drogenkunde (Leiden, New York, and Cologne: E. J. Brill, 1993); Marcel De Cleene and Marie Claire Lejeune, Compendium of Symbolic and Ritual Plants in Europe, 2 vols. (Ghent: Mens & Cultuur, 2002); Hendrik J. Drossart Lulofs, and E. L. J. Poortman, Nicolaus Damascenus ‘De plantis’: Five Translations (Amsterdam, Oxford, and New York: North-Holland Publishing Company, 1989); Hermann Fischer, Mittelalterliche Pflanzenkunde (Munich: Verlag der Münchner Drucke,1929; rpt. Hildesheim: Olms, 1967); Carmélia Opsomer, Index de la pharmacopée de Ier au Xe siècle, 2 vols. (Hildesheim, Zurich, and New York: Olms, 1989); John M. Riddle, Quid pro quo: Studies in the History of Drugs (Aldershot, Hampshire, and Brookfield, VT: Variorum, 1992); Fuat Sezgin, Geschichte der arabischen Schrifttums, vol. 4: Alchimie, Chemie, Botanik, Agrikultur bis ca. 430 H. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1971); Jerry Stannard, Pristina medicamenta: Ancient and Medieval Medical Botany, ed. Katherine E. Stannard, and Richard Kay (Aldershot, Hampshire, and Brookfield, VT: Variorum, 1999); id., Herbs and Herbalism in the Middle Age and the Renaissance, ed. Katherine E. Stannard, and Richard Kay (Aldershot, Hampshire, and Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1999); Johannes Stirling, Lexicon nominum herbarum arborum fructuumque lingua latinae ex fontibus Latinitatis ante saeculum XVII scriptis, collegit et descriptionibus botanicis illustravit, 4 vols. (Budapest: Encyclopaedia, 1995–1998); Manfred Ullmann, Die Natur- und Geheimwissenschaften im Islam (Leiden and Cologne: E. J. Brill, 1972).

Alain Touwaide

Byzantine Art and Architecture A. Introduction Byzantine art is a Christian art, dedicated to the expression of the faith and the dogmas of the Eastern, Orthodox Church. It includes several aspects of pictorial arts, such as mosaics, murals, icon-painting, illuminative manuscripts, sculptures, ceramics, metal and stone objects, jewels, coins, textiles as well as church- and secular architecture. Both chronologically and topographically it concerns a vast space of time and a wide geographical area,

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with, however, unstable borders; from eastern Asia Minor to southern Balkans, and from northern Africa to Italy and Greece. A typical – not by all scholars accepted – date for its official start is 324 A.D., when the emperor Constantine the Great transferred the capital of the Roman Empire from Rome to the newly-founded city of Constantinople. An equally important date is 313, when the Mediolano (Milano) Edictum was declared, which led to religious liberty, and consequently, to the recognition of Christian faith as the state’s religion. A definite end is 1453, when Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine state, was finally conquered by the Ottoman Turks. During the Byzantine era foreign cultures, such as Islam or the West, accepted impacts and transferred influences, establishing interesting forms. After the fall of Constantinople, the tradition of Byzantine art remained vivid and it was reflected centuries hereafter to the artistic production of eastern world (Georg Ostroworsky, Geschichte des byzantinischen Staates [1940; 1963]; The Cambridge Medieval History, vol. IV, 1966; Dionysios Zakythinos, The Byzantine Empire 324–1071, 1st ed. 1969, 1972, 19–23; Gilbert Dagron, Naissance d’ une capitale: Constantinople et ses constitutions de 330 à 451, 1974; Ekaterini Christophilopoulou, Byzantine History, vol. 2, 1st ed. 1975, 1993, 20–21,127–138; Ioannis Karayiannopoulos, The Byzantine State, 1st ed. 1983, 2001, 52–61. B. Terminological Definition and Analysis Despite the variations of style, due to epoch or locality, Byzantine art and architecture is of uniform and distinct character, without nevertheless lucking of experimentations. In order to study it in a more effective, methodological way, a division of time periods and geographical locations is traditionally established. Consequently, there is a typical distinction of the Early Christian (330–843), Middle Byzantine (843–1204) and Late Byzantine era (1204–1453), as well as the artistic production and monuments of great centers (Constantinople, Thessaloniki, northern Italy, etc.) and those of the provinces (Greece, Asia Minor, Balkans, Near East, etc.). The typological evolution of Byzantine architecture is characterized by the progressive abandonment of the large scale basilicas with wooden or vaulted roofs of the first centuries. Parallel to this tendency is the emergence of the magnificent domed churches in Constantinople (Saint Sophia, Saint Erene, etc.) in the middle of the 6th century, which led to the adoption of new provincial types like triconchs, tetraconchs, free crosses, remaining however to a modest scale. The popular use of the cross-in-square inscribed domed type appeared officially in mainland of Greece, in the second half of the 10th century

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(Church of Theotokos, Boiotia). The use of brick patterns as decoratives (letters, crosses, meanders, etc.) as well as of the cloisonné masonry (stones encircled by bricks), prevailed as elements that characterized the church architecture hereafter. The dominance of the Crusaders after 1204 in lands of the Byzantine empire brought about changes in the provincial church architecture. Cheaper and easier to built types became common, such as the traverse vault or the single vaulted churches. The style of late Byzantine architecture is expressed by the addition to the main church of collateral spaces, such as naves, and chapels, with a rich and elegant brick decoration. In pictorial arts, the main tendencies were a higher or lesser degree of abstraction, the corresponding amount of classical heritage, the intense spirituality of figures and the deliberate refusal of nature resemblance. The earliest depictions are testified in tombs and catacombs, with vivid symbolic content. Landmarks of the early Christian period are the panel-icons of the encaustic technique, dated from the 6th to 9th century. The application of mosaic decoration was also common during this period, reaching a peak during the reign of emperor Justinian (527–565). The fact displays the lavish patronage that allowed huge funds on the erection and the decoration of the churches in the grand centers. During however the centuries of Iconoclasm (726–843), a period of political and religious crisis, non-pictorial symbols, such as crosses or geometrical and plant motives were imposed as the official expression of art. A period of great influence of classical artistic values succeeded, known as “Macedonian Renaissance” named after the dynasty that ruled the empire from the 9th century. It inspired miniature painting and reflected in ambitious iconographic programs. In the region of Cappadocia a provincial expression of painting was exercised, further influencing iconography and style of the so-called “lay” art. The conquest of Constantinople by the Crusaders in 1204 and the consequent division of the former Byzantine lands in Latin states, left decisive effects in the pictorial arts of the East, visible in details in figures and in compositions. The last phase of the Byzantine art, the so-called “Paleologean Renaissance.” named after the last dynasty that ruled the empire, adapted a humanistic character, with dramatic and passionate gestures, voluminous and plastic figures, representations of rich architectural and natural landscape (Architecture: Gabriel Millet, L’ École grecque dans l’ architecture Byzantine, 1916; Georgios Sotiriou, Christian and Byzantine Archaeology, 1942; André Grabar, Martyrium: Recherches sur le culte des reliques et l’ art Chrétien antique, 1946; Anastasios Orlandos, H  «      

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    «   « «, vol. 1–3, 1952–1957; Richard Krautheimer, Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture, 1st ed. 1965, Cyril Mango Architettura Bizantina, 1979; Friedrich-Wilhelm Deichmann, Einführung in die christliche Archäologie, 1983; Painting: Otto Demus, Byzantine mosaic decoration, 1964, Viktor Lazarev, Storia della pittura bizantina, 1967, David TalbotRice, Byzantine painting, the last phase 1968; Kurt Weitzmann-Manolis Chatzidakis, Krsto Mijatev, and Svetozar Radojcic, Frühe Ikonen: Sinai, Griechenland, Bulgarien, Jugoslawien, 1965; Kurt Weitzmann, Studies in Classical and Byzantine Manuscript Illumination, 1971. C. History of Research and Future Trends The particular interest in Byzantine studies was first demonstrated in the sections of Byzantine literature and theology. Foreign travelers were the first who preserved a picture of Byzantine monuments, through descriptions and engravings. Byzantine art was at first considered as part of medieval history and philology, and the first “Department of Byzantine Studies” was founded in Munich, Germany, in 1892 by the scholar Karl Krumbacher. The first books concerning architecture and mural painting were published mainly at the beginning of the 20th century. Scholarly interest was especially focused on the Byzantine antiquities of Asia Minor and Cappadocia, as well as those of Northern Africa. Matters concerning the origin and the expansion of the cross-in-square and of the traverse vault type are still open to debate. A long list of scientific journals and institutes treat aspeds of Byzantine culture, history, and archaeology. The “International Association for Byzantine Studies” was organized in 1948 and since then 21 conferences have been held in several cities. After the end of Second World War, publications as well as great scale excavations took place. One of the greatest expositions that brought out the Byzantine art to the world was organized in Athens in 1964. Since then, numerous exhibitions and museum collections from Europe to the United States have been dedicated to the art of Byzantium. Future trends include the study of settlements, church, secular and preindustrial buildings. Light is also shed upon fields such as ceramics or metal artifacts of daily life – finds often neglected in former times.

Select Bibliography Marcell Restle and Klaus Wessel, Reallexikon zur byzantinischen Kunst (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1966); Charles Delvoye, L’art byzantin (Paris: Arthaud, 1967); Wolfgang Fritz Volbach and Jacqueline Lafontaine-dosogne, Byzanz und der christliche Osten (Berlin: Propyläen Verlag, 1968); André Grabar, L’art de la fin de l’antiquité et

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du moyen age, 3 vol. (Paris: College de France, 1968); David Talbot Rice, Art of the Byzantine Era (New York: Praeger 1963/1994); L’art byzantin, art européen (Athens, 1964 [exhibition catalogue]); The Glory of Byzantium, ed. Helen Evans and William Wixom (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1997 [exhibition catalogue]); Byzantium: Faith and Power, ed. Helen Evans (London: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2004 [exhibition catalogue]).

Sophia Germanidou

Byzantine Philosophical Treatises A. Introduction Modern academic Byzantine Studies began around the mid-19th century. Because these Studies had their origin in classical philology, they were first focused on literature, historiography, rhetoric, the visual arts and jurisprudence. Philosophy remained outside the scope of the main interests in Byzantine Studies, despite the seminal research of Karl Krumbacher (Geschichte der byzantinischen Literatur, 1897), and perhaps precisely because of his work, insofar as he treated philosophical texts within the study of Byzantine literature in general, without specifically differentiating philosophical texts from other types of literature. Moreover, Krumbacher denied the possibility of any original philosophical development in Byzantine thought, and spoke of the “further fruitlessness” of the “Greek intellect” (op. cit., 428). In light of the origins of Byzantine Studies and Krumbacher’s judgment, Herbert Hunger’s statement in the mid-20th century comes as no surprise: “It could be argued that there was no Byzantine philosophy at all! Theology was once and for all responsible for the sphere of metaphysics, and every philosophical work produced outside this framework, as far as we can conceive today, essentially is merely some derivative of Platonism and/or Aristotelianism, without even mentioning that there is no room for talking about some development of the Byzantine philosophy” (Herbert Hunger, Byzantinische Geisteswelt, 1958, 15). Exactly twenty years later, however, the same author devoted the first sixty pages of his major work, Die hochsprachliche profane Literatur der Byzantiner (vol. 1, 1978, 4–62), to philosophy in Byzantium, defining the main orbits that research in the next 20 years would follow. So, something happened between 1958 and 1978 – the foundations of which were laid somewhat earlier – that changed Hunger’s views.

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B. The Real Beginning: Tatakis Indeed, the real beginning of the study of Byzantine philosophy may be dated shortly before Hunger’s first book, and is related to the works of Basil Tatakis, most of all to his book La Philosophie Byzantine, published in 1949 as a fascicule supplementaire to the Histoire de la philosophie of Emile Brehier. Tatakis himself declares in the preface of that book that there had been no preceding studies or texts on the subject that he could use in his own research: the philosophical thought in Byzantium had not before then been an object of detailed and systematic research. Although some of Tatakis’s analyses may seem superficial today, we would be ungrateful not to remark his exceptional merits in the study of Byzantine philosophy, of which he undoubtedly is to be considered as the modern founder. Besides identifying the major figures in Byzantine philosophy and their most important teachings, Tatakis posed several questions that became crucial for interpreters in the course of the next 50 years. The first question posed by Tatakis is whether philosophy, in the strict sense of the term, really existed in Byzantium or whether it was merely a technical and didactic instrument of theology. Tatakis answered this question in favor of the independence of philosophy, stressing the higher level of autonomy of philosophy in Byzantium in comparison with the situation in medieval Western Europe. In the context of that argument, it is not by chance that he highlights the work of Michael Psellos; because of Tatakis’s influence Psellos is still regarded by many as “the central figure in Byzantine philosophy,” and his name is known even to those who otherwise do not have the slightest idea about the existence of philosophy in Byzantium. Tatakis’s position entails another question, concerning the relative influence on Byzantine philosophy of ancient philosophy, on the one hand, and of Christian dogma, on the other (for ancient philosophy and Christian dogma indisputably are the two basic sources of philosophy in Byzantium). Tatakis also raised questions concerning, strictly speaking, the actual temporal beginning of Byzantine philosophy. The question arises because of the gradual, “evolutionary” and non-catastrophic beginnings of the historical Byzantine period. Even now historians still argue whether Byzantine philosophy has its origins in the 4th or in the 6–7th or even in the 9th century. Today, there is a tendency to accept that the main problems, definitions and methods of Byzantine philosophy were formed in the period before the 7th century, that the independence of Byzantine philosophy is already visible during the 7–8th century, and that in the 9th century we are able to speak about a “Byzantine classicism” (so Paul Lemerle’s expression, Le Premier humanisme byzantin, 1971, 196 and 204) that refers to “classics” at the roots of its

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own tradition. An overemphasis on the problem of dating is evidence of the uncertainty concerning the constructive elements of Byzantine philosophy. Tatakis, who in 1949 put the beginning in the 4th century, in 1969 (“La Philosophie grecque patristique et byzantine, “Histoire de la philosophie, vol. I, Orient, Antiquité, Moyen Age, 1969, 936–1005) yet speaks about a preceding “early Byzantine period,” which he names “patristic.” He thus symptomatically introduces a concept of “patristic” that is alien to the Byzantine tradition itself, and thereby casts the problem of the self-identity of philosophy into an inadequate and distorting framework. For a long time the criteria determining the “essence” of Byzantine philosophy have been borrowed from the perspective and categories of Western European medieval culture. That perspective is especially evident in the ways scholars have posed and resolved questions concerning the relationship between “theology and philosophy” in Byzantium. C. The Establishment of the Paradigm The book Kirche und theologische Literatur im byzantinischen Reich by Hans-Georg Beck, published in 1959, advanced this question further. Beck catalogues, systemizes and characterizes the authors and the texts, which still today remain the most important objects of research for the historians of Byzantine philosophy; working as an historian of theology and adopting an entirely Western European definition of “theology,” he subdivides philosophical texts into the categories “dogmatic and polemical.” He thus began a discussion that has lasted for nearly 50 years, providing a framework for the investigation of the philosophical affiliations of authors, with fundamental significance for philosophical developments in Byzantium. In his collection of articles titled Antike Philosophie und byzantinisches Mittelalter and especially in his program text, “Die Kontinuität in der Philosophie der Griechen bis zum Untergang des byzantinischen Reiches” (op. cit., 15–37), Klaus Oehler established another circle of questions and problems concerning Byzantine philosophy. As the title of his program text indicates, Oehler sought to prove that Byzantine philosophy was essentially a continuation of ancient philosophy in the Byzantine Christian “regime;” thus he emphasized the continual reception of Aristotle and especially of Plato by Byzantine thinkers, and invented the formula of the “neo-Platonic-Byzantine” philosophy – also under the sign of Christianity – which according to him lasted from the 3rd until the 15th century. Oehler’s interpretation has given rise to endless discussions concerning Platonism and Aristotelianism in Byzantium; as a result of being analyzed in these broad categories, it became a commonplace that the prevailing “Platonic” character of Byzantine

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philosophy may be contrasted with the prevailing “Aristotelian” character of Western philosophy. Reading Byzantine philosophy in these terms made it difficult to find anything philosophically specific to the thought of Byzantine thinkers themselves. This discussion has become exhausted. Contemporary scholarship on Byzantine philosophy supports the argument of Linos Benakis that despite the direct reception and assimilation of terms, concepts, problems and views articulated in ancient philosophy, it is proper to think of “an authentic […] philosophical tradition in the Byzantine world” (“Byzantine Philosophy,” Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol 2, ed. E. Craig, 1998, 160–65, here 162). Indeed, we can speak properly and not merely generically about Byzantine “Platonism” and “Aristotelianism” only during and after the decade of the 1440s! It is curious, for Benakis claims that Byzantine philosophy exactly at that time is “unsystematic,” a statement which itself has recently become an object of dispute. Oehler also undertook to identify and systemize what he judged to be the main problems of Byzantine philosophy. He determined the most important basic questions concerning not only the origins and primary sources of Byzantine philosophy but also concerning its “essence” or “spirit.” That ‘essence’ of Byzantine philosophy, Oehler argued, is to be found especially in anthropological questions concerning the human substance and hypostasis, the soul, reason and the body. Within this network of anthropological questions, Oehler identifies the doctrine concerning the distinction between the essence and its energies (which has its origins in Aristotle but was transmitted as well in neo-Platonic and Christian speculations) as central to all of Byzantine philosophy. The main lines of research on Byzantine philosophy in the period 1949–1969 were consolidated and ratified in Hunger’s fundamental work published in 1978. The whole problematic of this line of interpretation centers around three questions or topics: (1) the definition of philosophy (which established, entails the question of the historical “continuity” and “innovation”); (2) the relations between “Platonism” and “Aristotelianism”; (3) the relation between “philosophy and theology.” Another product generated by Hunger’s analysis of Byzantine philosophy is the notion “Christian Humanism” in Byzantium, which term in the end explains nothing – or perhaps everything. In any event, the tight linking of philosophy with theological discourse in Byzantium has enabled scholars to comprehend the whole content and wide range of problems discussed by Byzantine “philosophic” thinkers. In 1977 Gerhard Podskalsky published his capital work titled Theologie und Philosophie in Byzanz (Podskalsky’s recent book, Von Photios zu Bessarion,

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2003, develops the same line of interpretation). The significance of Podskalsky’s book surpasses that of the works I have mentioned heretofore. Podskalsky’s work is based on a detailed knowledge of the sources and evinces several other remarkable qualities, without which the advances of contemporary studies of Byzantine philosophy would be inconceivable. At the same time, one cannot fail to remark the polemic character of his work, whereby he defines his own positions by contrast with those of a set of opponents (which doe not include any of the authors that was mentioned so far). This character of Podskalsky’s work makes it easy for one to identify the preconceptions that affect his interpretations. One should first note that Podskalsky does not radically pose the question of the specific meaning of the concept of ‘theology’ within Byzantine culture; rather, he insists that in relation to this term we ought to speak mainly of a spiritual experience, and he points out further that in Byzantium theology was not transformed into “science,” as was attempted in the West. Although he does not say so explicitly, Podskalsky’s arguments suggest that the speculative discourse and reflection on theological problems in Byzantium is an element of philosophical thought, that is, that such discourse and speculation pertains to the superior part of “first philosophy.” Podskalsky’s re-conception of Byzantine theological speculation enables him to draw attention to the actual methods of philosophizing in Byzantium, and to differentiate diverse tendencies in Byzantine philosophical culture. Some of his preconceptions and prejudices, however, cause him underestimate a limine some trends in Byzantine thought in favor of others; thus, for example, he speaks of a collision between “mystical theology” (identified with some “bildungsfeindliche Orthodoxie”) and “humanism” standing for an “assimilationsfreudige theologische Wissenschaft.” Podskalsky’s criteria for “humanism” (like Hunger’s) are such that under this category one may include, de facto, all of the philosophically active authors in Byzantium. That Podskalsky places authors whom he does not like in a contrary category is not the result of an analysis of historical realities but of his polemical preconceptions. Podskalsky’s modern opponents are thinkers, who have contributed decisively to the development of the studies in Byzantine philosophy, even though none of them is a philosopher ex professo and many of them explicitly reject philosophizing in the theological sphere. Here we refer to such figures as Vladimir Lossky, Georgy Florovsky and Jean Meyendorff, to which we can add the names of Vasilij Kriwoshein, Dumitru Staniloae, Kallistos Ware and others. The works of these scholars and thinkers, the so-called “neo-Palamites” (originally a pejorative name), began to appear in the years

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immediately following World War II; in their writings they construct an immanently coherent or “integral” theological teaching, based strongly on the works of Gregorius Palamas, which they polemically defend and cast in the conceptual framework of western European culture, where most of them anyway live and work. The significance of these thinkers’ work is to be appreciated by reason of the fact that, by means of immanent criteria, they discovered the main problems pertaining to thought about God in the Eastern Christian tradition, emphasized the main stages in its unfolding, and produced the first critical editions of Byzantine authors of capital importance. Their work reveals the specific character of thought within the Eastern tradition and its independent value. Precisely in their attempt to stress the specific identity of Byzantine thought and its independence, and in their responses to sharp criticisms of their work by its opponents, the “neo-Palamites” choose often to exaggerate the “otherness” of the Eastern tradition, to ascribe to it an absolute incommunicability with Western philosophical and theological thought, and in so doing not rarely impose upon Byzantine thought a certain antirationalism and anti-philosophic attitude, etc. D. The Academical Establishment and the Quest for Philosophical Histories It is within this perspective that one should evaluate the work of Linos Benakis, whose first article on Byzantine philosophy was published in 1958. One can say surely that thanks to the books and articles of Benakis, concerning key authors and the general characteristics of Byzantine thought, studies of Byzantine philosophy now move steadily in the direction of the investigation of authentic philosophical problems within the Byzantine cultural tradition, and that they are perceived through the lens of a problematic specific to Byzantine thought (and not, for example, imported from the study of Western Latin philosophy). Benakis has made another major contribution: from Tatakis until now students of Byzantine philosophy have lamented that a huge number of Byzantine philosophical texts remain unedited or published at all. Benakis, his students and the school founded by him have done much to remedy that situation and to fill that serious void. Concerning Benakis one should acknowledge yet another important contribution: it was because of his initiative that in 1987 the Commission on “Byzantine philosophy” in the Société Internationale pour l’Étude de la Philosophie Médiévale (S.I.E.P.M.) was founded; Benakis served as the President of that Commission from that date until 2002. In sum, one can say that it is due to the efforts of Linos Benakis’s that studies in Byzantine phil-

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osophy have become recognized as a normal research and academic discipline. At this historical juncture, it is a fact that all of the large questions concerning Byzantine philosophy posed by scholars during the second half of the 20th century concerning the existence, sources and general characteristics of Byzantine philosophy, its main trends, historical developments, periods and figures are in principle answered, at least according to the terms in which they were posited. Essentially a macro-framework for the study of Byzantine philosophy has achieved consensus. This makes possible and even demands the investigation of what until now have been by-passed fields of research. Such, for instance, are the analyses of the influence of Latin philosophy and theology upon Byzantine thinkers (important here are the works of John Demetracopoulos) and comparative analyses of the Byzantine and Latin traditions (such as the works of Tzotcho Boiadjiev and generally those of the Bulgarian school of philosophical medieval studies, exemplified, e. g., by the volume Die Dionysius Rezeption im Mittelalter, ed. Tzotcho Boiadjiev, Georgi Kapriev, and Andreas Speer, 2000). Likewise Byzantine philosophers have been studied in perspectives that are not strictly “philosophical”; noteworthy in this regard is Nagel G. Wilson’s Scholars of Byzantium (1st ed. 1983, 2nd. ed. 1996), wherein Wilson explores the Byzantine philosophers in terms of their relation to the written text. As I stated above, the study of Byzantine philosophy has become increasingly recognized as a distinct academic discipline. Since 1999 course in the history of Byzantine philosophy have been established in the curricula of the universities in practically all of the Orthodox Balkan countries. Such courses have also appeared in the universities of Western Europe and in America. There is a noticeable similar expansion of the geography of the research centers. More and more Byzantine philosophy has attracted interest independently of religious or regional and cultural motivation, and there has developed an interest in philosophical texts beyond the disciplinary boundaries of philosophy and theology, e. g., among sociologists. Having reached the first decade of the 21st century, it is just to say that the founding, accumulative phase of research in Byzantine philosophy – during which the basic facts were accumulated, the major themes determined and the proper methods established – has successfully come to an end. It is for that reason to disagree with Linos Benakis’s thesis from 2002, according to which “we are not yet ready to replace Tatakis’s work with a new, more comprehensive history of Byzantine philosophy” (“Current research in Byzantine Philosophy,” Byzantine Philosophy and its Ancient Sources,

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ed. K. Ierodiakonou, 285). On the contrary, today we are not only ready but obliged to “replace” it. Of course, the point here is not simply to replace Tatakis’s book with books of the same kind, even if these books would be broader in scope, more detailed or more precise. The development of research has already reached a point at which the creation of historical surveys of Byzantine Philosophy, i. e. of more or less elaborate descriptions of its contents, could be viewed only as anachronism. On the contrary, the period that was started in such one honorable way by Tatakis, requires, in order to be worthy of the honor due to its pioneers, to be finished by the construction of a philosophical history or even philosophical histories of the philosophical practices in Byzantium (to make use of a Kent Emery’s, Jr., terminological formulation of this distinction). Only a mature conceptual analysis of the Byzantine philosophical tradition can explicate to the full the essence of what Tatakis started in 1949. One contribution to that effort is Georgi Kapriev’s book, Philosophie in Byzanz, 2005; as well as its pilot Bulgarian version (The Byzantine Philosophy: Four Centres of the Synthesy, 2001). The object in that book is to present a general outline of Byzantine philosophy, constructed in light of the research accumulated during the period that has just now come to an end. The book answers or responds to at least two questions that have remained open. First, it has addressed the problem of the so-called “unsystematic” quality of the thought of Byzantine philosophers. This view was imposed by two different parties. The first group is constituted by the Orthodox theologians of the 20th century, who correctly relate the concept of a “system” with a certain quality of the strictly rational reflection, and therefore reject such a notion in light of their entirely theological interpretation of the Byzantine tradition. The second group consists of those who have adopted the Western assumption that the presence of a “system” requires and is necessarily verified by a systematic text. On the contrary, the book argues that “systematic” thought exists foremost in the mind, whether or not it ever finds explicit literary expression, which it is not obliged to do by some inner necessity. Following a remark by Vladimir Lossky, Kapriev has determined the systematic structure of Byzantine philosophy through certain points of the synthesis in which the whole tradition regroups around a given concept, which defines the paradigm of philosophizing for a sufficient period of time, although Byzantium does not witness the establishment of philosophical schools in the strict sense of the term. Against this background can be solved the problem of the “development” of Byzantine philosophy, which is “unthinkable” (Hunger) if one tries to chart that development

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according to the measure of the Latin tradition. If, however, one considers the new problematic spheres that emerge from a different structuring of the thematic massifs, the increasing subtlety of the conceptual apparatus, and an in-depth control of the problems, we can speak with confidence of the unfolding of a philosophical tradition that moves towards a more-and-more universal philosophical synthesis, until the time that it was violently ruptured. The end of the 50-year period of scholarly research that outlined will be marked by the critical recapitulation of that research to be published in the fascicule on Byzantinische Philosophie in the new Ueberweg history of philosophy (Byzantinische Philosophie: Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie: Begründet von Friedrich Ueberweg, rev. ed., ed. Helmut Holzhey, Die Philosophie des Mittelalters, vol. 1/1, ed. Georgi Kapriev, forthcoming). Klaus Oehler was indignant at the fact that in the old four-volume edition of the UeberwegGeschichte all of Byzantine philosophy is summarized in 7 pages. In the new edition Byzantine philosophy will receive around 30 times more space, which still is not enough to do full justice to the scope of the tradition and the factual knowledge that we have about it. Even so, it is adequate for a fitting summary. E. The New Phase of Research At the same time, the strategies and perspectives that will characterize the new period of research on Byzantine philosophy have already been delineated. These may be seen most clearly in the volume Byzantine Philosophy and its Ancient Sources, 2002, edited by Katerina Ierodiakonou. The approach taken by the authors in this volume leaves behind generalizing problems, while standing firmly on what has already been achieved. The authors study their subjects in-depth and in detail, focusing on special, concrete and symptomatic problems. So the authors refrain from generalizing conclusions, understanding that new discoveries will call into question some things that have seemed evident until now. I do have no doubts that this volume will be interpreted as the first complete product establishing the paradigm for a new, second period of research in Byzantine philosophy. Thus, we are entering an intensive (as opposed to extensive) phase of scholarship in Byzantine philosophy. During this phase texts offering a general explanation of Byzantine philosophy will be fewer and fewer. The scholarship will concentrate on investigating concrete details through different, sometimes unexpected and provocative points of view. An expansion of horizons will undoubtedly occur, as will discoveries of unexpected connections, until now not seriously considered, and new parameters of the Byzantine

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tradition of thought will be established. Prejudices and clichés of the past generation will be overcome, although the new scholarship will probably generate its own “clichés of the second generation” that will be detected by some third generation of scholars that follow. The new phase of scholarship that we are entering will be more firmly based on a more elaborate and perfected material and technical apparatus; this aspect means that we shall see a more dynamic activity in the editing and publishing of primary texts and sources. Another salient characteristic of the new research agenda will be extensive international cooperation, conceived in the framework of precisely formulated and detailed projects, conducted by large-scale international teams. In this context, one can expect a closer cooperation among the growing number of research centers dedicated to specialized research in Byzantine philosophy and intellectual history. All will observe that this state of affairs parallels rather closely the present historical situation in many long well-established fields of research (e. g., in the field of medieval Latin philosophy). Studies in Byzantine philosophy, then, are not under-going some scientific revolution, but are experiencing a normal stage of growth, evincing all of the advantages and disadvantages of its particular condition. Select Bibliography Hans-Georg Beck, Kirche und theologische Literatur im byzantinischen Reich (Munich: Beck, 1959); Linos Benakis, Byzantine Philosopha (Athens: Parusia, 2002); Herbert Hunger, Die hochsprachliche profane Literatur der Byzantiner, vol. 1 (Munich: Beck, 1978), 4–62; Byzantine Philosophy and its Ancient Sources, ed. Katerina Ierodiakonou (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002); Georgi Kapriev, Philosophie in Byzanz (Wuerzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2005); Karl Krumbacher, Geschichte der byzantinischen Literatur von Justinian bis zum Ende des oströmischen Reiches (527–1453) (1892; Munich: Beck, 2nd ed. 1897); Paul Lemerle, Le Premier humanisme byzantin (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1971); Klaus Oehler, Antike Philosophie und byzantinisches Mittelalter: Aufsätze zur Geschichte des griechischen Denkens (Munich: Beck, 1969); Gerhard Podskalsky, Theologie und Philosophie in Byzanz: Der Streit um die theologische Methodik in der spätbyzantinischen Geistesgeschichte (14./15. Jh.), seine systematischen Grundlagen und seine historische Entwicklung (Munich: Beck, 1977); Basile Tatakis, La philosophie byzantine (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1949).

Georgi Kapriev

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Byzantine Sciences A. The End of Byzantine Science: the East Scientific activity was thriving in the Byzantine Empire after the re-conquest of Constantinople in 1261 over the ephemeral Latin Kingdom (particularly in the late-13th and the early-14th centuries). Nevertheless, it necessarily decreased during the last decades of the Empire because of the strong reduction of the territory, the population, and the available resources, without ceasing, however, and not even after the fall of Constantinople on the 29th of May 1453, contrary to an opinio communis. After the Ottoman conquest, the Byzantine scientists who had stayed in the area of the former empire, be they physicians, mathematicians, astronomers, or geographers for instance, integrated into the Ottoman society and worked for the new ruling class – including in close collaboration with Ottoman and other colleagues – as such a manuscript as Vienna, Austria National Library, medicus graecus 1 (dating back to ca. 512 C.E.) suggests. If the practice of science was not interrupted by the Ottoman conquest, it was partially transformed, however, as it included from then on a process of transcultural interaction and transfer, as the many multilingual lexica of plant names, for example, indicate. Such transcultural exchange increased over time, particularly with the expansion of the Ottoman Empire by Soliman the Magnificent (b. ca. 1494; sultan 1520; d. 1566), the conquest of Persia, and the capture of such important cities as Baghdad in 1535. The library collections in the capital and in other wealthy cities of the ex-Abbasid Empire were transferred to Istanbul, and their books moved to the hands of Greek librarians, if not scientists, as their re-binding indicates. Nevertheless, with the passing of time, this trend decreased, if it did not stop. With the organization of Ottoman Empire and the instauration of the system of the millet, that is, the groups within the Ottoman society defined on the basis of religions, Greek speaking communities interacted increasingly less with the other linguistic and religious groups of the Empire, and became gradually isolated without necessarily having the indispensable means to pursue and develop a scientific culture. Among others, they did not have access to printing within the Ottoman Empire (books in Greek alphabet were printed outside, principally in the Austrian Empire). In these conditions, Greek communities in the Ottoman world tended to perpetuate the Byzantine tradition. In medicine, this took the form of the iatrosofia, that is, compilations of formulas for medicines listed according to the principle a capite ad calcem (from head to toe). Although such compilations

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were often entitled as being by Hippocrates (460–between 375 and 351 B.C.E.), Dioscorides (1st c. C.E.), Galen (129–after 216 [?] C.E.), and Meletius (of uncertain epoch; usually dated between the 7th and the 13th c.), the formulas were often of a different origin: they came from the medical practices of the authors of these manuals, as well as from Byzantine medical encyclopedias and therapeutic handbooks preserved among Greek-speaking groups. The attribution of iatrosofia to the physicians of classical Antiquity is significant, for it reveals a process of self-identification of Greek-speaking populations, who affirmed in this way not only their authenticity, but also – if not above all – their anteriority in a context in which they felt segregated, and even oppressed. As for the Byzantine Meletius, he was included in the titles of iatrosofia because he was the author of the work of Christian anthropology that had probably the largest circulation in the Byzantine world. The presence of his name in the title of iatrosofia reveals the second most important parameter of the self-definition of the Greek-speaking communities in the Ottoman world, that of religion, in the specific case here Orthodoxy, and shows that the Ottoman division of society into groups defined by their religion was not necessarily perceived as a measure imposed from the outside by the political authority, but corresponded to a reality (for the primary sources on Greek science in the Ottoman Empire, see the inventory by Giannês Karas, Oi epistêmes stên Tourkokratia: Cheirographa kai entupa, 3 vols., 1992–1994; for the iatrosofion, see Touwaide Alain, “Byzantine Hospital Manuals (Iatrosophia) as a Source for the Study of Therapeutics,” The Medieval Hospital and Medical Practice, ed. Barbara S. Bowers, 2007, 147–73). It was only with the independence of Greece in 1829 that modern, viz. Western, science arrived in Greece, mainly with the German scientists invited by King Otto (b. 1815; king 1832; d. 1867) to become the first professors of the newly founded university at Athens. Printing also started to develop in the country, contributing to the introduction and diffusion of modern science among the Greek population of the kingdom. Nevertheless, such works as the iatrosofia continued to be copied by hand until late in the 19th century, not only within the Greek-speaking communities still in the Ottoman empire (for example, in Egypt), but even in Greece. B. The End of Byzantine Science: the West In the West, Byzantine science had a different fortuna. During the 15th century, particularly after the fall of Constantinople, many Byzantine scientists left the territory of the defunct Empire in a wide move of population going into exile. They fled westward, to Crete (then a Venetian territory) or further west to Italy, mainly Florence, Venice-Padua, and Rome, but also to such im-

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portant cities as Milan or smaller, but not necessarily less intellectually active towns such as Ferrara, Modena, or Urbino. They brought with them the texts that provided the basis of their education, be it general – from Homer to Demosthenes, including Pindar, Eschylus, Sophocles, Euripides or Thucydides to mention some – philosophical – Plato, for example – or scientific – from Aristotle to Dioscorides, Ptolemy, or Galen, for instance. In a first phase, such texts were newly translated into Latin and printed, replacing old medieval translations. The availability of Greek works in the original language – be they literary, philosophical, or scientific – and their comparison with the Latin versions produced in the Middle Ages made Western scientists aware of the transformations introduced in these works over time, particularly because of their translation(s) and their transmission from one culture to another, first from Byzantium to the Arabic world and then from the Arabic world to the West. Although these transformations were not always deteriorations resulting from the reproduction of texts by hand, but were often new developments added to the texts in layered levels of sedimentation by AraboIslamic and then medieval scientists, they were seen by Western Renaissance scientists as corruptions of the original contents. The medieval versions of classical texts that circulated in the West at that time were rejected, as were also their epiphenomena, be they glosses, more developed commentaries, new interpretations, or more original works rooted, however, in the ancient heritage. One of the most adamant defenders of this return to the supposed original purity of ancient scientific works was the physician of Ferrara, Nicolao Leoniceno (1428–1524). Probably transferring to scientific treatises the methods of textual criticism developed for literary works by Angelo Poliziano Ambrogini (1454–1494), better known as Poliziano, Leoniceno promoted a return to the most ancient works of the Greeks, which, in the field of medicine, were those by Hippocrates, Dioscorides, and Galen, thus eliminating de facto, though not necessarily explicitly, their subsequent developments in the Byzantine world, from Oribasius (4th c.) to Nicolaus Myrepsus (14th c.), and including Aetius and Alexander of Tralles (both 6th c.), Paul of Egina (7th c.), Theophanes Chrysobalantes (10th c.; renamed Theophanes Nonnos in the Renaissance), Symeon Seth (11th c.), or Ioannes Zacharias Actuarius (13th–14th c.). The corpus of writings by or attributed to Aristotle was printed in Greek as early as 1495–1497 by the humanist publisher Aldo Manuzio (1449–1515), the Corpus Galenicum in 1525 by the heirs of Aldo Manuzio, and the whole series of treatises ascribed to Hippocrates in 1526 by the same. There were some exceptions in this shift from contemporary to ancient works, the most characteristic of which was Giorgio Valla (ca. 1447–1500).

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The owner of the largest collection of Greek manuscripts of that time, he translated into Latin some Byzantine scientific treatises, among them the 11th-century Byzantine translation of the Arabic treatise On Smallpox and Measles originally by abû Bakr ar-Râzî (865–925 C.E.). The work seemed to offer therapeutic value for the treatment of syphilis that was spreading throughout Europe at that time. This case of transfer from Byzantine to Western medical practice is probably unique, however. Leoniceno’s program, first embraced and reinforced by publishers and printers, particularly Aldo Manuzio with whom Leoniceno was in close contact, had a deep impact on contemporary scientists. Byzantine scientific literature did not disappear totally, however, but benefitted from the search of ancient Greek books in the 16th century and the formation of collections of manuscripts such as the Bibliothèque royale in France, the Bibliotheca Vaticana, or the collection at El Escorial in Spain, to mention just a few. Byzantine science entered the many collections of Greek manuscripts created at that time, without being printed, be it in Renaissance Latin translations or in the original Greek text, before the 1530s, however (with few exceptions) (alphabetical order of names and titles: Aetius: 1533–35 Latin, and1534 Greek; Cassius iatrosophistes [between the 4th and the 7th c.]: 1541 Greek [and also a Latin version the same year]; Demetrius Pepagomenos [15th c.], De podagra: 1517 Latin, and 1558 Greek; Ioannes Zacharias Actuarius, De actionibus et affectibus spiritus animalis: 1547 Latin, 1557 Greek; De medicamentorum compositione: 1540 Latin; De urinis: 1519 Latin; Methodus medendi: 1554 Latin; Meletius: 1552 Latin; Nemesius [late 4th c.]: 1538 Latin, 1565 Greek; Nicolaus Myrepsus: 1541 Latin; Oribasius: 1543 Greek and Latin; Paul of Egina, Book I: 1510 Latin; opera omnia: 1528 Greek; Stephanus of Athens [or Alexandria; 5th/6th c.], Alphabetum empericum: 1581 Latin, and Commentarium in Galeni de medendi methodo: 1536 Greek). Even when Byzantine scientific texts were printed, the interest was more of an antiquarian than of a scientific nature, contrary to what happened with the Corpus Hipppocraticum, Dioscorides, and Galen. C. Early History of Byzantine Science At the turn of the 17th to the 18th century, the interest in Byzantine science faded even more. The field of medicine is significant. When the Frenchman Daniel Le Clerc (1652–1728) wrote his Histoire de la médecine, which was published in 1702, he covered the period from Hippocrates to Galen. It was the merit of the Englishman John Freind (1675–1728) to take over the history of medicine from Oribasius on in his History of physick published in 1725–1726. However, whereas he treated Oribasius in seven pages (4–10 of the 1735 Latin edition of Venice), Aetius and Alexander of Tralles in twelve each (11–23 and

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24–35 respectively), Uranius (6th c.) and the historian Procopius (507–after 555) in eight (36–43), and Paul of Egina in seventeen (44–60), he covered the whole period from 640 (the supposed date of Paul of Egina) to 1453 in 26 pages (61–86) which included general considerations on the style of late Byzantine physicians and conclusive reflections (five pages, 82–86).The only late Byzantine to receive more attention is Ioannes Zacharias Actuarius, to whom Freind devoted nine pages (73–81). This exception might result from a practical consideration, expressed by Freind in the title page of his History, where the subtitle reads: “… In qua ea praecipue notantur quae ad Praxin pertinent …” Yet, in the fight of English physicians against smallpox, Freind suggested, in a way that reminds of Giorgio Valla, the use of treatments prescribed by ancient physicians, namely purgation. Indeed, in his History of medicine, Freind prized Actuarius for being, according to him, the first among Greek authors to recommend the use of purgative agents (75–76). This regain of interest was short-lived. After Freind and during the whole 18th and 19th centuries, Byzantine medicine and, more generally, Byzantine science did not receive much attention among scholars and scientists. This was particularly the case in the 19th century, during which two monumental editions of classical works were produced that eclipsed almost any other work: the Opera omnia of Galen edited by the German physician and classicist Karl Gottlobb Kühn (1754–1840) and published in 20 volumes (with 22 tomes) from 1821 to 1833, and, slightly later, the Oeuvres complètes d’Hippocrate by the French scholar and lexicographer Emile Littré (1801–1877), published in 10 volumes from 1839 to 1861. Classicism was triumphant as was further demonstrated by the catalogue of Greek medical manuscripts published under the direction of the German philologist Hermann Diels (1848–1922) by the Academy of Sciences of Prussia in Berlin (Die Handschriften der antiken Ärzte, vol. 1: Hippokrates und Galenos, ed. Hermann Diels, 1905; Die Handschriften der antiken Ärzte, vol. 2: Die übrigen griechischen Ärzte ausser Hippokrates und Galenos, ed. id., 1906; with a supplement: Bericht über den Stand des interakademischen Corpus Medicorum Antiquorum und erster Nachtrag zu den in den Abhandlungen 1905 and 1906 veröffentlichten Katalogen: Die Handschriften der antiken Ärzte. I. und II. Teil, ed. id., 1908. The first two parts were republished in 1906 under the following title: Die Handschriften der antiken Ärzte: Griechische Abteilung, ed. id., 1906. This version was reprinted together with the supplement under the following title: Die Handschriften der antiken Ärzte. I. Hippokrates und Galenos; II. Die übrigen griechischen Ärzte; III. Nachtrag, ed. id., with a preface by Fridolf Kudlien, 1970). The purpose of the enterprise was to edit critically Greek medical texts (see, for example, Hermann Diels, “Über das neue Corpus medicorum,” Neue Jahrbücher

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für das klassische Altertum, Geschichte und deutsche Literatur und für Pädagogik 19 [1907]: 722–26). The focus was mainly on a narrowly defined classical antiquity as an overview of the two volumes of the catalogue shows. Whereas the first volume (1905) was devoted to Hippocrates and Galen and contained 151 pages, the second (1906) was to “all other physicians” from Diocles (4th c. B.C.E.) to Ioannes Zacharias Actuarius, and consisted of only 112 pages. The list of physicians included the post-Aristotelian physician Diocles (2 pp., 27–28), the Alexandrian surgeon Heliodorus (2 pp., 41–42), such classical authors as Aretaeus (3 pp., 17–19), Dioscorides (6 pp., 29–35), Rufus (4 pp., 88–91), and Soranus (3 pp., 92–94), the three 4th-century Christian anthropologists Basil the Great (1 p., 21), Gregory of Nyssa (2 pp., 39–40), Gregory the Theologian (2pp., 40–41), Meletius (3pp., 62–64), Nemesius (3pp., 66–68), and Hermes Trismegistus (6pp., 43–48). Among the Byzantine authors, Aetius (3 pp., 5–7), Alexander of Tralles (3 pp., 11–13), Oribasius (5 pp., 70–74), and Paul of Egina (4 pp., 77–81) (that is, the early Byzantines who pursued the classical tradition) cover 15 pages (i. e., 14 % of the volume), while the others (actually, some early Byzantine, and a selection of Middle- and Late-Byzantine ones) are almost all treated in one page as the following cases show (selection; alphabetical order of names): Antonius Pyropoulos (15th c.) (p. 15, 2 manuscripts), Constantine Meliteniotes (14th c.) (p. 24, 1 ms.), Ioannes of Alexandria (6th or 7th c.) (p. 51, 1 ms.), Ioannes Choumnos (15th c.) (p. 52, 1 ms.), Ioannes Staphidaces (14th c.) (p. 55, 1 ms.), Leo (9th or 10th c. ?) (p. 57, 3 mss. and some fragments), Neophytos Prodromênos (14th c.) (p. 68, 7 mss.), Nicolaus Myrepsus (59, 7 mss.), Stephanus of Alexandria and Athens (2 pp. each, pp. 95–96 and 97–98, and 18 and 29 mss., respectively), Theophilus (7th c.) (6 pp., pp. 101–106), and Ioannes Zacharias Actuarius (4 pp., pp. 108–111). This treatment reflects a major focus on classical antiquity (177 pages out of a total of 263 corresponding to almost 70 %), and, for the rest, a similar importance given to the authors of late antiquity (15 pp.) and the Christian anthropologists (11 pp.), followed by Hermes Trismegistus (6 pp.). None of the Byzantine physicians equal this latter number of pages, with the exception of Theophilus, whose treatises had been very influential in the West (in Latin trans.). D. 20th-Century Obscurantism In 20th-century Byzantine Studies, science(s) might be rightly considered as la grande absente. As in the previous centuries, the case of medicine is particularly revealing. The conclusions by Auguste Corlieu (1825–1905), Les médecins grecs depuis la mort de Galien jusqu’à la chute de l’empire d’Orient (210–1453), 1885, are emblematic (pp. 173–74):

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Byzantine Sciences Qu’ont produit les médecins que nous avons cités dans les pages précédentes? Peu de choses sans doute … Oribase n’a presque rien ajouté à l’anatomie de Galien … Aétius ne fut qu’un compilateur … C’est le seul médecin que fournisse le Ve siècle. Le VIe siècle ne nous laisse aussi qu’un nom … Le VIIIe siècle est moins riche … Le XIe siècle et les siècles suivants n’ont guère produit que des thérapeutistes”. As for the causes of this (p. 174): “… nous trouverons, dans des considérations d’ordre politique, l’application de cette décadence de la médecine grecque … il n’y avait de calme que dans les monastères. Ce furent alors les moines qui s’emparèrent en Occident de l’étude de la médecine grecque. Ce fut le temps propice pour les pratiques mystiques, les prières, les invocations. On retombait dans les temps pré-hippocratiques. En Orient, au contraire, un essor avait été donné par des chefs arabes …

This judgment was shared by Byzantinists as the epoch-making Geschichte der byzantinischen Literatur von Justinian bis zum Ende des oströmischen Reiches (527–1453), published in 1897 by Karl Krumbacher (1856–1909), shows (pp. 613–14): Auch auf diesem Gebiete [= medicine] … äusserte die blindgläubige Verehrung der alten ihre verderbliche Wirkung auf die Entwicklung einer originellen forschenden und darstellenden Thätigkeit …

Krumbacher covered the whole section of Byzantine science in only 23 out of the 1193 pages contained in his monumental work, treating all disciplines in an equally brief way (medicine, pp. 613–16 [bibliography 616–20]; mathematics and astronomy, 620–24 [bibliography 624–31]; zoology, botany, mineralogy, alchemy, 631–33 [bibliography 633–34]). The historian of medicine, Iwan Bloch (1872–1922), in the Handbuch der Geschichte der Medizin edited by Max Neuburger (1868–1955) and Julius Leopold Pagel (1851–1912), and published in 1902, had a somewhat more complex, though still negative, opinion. Starting with a seemingly positive reevaluation of Byzantium (p. 492): Die Kultur des byzantinischen Reiches war nicht bloss … eine Kultur des Verfalls, nicht bloss eine in das Mittelalter hineinragende Ruine des Altertums …

He went on with a dark evocation of Byzantine political life (p. 492): Die politische Geschichte des Byzantinerreiches ist im grossen und ganzen eine “eintönige Geschichte der Intrigen von Priestern,Verschnittenen und Frauen, der Giftmischereien, der Verschwörungen der gleichmässigen Undankbarkeit, der beständigen Vatermorde” …

Once the stage was set, he described science in negative terms and identified the following factors as the causes of this:

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(493) Das Christentum … musste, je mehr es sich in der Kirche organisierte, den Fortschritt der Wissenschaft in ungünstigem Sinne beeinflussen … (p. 501) Neben dem Einflusse der christlichen Lehre ist derjenige der philosophischen Mystik und des Aberglaubens bezeichnend (p. 502) für den Charakter der byzantinischen Epoche … (p. 504) Eine noch bestimmtere Ausgestaltung erfuhren Magie und Zauberglauben durch ihre Verknüpfung mit der Philosophie …

Nevertheless, Bloch credited Byzantine physicians with one merit: they traveled abroad to learn about medicine and therapeutics ([sic]) (p. 513)! More recently, the authoritative and deeply respected Viennese Byzantinist Herbert Hunger (1914–2000), though not openly as critical as his predecessors, was no more positive, devoting to science some 100 pages (vol. 2, p. 218–320) of his 2-volume set Die hochsprachliche profane Literatur der Byzantiner, 1978 (XXVI + 542, and XX + 528 pp.) in the new authoritative Handbuch der Altertumswissenschaft. His consideration on iatrosofia is significant (vol. 2, p. 304): Niemand wird monatelange Arbeit auf das Lesen elend geschriebener Codices aufwenden wollen, um zuletzt eine Rezeptsammlung mehr aus dem Dschungelbereich der Iatrosophia in Händen zu haben, noch dazu wo es in der byzantinischen Literatur allenthalben reizvollere Inedita gibt …

Shortly after, in his introductory remarks to a symposium on Byzantine medicine held in 1983, the convener, John Scarborough, opened the meeting with the following statement (Symposium on Byzantine Medicine, 1984) (see p. ix): Among medical historians, the commonly held opinion of Byzantine medicine is one of stagnation, plagiarism of the great medical figures of classical antiquity, and a somber boredom that seemingly awaited the Italian Renaissance …

And referring to Guido Majno, The Healing Hand: Man and Wound in the Ancient World, 1975, he added (p. ix): Typical is Majno’s “… after Galen, the history [of medicine] grinds to a halt for at least one thousand years. Europe sank into the Dark Ages” …

E. The Long Search for a Method 20th-century research on Byzantine science came out of an increased interest in material life and the developments in manuscript heuristic in the 19th century. The German classicist August Friedrich von Pauly (1796–1845), who was more interested in the concrete aspects of life than in linguistics, literary criticism, or hermeneutics, as he himself stated, conceived and started publishing the Real-Encyclopädie der Alterthumswissenschaft in 1839 (Stuttgart).

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His death in 1854 at the age of 49 prevented him from completing the work, which was achieved in 1852 (6 vols.). The Real-Encyclopädie, which was later expanded, devoted a certain number of entries to the history of sciences, including the continuity of classical science in Byzantium, although the work was specifically about classical antiquity. Manuscript heuristic started at almost the same period, with the German physician and classicist Friedrich Reinhold Dietz (1804–1836) of Königsberg. In preparing critical editions, he did not limit his work to consulting only locally available manuscripts, but he traveled throughout Germany, Italy, Spain, France, and Britain, systematically searching codices containing Greek medical texts. Although he was mainly focused on Hippocrates, he was also interested in Byzantine physicians from Oribasius to Actuarius. He was supposed to prepare an edition of Oribasius for the corpus edited by Kühn (below), and he collated manuscripts of (in chronological order) Aetius, the Alexandrian commentators on Hippocrates, Paul of Egina, Theophilus, Symeon Seth, Ioannes Zacharias Actuarius and others. He could not fully complete his program, however, because he died in 1836 at the age of 32. Editorial activity was taken over and transformed into a systematic enterprise by the German physician and historian of medicine, Karl Gottlob Kühn, who launched a monumental corpus entitled Medicorum graecorum opera quae exstant in 28 volumes (Hippocrates, Dioscorides, Galen, and Aretaeus), which should have also included Oribasius (to be published by Dietz), Aetius (to be published by Karl Christian Lebrecht Weigel [1769–1845]), and Paul of Egina (to be published by the botanist and historian of botany Kurt Sprengel [1766–1833]). The search for manuscripts was pursued mainly by the French physician and historian of medicine Charles Daremberg (1817–1872), who proposed in 1847 the publication of a new corpus of ancient medical texts, the Collection des médecins grecs et latins, with an intention similar to that of Dietz, that is, to produce critical editions based on an accurate examination and collation of manuscripts. Daremberg differred from Dietz, however, as he wanted to be exhaustive. He visited libraries in Germany, Belgium, England, and Italy, and brought back a great wealth of data, which he combined with the results of his examination in loco of the codices in the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris. On this basis he prepared what he called a Catalogue raisonné des manuscrits médicaux, a project that dated back to an incubation in the years 1841–1844. The catalogue was conceived as the necessary first step for the publication of medical texts in the Collection des médecins grecs et latins. But, as Daremberg explained, this catalogue was more than a list of manuscripts: it also included data on the production of the manuscripts (their

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period and place of writing), as, according to him, such information is of primary importance for the history of science. A specimen of the catalogue was published in two parts in 1851 and 1852, with a revised edition in 1853. As active Daremberg had been, neither the full Catalogue raisonné nor the comprehensive Collection of ancient medical texts he had envisioned ever appeared, with the exception of an edition of Oribasius prepared in collaboration with the Dutch scholar Ulgo Cats Bussemaker (1810–1865). Nevertheless, Daremberg could illustrate the validity of his intuition about the value of manuscripts as witnesses to the practice of science in Byzantium. In analyzing a codex of the Phillipps collection in England, he investigated the genesis of the Byzantine translation of the zâd al musâfir wa qût al hâdir (Provisions for the Traveller and Nourishment for the Sedentary) by ibn al-Jazzâr (d. 979/980 or 1010 C.E.), known as the efodia tou apodêmountos (that is, [Medical] Recommendations for the Traveler), producing an important contribution to the history of medicine in the Byzantine world, particularly in southern Italy (Sicily or the mainland). Nevertheless, he did not apply this approach to other works, and did not bring to light, thus, the new scientific activity generated by the classical texts. It will be a century before Daremberg’s intuition is rediscovered and applied in a productive way. In the meantime, several Byzantine scientific texts were edited, among which (in the fields of medicine, and natural sciences) Alexander of Tralles in 1878–1879 by Theodor Puschmann (1844–1899); the the Epistula de vermis of Alexander of Tralles, Cassius iatrosophistes, and Theophilus, to mention some, by Julius Ideler (1809–1842) in the Physici greci minores (2 vols., 1841–1842); Adamantius (5th c.) by Valentin Rose (1829–1916) in his Anecdota Graeca et Graecolatina (vol. 1, 1864); Meletius by John Anthony Cramer (1793–1848) in his Anecdota Graeca (4 vols., 1835–1837); the Scriptores physiognomici (1893) by Richard Förster (1843–1922); Theophilus by William Alexander Greenhill (1814–1894) in 1842, and the alchemists (1887–1888) by Marcelin Berthelot (1827–1907) and Charles-Emile Ruelle (1833–1912). The idea of a systematic inventory of manuscripts first launched by Daremberg was still present in the scholarly community even though Daremberg could not implement it. The Athenian ophthalmologist Georges A. Costomiris (1849–1902), who was also doing historico-medical research in Paris in the footsteps of Daremberg, began in 1887 to browse the holdings of the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris, and to consult printed catalogues of Greek manuscripts, in order to bring to the attention of the scholarly community unknown Greek medical texts. Costomiris’s catalogue, published in five issues of the French Revue des Études Grecques (1889–1897), listed 214

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different codices containing the texts of twenty authors, many of whom were Byzantines (names are followed by the references to the several issues of Costomiris’ work [number of the issue, and pages]): Ioannes Zacharias Actuarius (5.414–445), the Byzantine compilations attributed to Aelius Promotus (2nd c. C.E.) in the manuscripts and by modern scholars (1.363–368), Aetius (2.150–179), Damnastes (11th c. [?]) (4.71–72), the Ephodia (11th c.) (3.101–110), the Hippiatrica (4.61–69), Leo the Philosopher (3.99–100), the enigmatic Metrodora of unknown time period (2.147–148), Nicolaus Myrepsos (5.406–414), Oribasius (2.148–150), Psellus (1018– after [?] 1081) (4.68–60), Symeon Seth (4.70–71), Theophanes Nonnos (3.100–101), Timotheus (5th c.) (3.99), and Tzetzes (ca. 1110–between 1180 and 1185) (5.405). On the basis of such inventory – and as a sort of défense et illustration – Costomiris produced a critical edition of the twelfth book of Aetius’ medical encyclopedia (1892). Another Greek physician, Skeuos Geôrgios Zerbos (1875–1966), investigated Greek medical manuscripts, with a particular interest in Aetius, Paul of Nicea (between the 7th and the 9th/10th c.), Metrodora, and Magnos of Emessa (4th c. [?]) as he himself indicated (“Kathorismos tôn onomatôn tôn suggrafeôn duo anônumôn iatrikôn keimenôn,” Athêna 20 [1908]: 502–08; see 502). On this basis he published critical editions of Aetius (partial; see [chronological order of publication]): Aetii Sermo sextidecimus et ultimus: Erstens aus Handschriften veröffentlicht mit Abbildungen, Bemerkungen und Erklärungen, 1901; “Aetiou Amidênou peri daknontôn zôôn kai ibolôn êtoi logos dekatos tritos,” Athêna 18 (1905): 241–302 (contains many, but not all chapters of book 13), with a re-edition as a monograph under the same title and two different printings (1905, in the series Editio graeca scriptorum medicorum veterum graecorum, and Syros, 1909); “Aetiou Amidênou logos dekatos pemptos,” Athêna 21 (1909): 2–138; “Aetiou Amidênou logos enatos,” Athêna 23 (1911): 265–392. Also, he studied some aspects of Byzantine medicine and some Byzantine physicians, including specific manuscripts (“O suggrafeas duo anônumôn archaiôn iatrikôn keimenôn,” Athêna 21 [1909]: 381–83) (alphabetical order of names of Byzantine authors): (Aetius) Die Gynekologie des Aëtios, 1901, and “Paratêrêseis eis ton triskaidekaton logon êtoi peri daknontôn zôôn kai ibolôn ofeôn Aetiou Amidênou,” Epetêris Ethnikou Panepistêmiou (1908): 307–60; (Metrodora) “Das unveröffentliche medizinische Werk der Metrodora,” Archiv für Geschichte der Medizin 3 (1909–1910): 141–44; (Paul of Nicea) Oi kôdikes tôn archaiôn anekdotôn iatrikôn cheirografôn tou Paulou Nikaiou: Ai peri toutôn dêmosieutheisai eidikai meletai mou kai ai ep’ autôn kriseis tês akadêmias tôn epistêmôn tou Berolinou kai tou kathêgêtou tês Istorias tês iatrikês en tô Panepistêmiô tou Berolinou, 1915.

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Daremberg’s and Costomiris’s work highlighted the interest and urgent need of a systematic catalogue of manuscripts containing scientific works, be they Byzantine or earlier. It was the merit of the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin to produce such a general catalogue of medical manuscripts, published under the direction of Hermann Diels and referred to above. Interestingly, the catalogue included the codices of the medieval Latin, Syriac, Arabic, and Hebrew translations of the Greek works, and constituted a basis for further study of the diffusion of classical science from the Byzantine Empire to the West (the early medieval Latin translations) and to the East (the translations into oriental languages). The project of new editions to be published in a new Corpus Medicorum Graecorum came to fruition as early as 1908, with the first volume on Philumenus (3rd c. C.E. [?]), edited by Max Wellmann (1863–1933) on the basis of an unicum (Vaticanus graecus 284). After 3 volumes of Galen were published (1914 [2 items] and 1915), Paul of Egina (2 vols., 1921–1924) was edited by Johan Ludvig Heiberg (1854–1928), Oribasius by Johann Georg Raeder (b. 1905) in 5 volumes (1926–1933), and half of Aetius’s medical encyclopedia in 2 volumes (1935 and 1950) by Alessandro Olivieri (b. 1872). Whereas this editing activity seemed promising for Byzantine science, it was only in 1969 that a volume on a physician of the middle Byzantine period came out (Leo, edited by Robert Renehan). Then, from 1983 to 1997, the commentaries on Hippocrates, Aphorisms, and Prognostic by the late Alexandrian Stephanus were edited in 5 volumes by Leendert G. Westerink (1913–1990). That is, a total of 15 out of the almost 60 volumes currently published in the Corpus (= 25 %), with three authors from late antiquity – actually a commentator on a classical author and three encyclopedists who synthesized the classical literature (mainly Galen) – and only one after the end of the school of Alexandria. A leading figure in the publication of Greek scientific texts from the 1880s to 1927 was the Danish scholar and historian of ancient science Johan Ludvig Heiberg. He edited (alphabetical order of ancient authors’ names): (anonymous) Anonymi logica et quadrivium cum scholiis antiquis (1928); (Apollonius of Perga [between 260 and 190 B.C.E.]) Apollonii Pergaei quae graece exstant (2 vols., 1891–1893); (Archimedes [287–212 B.C.E.]) Archimedis opera omnia (3 vols., with two editions: 1880–1881, and 1910–1915); (Corpus Hippocraticum) Aphorisms (1892), and the first volume of the Opera (1927) in the Corpus Medicorum Graecorum (in collaboration with Johannes Mewaldt [1880–1964], Ernst Nachmanson [1877–1943], and Hermann Schöne [1870–1941]); (Euclid [ca. 300 B.C.E.]) Euclidis opera omnia (8 vols., 1883–1916); (Hero [1st c. C.E.]) Heronis Alexandrini opera quae supersunt omnia

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(5 vols., 1899–1914); (mathematicians) the Mathematici graeci minores (1927); (Paul of Egina) Pauli Aeginetae libri tertii interpretatio latina antiqua (1912); Glossae medicinales (1924); (Ptolemaeus [1st-2nd c.]) the Syntaxis mathematica (2 vols., 1898–1903), and the Opera astronomica minora (1907) in Claudii Ptolemaei opera quae exstant omnia; (Serenus [4th c. C.E.]) Sereni Antinoensis opuscula [mathematica] (1896); and (Theodosius [ca. 160–ca. 90 B.C.E.]) De sphaericis (1927). Heiberg wrote also a history of mathematical and natural sciences in antiquity (Geschichte der Mathematik und Naturwissenschaften im klassischen Altertum, published in the Handbuch der Altertumswissenschaft, 1st ed. in 1912 [English trans. in 1922; Italian trans. in 1924], with a rev. ed. in 1925). In spite of its title, the latter includes some data about post-classical and Byzantine science, as it extends up to Martianus Capella (early 5th c.) for the mathematics; it mentions the university of Constantinople, created in 425 (p. 61), and such Byzantine scientists as Psellus, Theodoros Metochites (1270–1332), Nicephore Gregoras (ca. 1290–between 1358 and 1361), Georgios Chrysokokkes (fl. ca. 1335–1350) (author of a work based on Persian astronomy and dated 1346), Isaak Argyros (between 1300 and 1310–ca. 1375), and Nicolaus Kabasilas (d. 1371) in the chapter on astronomy (pp. 61–62); and, in that on medicine (p. 116), it includes Oribasius, Paul of Egina, Stephanus of Athens (and Alexandria), and Theophilos Protospatharios. Next, however, the chapter passes to Byzantium, which it treats in half-a-page, with such considerations as (p. 117): Auch in Byzanz wurde medizinische Schrifstellerei bis zuletzt betrieben, ohne Originalität, aber recht fleissig … Im 10. Jahrh. hat Theophanes Nonnos eine kümmerliche Kompilation Iatrika aus Oreibasios hergestellt …

This corresponds to what Heiberg wrote about Byzantine geography (deprived of originality according to him [p. 87]) and botany (supposedly absent from the Byzantine scientific panorama unless it was agronomical or medical [p. 90]). Such statements contrasted with Heiberg’s knowledge of Byzantine manuscripts, of which he mentioned some (for example the Florentinus Laurentianus 74, 7, containing Apollonius of Citium [1st c. B.C.E.] and richly illustrated [p. 117]), and in some of which he traced an Arabic influence on Byzantine astronomy (pp. 61–62) and medicine (p. 117). To prepare his many editions, Heiberg consulted, indeed, a great many manuscripts from several collections in Europe, which he knew well, including their history (he published an article on one of the most significant collections of the Renaissance, that of Giorgio Valla [above], which is still the work of reference on the topic). Also, he participated in the Catalogue des manuscrits alchimiques grecs

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(vols. 1 and 3 [both 1924]). Such familiarity with manuscripts probably contributes to explain why, in 1901, he invited Diels to publish a new corpus of ancient Greek medical literature for which preparation the catalogue of Greek medical manuscripts would be indispensable. But, at the same time, this deep knowledge of the manuscripts stresses a contradiction in Heiberg’s work, and perhaps also in the practice of the history of ancient and Byzantine science, be it at Heiberg’s time or possibly also in current research: Byzantium was viewed mainly – if not only – as the agent of transmission of classical science, and not so much as a producer of science, whatever its form. Such an interpretation is not contradicted by the major programs on astrological and alchemical manuscripts (all Byzantine) that started at that time and in the launching of which Heiberg participated (Catalogus Codicum Astrologorum Graecorum, 20 vols., 1898–1953; Catalogue des manuscrits alchimiques grecs, 8 vols., 1928–1932): astrological and alchemical manuscripts were considered as sources for the history of mentalities and religion, both in Antiquity and Byzantium, and not for the history of science(s), according to an approach going back to Karl Usener (1834–1905), who had been a university teacher of Diels. Such approach was particularly the case of the Belgian philologist Franz Cumont (1868–1947), who created and directed the corpus of astrological manuscripts for a certain time, and shared such responsibility with his co-citizen Joseph Bidez (1867–1945). In this view, Heiberg did not bring to light the data he discovered in the Byzantine manuscripts of the texts he studied, and did not consider the data resulting from their codicological, paleographical, and historical analysis as a significant primary source for the history of Byzantine science(s). Instead, he simply reproduced the interpretation of Byzantine science developed during the 19th century, particularly in the German school of Altertumswissenschaft, for which culture and science were born in classical antiquity (particularly in Greece) and declined afterwards until the Renaissance. Significantly, however, although he used the few available 19th-century editions of Byzantine scientific texts and some 19th-century secondary literature (among others the works by Usener), Heiberg relied on late 18th-century antiquarian bibliography in his references to Byzantine scientists (mainly the Bibliotheca graeca of Johann Albert Fabricius [1668–1736] in the 4th edition by Gottlieb Christoph Harles [1738–1815], published in 1790–1804). Only in the 1930s did historians and philologists begin to have a per se interest in Byzantine scientific texts. The Greek physician Aristotelês Kouzês (1872–1961) of Athens published several articles on Byzantine physicians and their works on the basis of his explorations of Greek manuscripts. His activity seems to have proceeded in two waves. In a first time (1907–1910),

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after a critical edition of Marcellus of Side, On pulses (1907), he focused on three key, though minor, Byzantine texts, which he edited: the treatise On Gout by Demetrius Pepagomenos (Dêmêtriou Pepagomenou, Suntagma peri tês podagras, 1909), the translation into Greek of the treatise On Smallpox and Measles originally written in Arabic by the physician abu Bakr ar-Râzî, best known in the medieval West as Rhazes (Razê, Logos peri loimikês exellênistheis ek tês surôn dialektou pros tên êmeteran, 1909), and the influential treatise On urine by Theophilos (Theofilou, Peri ourôn biblion, 1910). Then, after an interruption of almost 20 years, he published again on the history of Byzantine medicine, starting with a general note drawing the attention to some unedited manuscripts (“Paratêrêseis epi tinôn anekdotôn iatrikôn kôdikôn tôn bibliothêkôn tês Eurôpês kai kathorismos eniôn toutôn,” Epetêris Etaireias Byzantinôn Spoudôn 6 [1929]: 375–82). His subsequent production was more markedly based on, and oriented toward, manuscript analysis, and resulted in bringing little known texts to the attention (chronological order of publication) (Neophytos Prodromênos): “To peri tôn en odousi pathôn ergon Neofutou tou Prodromênou,” Epetêris Etaireias Buzantinôn Spoudôn 7 (1930): 348–57; (Ioannes Prisduanôn [of unknown epoch: 12th c. ?]) “To peri ourôn ergon tou Iôannou episkopou Prisduanôn,” Epetêris Etaireias Buzantinôn Spoudôn 10 (1933): 364–71; (Constantine Meliteniotes) “Quelques considérations sur les traductions en grec des oeuvres médicales orientales et principalement sur les deux manuscrits de la traduction d’un traité persan par Constantin Méliténiotis,” Praktika tês Akadêmias Athênôn 14 (1939): 205–20; (Nicephoros Blemmydes [1197–ca. 1269]) “Les oeuvres médicales de Nicéphore Blémmydes selon les manuscrits existants,” Praktika tês Akadêmias Athênôn 19 (1944): 56–75; (Theophilos) “The Apotherapeutic of Theophilos according to the Laurentian Codex, plut. 75, 19,” Praktika tês Akadêmias Athênôn 19 (1944): 9–18; (Romanos [10th c.]) “The Medical Work of Romanos According to the Vatican Greek Codex 280,” Praktika tês Akadêmias Athênôn 19 (1944): 162–170; (Leo) “The Written Tradition of the Works of Leo the Iatrosophist,” Praktika tês Akadêmias Athênôn 19 (1944): 170–177; (Antonius Pyropoulos [15th c.]) “Some New Informations on Antony Pyropoulos as Physician and on his Small Notice: ‘Peri metrôn kai stathmôn’ according the Codex 877 of the Iberia Monastery on Mount Athos and the Cod. med. gr. 27 of the National Library of Vienna,” Praktika tês Akadêmias Athênôn 21 (1946): 9–18. Almost at the same time Kouzês was starting the second phase of his activity, the Belgian philologist Armand Delatte (1886–1964) published several botanical lexica and texts on plants from manuscripts: “Le lexique de botanique du Parisinus graecus 2419,” Serta Leodiensia ad celebrandam patriae libertatem iam centesimum annum recuperatam composuerunt philologi leodenses,

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1930, 59–101, and Anecdota Atheniensia et alia, vol. 2: Textes grecs relatifs à l’histoire des sciences, 1939, passim. The troubled history of the 20th century brought an end to these attempts. After World War II, it was the merit of Joseph Mogenet (1913–1980) to show that Byzantine manuscripts of classical scientific texts may illustrate the practice of science in Byzantium – instead of being just the vehicles of these texts. Mogenet showed, indeed, that a scholion in a manuscript of Ptolemy’s Almagest (Vaticanus graecus 1594, 10th c.) reveals a practice of the text that was not limited to a poor or impoverished repetition, but was also used for new applications, including methods of calculation borrowed from the Arabic world (Joseph Mogenet, “Une Scolie inédite du Vat. gr. 1594 sur les rapports entre l’astronomie et Byzance,” Osiris 14 [1962]: 198–221). In so doing, Mogenet transformed the study of Byzantine scientific manuscripts: instead of only transmitting classical texts, they also bear witness to the way these texts were studied and to the work done on these texts, in a significant shift of the focus that brilliantly illustrated the validity of Daremberg’s intuition on the interest of studying the history of manuscripts, and eventually laid down the necessary methodological foundations for Byzantine science to be investigated on a solid basis. F. 20th-Century Research While history of Byzantine science(s) was searching its way in the late 19th and early 20th century, ongoing research on the history of science(s) included Byzantium in some of its encyclopedic programs. One of them was the monumental five-volume Introduction to the History of Science (1927–1948) by the Belgian-born historian of science(s) George Sarton (1884–1956), covering the whole Mediterranean and Western tradition from Homer to the 14th century. In the first volume, the work proceeds by time-periods characterized by a leading figure each, some of whom are Byzantine: the time of Oribasius (second half of 4th c.) (1, pp. 359–76); the time of Proclus (412–485 C.E.) (second half of 5th c.) (1, pp. 399–413); and the time of Ioannes Philoponus (ca. 490–ca. 570) (first half of 6th c.) (1, pp. 411–42). All chapters (whatever their emblematic figure) include data about the several scientific traditions taken into consideration, Byzantine, Syriac, Arabic (when appropriate), Persian, Indian, and Chinese. In the second volume, Sarton used the same approach, together with a more analytical one, by disciplines and/or problems. For the first half of the 12th century, for example (under the sign of William of Conches [before 1090–after 1154], Abraham Ibn Ezra [ca. 1089–ca. 1167], and Ibn Zuhr [= Averroes] [ca. 1091–1162]), the place of Byzantium in the initial synthetic survey (2.1, pp. 109–52) is pretty much reduced: it receives,

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indeed, 9 lines (p. 120) in Philosophic Background (pp. 117–22), 4 (p. 124) in Mathematics and Astronomy (pp. 122–27), 5 (p. 133) in Natural History (pp. 132–33), and 6 (p. 134) in Medicine (pp. 133–37). Absent from Chemistry (pp. 129–130) and Geography (pp. 130–32), it does not appear either in the analytical part, in Religious Background (pp. 153–66), Translators (pp. 167–81), Chemistry (pp. 218–20), and Geography (pp. 221–25), and is briefly treated (191–92) in Philosophic Background (pp. 182–203), as in Mathematics (pp. 204–15; 209 for Byzantium), Natural History (pp. 226–28; 228 for Byzantium), and Medicine (pp. 229–48; 236 for Byzantium). On astronomy, specifically, Pierre Duhem (1861–1916) compiled Le Système du monde, devoted to the history of the discipline until Copernicus (1473–1543). Whereas he intended it as a twelve-volume work, he could complete only nine (published 1913–1959; English trans. of volumes 7–9 under the title Medieval Cosmology, 1985). Similarly, on experimental sciences, Lynn Thorndike (1882–1965) wrote an eight-volume History of Magic and Experimental Science (1923–1958), During the First Thirteen Centuries of our Era, as the sub-title specifies. Byzantium is barely present (1, pp. 480–503) with Basil, Epiphanius (between 310 and 320–402 or 403), and the Physiologus, and postclassical medicine (actually Oribasius, Aetius, Alexander of Tralles, and Paul of Egina; 1, pp. 566–84). Continuous during the 20th century with such major projects as the Encyclopedia of Islam (2 editions, especially the 2nd; the 3rd is in preparation) and the Encyclopaedia Iranica (now also available on the internet in open access), encyclopedism was particularly productive toward the end of the century, with the following realizations, specifically devoted to the history of science or including it (in chronological order of publication): Dictionary of Scientific Biography, ed. Charles Gillispie, 18 vols. (1970–1990), containing the following entries on Byzantine scientists (alphabetical order of names): Alexander of Tralles (1 p. 121), Nemesius (10, pp. 20–1), Oribasius (10, pp. 230–31), Paul of Egina (10, pp. 417–19), Psellus (11, pp. 182–86), and Stephanus of Alexandria (13, pp. 37–8); the Dictionary of the History of Ideas, ed. Philip P. Wiener, 5 vols., 1973–74; the Lexikon des Mittelalters, ed. Robert Auty, 9 vols., 1980–1999; the Dictionary of the Middle Ages, ed. Joseph Strayer (1904–1987), 13 vols., 1982–1989; the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, ed. Alexander P. Kazhdan et al., 3 vols., 1991; the Neue Pauly, ed. Hubert Cancik, and Helmuth Schneider, 13 vols. with an index and 5 supplements, 1996–2003 (English trans. under the title Brill’s New Pauly, 16 vols. and 4 supplements published from 2002); Medieval Science, Technology, and Medicine: An Encyclopedia, ed. Thomas Glick, Steven J. Livesey, and Faith Wallis, 2005, with contrasted information: whereas there is no entry on By-

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zantium and no mention of Byzantium in some important entries (Astronomy [64–67], Euclid [164–67], Illustration, Medical [262–64] and Scientific [264–67], Medicine [336–40], Ptolemy [427–29], and Translation Movements [482–86]), others include Byzantium (Botany [96–8], Burgundio of Pisa [104–105], Cartography, Byzantine [117–18], Dioscorides [152–54], Galen [179–82], Herbals [218–20], Kosmas Indikopleustês [302–303], Pharmaceutic Handbooks [393–94], Pharmacology [394–97], and Pharmacy and Materia Medica [397–99]); Enzyklopädie Medizingeschichte, ed. Werner E. Gerabek, Bernhard D. Haage, Gundolf Keil, and Wolfgang Wegner, 2005, with several entries on Byzantine physicians (alphabetical order of names): Aetius (16), Alexander of Tralles (31–2), Iohannes Zacharias Aktuarios (703), Nicolaus Myrepsus (1020), Nemesius (1030), Oribasius (1076–77), Paul of Egina (1116), Philaretos (9th c. [?]) (1150), Psellus (1189), Stephanus of Athens (1360), Symeon Seth (1332), the Suda (ca. 1000 [?]) (1366), and Theophilos Protospatharios (1385); the Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers, ed. Thomas Hockey, 2 vols., 2007, with a limited number of Byzantine astronomers (alphabetical order of names): Gregory (or George) Chionides (or Chioniades) (ca. 1240–1250–ca. 1320) (229); Nicephore Gregoras (440–41); Hypatia (ca. 370–415) (544–45), Olympiodorus the Younger (ca. 495/505–after 565) (853); Pappus of Alexandria (4th c. [?]) (869–70); Ioannes Philoponus (900–1); Simplicius of Cilicia (ca. 490–ca. 560) (1062–63); Synesius of Cyrene (ca. 365/370–ca. 413) (1117–18); and Theon of Alexandria (ca. 335–ca. 400) (1133–1134); Medieval Islamic Civilization: An Encyclopedia, 2 vols., ed. Josef W. Meri, 2006; the Encyclopedia of Ancient Natural Scientists: The Greek Tradition and its Many Heirs, ed. Paul Keyser, and Georgia Irby-massie, 2008, which presents some data on Early-Byzantine scientists or anonymous works; and the New Dictionary of Scientific Biography, ed. Noretta Koertge, 8 vols., 2008, which has some entries on less known or recently better researched Byzantine men of science (alphabetical order of names, with the mention of the field of activity): Isaac Argyrus (1300 or 1310–ca. 1375) (1, 98–9; astronomy); George (or Gregory) Chioniades (or Chionides) (2, 120–2; astronomy); Ioannes Philoponus (4, 51–3, natural philosophy); Theodore Meliteniotes (ca. 1320–1393) (5, 94–6, astronomy); Manuel Moschopoulos (ca. 1265–after 1340) (5, 196, mathematics); Olympiodorus of Alexandria (5, 338–40, natural philosophy, astrology, alchemy); and Stephanus of Alexandria (6, 516–19, astronomy, astrology, alchemy, medicine, mathematics). Specialized research in the 20th century dealt with such topics as (alphabetical order of disciplines; within each section, chronological order of publication; selection) (alchemy) Robert Halleux, Les Textes alchimiques, 1979; Maria Papathanassiou, “Stephanus of Alexandria: On the Structure and

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Date of his Alchemical Work,” Medicina nei secoli 8 (1996): 247–266; L’alchimie et ses racines philosophiques: La tradition grecque et la tradition arabe, ed. Cristina Viano, 2005; (arithmetic, general) Paul Tannery (1843–1904), Mémoires scientifiques, vol. 4: Sciences exactes chez les Byzantins, ed. Johan Ludvig Heiberg, and Hieronymus Georg Zeuthen (1839–1920), 1920; André Allard, “L’enseignement du calcul arithmétique à partir des XIIe et XIIIe siècles: l’exemple de la multiplication,” Manuels, programmes de cours et techniques d’enseignement dans les Universités médiévales, 1994, 117–35; Jaap Mansfeld, Prolegomena Mathematica from Apollonius of Perga to Late Neoplatonism with an Appendix on Pappus and the History of Platonism, 1998; (arithmetic, Diophantus of Alexandria [3rd c. C.E.]) Paul Tannery, Diophanti Alexandrini Opera omnia cum Graecis commentariis, 1893–1895; André Allard, “La Tradition du texte grec des Arithmétiques de Diophante d’Alexandrie,” Revue d’Histoire des Textes 12/13 (1982/3): 57–137; Id., “Les scolies aux arithmétiques de Diophante d’Alexandrie dans le Matritensis Bibl. Nat. 4678 et les Vaticani gr. 191 et 304,” Byzantion 53 (1983): 682–710; Jean Christianidis, “Une Interpretation byzantine de Diophante,” Historia Mathematica 25 (1998): 22–28; (arithmetic, George Pachymeres [1242–ca. 1310]) Paul Tannery, Quadrivium de Georges Pachymère ou Suntagma tôn tessarôn mathêmatôn arithmêtikês, mousikês, geôgraphias kai astronomias, ed. E. Stéphanou, 1950; (arithmetic, Isaac Argyrus) André Allard, “Le Petit traité d’Isaac Argyre sur la racine carrée,” Centaurus 22 (1978): 1–43; (arithmetic, Indian) André Allard, “Le premier traité byzantin de calcul indien: Classement des manuscrits et édition critique du texte,” Revue d’Histoire des Textes 7 (1978): 57–107; (arithmetic, Maximos Planudes [ca. 1255–ca. 1305]) André Allard, Maxime Planude, le ‘Grand calcul selon les Indiens’: Histoire du texte, édition critique traduite et annotée, 1981; Jean Christianidis, “Maxime Planude sur le sens du terme diophantien plasmatikon,” Historia Scientiarum 6 (1996): 37–41; (astronomy) David Pingree (1933–2005, “Gregory Chioniades and Palaeologan Astronomy,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 18 (1964): 135–160; Anne Tihon, “Le calcul de la longitude de Vénus d’après un texte anonyme du Vat. gr. 184,” Bulletin de l’Institut historique belge de Rome 39 (1968): 51–82; Ead., Le ‘Petit Commentaire’ de Théon d’Alexandrie aux Tables Faciles de Ptolémée: Histoire du texte, édition critique, traduction, 1973; Joseph Mogenet, and Anne Tihon, in collaboration with Daniel Donnet, Barlaam de Seminara, Traités sur les éclipses de soleil de 1333 et 1337: Histoire des textes, éditions critiques, traductions et commentaires, 1977 (on Barlaam [ca. 1290–1348]); Anne Tihon, “Un traité astronomique chypriote du XIVe siècle,” Janus 64 (1977): 279–308; 66 (1979): 49–81; 68 (1981): 65–127; Ead., “L’astronomie byzantine,” Byzantion 51 (1981): 603–24; Joseph Mogenet, Le ‘Grand Commentaire’ de Théon d’Alexandrie aux

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Tables Faciles de Ptolémée, Livre I: Histoire du texte, édition critique, traduction. Rev., with a trans. by Anne Tihon, 1985; Ead., “Calculs d’éclipses byzantins de la fin du XIVe siècle,” Le Muséon 100 (1987): 353–61; Ead., Le ‘Grand Commentaire’ de Théon d’Alexandrie aux Tables Faciles de Ptolémée, Livres II et III: Histoire du texte, édition critique, traduction, and id., Livre IV, 2 vols., 1991–1999; Ead., Etudes d’astronomie byzantine, 1994 (reproduces articles previously published by the author); Ead., “Sous la plume de Jean Chortasmenos: Des scolies byzantines sur la trépidation des équinoxes,” Philosophie et sciences à Byzance de 1204 à 1453: Les textes, les doctrines et leur transmission, ed. Michel Cacouros, and Marie-Hélène Congourdeau, 2006, 157–184 (on Ioannes Chortasmenos [ca. 1370-before 1439]; (astronomy, applied) Otto Neugebauer (1899–1990), and Henry Bartlett Van Hoesen (1885–1965), Greek Horoscopes, 1959; (biology) Jean Théodoridès, Les sciences biologiques et médicales à Byzance, 1977; (botany) Vilhelm Lundström (1869–1940), “Neophytos Prodromenos’ botaniska namnförteckning,” Eranos 5 (1903–1904): 129–55; Armand Delatte, “Le lexique de botanique …” (above); Id., Anecdota … (above), passim; Félix Brunet (b. 1872), “Contribution des médecins byzantins à l’histoire des plantes et à la botanique médicale en France,” Hippocrates 5 (1939): 524–31; Armand Delatte, “Le traité des plantes planétaires d’un manuscrit de Léningrad,” Annuaire de l’Institut de philologie et d’histoire orientales 9 (1949): 145–77; Margaret H. Thomson, Textes grecs inedits relatifs aux plantes, 1955; Ead., Le jardin symbolique: Texte grec tiré du Clarkianus XI, 1960; Ernst Heitsch, ‘Carmen de viribus herbarum’, Die griechischen Dichterfragmente der römischen Kaiserzeit, vol. 2, 1964, 23–38; John Riddle “Byzantine Commentaries on Dioscorides,” Symposium on Byzantine Medicine, ed. John Scarborough, 1985, 95–102 (reproduced in John M. Riddle, Quid pro quo: Studies in the History of Drugs, 1992, no. XIII]); Alain Touwaide, “Lexica medico-botanica byzantina. Prolégomènes à une étude,” Tês filiês tade dôra. Miscelánea léxica en memoria de Conchita Serrano, 1999, 211–28; (chemistry) James R. Partington (1886–1965), A History of Greek Fire and Gunpowder, 1960; Carlo Maria Mazzucchi, “Il fuoco greco,” Storia della guerra futura: Atti del Convegno, Varallo, 22 settembre 2006, ed. Carlo Rastelli, and Giovanni Cerino Badone, 2006, 125–32; (geography) Didier Marcotte, Les géographes grecs, vol. 1: Introduction générale and Pseudo-Scymnos, Circuit de la Terre, 2000; Maria Gabriela Schmidt, Die Nebenüberlieferung des 6. Buchs des Geographie des Ptolemaios. Griechische, lateinische, syrische, armenische und arabische Texte, 1999; (mathematics) Jean Verpeaux (1922–1965), Nicéphore Choumnos, homme d’état et humaniste byzantin (ca. 1250/1255–1327), 1959 (see 151–70: chapter 5: Nicéphore Choumnos et les connaissances mathématiques); Alistair Macintosh Wilson, The Infinite in the Finite, 1995, on Pappus of Alexandria (408–20) and The

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Last of the Greeks (420–23); (medicine [general; see below for specific studies]) Théodoridès, Les sciences … (above); Aristotelês Eytichiadês, Ê aksêsis tês buzantinês iatrikês epistêmês kai koinônikai afarmogai autês kata schetikas diataxeis, 1983; Nicoletta Palmieri, “La théorie de la médecine des Alexandrins aux Arabes,” Les voies de la science grecque: Etudes sur la transmission des textes de l’Antiquité au dix-neuvième siècle, ed. Danielle Jacquart, 1997, 33–133; MarieHélène Congourdeau, “La médecine byzantine: Une réévaluation nécessaire,” La revue du praticien 54 (2004): 1733–37; Ead., “La médecine à Nicée et sous les Paléologues: état de la question,” Philosophie et sciences …, ed. Cacouros, and Congourdeau (above), 185–88; Alain Touwaide, “The Development of Palaeologan Renaissance: An Analysis Based on Dioscorides’ De materia medica,” ibid., 189–224; (metrology) Erich Schilbach, Byzantinische Metrologische Quellen,1970; Id., Byzantinische Metrologie, 1970; (mineralogy) Dietlinde Golz, Studien zur Geschichte der Mineralnamen in Pharmazie, Chemie und Medizin von den Anfängen bis Paracelsus, 1972; Sonja Schönauer, Untersuchungen zum Steinkatalog des Sophrosyne-Gedichtes des Meliteniotes mit kritischer Edition der Verse 1107–1247, 1996; (oneirology) M. Andrew Holowchak, Ancient Science and Dreams. Oneirology in Greco-Roman Antiquity, 2001; Maria Mavroudi, A Byzantine Book on Dream Interpretation: The Oneirocriticon of Achmet and Its Arabic Sources, 2002; Steven M. Oberhelman, Dreambooks in Byzantium: Six Oneirocritica in Translation, with Commentary and Introduction, 2008; (pharmacy) Pan. G. Kritikos, and Stella P. Papadaki, “Contribution à l’histoire de la Pharmacie chez les Byzantins, “Die Vorträge der Hauptversammlung der Internationalen Gesellschaft für Geschichte der Pharmazie e. V. während des Internationalen Pharmaziegeschichtlichen Kongresses in Athen vom 8. bis 14. April 1967, ed. Georg Edmund Dann (1898–1979), 1969, 13–78; Jerry Stannard, “Aspects of Byzantine Materia Medica,” Symposium …, ed. Scarborough (above), 205–11 (reproduced in Jerry Stannard, Pristina Medicamenta: Ancient and Medieval Medical Botany, ed. Katherine E. Stannard, and Richard Kay, 1999, no. IX); John Scarborough, “Early Byzantine Pharmacology,” Symposium …, ed. Scarborough (above), 213–32; Maria Papathomopoulos, “Stephanus of Alexandria: Pharmaceutical Notions and Cosmology in his Alchemical Work,” Ambix 37 (1990): 121–33; Rudolf Schmitz (1918–1992), Geschichte der Pharmazie, vol. 1: Von den Anfängen bis zum Ausgang des Mittelalters, 1998, 205–17; Marie-Hélène Marganne, “Etiquettes de médicaments, listes de drogues, prescriptions et réceptaires dans l’Egypte gréco-romaine et byzantine,” Pharmacopoles et apothicaires: Les ‘Pharmaciens’ de l’Antiquité au Grand Siècle, ed. Franck Collard, and Evelyne Samama, 2006, 59–73; (veterinary medicine) Gudmund Björck (1905–1955), “Le Parisinus grec 2244 et l’art vétérinaire grec,” Revue des études grecques 48 (1935):

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505–24; Anne-Marie Doyen-higuet, “The Hippiatrica and Byzantine Veterinary Medicine,” Symposium …, ed. Scarborough (above), 111–20; Stavros Lazaris, “Les rapports entre l’illustration et le texte de l’Epitome, manuel byzantin d’hippiatrie,” Archives internationales d’histoire des sciences 49 (1999): 281–301; Id., “La production nouvelle en médecine vétérinaire sous les Paléologues et l’oeuvre cynégétique de Dèmètrios Pépagôménos,” Philosophie et sciences …, ed. Cacouros, and Congourdeau (above), 225–68; Anne-Marie Doyen-Higuet, L’epitomé de la Collection d’hippiatrie grecque: Histoire du texte, édition critique, traduction et notes, vol. 1, 2006; Anne McCabe, A Byzantine Encyclopaedia of Horse Medicine: The Sources, Compilation, and Transmission of the Hippiatrica, Oxford, 2007; (zoology) Jean Théodoridès, “L’intérêt scientifique des miniatures zoologiques d’un manuscrit byzantin de la ‘matière médicale’ de Dioscoride (Codex M 652, Pierpont Morgan Library, New York),” Acta biologica Debrecina 7–8 (1969–1970): 265–72; Zoltan Kádár, Survivals of Greek Zoological Illuminations in Byzantine Manuscripts, 1978; Stavros Lazaris, “Le Physiologus grec et son illustration: Quelques considérations à propos d’un nouveau témoin illustré (Dujcev. gr. 297),” and Jacqueline Leclerc-Marx, “La sirène et l’(ono)centaure dans le Physiologus grec et latin dans quelques Bestiaires: Le texte et l’image,” Bestiaires médiévaux: Nouvelles perspectives sur les manuscrits et les traditions textuelles, ed. Baudouin Van den Abeele, 2005, 141–67 and 169–82 respectively; Pierre Beulens, “L’étude de l’Histoire des animaux durant l’occupation latine de Constantinople et sous les Paléologues,” Philosophie et sciences …, ed. Cacouros, and Congourdeau (above), 113–25. The current bibliography on the history of sciences, can be found in the volume ISIS Current Bibliography of the History of Science and its Cultural Influences, published as a yearly supplement to ISIS, the journal of the History of Science Society (HSS) of America. Byzantium is dealt with in a specific section (no. 220), which includes several sub-sections (by disciplines). Since there are also disciplinary sections (nos. 101–64), all sections are crossed-referenced and indexed (subject index) in order to make it possible to easily locate any relevant item. Besides the Catalogus Codicum Astrologorum Graecorum and the Catalogue des manuscrits alchimiques grecs (above), another important 20th-century achievement is the Corpus des astronomes byzantins, 10 vols., by different publishing companies over time, 1983–2001 (in chronological order of publication, and number in the series): Joseph Mogenet, Anne Tihon, Robert Royez, and Anne Berg, Nicéphore Grégoras, Calcul de l’éclipse de Soleil du 16 juillet 1330, 1983; David Pingree, The Astronomical Works of Gregory Chioniades, 2 vols., 1985–1986; Alexander Jones, An Eleventh-century Manual of Arabo-Byzantine

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Astronomy, 1987; Régine Leurquin, Théodore Méliténiote, Tribiblos astronomique, 3 vols., 1993; Raymond Mercier, An Almanac for Trebizond for the Year 1336, 1994; David Pingree, The Preceptum Canonis Ptolomei, 1997; Anne Tihon, and Raymond Mercier, Georges Gémiste Pléthon, Manuel d’astronomie, 1998; Anne Tihon, Régine Leurquin, and Claude Scheuren, La version grecque du Traité sur l’astrolabe du Pseudo-Messahalla, 2001. G. The Case of Medicine The field of Byzantine science that developed more in 20th-century Western scholarship is medicine. Though with the limitations we have stressed, many texts have been edited and studied (including sometimes the biography of the author). A bibliographical guide on Greek medical literature (actually, a list of critical editions by ancient authors) including some Byzantine authors has been published by Helmut Leitner, Bibliography to the Ancient Medical Authors, 1973, which was not necessarily well received (see, for example, a review by K. R. Walters, and David Wilson, Gnomon 48 [1976]: 604–06). Supplementary bibliographical information has been provided in such notes as John Scarborough, “Texts and Sources in Ancient Pharmacy,” Pharmacy in History 29 (1987): 81–84, and 133–39; Wesley D. Smith, “The Leitner Supplements: An Addendum,” Society for Ancient Medicine Newsletter 20 (1992): 34–35; and John Scarborough, “New Texts in Byzantine and Arabic Toxicology and Pharmacology,” Pharmacy in History 38 (1996): 96–99. Also, several reports on such major enterprise as the Corpus Medicorum Graecorum (which includes some early-Byzantine physicians) have been published during the century; for the most recent (with the references of the earlier reports), see: Jutta Kollesch, “Das Berliner Corpus der antiken Ärzte: Zur Konzeption und zum Stand der Arbeiten,” Tradizione e ecdotica dei testi medici tardoantichi e bizantini: Atti del Convegno Internazionale, Anacrapri 29–31 ottobre 1990, ed. Antonio Garzya, 1992, 357–50. Finally, an anthology of texts (in Italian trans.) has been recently published by Neapolitan philologists (see below): Medici Bizantini, 2006, (includes [chronological order of Byzantine authors] Oribasius, Aetius, Alexander of Tralles, Paul of Egina, Leo; translations are by Antonio Garzya, Roberto De Lucia, Alessia Guardasole, Anna Maria Ieraci Bio, Mario Lamagna, Roberto Romano). For specific studies on Byzantine authors and medical texts, see (alphabetical order of Byzantine authors’ name; selection): Aelius Promotus (pseudo-) Sibylle Ihm, “Der Traktat peri tôn iobolôn thêriôn kai dêlêtêriôn farmakôn des sog. Aelius Promotus: Vorstellung eines erstmals vollständig edierten toxikologischen Textes,” Antike Naturwissenschaft und ihre Rezeption, ed. Klaus Döring, Bernhard Herzhoff, and Georg Wöhrle, vol. 5 (1995):

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79–89; Ead., Der Traktat peri tôn iobolôn thêriôn kai dêlêtêriôn farmakôn des sog. Aelius Promotus: Erstedition mit texkritischen Kommentar, 1995; (Aetius), Alessandro Olivieri, “Gli Iatrika di Aetios nel cod. Messinese no. 84,” Studi italiani di filologia classica 9 (1901): 299–367; Zerbos, Die Gynekologie … (above); Id., Aetii Sermo sextidecimus … (above); Id., “Aetiou Amidênou peri daknontôn zôôn …” (above); Id., “Paratêrêseis eis ton triskaidekaton logon …” (above); Id., “Aetiou Amidênou logos dekatos pemptos” (above); Id., “Aetiou Amidênou logos enatos” (above); Jean Théodoridès, “Sur le 13e livre du traité d’Aétios d’Amida, médecin byzantin du VIe siècle,” Janus 47 (1958): 221–37; Antonio Garzya, “Problèmes relatifs à l’édition des livres IX–XVI du Tétrabiblon d’Aétios d’Amida,” Revue des Etudes Anciennes 86 (1984): 246–57; (Alexander of Tralles) Félix Brunet, Médecine et thérapeutique byzantines: Œuvres médicales d’Alexandre de Tralles, le dernier auteur classique des grands médecins grecs de l’antiquité, 4 vols., 1933–1937; Barbara Zipser, “Die Therapeutica des Alexander Trallianus: Ein medizinisches Handbuch und seine Überlieferung,” Selecta colligere, vol. 2: Beiträge zur Technik des Sammelns und Kompilierens griechischer Texte von der Antike bis zum Humanismus, 2005, ed. Rosa Maria Piccione, and Matthias Perkams, 2005, 211–34; (anonymous) Ivan Garofalo (ed. and comm.), and Brian Fuchs (trans.), Anonymi Medici, De morbis acutis et chronicis, 1997; (Antonius Pyropoulos) Kouzês, “Some new informations …” (above); (Constantine Meliteniotes) Kouzês, “Quelques considérations …” (above); (Demetrius Pepagomenos) Kouzês, Dêmêtriou Pepagomenou, Suntagma …, (above); Maria Capone Cipollaro, Demetrio Pepagomeno, Prontuario medico, 2003; (Dioscorides) Pan. G. Kritikos, and Theodora Athanassoula, Sur les codex pharmaceutiques grecs: Un Codex inconnu de Dioscoride (1ère communication), no date; Geôrgios Christodoulos, Summikta kritika, 1986, 131–99 (on the Athos manuscript of Dioscorides [=  75, 11th c.]); Alain Touwaide, “Le traité de matière médicale de Dioscoride en Italie depuis la fin de l’Empire romain jusqu’aux débuts de l’école de Salerne: Essai de synthèse,” From Epidaurus to Salerno: Symposium held at the European University Centre for Cultural Heritage, Ravello, April, 1990, ed. Antje Krug, 1994, 275–305; Emilie Léal, “Un manuscrit illustré du traité de matière médicale de Dioscoride: le Paris grec 2180,” 2 vols., B.A. thesis, University of Provence, Aix-Marseille, 1997; Alessia Aletta, “Studi e ricerche sul Dioscoride della Pierpont Morgan Library M.652,” 2 vols., B.A. thesis, University of Rome, 1997–1998; Pascal Luccioni, “La postérité de l’œuvre de Dioscoride jusqu’au VIe siècle: Remèdes, fraudes et succédanés,” Ph.D. thesis, University of Paris IV-Sorbonne, 1998; Annamaria Ciarallo, “Classificazione botanica delle specie illustrate nel Dioscoride della Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli,” Automata 1 (2006): 39–41; (Pseudo-Diosco-

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ride, toxicological treatises) Julius Berendes (1837–1914), “I. Des Pedanios Dioskurides Schrift über die Gifte und Gegengifte – II. Des Pedanios Dioskurides Schrift über die giftigen Tiere und den tollen Hund,” Apotheker Zeitung 20 (1905): 908–11, 918, 926–28, 933–35, 945–46, 952–54; Alain Touwaide, “Les deux traités toxicologiques attribués à Dioscoride: La Tradition manuscrite grecque, édition critique du texte grec, index,” 5 vols., Ph.D. thesis, University of Louvain, 1981; Id., “L’authenticité et l’origine des deux traités de toxicologie attribués à Dioscoride: I. Historique de la question. II. Apport de l’histoire du texte grec,” Janus 70 (1983): 1–53; Id., “Les deux traités de toxicologie attribués à Dioscoride: Tradition manuscrite, établissement du texte et critique d’authenticité,” Tradizione e ecdotica … (above), 291–339; (Pseudo-Dioscorides [?], On simple medicines) Julius Berendes, “Die Hausmittel des Pedanios Dioskurides, übersetzt und mit Erklärungen versehen,” Janus 12 (1907): 10–33, 79–102, 140–63, 203–24, 268–92, 340–50, 401–12; (efodia) Marie-Hélène Congourdeau, “À propos d’un chapitre des Éphodia: L’avortement chez les médicins grecs,” Revue des Etudes Byzantines 55 (1997): 261–77; Alain Touwaide, “Magna Graecia iterata: Greek medicine in Southern Italy in the 11th and 12th centuries,” Medicina in Magna Graecia: The Roots of our Knowledge, ed. Alfredo Musajo Somma, 2004, 85–101; Id., “Medicina Bizantina e Araba alla Corte di Palermo,” Medicina, Scienza e Politica al Tempo di Federico II: Conferenza Internazionale, Castello Utveggio, Palermo, 4–5 ottobre 2007, ed. Natale Gaspare De Santo, and Guido Bellinghieri, 2008, 39–55; (Galen) Nigel G. Wilson, “Aspects of the Transmission of Galen,” Le strade del testo, ed. Guglielmo Cavallo, 1987, 45–64; Jean Irigoin (1920–2006), Tradition et ecdotique des textes grecs, 1997, passim; Vivian Nutton, “Galen in Byzantium,” Material Culture and Well-Being in Byzantium (400–1453): Proceedings of the International Conference (Cambridge, 8–10 September 2001), ed. Michael Grünbart, Ewald Kislinger, Anna Muthesius, and Dionysios Stathakopoulos, 2007, 171–76; Peter E. Pormann, “The Alexandrian Summary (Jawami) of Galen’s On the Sects for Beginners: Commentary or Abridgment?,” Philosophy, Science and Exegesis in Greek, Arabic and Latin Commentaries, ed. Peter Adamson, Han Baltussen, and M. W. F. Stone, 2 vols., 2004, vol. 2, 11–33; (Hippocrates) Owsei Temkin (1902–2002), “Geschichte des Hippokratismus im ausgehenden Altertum,” Kyklos 4 (1932): 1–80; Id., Hippocrates in a World of Pagans and Christians, 1991; (Ioannes of Alexandria) Iohannis Alexandrini Commentaria in Librum De Sectis Galeni, ed. C. D. Pritchet, 1982; John of Alexandria, Commentary on Hippocrates’ Epidemics VI, Fragments, ed. and trans. John M. Duffy, and Commentary on Hippocrates’ On the Nature of the Child, ed. and trans. T. A. Bell et al., 1997; (Ioannes Argyropoulos [ca. 1393/4–1487]) Alain Touwaide, “The Letter …

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to a Cypriot Physician attributed to Johannes Argyropoulos (ca. 1448–1453),” Medicina nei Secoli 11 (1999): 585–601; (Ioannes Prisduanôn) Kouzês, “To peri ourôn …” (above); (Ioannes Zacharias Actuarius) Stauros Iô. Kourouzês, “O Aktouarios Iôannês Zacharias paralêpês tês epistolês i’ tou Geôrgiou Lakapênou,” Athêna 78 (1980–1982): 237–76; Armin Hohlweg, “Johannes Aktouarios: Leben, Bildung und Ausbildung; De methodo medendi,” Byzantinische Zeitschrift 76(1983): 302–21; Id., “John Actuarius’s De methodo medendi: On the New Edition,” Symposium …, ed. Scarborough (above), 121–33; Stauros Iô. Kourouzês, To epistolarion Geôrgiou LakapênouAndronikou Zaridou (1299–1315 ca.) kai o iatros Aktouarios Iôannês Zacharias (1275 ca.-1328?): Meletê filologikê, Athens, 1984–1988; (Leo the Physician) Kouzês, “The Written Tradition …” (above); Robert Renehan, “On the Text of Leo Medicus: A Study in Textual Criticism,” Rheinisches Museum für Philologie 113 (1970): 79–88; Lawrence J. Bliquez, “The Surgical Instrumentarium of Leon Iatrosophistes,” Medicina nei Secoli 11 (1999): 291–322; Barbara Zipser, “Überlegungen zum Text der Sunopsis iatrikes des Leo medicus,” Studia Humanitatis ac Litterarum Trifolio Heidelbergensi dedicata: Festschrift für Eckhard Christmann, Wilfried Edelmaier und Rudolf Kettemann, ed. Angela Hornung, Christian Jäkel, and Werner Schubert, 2004, 393–99; Ead., “Zu Aufbau und Quellen der Sunopsis iatrikes des Leo medicus,” Antike Fachtexte-Ancient Technical Texts, ed. Thorsten Fögen, 2005, 107–15; (Meletius) Robert Renehan, “Meletius’ Chapter on the Eyes: An Unidentified Source,” Symposium …, ed. Scarborough (above), 159–68; (Metrodora) Zerbos, “Das unveröffentlichte medizinische Werk …” (above); Marie- Hélène Congourdeau, “Mètrodôra et son œuvre (traduction d’un traité de gynécologie populaire),” Maladie et société à Byzance, ed. Evelyne Patlagean, 1994, 21–42; (Nemesius) Hellen Brown Wicher, “Nemesius Emesenus,” Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum: Mediaeval and Renaissance Latin Translations and Commentaries: Annotated Lists and Guides, ed. F. Edward Cranz (1914–1998), vol. 6, 1986, 31–72; Moreno Morani, Nemesius, De natura hominis, 1987; (Neophytos Prodromênos) Lundström, “Neophytos Prodromenos’ …” (above); Kouzês, “To peri tôn en odousi pathôn …” (above); (Nicephoros Blemmydes) Id., “Les œuvres médicales …” (above); Evangelia A. Varella, “Nicephorus Blemmydes: Naturwissenschafliches Porträt eines Gelehrten des späten Mittelalters,” Orthodoxes Forum 2 (1990–1991): 1–16; Athanasios Diamantopoulos, Musical Uroscopy: On Urines by the Wisest Vlemydes; An Excellent Medical Work in the Iambic Manner by the Wisest Psellus, 1996; (Paul of Egina) Julius Berendes, “Des Paulos von Aegina Abriss der gesammten Medizin in sieben Büchern, übersetzt und mit Erklärungen versehen,” Janus 13 (1908): 417–32, 515–31, 538–600, 654–69; 14 (1909): 33–49, 124–39,

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602–24, 689–707, 754–74; 15 (1910): 9–40, 73–111, 143–73, 229–60, 462–83, 534–62, 622–49; 16 (1911): 153–68, 381–89, 492–511, 548–65; 17 (1912): 20–44, 93–116, 233–61, 316–47, 368–99, 448–79, 557–72, 593–609; 18 (1913): 24–55, 121–51, 210–14, 282–97, 380–401; this translation was further reproduced in a monographic form under a new title: Paulos’ von Aegina des besten Arztes, Sieben Bücher. Übersetzt und mit Erläuterungen versehen, 1914; Mario Tabanelli, Studi sulla Chirurgia Bizantina: Paolo di Egina, 1964; Eugene F. Rice, “Paulus Egineta,” Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum: Mediaeval and Renaissance Latin Translations and Commentaries: Annotated Lists and Guides, ed. F. Edward Cranz, vol. 4, 1980, 145–91; (Paul of Nicea) Zerbos, Oi kôdikes tôn archaiôn anekdotôn iatrikôn cheirografôn tou Paulou Nikaiou … (above); Anna Maria Ieraci Bio, Paolo di Nicea, Manuale Medico, 1996; (Philaretos) John A. Pithis, Die Schriften peri sfugmôn des Philaretos: Text, Übersetzung, Kommentar, 1983; (Psellus) Armin Hohlweg, “Medizinischer ‘Enzyklopedismus’ und das ponêma nousôn des Michael Psellos,” Byzantinische Zeitschrift 81 (1988): 39–49; Robert Volk, Der medizinische Inhalt der Schriften des Michael Psellos, 1990; Diamantopoulos, Musical Uroscopy …, (above); (Râzî) Kouzês, Razê, Logos peri loimikês … (above); (Romanos) Id., “The Medical Work …” (above); (Stephanos of Athens [and Alexandria]) Wanda Wolska-conus, “Stéphanos d’Athènes et Stéphanos d’Alexandrie: Essai d’identification et de biographie,” Revue des Etudes Byzantines 47 (1989): 5–89; Ead., “Les commentaires de Stéphanos d’Athènes au Prognostikon et aux Aphorismes d’Hippocrate: de Galien à la pratique scolaire alexandrine,” Revue des Etudes Byzantines 50 (1992): 5–86; Ead., “Stéphanos d’Athènes (d’Alexandrie) et Théophile le Prôtospathaire, commentateurs des Aphorismes d’Hippocrate: Sont-ils indépendants l’un de l’autre?,” Revue des Etudes Byzantines 52 (1994): 5–68; Ead., “Sources des commentaires de Stéphanos d’Athènes et de Théophile le Prôtospathaire aux Aphorismes d’Hippocrate,” Revue des Etudes Byzantines 54 (1996): 5–66; Ead., “Un ‘Pseudo-Galien’ dans le commentaire de Stéphanos d’Athènes aux Aphorismes d’Hippocrate: O neôteros exêgêtês,” Revue des Etudes Byzantines 56 (1998): 5–78; Keith Dickinson, Stephanus the Philosopher and Physician: Commentary on Galen’s Therapeutics to Glaucon, 1998; (Theophanus Nonnus [actually, Chrysobalantes]) Io. Steph. Bernard (1718–1793), Theophanis Nonni Epitome de Curatione Morborum Graece ac Latine ope codicum manuscriptorum recensuit notasque adiecit, 2 vols., 1794–1795; Joseph A. Sonderkamp, “Theophanes Nonnus: Medicine in the Circle of Constantine Porphyrogenitus,” Symposium …, ed. Scarborough (above), 29–41; Id., Untersuchungen zur Überlieferung der Schriften des Theophanes Chrysobalantes (sog. Theophanes Nonnos), 1987; (Theophilos) Kouzês, Theofilou, Peri ourôn biblion … (above); Id., “The Apotherapeutic …” (above).

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Over time – particularly in recent years – a different type of approach developed, by topics (alphabetical order of topic names; selection) (abortion) Effie Poulakou-Rebelakou, John Lascaratos, and Spyros G. Marketos, “Abortions in Byzantine Times (325–1453 AD),” Vesalius 2 (1996): 19–25; Marie-Hélène Congourdeau, “Les abortifs dans les sources byzantines,” Le corps à l’épreuve: Poisons, remèdes et chirurgie. Aspects des pratiques médicales dans l’Antiquité et au Moyen-Age, ed. Franck Collard, and Evelyne Samama, 2002, 57–70; (Alexandria) Owsei Temkin, “Studies on Late Alexandrian Medicine. I: Alexandrian Commentaries on Galen’s De Sectis ad Introducendos,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 3 (1935): 405–430; (analgesics) George Kalantzis, Constantine Trompoukis, Constantine Tsiamis, and John Lascaratos, “The Use of Analgesics and Hypnotics in the Ancient Greek and Byzantine Era,” Proceedings of the History of Anaesthesia Society 32 (2003): 27–31; Kônstantinos Tsiamês, and Iôannês Laskaratos, “Analgêtika kai upnôtika stên Archaia Ellada kai sto Buzantio,” Hellenic Journal of Surgery 76 (2004): 65–71; (anthropology, Christian) Carolus Burkhard (b. 1858), Alfanus, Nemesii Episcopi Premnon Physicon Peri fuseôs anthrôpou liber a N. Alfano achiepiscopo Salerni in Latinum translatus, 1917; Alexis Smets, and Michel Van Esbroeck, Basile de Césarée, Sur l’origine de l’homme (Hom. X et XI de l’Hexaéméron): Introduction, texte critique, tradution et notes, 1970; Kristijan Domiter, Gregor von Nazianz, De human natura (c. 1, 2, 14): Text, Übersetzung, Kommentar, 1999; (cosmetic medicine) John Lascaratos, Constantine Tsiamis, Gerassimos Lascaratos, and Nicholas G. Stavrianeas, “The Roots of Cosmetic Medicine: Hair Cosmetics in Byzantine Times (AD 324–1453),” International Journal of Dermatology 43 (2004): 397–401; (Crusades) Piers D. Mitchell, Medicine in the Crusades: Warfare, Wounds and the Medieval Surgeon, 2004; (dentistry) Effi Poulakou-Rebelakou, M. Stravrou, Constantinos Tsiamis, J. Stravrou, and M. Prokopidi, “Dental Drugs during the Byzantine Times (330–1453 AD),” Program Abstracts of the XXth Nordic Medical History Congress, Reykjavik, Iceland, August 10–13, 2005; (diet) Dionysios Ch. Stathakopoulos, Famine and Pestilence in the Late Roman and Early Byzantine Empire: A Systematic Survey of Subsistence Crises and Epidemics, 2004; Feast, Fast or Famine: Food and Drink in Byzantium, ed. Wendy Mayer, and Silke Trzcionda, 2005; Eat, Drink, and Be Merry (Luke 12:19): Food and Wine in Byzantium, in Honour of Professor A. A. M. Bryer, ed. Leslie Brubaker, and Kalliroe Linardou, 2007; (elderly) John Lascaratos, and Effie Poulacou-rebelacou, “The Roots of Geriatric Medicine: Care of the Aged in Byzantine Times (324–1453 AD),” Gerontology 46 (2000): 2–6; (generation) Marie-Hélène Congourdeau, “Sang féminin et génération ches les auteurs byzantins,” Le sang au moyen âge: Actes du quatrième colloque inter-

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national de Montpellier, Université Paul-Valéry (27–29 novembre 1997), 1999, 19–23; Ead., “L’embryon entre néoplatonisme et christianisme,” Oriens-Occidens 4 (2002): 201–16; (hospital) Timothy Miller, “Byzantine Hospitals,” Symposium …, ed. Scarborough (above), 53–63; Id., The Birth of the Hospital in the Byzantine Empire, 1985 (rev. ed. 1997); Urs Benno Birchler-Argyros, Quellen zur Spitalgeschichte im Oströmischer Reich, 1998; Timothy Miller, “Byzantine Physicians and Their Hospitals,” Medicina nei Secoli 11 (1999): 323–35; David Bennett, “Three Xenon Texts,” Medicina nei Secoli 11 (1999): 507–19; Andrew Crislip, From Monastery to Hospital: Christian Monasticism & the Transformation of Health Care in Late Antiquity, 2005; Peregrine Horden, “The Earliest Hospitals in Byzantium, Western Europe, and Islam,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 35 (2005): 361–89; Id., “How Medicalised were Byzantine Hospitals?,” Medicina e storia 10 (2005): 45–74; (iatromathematics) Maria Papathanassiou, “Iatromathematica (Medical Astrology) in Late Antiquity and the Byzantine Period,” Medicina nei Secoli 11 (1999): 357–76; (illness, plague) Marie-Hélène Congourdeau, “La peste noire à Constantinople de 1348 à 1466,” Medicina nei Secoli 11 (1999): 377–89; Plague and the End of Antiquity, ed. Lester K. Little, 2007; (illness, smallpox) Karl-Heinz Leven, “Zur Kenntnis der Pocken in der arabischen Medizin, im lateinischen Mittelalter und in Byzanz,” Die Begegnung des Westens mit dem Osten: Kongressakten des 4 Symposion des Mediävistenverbandes in Köln 1991 aus Anlass des 1000. Todesjahres der Kaiserin Theophanu, ed. Odilo Engels, and Peter Schreiner, 1993, 341–54; John Lascaratos, “Two Cases of Smallpox in Byzantium,” International Journal of Dermatology 41 (2002): 792–95; (Late Antiquity) Vivian Nutton, “From Galen to Alexander: Aspects of Medicine and Medical Practice in Late Antiquity,” Symposium …, ed. Scarborough (above), 1–14; (leprosy) Luke Demaître, Leprosy in Premodern Medicine: A Malady of the Whole Body, 2007; (monasteries) Volk Robert, Gesundheitswesen und Wohltätigkeit im Spiegel der byzantinischen Klostertypika, 1983; (ophthalmology) John Lascaratos, and Spyros Marketos, “Ophthalmological Therapy in Hospitals (xenones) in Byzantium,” Documenta Ophthalmologica 77 (1991): 377–83; John Lascaratos, “Eyes on the Thrones: Imperial Ophthalmologic Nicknames,” Survey of Ophthalmology 44 (1999); 73–8; Id., “Ophthalmology in Byzantium (10th–15th Centuries),” Medicina nei Secoli 11 (1999): 391–403; (psychosomatic medicine) Aristotelis Chr. Eftychiadis, “Byzantine Psychosomatic Medicine (10th–15th Centuries),” Medicina nei Secoli 11 (1999): 415–21; (rabies) Jean Théodoridès, “Rabies in Byzantine and Islamic Medicine,” Symposium …, ed. Scarborough (above), 149–58; Id., Histoire de la rage: Cave canem, 1986; (Ravenna) Nicoletta Palmieri, “Un antico commento a Galeno della scuola medica di Ravenna,” Physis 23 (1981):

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197–296; (religion) Gary B. Ferngren, and Karl-Heinz Leven, “Médecine aux premiers siècles du christianisme,” Lettre d’informations-Université Jean Monnet-Saint Etienne (Centre Jean Palerne) 26 (1995): 2–22; Pierre Julien, François Ledermann, and Alain Touwaide, Cosma e Damiano dal culto popolare alla protezione di chirurghi, medici e farmacisti: Aspetti e immagini, 1993; JeanClaude Larchet, Théologie de la maladie, 1991; Les pères de l’église face à la science médicale de leur temps, ed. Véronique Boudon-Millot, and Bernard Pouderon, 2005; (rhumatism) Constantine Tsiamis, Nicholas Tiberio Economou, and Effie Poulakou-Rebelakou, “Teorie e trattamento delle malattie reumatiche nel periodo bizantino (330–1453),” Reumatismo 58 (2006): 157–64; (surgery) Lawrence J. Bliquez, “Two Lists of Greek Surgical Instruments and the State of Surgery in Byzantine Times,” Symposium …, ed. Scarborough (above), 187–204; John Lascaratos, and Athanasios Kostakopoulos, “Operations on Hermaphrodites and Castration in Byzantine Times (324–1453 AD),” Urologia Internationalis 58 (1997): 232–35; John Lascaratos, C. Liapis, and C. Ionidis, “Surgery on Aneurysms in Byzantine Times (324–1453 A.D.),” European Journal of Vascular and Endovascular Surgery 15 (1998): 110–14; John Lascaratos, Constantine Tsiamis, and Alkiviadis Kostakis, “Surgery for Inguinal Hernia in Byzantine Times (A.D. 324–1453): First Scientific Descriptions,” World Journal of Surgery 27 (2003): 1165–69; Stephanos Geroulanos, “Surgery in Byzantium,” Material Culture ... (above), 129–34; (terminal patients) John Lascaratos, Effie PoulakouRebelakou, and Spyros G. Marketos, “Abandonment of Terminally Ill Patients in the Byzantine Era: An Ancient Tradition?,” Journal of Medical Ethics 25 (1999): 254–58; (therapy) Aristotelês Eytychiadês, Eisagogê eis tên buzantinên therapeutikên, 1983; Pavlos Ntafoulis, and G. Lavrentiadis, “Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy in 6th Century: St. John’s Ladder of Divine Ascent,” Psychiatriki 16 (2005): 270; (urology) Mario Lamagna, ‘Il trattato De urinis di Stefano d’Atene e l’uroscopia alessandrina,” Galenismo e medicina tardoantica: Fonti greche, latine e arabe. Atti del Seminario Internazionale di Siena, Certosa di Pontignano, 9 e 10 settembre 2002, ed. Ivan Garofalo, and Amneris Roselli, 2003, 54–73; (uroscopy) Konstantin Dimitriadis, “Byzantinische Uroskopie,” Ph.D. thesis, University of Bonn, 1971; Athanasios A. Diamantopoulos, “Uroscopy in Byzantium,” American Journal of Nephrology 17 (1997): 222–27 (reproduced in Istoria tês Ellênikês Nefrologias, vol. 1., ed. Thanasês Diamantopoulos, 2000, 220–25); Alain Touwaide, “On Uroscopy in Byzantium,” Istoria tês Ellênikês Nefrologias (above), 218–20; The History of Byzantine Uroscopy, ed. Athanasios Diamantopoulos, 2005; (well being) Athanasios Diamandopoulos, “The Effect of Medicine, in Particular the Ideas about Renal Diseases, on the ‘Well-Being’ of Byzantine

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Citizens,” Material Culture … (above) 93–99; Klaus Bergdolt, Wellbeing: A Cultural History of Healthy Living, 2008. Also, social historians have become increasingly interested in the history of medicine. Investigation on the scientific and intellectual life in Byzantium, which constituted the context of the exercise of science, is not new, as it was illustrated as early as the 1960s (if not before) by such works as Ihor Sev cenko ˇ (1922–2009), Etudes sur la polémique entre Théodore Métochite et Nicéphore Choumnos: La vie intellectuelle et politique à Byzance sous les premiers Paléoloques, 1962; Id., “Théodore Métochites, Chora et les courants intellectuels de l’époque,” Art et société à Byzance sous les Paléologues: Actes du colloque organisé par l’Association Internationale des Etudes Byzantines, Venise, 1968, 1971, 13–39 (reproduced in Id., Ideology, Letters & Culture in the Byzantine World, 1982, no. VIII; English trans.: “Theodore Metochites, the Chora, and the Intellectual Trends of his Time,” The Kariye Djami, vol. 4: Studies in the Art of the Kariye Djami and its Intellectual Background, ed. Paul Atkins Underwood, 1975, 19–91). In this view, teaching, be it general or scientific, became an object of renewed study after such classical works as (chronological order of publication): Theodor Puschmann (1844–1899), Geschichte des medicinischen Unterrichts von den ältesten Zeiten bis zur Gegenwart, 1889, 113–30 (see chapter 2: Der medicinische Unterrichte im Mittelalter: Der Einfluss des Christenthums); Friedrich Fuchs (b. 1890), Die höheren Schulen von Konstantinople im Mittelalter, 1926. For more recent work, see Marjorie Ann Moffat, “School-Teachers in the Early Byzantine Empire, 330–610 A.D.,” Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 1972; Constantinos N. Constantinides, Higher Education in Byzantium in the Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Centuries (1204–ca. 1310), 1982; John Duffy, “Byzantine Medicine in the Sixth and Seventh Centuries: Aspects of Teaching and Practice,” Symposium …, ed. Scarborough (above), 21–27; Anne Tihon, “Enseignement scientifique à Byzance,” Organon 24 (1988): 89–108 (reproduced in Ead., Etudes d’astronomie … [above], no. IX). Also, the place of medicine in literature became a topic for research: Alice Leroy-Molinghen, “Médecins, maladies et remèdes dans les Lettres de Théophylacte de Bulgarie,” Byzantion 55 (1985): 483–92; Alexander Kazhdan, “The Image of the Medical Doctor in Byzantine Literature of the Tenth to Twelfth Centuries,” Symposium …, ed. Scarborough (above), 43–51; Karl-Heinz Leven, Medizinisches bei Eusebios von Kaisareia, 1987; Paraskevi Timplalexi, Medizinisches in der byzantinischen Epistolographie (1100–1453), 2002. Similarly, the place of medicine in society, its role and impact on the patients’ health was investigated. One component of such research is the investigation about famous patients: Ewald Kislinger, “Der kranke Justin II. und die ärztliche Haftung bei Operationen in Byzanz,” Jahrbuch der österreichischen byzantinistischen Gesellschaft

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36 (1986): 39–44; John Lascaratos, “The Poisoning of the Byzantine Emperor Romanos III Argyros (1028–1034 A.D.),” Mithridata 10 (1995): 6–10; John Lascaratos, and Panaghiotis Vassilios Zis, “The Epilepsy of the Emperor Theodore II Lascaris (1254–1258),” Journal of Epilepsy 11 (1998): 296–300; John Lascaratos, and Spyros Marketos, “The Cause of Death of the Byzantine Emperor John I Tzimisces (969–976): Poisoning or Typhoid Fever?,” Journal of Medical Biography 6 (1998): 171–74; John Lascaratos, and V. Manduvalos, “Cases of Stroke on the Throne of Byzantium,” Journal of the History of the Neurosciences 7 (1998): 5–10; John Lascaratos, and Effie Poulakou-rebelakou, “Did Justinian the Great (527–565 CE) Suffer from Syphilis?,” International Journal of Dermatology 38 (1999): 787–91; John Lascaratos, and Panaghiotis Vassilios Zis, “The Epilepsy of Emperor Michael IV, Paphlagon (1034–1041 A.D.): Accounts of Byzantine Historians and Physicians,” Epilepsia 41 (2000): 913–17. Going together, research on famous historical individuals who are also physicians: John Lascaratos, and Spyros Marketos, “A Little-known Emperor-physician: Manuel I Comnenus of Byzantium (1143–1180),” Journal of Medical Biography 4 (1996): 187–90. This shift toward the perception of medicine – rather than its production – took a new dimension with the interrogation on the body and the construction of a new perception of the body in the Early-Byzantine world: Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, 1988. In the same way, research became interested in the reactions, both of individuals and the society, toward diseases, plague among others: Marie-Hélène Congourdeau, and Mohammed Melhaoui, “La perception de la peste en pays chrétien byzantin et musulman,” Revue des Études Byzantines, 59 (2001): 95–124; Alessio Sopracasa, “Aspetti dell’immaginario bizantino: Le fantasie e la verità nell’esperienza della malattia, una quotidianità straordinaria,” Annali 2000. Studi e Materiali dalle Tesi di laurea, II, Università Ca’ Foscari-Venezia, Dipartimento di studi storici, 2001, 29–50; Id., “La maldie et la peste dans l’empire byzantin à l’époque des Paléologues (XIIIe-XVe siècles)”, M.A. thesis, University of Paris IV-Sorbonne, 2000–2001. Another aspect of this new orientation is the interest in a whole region approached in all its aspects at a certain point of time, as is the case in Patricia Skinner, Health & Medicine in Early Medieval Southern Italy, 1997. The focus is not on the capital or a major city (wherever it was located), but on an area taken as a whole, in the periphery of the empire; not only the producers of medical knowledge, but also the users of such knowledge in the daily practice of medicine; not only the schools and centers of learned medicine (including libraries and their books, as well as other professional loci), but also the places where medical service was provided, with the providers and users

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(that is, the patients) of such service, including the epidemiological conditions of the population. This orientation of the historical enquiry had also an impact on the approach to the primary sources, that is, the manuscripts containing medical texts. The medical book became a specific object of historico-medical investigation, of an archeological nature. See for example: Aristomenis Matsagas, Spyros Marketos, and Konstantinos Siokos, “Das medizinische Buch in Byzanz,” Proceedings of the XXX International Congress of the History of Medicine, Düsseldorf, 1986, 1988, 1139–45; Guglielmo Cavallo, “I libri di medicina: Gli usi di un sapere”, Maladie et société …, ed. Patlagean (above), 43–56; Iatrika buzantina cheirografa, 1995. In this view, scientific illustration was particularly scrutinized as a source of information on the practice of medicine, making inventories of illustrations more necessary than ever, from the old and now obsolete, though still useful work of Henri Bordier (1817–1888), Description des peintures et autres ornements dans les manuscrits grecs de la Bibliothèque nationale, 1883, to such other works as Loren Mackinney (1891–1963), Medical Illustrations in Medieval Manuscripts, 1965, or, more recently (though limited to only one sector): Stavros Lazaris, “Inventaire sommaire des manuscrits grecs scientifiques illustrés de la Bibliothèque nationale de Paris: Manuscrits zoologiques, botaniques, remèdes, recettes d’antidotes, alchimiques, astrologiques,” Byzantiaka 13 (1993), 191–265. Also, single manuscripts of particular importance were analyzed in detail (chronological order of publication; selection): Paul Buberl (1885–1942), Die Byzantinischen Handschriften, vol. 1: Der Wiener Dioskurides und die Wiener Genesis, 1937 (about codex Vienna, National Library of Austria, medicus graecus 1); Jean Théodoridès, “Remarques sur l’iconographie zoologique dans certains manuscrits médicaux byzantins et étude des miniatures zoologiques du codex Vaticanus graecus 284”, Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Byzantinischen Gesellschaft 10 (1961): 21–29; Alain Touwaide, “Un recueil grec de pharmacologie du Xe siècle illustré au XIVe siècle: Le Vaticanus graecus 284”, Scriptorium 39 (1985): 13–56; Léal, “Un manuscrit illustré …” (above) (about codex Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, graecus 2180); Aletta, “Studi e ricerche …” (above) (about codex New York, Morgan Library, M652); and Alain Touwaide, “The Salamanca Dioscorides (Salamanca, University Library, 2659),” Erytheia 24 (2003): 125–58. Also, the lexicology of medical texts was newly approached, particularly in the context of the dictionary of Byzantine Greek prepared at the University of Vienna (below). See for example: Armin Hohlweg, “Terminologie in Byzantinischen Medizinischen Texten und Lexikographie,” Lexicographica Byzantina: Beiträge zum Symposion zur Byzantinischen Lexikographie (Wien, 1.–4. 3.

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1989), ed. Wolfram Hörander, and Erich Trapp, 1991, 129–35; Dionysios Ch. Stathakopoulos, “Die Terminologie der Pest in Byzantinischen Quellen,” Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Byzantinistik 48 (1998): 1–7. The analysis of textual traditions, however, remained mainly oriented to the construction of a stemma codicum (instead of considering the way the texts were read and used at the different time periods of Byzantine history or, conversely, investigating what the books and texts tell about the places where they were produced and used as is the case, for example, in David Bennett, “Medical Practice and Manuscripts in Byzantium,” Social History of Medicine 13 [2000]: 279–91), following a tradition going back to the early days of the scientific approach to textual tradition and illustrated in the 20th century by such works as Hermann Diels, Die handschriftliche Überlieferung des Galenschen Commentars zum Prorrheticum des Hippokrates, 1912; Georg Helmreich (1849–1921), Handschriftliche Studien zu Meletius, 1918; Fridolf Kudlien, Die handschriftliche Überlieferung des Galenkommentars zu Hippokrates De articulis, 1960; Jean Irigoin, “Tradition manuscrite et histoire du texte: Quelques problèmes relatifs à la Collection hippocratique,” Revue d’Histoire des Textes 3 (1973): 1–13; Id., “L’Hippocrate du Cardinal Bessarion (Marcianus graecus 269 [533]),” Miscellanea Marciana di studi Bessarionei a coronamento del V Centenario della donazione nicena, 1976, 161–74; Jacques Jouanna, “L’analyse codicologique du Parisinus gr. 2140 et l’histoire du texte hippocratique,” Scriptorium 38 (1984): 50–62; Id., “L’Hippocrate de Modène: Mut. Est. gr. 233 (. T. 1. 12), 220 (. O. 4. 8) et 227 (. O. 4. 14),” Scriptorium 44 (1995): 273–83; Anna Maria Ieraci Bio, “Testi ginecologici tra Oriente ed Occidente, 1. Metrodora ed il Dynameron di Nicola Mirepso. 2. Una testimonianza italogreca su una Quaestio medicalis salernitana,” La Scuola Medica Salernitana: Gli autori e i testi, Convegno internazionale, Università degli Studi di Salerno, 3–5 novembre 2004, ed. Danielle Jacquart, and Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, 2007, 283–314. This is also – and particularly – the case of the Italo-French conferences on medical literature organized since 1990, markedly of a philological nature, rather than of history of medicine (chronological order of the conferences and their proceedings): Tradizione e ecdotica dei testi medici tardoantichi e bizantini: Atti del Convegno internazionale, Anacapri, 29–31 ottobre 1990, ed. Antonio Garzya, 1992; Storia e ecdotica dei testi medici greci: Atti del II Convegno Internazionale, Parigi 24–26 maggio 1994, ed. Antonio Garzya, and Jacques Jouanna, 1996; I testi medici greci: Tradizione e ecdotica: Atti del III Convegno Internazionale, Napoli, 15–18 ottobre 1997, ed. Antonio Garzya, and Jacques Jouanna, 1999; Trasmissione e ecdotica dei testi medici greci: Atti del IV Convegno Internazionale, Parigi, 17–19 maggio 2001, ed. Antonio Garzya, and Jacques Jouanna, 2003; Ecdotica e ricezione dei testi medici greci: Atti del V

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Convegno Internazionale Napoli, 1–2 ottobre 2004, ed. Véronique Boudon-Millot, Antonio Garzya, Jacques Jouanna, and Amneris Roselli, 2006. Among the many contributions to these volumes of proceedings, one could quote the following from the 2006 proceedings, which illustrate well the strictly philological approach of such conferences (alphabetical order of modern author’s name): Maria Capone Ciollaro, “Un ricettario medico attribuito a Giovanni Archiatra,” 213–30; Marie Cronier, “Quelques aspects de l’histoire du texte du De materia medica de Dioscoride: Forme originelle, remaniements et révisions à Constantinople aux Xe – XIe siècles,” 43–65; Roberto De Lucia, “La sezione ginecologica della miscellanea medica in Vat. gr. 299,” 231–51; Rita Masullo, “Sul Peri sfugmôn attribuito a Mercurio monacho,” 335–46. More interested in the transmission of knowledge, instead, though based only on manuscripts, is Nigel G. Wilson, “Aspects of the Transmission of Galen,” Le strade del testo, ed. Guglielmo Cavallo, 1987, 45–64, and Jean Irigoin, Tradition et critique des textes grecs, 1997, which contains several fundamental studies on the history of medical texts: (35–7) Le corpus hippocratique: la tradition médiévale; (191–210) Hippocrate et la Collection hippocratique; (211–36) Hippocrate, Galien et quelques autres médecins grecs. In general, the model of textual explanation of classical literature (be it Greek or Latin) is simply transferred to medical treatises. This is particularly the case in the critical editions and in the analysis of medical and scientific texts, which focus on such aspects as the literary explanation, the identification of the sources, and/or the influence. For example: Claudio Schiano, “Il trattato inedito Sulle febbri attribuito a Giovanni Filopono: Contenuto, modelli e struttura testuale,” Galenismo e medicina …, ed. Garofalo, and Roselli, …, 75–100; Nicoletta Palmieri, “Fonti galeniche (e non) nella lettura alessandrina dell’Ars medica,” ibid., 133–60; Ivan Garofalo, “I sommari degli Alessandrini,” ibid., 203–231; Peter E. Pormann, “Jean le Grammarien et le De sectis dans la littérature médicale d’Alexandrie,” ibid., 233–263. H. Current Organization of Research and Future Directions As this panorama shows, the history of Byzantine science(s) is still largely philological, and deals predominantly with the search for manuscripts, their deciphering and analysis, the edition of texts that may have been known but have been overlooked, or, instead, that remained unknown, and the understanding of their content from a philological, and not necessarily from a technical viewpoint, that is, from the viewpoint of the history of science(s).

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History of Byzantine science(s) is a multi-faceted field of scientific investigation located at the intersection of several historical techniques and requiring a solid philological formation, an excellent training as codicologist, the acute eye of a paleographer, the perseverance of a Benedictine (to decipher texts), the endurance (and funding) of an explorer (to travel worldwide, visit the libraries where manuscripts are preserved, and browse their collections), and also a good level of acquaintance with – or at least of understanding of – the scientific discipline of the field of study, astronomy, medicine, botany, or mathematics, for example. As such, the history of Byzantine science(s) does not always find a place in the current structure of the academia. As a consequence, there are no departments, no research centers, no society, no journal, or no specialized library collection on the argument, with the very few exceptions below. More deeply, many of the indispensable instrumenta studiorum are still lacking, starting with the inventory of the manuscripts and, on this basis, of the texts that have been preserved. Medicine, astrology, and alchemy are exceptions, however, as there are specific catalogues of manuscripts (Diels, Die Handschriften …; the Catalogus Codicum Astrologorum …, and the Catalogue des manuscrits alchimiques grecs [all above]). Nevertheless, these catalogues, which were compiled in the early or until mid-20th century, are not as useful as one would wish because of limitations in their approach (this is particularly the case for medical manuscripts, predominantly oriented toward classical antiquity sensu stricto), the sources used to compile the information (earlier printed catalogues, sometimes with two catalogues for the same collection, each of them possibly using a different system of shelfmarks), and changes in the collections during the 20th century (damages because of conflicts in Europe, and/or move of some collections) (for some updates for medical manuscripts, see, for example, Mariarosa Formentin, I codici greci di medicina nelle tre Venezie, 1978, and, though of a different nature [the manuscripts produced in southern Italy]: Anna Maria Ierraci Bio, “La trasmissione della letteratura medica greca nell’Italia meridionale fra X e XV secolo,” Contributi alla cultura greca nell’Italia meridionale, I, ed. Antonio Garzya, 1989, 133–258). Also, cataloguing of Greek manuscripts made substantial progress during the 20th century, particularly the second half (for a list of the catalogues of Greek collections of manuscripts by cities, see Jean-Marie Olivier, Répertoire des bibliothèques et des catalogues de manuscrits grecs de Marcel Richard. Troisième édition entièrement refondue, 1995). On the basis of this renewed production, the so-called Greek Index Project, originally located at the Pontifical Institute of Medieaeval Studies in Toronto, aimed to catalogue all the manuscripts of all Greek authors from Antiquity to the end of Byzantium, including scientists and anonymous scientific texts

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(Robert E. Sinkewicz, and Walter H. Hayes, Manuscript Listings for the Authored Works of the Palaeologan Period, 1989; Robert E. Sinkewicz, Manuscript Listings for the Authors of Classical and Late Antiquity, 1990; Id., Manuscript Listings for the Authors of the Patristic and Byzantine, 1992). In 1993, the Project was transferred to the Institut de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes of the French CNRS and transformed into the database PINAKES: Textes et manuscrits grecs, which has been recently (September 2008) made available through the Internet (http://pinakes.irht.cnrs.fr). PINAKES compensates partially for the problems of the Project, as it includes some update on the current location of items that have been moved during the 20th century and since the publication of the catalogues in which they are listed (if any). Also, some catalogues and/or studies of scientific manuscripts by author and type of texts have been published. For Aristotle, see Paul Moraux (1919–1985), Dieter Harlfinger, Dietrich Reinsch, and Jürgen Wiesner, Aristoteles Graecus: Die griechischen Manuskripte des Aristoteles, vol. 1: Alexandrien-London, 1976; for medical commentaries: Sibylle Ihm, Clavis Commentariorum der antiken medizinischen Texte, 2002; for lexica: Les manuscrits des lexiques et glossaires de l’antiquité tardive à la fin du moyen âge: Actes du Colloque international organisé par le “Ettore Majorana Centre for Scientific Culture” (Erice, 23–30 septembre 1994), ed. Jacqueline Hamesse, 1996, and Lexiques bilingues dans les domaines philosophique et scientifique (Moyen Age et Renaissance): Actes du Colloque international organisé par l’Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (Paris, 1997), ed. Jacqueline Hamesse, and Danielle Jacquart, 2001; and Touwaide, “Lexica medico-botanica byzantina …” (above). Also, a program aimed at producing a new listing and, later on, a catalogue of Greek medical manuscripts is currently running at the Institute for the Preservation of Medical Traditions located at the Smithsonian Institution (Alain Touwaide, “Greek Medical Manuscripts-Toward a New Catalogue,” Byzantinische Zeitschrift 101 [2008]: 199–208; Id., “Byzantine Medical Manuscripts: Towards a New Catalogue, with a Specimen for an Annotated Checklist of Manuscripts Based on an Index of Diels’ Catalogue,” Byzantion 79 [2009]: 453–595). Such listing is posted on the Internet (as the catalogue also will be) so as to be possibly updated constantly (http://www.medicaltraditions.org). Research centers that have been active in the last decades of the 20th century – or still are – in History of Byzantine Science(s) include the Université de Louvain (Belgium), where the type of analysis based on manuscripts described above has been particularly developed. Anne Tihon (above, for her publications) pursued the activity on Byzantine astronomy started by Joseph Mogenet (above) and, before him, by Adolphe Rome (b. 1889), editor of Pappus’ and Theon’s commentaries on Ptolemy’s Almagest (3 vols., 1931–1943). Besides her own publications – with a particular focus on the

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exchanges between the Arabic and Byzantine worlds in more recent times – Tihon has launched the Corpus des astronomes byzantins (above). Typically, publications from Louvain are of a technical nature, and analyze the data of the texts in great detail. The historian of mathematics and astronomy David Pingree (below) published important texts in the Corpus des astronomes byzantins (above), as did also Alexander Jones (above), who edited astronomical papyri, including early-Byzantine ones (Astronomical Papyri from Oxyrhynchus, 1999), and is now with the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World of New York University in New York, N.Y. The model developed at Louvain on the history of astronomy was further transposed to other sectors: the history of mathematics with André Allard (Faculté Universitaires de Namur, and Université catholique de Louvain, at Louvain-la-Neuve [Belgium]) (above); medicine and natural sciences with Alain Touwaide (currently at the Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of Natural History, Washington, D.C. [U.S.A.]) (below); and veterinary medicine with Anne Marie Doyen-Higuet (Faculté Universitaires de Namur, and Université catholique de Louvain, at Louvain-la-Neuve [Belgium]) (above). In Belgium also, the Université de Liège has developed similar research programs in history of science, which include Byzantine science and deal with two different disciplines: medical papyri with Marie-Hélène Marganne at the CEDOPAL-Centre de Documentation de Papyrologie Littéraire. Marganne has published an inventory of Greek medical papyri (including EarlyByzantine pieces) (Inventaire analytique des papyrus grecs de médecine, 1981), and wrote a thesis on the same topic (“Papyri Medicae Graecae. Contribution de la papyrologie à l’histoire de la médecine antique,” Ph.D. thesis, University of Liège, 1982–1983). She curates the so-called Mertens-Pack3 archive on literary papyri, with a particular focus on medical pieces. She has published regular updates, with a synthesis in “Médecine grecque et papyrologie: bilan et perspectives,” Colloque la médecine grecque antique: Actes, ed. Jacques Jouanna, and Jean Leclant, 2004, 235–251. The archive on Greek medical papyrus has been transformed in a computerized database available on the Internet since 2001: http://promethee.philo.ulg.ac.be/cedopal/indexanglais.htm. In collaboration with the pharmacist Pierre Koemoth, she has also posted on the Internet a bibliographical list on pharmacology in papyri entitled Pharmacopoea aegyptia et graeco-aegyptia, which contained some material on the Byzantine period and is regularly updated (http://www2.ulg.ac.be/facphl/services/ cedopal/pages/bibliographies/PHARMEG.htm). In Liège also, Robert Halleux at the Centre d’Histoire des Sciences et des Techniques, specialized on mineralogy and metallurgy and edited, among others, Greek lapidaries (Les

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lapidaires grecs: Lapidaire orphique, Kérygme, Lapidaires d’Orphée, Socrate et Denys, Lapidaire nautique, Damigéron-Evax, 1985). Other centers worldwide include the Laboratoire “Médecine grecque” currently directed by Véronique Boudon-Millot, in the Unité Mixte de Recherche (UMR) 8167 Orient et Méditerranée affiliated with the French CNRS and the Université Paris Sorbonne. The Laboratoire co-organizes with the University of Naples the philological conferences on medical texts originally started by Antonio Garzya (above). Some of the scholars associated with the Laboratoire work on early-Byzantine medical texts, doing philological work. The Laboratoire has created and still develops the Medic@ Library in collaboration with the Bibliothèque Interuniversitaire de Médecine (BIUM) in Paris directed by Guy Cobolet (himself a historian of medicine). It is a digital collection available in open access on the Internet (http://www.bium. univ-paris5.fr/histmed/medica.htm), which contains, among others, printed editions (16th to the 19th c.) of Byzantine medical texts (Aetius, Alexander of Tralles, Oribasius, Paul of Egine, Stephanus of Athens, Theophanes Nonnus, and Theophilus) and also secondary literature. In Paris also, the Centre de recherche d’Histoire et Civilisation de Byzance affiliated with the CNRS and participating in the Unité Mixte de Recherche (UMR) 8167 Orient et Méditerranée is hosted by the Collège de France. Some among the scholars associated with the Centre (for instance Marie-Hélène Congourdeau) include Byzantine medicine in their programs. In Italy, the Istituto Papirologico “G. Vitelli” in Florence prepares a corpus of Greek medical papyri (including Early Byzantine [up to the 6th c.]), which was coordinated by Isabella Andorlini, now with the University of Parma. A prototype of the corpus was published in 1997: ‘Specimina’ per il Corpus dei Papiri Greci di Medicina: Atti dell’incontro di studio (Firenze, 1996), ed. Isabella Andorlini, 1997. Andorlini also published a list of medical papyri similar to that previously authored by Marganne (above): Isabella Andorlini Marcone, “L’apporto dei papiri alla conoscenza della scienza medica antica,” ANRW II.37.2 (1996): 458–562. In Naples, Antonio Garzya, formerly at the Department of Classics of the University Federico II, fostered the study of the history of Greek medicine, including early-Byzantine texts. In so doing, he followed Alessandro Olivieri, editor of Aetius (vols. 1 and 2) in the Corpus Medicorum Graecorum (above). He also launched the series of philological conferences on classical medical texts now held in Naples and Paris (above), and announced a program aimed to take over the program of completing the critical edition of Aetius. In Greece, the Chair of History of Medicine at the Medical Faculty of the University of Athens was held for a long time by Spyros Marketos. Himself

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a physician, he associated several others to the Chair, among whom John Lascaratos (an ophthalmologist), and Effie Poulakou-Rebelakou (a pediatrician). Frequently with one or more of his collaborators, he authored several specialist analyses on Byzantine medicine (see the many references above). Also, Stefanos Geroulanos, a physician initially in Zürich and now in Athens, developed a museum of history of medicine at the University of Iôannina, and published on the history of Byzantine medicine and surgery (above). In Patras, Athanasios Diamantopoulos, a physician and an archeologist, worked particularly on nephrology and urology (above). In Thessalonika, the pharmacist Evangelia Varella specialized on the history of her own discipline (including Byzantium), and contributed to the creation of a museum of history of pharmacy, which opened recently. In Germany, the Corpus Medicorum Graecorum in Berlin, which was directed for a long time by Jutta Kollesch, publishes the Corpus (above) and holds the archive of the catalogue of Greek medical manuscripts compiled by Diels’s collaborators (above). Many of these centers host researchers preparing a Ph.D. thesis, as do also individuals worldwide, and other research centers and libraries specialized in Byzantine studies or in the history of medicine. Vienna (Austria) is a major center for Byzantine studies with a cluster of institutions that have published (or are preparing) reference works for Byzantine studies: the Institut für Byzantinistik und Neogräzistik at the University, the Institut für Byzanzforschung of the Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, and the Österreichische National Bibliothek. None of the research programs in Vienna (conducted or sponsored by any single institution or in collaboration) specifically deals with the history of science(s). However, many such programs (completed or still running) offer important information for the study of science(s) in Byzantium: the Prosopographisches Lexikon der Palaeologenzeit (directed by Erich Trapp [now with Bonn University] and published by the Academy, 1976–1996) lists all the individuals in the Byzantine Empire from 1261–1453 known by name (including scientists); the Lexikon zur Byzantinischen Gräzität, besonders des 9.–12. Jahrhunderts (University and Academy) includes many items from scientific texts (published by the Academy; current state of publication: until palianthrôpos); the program on Alltagsleben und materielle Kultur von Byzanz (University) studies the material component of every day life in the Byzantine Empire, including medicine; the Bibliography on Byzantine Material Culture and Daily Life (University) aims “to collect all secondary sources concerning objects of daily life and the material culture of Byzantium”; and the Repertorium der griechischen Kopisten 800–1600 (Academy, 3 vols. published so far; research has been conducted under the supervision of the

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late Herbert Hunger, by Ernst Gamillscheg [now at the National Library] in collaboration with Dieter Harlfinger then [and now again, after years in Hamburg] at the Aristoteles-Archiv in Berlin [below]; from volume 3 on, external collaborators have been associated) lists all the Greek manuscripts signed by, attributed to, or newly identified as being produced by known copyists. The Aristoteles-Archiv, at the Freie Universität in Berlin, “has a unique microfilm collection of all Greek Aristotle manuscripts as well as approximately 1,000 additional manuscripts with late antique and Byzantine commentaries on Aristotle’s treatises.” The Program in Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collections of Harvard University, but located in Washington, D.C. (U.S.A.), hosts a collections of 149,000 volumes devoted to all aspects of Byzantine history, including sciences. It offers yearly fellowships for pre- and post-doctoral research, and publishes the Dumbarton Oaks Papers. In Washington also, the Institute for the Preservation of Medical Traditions hosted by the Smithsonian Institution (National Museum of Natural History, Department of Botany) preserves a library collection of ca. 15,000 items specifically on the history of science(s) (mainly natural and life sciences) in the ancient Mediterranean (Antiquity, the Middle Ages [with a particular focus on Byzantium], and the Renaissance), which contains critical editions of primary sources, secondary literature (from classical philology to botany, ethnobotany, and ethnopharmacy, and including Greek paleography and codicology), microfilms of Greek medical manuscripts, computerized databases, and a digital collection of still unpublished Byzantine medical texts reproduced from manuscripts. Close to Washington (actually in Bethesda, MD), the History of Medicine Division of the U.S. National Library of Medicine on the campus of the National Institutes of Health has one of the most extensive collections in the world on the history of medicine, including early printed books. Though not specialized on Byzantium or any other specific time period and/or area, it holds a vast quantity of material relevant for the study of Byzantine medicine and science (from incunabula printed editions to the most recent secondary literature). In the United States also, Brown University (Providence, Rhode Island) had a Department of History of Mathematics specialized in the Mediterranean tradition from Mesopotamia to the Renaissance and including Byzantium. The Department was created by Otto Neugebauer (above) and directed until recently by David Pingree (above), who built a library of more than 20,000 items on the history of exact sciences. The collection is now included in the library of Brown University. In London (U.K.), the Wellcome Library of History of Medicine is a major repository of material on the history of medicine (books, journals, manu-

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scripts, and pictures), including Byzantium (some items in the manuscript collection are Byzantine). Whereas there is no society, group of any kind, or conference specifically devoted to the history of Byzantine science(s), many local, national, and international societies (be they devoted to Byzantine history or history of science, medicine, pharmacy or other discipline[s]) usually include Byzantium into their fields of interest (even though, often, they do not necessarily encourage the history of Byzantine science[s]). Many such societies usually organize annual meetings (particularly the national societies), whereas the international societies (history of science, and Byzantine studies) organize large conferences every four years. There is no specific medium for publications on the history of Byzantine science, with the exception of the Corpus des astronomes byzantins (above) and, for medicine, the Corpus Medicorum Graecorum (particularly its Supplementum Orientale as the Corpus is focused on classical antiquity from the 5th century B.C.E. to the end of antiquity [“… vom 5. Jahrhundert v. Chr. bis zum Ausgang der Antike …”]), and the newly created series Medicine in the Medieval Mediterranean focusing on Byzantium and its neighbors in the Eastern Mediterranean. However, such journals as (alphabetical order of titles) Byzantinische Zeitschrift (currently edited by Albrecht Berger, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich), Byzantinoslavica (published by the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, in Prague), Byzantion (published by the Société belge d’études byzantines), the Dumbarton Oaks Papers (above), Erytheia (directed by Prof. Pedro Bádenas de la Peña [Madrid] and published by the Asociación cultural Hispano-Helénica), Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies (edited by Duke University, Durham, N.C. [U.S.A.]), the Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Byzantinistik (edited by the Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften in Vienna [Austria]), the Revue des Etudes Byzantines (published by the Société française d’études byzantines), and Thesaurismata (published by the Istituto Ellenico di Studi Bizantini e Postbizantini in Venice [Italy]) accept articles on topics related to the history of science(s) in Byzantium. The Byzantinische Zeitschrift also includes in each issue a bibliography of current production with the following sections on the history of sciences: 11. Fachwissenschaften, with the subsections A. Mathematik, Physik, Astronomie, Astrologie; B. Naturwissenschaften (Zoologie, Botanik, Minealogie, Alchemie); C. Medizin, Pharmazie. Also, the editions of texts (including scientific ones) are listed in the section 1 A. Hochsprachliche Literatur, with its several subdivisions: b. Literaturgattungen; c. Fortleben antiker Autoren; d. Byzantinische Autoren (Ausgaben, Übersetzungen, Sekundärlitertur). On the other hand, the journals on the history of sciences below publish ocasionally articles on Byzantine science (though

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not necessarily soliciting them) (alphabetical order of titles): Ambix (specialized on the history of alchemy), Centaurus (history of mathematics), Early Science and Medicine, Historia Scientiarum, Historia Mathematica, ISIS (history of sciences in general), Nuncius (id.), Physis (id.), and Sudhoffs Archiv (id.). Given the importance of manuscripts and texts in the field, such journals as (alphabetical order of titles) Codices manuscripti, Manuscripta, Revue d’Histoire des Textes, Scriptorium, Scrittura e civiltà (until 2001), and the newly created journals Galeno and Scripta also publish articles on manuscripts and the tradition of text of scientific works, including Byzantine ones. Finally, some of the journals above are accompanied by a series of monographs, and the International Society of History of Sciences edits the series De diversis artibus, which publishes any work relevant to the history of science(s), including Byzantine science(s). Byzantine science(s) is an under-researched field of historical inquiry, where fundamental research is urgently needed (actually, inventory and critical editions of primary sources from manuscripts [themselves still to be systematically explored], ideally also translation of edited texts into a modern language, and technical analysis of such edited texts). Such need explains the profile of the all too rare researchers in the field, who are primarily (and altogether) classicists, Byzantinists, philologists, historians, codicologists, paleographers, historians of texts and editors, preferably with a good level of understanding, if not of knowledge, of the scientific discipline of the texts they are working on. Only such fundamental research will make it possible to write the documented syntheses on Byzantine science(s) that are still missing, and, on this basis, to do comparative work on the several medieval traditions, so as to make it possible to perceive the place, importance, and impact of Byzantine science(s) in medieval Mediterranean science(s). Work of this type has already started, however. As I have mentioned, indeed, the introduction of Arabic medicine into Byzantium has been noticed as early as the 1930s by Aristotelês Kouzês (“Quelques considérations …,” [above]). Later on, Joseph Mogenet brought to light the earliest known trace of this phenomenon in astronomy (“Une scolie …,” [above]), and the German historian of medicine Georg Harig (1935–1989) in Berlin (Germany) made similar work on the 11th-century polymath Symeon Seth (“Von den arabischen Quellen des Simeon Seth,” Medizinhistorisches Journal 2 [1967]: 248–68). Probably following Mogenet, Anne Tihon studied more indepth the introduction and assimilation of Arabic astronomy into Byzantium, as did also Alain Touwaide for medicine (chronological order of publication): Anne Tihon, “Les tables astronomiques persanes à Constantinople dans la première moitié du XIVe siècle,” Byzantion 57 (1987): 471–87;

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Ead., “Sur l’identité de l’astronome Alim,” Archives internationales d’histoire des sciences 39 (1989): 3–21; Ead., “Tables islamiques à Byzance,” Byzantion 60 (1990): 401–25; Alain Touwaide, “Un Manuscrit athonite du Traité de matière médicale de Dioscoride: l’Athous Magnae Laurae  75,” Scriptorium 45 (1991): 122–27; Marie-Hélène Congourdeau, “Prolongements et diffusion: Le monde byzantin,” A l’ombre d’Avicenne: La médecine au temps des califes, 1996, 271–73; Alain Touwaide, Medicinalia Arabo-Byzantina, vol. 1: Manuscrits et textes, 1997; Anne Tihon, “Les textes astronomiques arabes importés à Byzance aux XIe et XIIe siècle,” Occident et Proche-Orient: Contacts scientifiques au temps des Croisades. Actes du colloque de Louvain-la-Neuve, 1997, ed. Isabelle Draelants, Anne Tihon, and Baudouin van den Abeele, 2000, 313–24; Ead., “Un texte byzantin inédit sur une horloge persane,” Sic itur ad Astra: Festschrift für den Arabisten Paul Kunitzsch zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. Menso Folkerts, and Richard Lorch, 2000, 523–35; Alain Touwaide, “Arabic Medicine in Greek Translation: A Preliminary Report,” Journal of the International Society for the History of Islamic Medicine 1 (2002): 45–53; Id., “Arabic Materia Medica in Byzantium during the 11th Century A.D. and the Problems of Transfer of Knowledge in Medieval Science,” Science and Technology in the Islamic World,” ed. S. M. Razaullah Ansari, 2002, 223–47; Id., “Magna Graecia iterata …,” Medicina …, ed. Musajo Somma (above), 85–101; Id., “Arabic Urology in Byzantium,” The History of Nephrology New Series, vol. 1, ed. Natale G. De Santo, Luigi Iorio, Spyros G. marketos, Shaul G. Massry, and Garabed Eknoyan, 2004, 167–73; Id., “The Jujube-Tree in the Eastern Mediterranean: A Case Study in the Methodology of Textual Archaeobotany,” Health and Healing from the Medieval Garden, ed. Peter Dendle, and Alain Touwaide, 2008, 72–100; Id., “Medicina Bizantina …,” Medicina …, ed. De Santo, and Bellinghieri (above) (the works by Mario Lamagna, “La recensio amplior inedita del De urinis di Avicenna,” Trasmissione e ecdotica …, ed. Garzya, and Jouanna [above], 271–80; and “La recensio amplior del De urinis di Avicenna: Lo stato della tradizione manoscritta,” Ecdotica e ricezione …, ed. Boudon-Millot et al. [above], 321–44, are only philological [producing a stemma codicum and discussing the variant readings] and not interested in the origin of the text, a comparison with the text in Arabic, the impact of the translation on Byzantine medicine, a scientific approach and/or evaluation, or any other aspect of the transfer of knowledge). This highly-specialized and multi-faceted profile required from historians of Byzantine science(s) may contribute to explain their rarity and, consequently, the exiguity of the space given to the history of Byzantine science(s) in current historical research. Also, the high level of specialization of the discipline may be responsible for the absence or misconception about Byzantine

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science(s) in reference works aimed at a wider audience, however well informed such works might be (see for example in Lawrence I. Conrad, Michael Neve, Vivian Nutton, Roy Porter [1946–2002], and Andrew Wear, The Western Medical Tradition, vol. 1: 800 BC to AD 1800, 1992, where Byzantium is almost totally absent, and Gotthard Strohmaier, “La ricezione e la tradizione: la medicina nel mondo bizantino e arabo”, Storia del pensiero medico occidentale, vol. 1: Antichità e medioevo, ed. Mirko D. Grmek, 1993, 167–215 [English trans.: “Reception and Tradition: Medicine in the Byzantine and Arab World”, Western Medical Thought from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, ed. Mirko D. Grmek [1924–2000], 1998, 139–69], where Byzantine medicine is briefly treated as lacking originality). Conversely, the rarity of scholars in the field, and the lack, together with the crucial need, of reference works leaves the field open and more necessary than ever, also allowing for original research. This is valid for both individual involvement and major research programs to be institutionally supported and sponsored (be it in the disciplines that have already been – and still are – studied [from medicine to zoology, for example] or new ones still to be explored). Only new and innovative research, preferably based on primary sources and of a truly trans-disciplinary nature, will make it possible to compensate for the lacunas on Byzantium in the current panorama of history of science(s), as it has started to be the case, though in a limited way, in such historical dictionaries and encyclopedias as the New Dictionary of Scientific Biography (above), the Encyclopedia of Astronomers (above), and Medieval Science, Technology, and Medicine (above), in which entries on Byzantine scientists of different disciplines have been written by modern specialists. Select Bibliography Catalogue des manuscrits alchimiques grecs, 5 tomes in 8 vols. (Brussels: Lamertin [except vols. 4 and 8: Secretary of the Union Académique Internationale], 1924–1932); Catalogus Codicum Astrologorum Graecorum, 12 tomes in 20 vols. (Brussels: Lamertin [except vols. 5/4, 9/1 and 9/2: Aedes Academiarum], 1898–1953); Corpus des astronomes byzantins, 10 vols. (Amsterdam: J.C. Gieben [vols. 1–6]; and Louvain-la-Neuve: Academia-Erasme [vol. 7]; Academia Bruylant [vols. 8–9]; and Bruylant-Academia [vol. 10], 1983–2001); Herbert Hunger, Die hochsprachliche profane Literatur der Byzantiner, 2 vols. (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1978); Symposium on Byzantine Medicine, ed. John Scarborough (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1985); Anne Tihon, Etudes d’astronomie byzantine (Aldershot [UK]: Variorum, 1994); Alain Touwaide, “Greek Medical ManuscriptsToward a New Catalogue,” Byzantinische Zeitschrift 101 (2008): 199–208; id., “Byzantine Medical Manuscripts: Towards a New Catalogue, with a Specimen for an Annotated Checklist of Manuscripts Based on an Index of Diels’ Catalogue,” Byzantion 79 [2009]: 453–595.

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Byzantine Theology A. Historical Background Byzantine theology was shaped through a succession of debates, conflicts and confluences, intellectual and others, that took place ever since the instauration of the Byzantine state as a Christian state. The Hellenistic heritage was simultaneously denied and assumed by the intellectuals of the new faith. A series of Ecumenical Councils, seven in total (from 325 to 787), were to construe the doctrinal configuration of the new Church. The struggle against the heresies such as monophysitism was the impetus behind the need for stating the dogmas in a time where doctrinal formulations were the subject even of common discussion. The Cappadocian Fathers, Gregory Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, and Basil the Great, together with John Chrysostom (4th c.), were key figures in the origin of the new tradition. The co-presence of the organized Church and the imperial structures gave to the new state form its distinctive nature although remnants of the Roman ‘imperial cult’ continued to play some role. The decisive factor that Church and Orthodoxy were in Byzantium made possible the later attribution to this form of government of the rather confusing terms of ‘Theocracy’ or ‘Caesaro-papism.’ The conflict with the rising Islamic force of the Arabs restrained the spread of Byzantine Christianity but made the men of the Church even more decisive as to the defense of their faith. Maximus the Confessor (580–662) distilled the negative theology of pseudo-Dionysius Areopagita and the origenism in the service of Orthodoxy and Byzantine mysticism; apophatic or negative theology became the special trend of the Eastern Christian tradition. The Iconoclastic crisis, from 730 to 843, permitted to decide, on the basis of the paradigm of the cult of the icons, upon the measure of abstraction that was theologically admitted and to confirm that the more spiritual and mystic representatives of the Church, i. e. the monastic people, were an important factor in the overall life of the state. John of Damascus (Mansur ibn Sarjun to his real name, ca. 665–749) although residing out of Byzantium contributed greatly to the construction of the new tradition with his work The Fountain Head of Knowledge, a sum of the up to his time theological and philosophical knowledge; the same man was of the principal defenders of the icons. By the end of the crisis, the reinforced Church assumed a more humanistic role regarding the safeguard and cultivation of the Greek letters while the dogmatic argument became less inspired. The splendor of the Byzantine Church appealed to the non-Christians of the North, the Slavs, and attracted them to Orthodoxy. The opposition to the

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Church of Rome was to push even further towards the affirmation of the identity of the Byzantine Orthodoxy. An imposing Patriarch like Photius (ca. 820–893) is emblematic of the evolution of Byzantine theology: a great humanist himself but also a strong ecclesiastical man who did not hesitate before the conflict with the Roman Church. The Schism between the two Churches was not to be consumed before two centuries, at the time of the Patriarch Michael Keroularios. The period before the Schism was marked by the exceptional presence of a mystical writer as Symeon the New Theologian. The invasions of the Crusaders and the sack of Constantinople (1204) opposed radically the orthodox folk religion and the spiritual representatives of Orthodoxy to the ‘Latins’. The short-lived Latin Empire could not alter this state of things and attract the Byzantines to the western faith. The regain of Constantinople by the Byzantines (1261) gave life to the mortally wounded state. In front of the rising power of the Ottoman Turks, the union with the Latin Church was felt as a necessity by a part of the governing elite as the state needed the help of the forces of the West but the Orthodoxy had by then acquired a distinctive national character and the people and the monks strongly opposed to the idea of a possible association between the two Churches. The Hesychast crisis (14th c.), from which the defender of the mystical method of the hesychast-quietist monks – the ‘omphaloscopes’/navel gazers for their opponents – Gregory Palamas (1296–1359) and his followers came out triumphant, insisted upon and furthered the tradition of the orthodox spirituality and mysticism. Among his adversaries figured an intellectual party that was influenced by and translating the works of Thomas Aquinas. A Union purposed Council held in Florence/Ferrara in the 15th century had no pragmatic effect. Georgios Gemistos Pletho (ca.1355–1452), a neo-pagan anti-unionist philosopher, felt that the rescue of the state could be achieved by the adoption of a state religion inspired by the Hellenic twelve-gods paganism but this idea found no echo and the Greek nation could not henceforth be regarded as distinguished from Orthodoxy. Only a small portion of the Byzantine intellectuals that fled the Turks was converted to Catholicism. The fall of Constantinople into the hands of the Ottoman Turks in 1453 did not condemn the Orthodoxy that continued to live as a ‘Byzantium after Byzantium’ for the Slavic peoples and strengthen the sentiment of national identity of the Greeks. B. The Problem of Definition The study of the Byzantine theology is an historical science not to be confused with Orthodox theology although the two domains are often intermingling. Since Orthodox religion and theology is still vivid, Byzantine

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theology is an historical discipline concentrated on dogmas and ideas about the divine developed in the areas once governed by the Byzantine state. The Orthodox Theology refers to a tradition that is still living and active while Byzantine Theology refers to a tradition that is historically limited. We could say that the second is a part of the first but there is another crucial distinction: the study of Byzantine theology does not have to draw the same conclusions as the Orthodox theology because the former is not directly a theological or religiously motivated or oriented science. Hans-Georg Beck defined the representatives of the historical science of Byzantine theology as the “theologische Byzantinistik” (Kirche und theologische Literatur im byzantininschen Reich, 1959, 7–23). In reality, the study of Byzantine theology as doctrinal science is further obstructed by the fact that the Byzantines were reluctant to reduce all religious sentiment to dogma and were very sensitive to the mystical aspect of their religion. Thus Beck rightly divides the history of Byzantine dogmas in two parts: “Dogmengeschichte,” the proper history of dogmas and “Askese und Mystik,” ascetism and mysticism (op. cit., 279–368). This double feature of Byzantine theology is shown in the title of Joan Mervyn Hussey’s and T.A. Hart’s, “Byzantine Theological Speculation and Spirituality” in the Cambridge Medieval History (see Bibliography). Yet, Beck’s doctrinal chapter constitutes only a small part of his basic work and it reflects the fact that in practice the historical study of Byzantine theology is of philological character and seems to concern texts of which the more profound understanding is left to the study of the general histories of the Byzantine state and civilization – such as those by Alexander Vasiliev, Louis Bréhier, George Ostrogorsky, John Bagnell Bury, Steven Runciman, André Guillou, Ioannes Karayannopoulos and others. We shall see later the problems that are engendered by the philological ‘take over’ in the study of Byzantine theology. C. Research History (1) Erudition Edward Gibbon has written in the concluding chapter of his monumental historical work: “I have described the triumph of barbarism and religion” (History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire [1776–1788], ed. D. Womersley, 1994, 1068). In this way, he was summing up the Enlightenment’s view on Middle Ages and religion, a position that was already manifest in Montesquieu’s Grandeur et décadence des Romains (1734) and in Voltaire’s Essais sur les mœurs (1756). The merit of the writers of Enlightenment is to have perceived a separate historical entity; but, they failed to distinguish between

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different religious traditions and saw in the medieval religion a common tradition of misplaced faith. That the medieval religiosity is one is an idea that we see in scholars like the Greek Leo Allatius (1586–1669) who, converted to Catholicism, worked for the accomplishment of the reconciliation between the Greek and the Roman Church and to this end he wrote the book De Ecclesiae Occidentalisatque Orientalis perpetua consensione (1648) in which he emphasized the aspects of agreement between the two Churches and minimized their differences. Other western writers tended to see a series of errores graecorum in the Byzantine religion. While Allatius fails as to the consideration of the specificity of Byzantine theology, his work corresponds to the time and place of birth of the modern research on the topic. Other Renaissance scholars have also turned to the study of the Oriental tradition; a list of the names and the tendencies is presented by Beck (“Entwicklung der theologischen Byzantinistik,” Kirche und theologische Literatur im byzantininschen Reich, op. cit., 7ff.). Among them, Aloisius Lippomani (1500–1559), Lorenz Sauer (Surius; 1522–1578), Francesco Torres (Turrianus, 1504–1584), Theodor Peltanus (1511–1584), Pierre Stevart (1547–1624), Petrus Canisius (1521–1597), his nephew Heinrich Canisius (1557–1610), Jacob Spanmüller (Pontanus; 1542–1626), Fronton de Duc (Ducaeus; 1558–1624), Balthasar Cordier (Corderius; 1592–1650), Jakob Goar (1601–1654), Philippe Labbe (1607–1667), Pierre Poussines (Possinus; 1609–1686), Jean Morin (1591–1659) et al. Other names are of greater distinction: Dionysius Petau (Petavius; 1583–1652), an important historian of Dogmas and his pupil Louis Thomassin (1619–1695); Heribert Rosweyde (1569–1629) who is at the origin of the study of the Lives of the Saints; François Combefis (1605–1679), editor of works by Maximus the Confessor. It is a time of ‘intuitive science’, erudition and editing effort. With the names of Casimir Oudin (1638–1717), Eusèbe Renaudot (1648–1720), Jean Hardouin (1646–1729), Michel Lequien (1661–1733), Jean Mabillon (1682–1771), William Beveridge (Beveregius; 1638–1708), William Cave (1637–1713) we pass to the 18th century. Joannes Bollandus (1596–1665), a continuator of the work of Rosweyde is the initiator of the Bollandist tradition of studying the Lives of the Saints. Giovanni Domenico Mansi (1692–1769) from Lucca, Italy, presented an ample collection of the Acts of the Councils (Sacrorum Conciliorum nova et amplissima Collectio, 31 vols., 1759–1798). If another Greek of Italy, Nikolaus Comnenus Papadopoulos (1651–1740) walks on the steps of Allatius as to the erudition and the idea of the unity between the churches of the East and West, we see other Greeks to insist upon the specificity of the Orthodox faith often with a strong

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anti-Latin stand; this is the case of Dositheos, Patriarch of Jerusalem (1641–1707) and his collections of Byzantine Anti-latin writings: Tomos katallagis (1692), Tomos agapis (1698), Tomos haras (1705) published in Jassy, Romania. The first representative of Greek Enlightenment, and also an Orthodox ecclesiastical man, Eugenios Voulgaris (1716–1806), besides his philosophical and other works, hasn’t disdained the study of Byzantine theology: he published the works of the theologian of the 15th c. Joseph Bryennios. His successor to the episcopate of Cherson in Russia, Nikephoros Theotokis (1731–1800) was of the same flair. The 18th century saw also the formation of an anthology of Byzantine mystical writers from the 4th c. and onwards like Gregorios Palamas, Symeon the new theologian, Markos Eugenikos and others; the anthology had the title Philokalia of the Holy Neptic Fathers (Philokalia in brief; 1st ed. 1782 Venice). The editors were St Makarios of Corinth (1731–1805) and St Nikodimos the Hagiorite (1749–1809), zealots who belonged to the movement of kollyvades proclaiming a return to the sources of Orthodox Christianity. Nikodimos, nevertheless, according to some views, was influenced by the legalist spirit of the Catholic church. Philokalia played an important role in the safeguard of the Byzantine religious spirit in Greece, the Slavic countries and elsewhere in the world. (2) Romanticism–Nationalism–Positivism Later, the need for greater syntheses and higher scientific ambitions as to the critical editing was becoming more and more evident. The German Joannes Albertus Fabricius (1668–1736) and his Bibliotheca Graeca (14 vols., 1705–1728) offered much to the knowledge of the Byzantine theological literature. His compatriots contributing to the same field were: Gottfried Christoph Harles (1738–1815), Johann Georg Walch (1693–1775), Johann Rudolf Kiesling (1706–1778), Christian Friedrich Matthäi (1744–1811), Joannes Jacob Reiske (1716–1774), Karl Bernhard Hase (1780–1864), Johann Karl Ludwig Gieseler (1792–1854), Walter Wolfgang (1818–1885), and Konstantin Tischendorf (1815–1874). Wilhelm Gass (1813–1889) presented an edition of the mystic Nicolaos Kabasilas’s On the Love of Christ and the Cardinal Joseph Hergenröther (1824–1890) a study on Patriarch Photius. The liberation of Greece from the Turkish yoke coincided with the rising of Romanticism and in the case of the Greek struggle for freedom caused a strong philhellenic movement. In this light we must see the grand fresco of the Byzantine history, a part of a general history of the Greek Nation, written by the Greek Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos (1815–1891), Historia tou Hellinikou Ethnous, 1860–1876. Paparrigopoulos presented a

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theory about the origins of iconoclasm, seeing in it the struggle of the Greek love for the Forms against the oriental aniconism. He was preceded by the Greek Spyridon Zampelios (1815–1881) who, in his work Asmata Dimotika tis Hellados ekdothenta meta meletis historikis peri mesaionikou hellinismou (1852), applied the Hegelian tripartite model to Greek history making the Byzantine theology an inheritor of Ancient Greek Philosophy and a prelude to Greek nationalism. Other Greek scholars with less breadth of inspiration were Andronikos Demetracopoulos (1825–1872), Joannes Sakkelion (1815–1891), Joannes Valettas (1814–1900), who published the letters of Patriarch Photius and Matthaios Paranikas (1832–1885) editor of an anthology of Byzantine church poetry. In France, the Abbé Jacques Migne (1800–1875), thanks to his organizational skills, published the important series of Byzantine theological literature (Patrologia Cursus Completus. Series Graeco-Latina = Patrologia Graeca, 161 vols. (162), 1857–1866). The exemplary figure of the times is the Italian Cardinal and philologist Angelo Mai (1782–1854), representative of the Italian ecclesiastic Romantic movement. Jean Baptiste Pitra (1812–1889) walked on the steps of Mai (see his Analecta Sacra et Classica Spicilegio Solesmensi Parata, 8 vols., 1876–1888). A lot of historical texts concerning matters of Byzantine theology were published in the German series Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae, 1828–1897. In Germany, Karl Eduard Zachariae von Lingenthal (1812–1894) presented a collection and study of Byzantine laws including or relevant to canon law (Collectio Librorum Juris Graeco-Romani Ineditorum, 1852; Jus GraecoRomanum, 7 vols., 1856–1884). In Greece, his work was continued by the Jurists Georgios A. Rhallès (1804–1883) and Michael Potlès (1812–1863). The Greek Konstantinos Sathas (1842–1914) published a vast editorial work of Orthodox and other sources in his Medieval Library series. The ancient erudition was thus culminating in the development of the modern editing science. This modern editing spirit was simultaneous to the Romantic movement that, in contrast to the Enlightenment’s aversion, had an esteem for the medieval literature and coincided with the rise of nationalist sentiments. The Russians contributed to the study of Byzantine culture and theology that were seen as precursors of the Russian culture and theology. The names of Vasilij Vasil’evski (1838–1899), Alexej Pavlov (1832–1898), and Nikolaj Krasnol’cev (1845–1898) are to be mentioned here. In France, following Pope Leo’s XIII (1810–1904) opening to sciences and the study of religious traditions, the French Assumptionists started researching the oriental traditions and from their labor the journal Échos d’Orient was to come up. Among the scholars distinguished in this field were Jules Pargoire (1872–1905),

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Jean Baptiste Rabois-Bousquet (1864–1911), Louis Petit (1868–1927) also the Catholic Archbishop of Athens, Severien Salaville (1881–1965), and mostly Martin Jugie (1878–1954), the great historian of Dogmas of the Christian oriental churches (Theologia Dogmatica Christianorum Orientalium ab Ecclesia Catholica Dissidentum, 5 vols., Paris, 1926–1935). Together with L. Petit and the Greek scholar from Constantinople Xenophon Sideridès (1851–1929), he published (1928–1930) the Complete Works of the Byzantine anti-unionist leader Georgios Scholarios who under the name Gennadios II became the first Patriarch of Constantinople after the fall of the city in the hands of the Ottomans. Notable contributions to the editing explosion concerning Byzantine theology, are: Frank E. Brightman, Liturgies Eastern and Western, I. Eastern Liturgies, 1896; Heinrich Gelzer, Texte der Notitiae Episcopatum, 1901; Philipp Meyer, Die Haupturkunden für die Geschichte der Athos-Klöster, 1894 (now also available online at: http://books.google.com/ books?id=Rwf2-Dh7Rb0C&dq=%3B+P.+MEYER,+Die+Haupturkunden+ fü); Franz Miklosich and Joseph Müller, Acta et Diplomata Graeca Medii Aevi Sacra et Profana, 6 vols., 1860–1890. (3) From Philologism to Postmodernism It is often said that the proper Byzantine theology has been developed after the Patristic period. The passage from the 19th to the 20th century saw an important rise of the patristic studies. From this tendency, some names of importance for the research on Byzantine theology are: Otto Zöckler, Wilhelm Bousset, Nathanael Bonwetsch, Karl Holl, Friedrich Loofs, Ernst von Dobschütz, Adolf von Harnack, Franz Diekamp, LouisMarie-Olivier Duchesne, Gustave Bardy, Henri Leclerq. The scholarship that inclined to the study of Byzantine theological literature is marked by the edition of the monumental history of Byzantine literature by Karl Krumbacher (Geschichte der byzantinischen Literatur, Munich, 1891, 2nd ed. 1897). In the second edition, Albert Ehrhard was responsible for the chapters on the religious literature where we see the exposition of prominent writers, of the relevant genres and the history of their evolution. It followed an important development in the study of the Byzantine Christian literature, inspired by the “Krumbacher Schule” that marked the scientific activity of scholars like August Heisenberg, Carl de Boor, Philipp Meyer, Johannes Dräseke, where the science of philology had an important part. The study of the Lives of the Saints was developed by the work of Charles de Smedt and mainly by the prolific Hippolyte Delehaye (1859–1940). In Greece, Spyridon Lampros (1851–1919) responded to this call for philological rigor, especially by the publication of the series Neos Hellenomnemon that offered a

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stand for inventory and editing work. A Greek of the diaspora, Athanasios Papadopoulos-Kerameus (1856–1919) accomplished an important editing work with his Analekta Hierosolymitikis Stahyologias, I–V, 1891–1898. Other notable Greek scholars were: Manuel Gedeon (1851–1943), the Archbishop of Athens Chrysostomos (Papadopoulos; 1868–1938), Gregorios Papamichael, Sophronios Eustratiadès, Konstantinos J. Dyobouniotès (Ta mysteria tès anatolikès orthodoxou ekklesias ex apopseos dogmatikis, 1923), Demetrios S. Balanos (Oi ekklesiastikoi byzantinoi syggrafeis, 1951). In Russia, we have the historians Fedor Uspenskij (1845–1928), Chrysanth Loparev (1862–1918), and Aleksandr Aleksandrovic Vasiliev (1867–1953). Supplementary information about the Byzantine theology we find in: A. Bardy, chapters 5–10 in Augustin Fliche and Victor Martin, Histoire de l’Église, IV, 1–2, 1934; and in: Karl Joseph von Hefele, Histoire des Conciles, (contin. and trans. Henri Leclerq, 8 vol, 1907–1921). Information is also available in: Gyula Moravcsik, Byzantinoturcica, I, 2 vols., 1958. A lot of relevant entries are to be found in: Dictionnaire de théologie catholique (ed. Alfred Vacant et al., 15 vols., 1907–1953). See also: Dictionnaire de la Spiritualité, 1932ff; and August Pauly and Georg Wissowa, Real-Enzyklopädie der klassischen Altertumswissenschaft, 1893–1980. As for the monastic institutions see: Placido de Meester, De monachico statu iuxta disciplinam byzantinam, 1942. The 20th century brought about a real outburst in the disciplines related to Byzantine theology of which philology was only an introduction. History, of course, continued to have a preponderant place invigorated by new approaches and thematic pluralism. Here, we can give only an indicative image of the literature strictly relevant to theology. Among the notable historians of ideas we find Francis Dvornik (The Photian Schism, Cambridge, 1948; The Idea of Apostolicity in Byzantium and the Legend of the Apostle Andrew, 1958; Byzantium and the Roman Primacy, 1966; Byzantine Missions among the Slavs, 1970) as well as another eminent historian, Sir Steven Runciman (Eastern Schism, 1956; The Great Church in Captivity, 1968; The Byzantine Theocracy, 1977). For general and introductive studies to Byzantine theology, see: Mauricius Gordillo, Compendium theologiae orientalis in commodum auditorum facultatis theologicae concinnatum, 2 vols., 1939; Andrea Palmieri, “La teologia bizantina,” Studi Religiosi 2 (1902): 115–35, 333–51. Venance Grumel, “Les aspects généraux de la théologie Byzantine,” Echos d’Orient 30 (1931): 385–96; Konstantinos Bonis, “Byzantinè Theologia,” Theologia 19 (1941–1948): 171–86, 287–300; J. M. Hussey, The Orthodox Church in the Byzantine Empire, 1986. In sum, the general surveys are never as definitive as we would like them to be due to the dispersion of the related scientific fields and to the difficulty of the subject itself characterized by a mystical aspect that resists analysis.

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The question of the relations of the Church of Constantinople with the Church of Rome is a dominant subject. See: Walter Norden, Das Papsttum und Byzanz. Die Trennung der beiden Mächte und das Problem ihrer Wiedervereiningung bis zum Untergange des byzantinischen Reiches, 1903; Marcel Viller, “La question de l’union des églises entre Grecs et Latins depuis le Concile de Lyon jusqu’à celui de Florence,” Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique 16 (1921): 260–305, 515–32, and 18 (1922): 20–60; Anton Michel, Humbert und Kerullarios, 1924–1930; Philip Sherrard, The Greek East and the Latin West, 1959; J. Gill, The Council of Florence, 1959; Kenneth M. Setton, The Papacy and the Levant, 1976–84; On the relations between Byzantine theology and Western ideology, see Ioannes S. Romanides’ Franks, Romans, Feudalism, and Doctrine: An Interplay between Theology and Society, 1981. On the influence of Thomist theology and philosophy in Byzantium, see: Stephanos Papadopoulos, Hellinikai metaphraseis thomistikon ergon. Thomistai kai antithomistai en Byzantio, 1967. The question of ecclesiastical geography is also an issue. See: Raymond Janin, La Géographie ecclésiastique de l’Empire byzantin, 1953; relevant are the subjects dealing with regionalism: John A. Hackett, A History of the Orthodox Church in Cyprus, 1901; Mgr Chrysanthos, Hè Ekklesia tès Trapezountos, 1933; Orest Tafrali, Thessalonique au quatorzième siècle, 1913. We see also regional studies combined with the research on the spreading of Orthodoxy into the Slavic countries: Dimitrije Bogdanovic, Jovan Lestvicnik u vizantijskoi I staroj srpskoi knjizenvosti (John Climacus in Byzantine Literature and the Ancient Serb Literature), 1968, and in connection with heresies: Jacques Jarry, Hérésies et factions dans l’Égypte Byzantine, 1970. The relation to the Islamic world is detailed in studies like: Speros Vryonis, The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamisation from the 11th through the 15th Century, 1971. On the two Byzantine ‘Commonwealths’, following Dmitri Obolensky, The Byzantine Commonwealth: Eastern Europe, 500–1453, 1971, see: for the first commonwealth, in the East: Garth Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth. Consequences of Monotheism in Late Antiquity, 1993; for the second one, in the North: Simon Franklin, Byzantium-Rus-Russia, 2002. See also: Evangelos Chryssos, Hè ekklesiastike politikè tou Ioustinianou, 1969 and Walter Emil Kaegi, Army, Society and Religion in Byzantium, 1982. On the question of the ‘imperial cult’ or ‘imperial religion’ in Byzantium, see: Louis Bréhier and Pierre Battifol, Les Survivances du culte impérial romain, 1920; Franz Joseph Dölger, “Zur antiken und frühchristlichen Auffasung der Herrschergergewalt von Gottes Gnaden,” Antike und Christentum 3 (1932): 117–27); Wilhelm Ensslin, Gottkaiser und Kaiser von Gottes Gnaden, 1943; for the difference between ‘worship’ and ‘adoration’ related to the ‘imperial

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cult’, see Kenneth M. Setton, Christian Attitude Towards the Emperor in the 4th Century, 1941. See also: Gilbert Dagron, Empereur et prêtre: Étude sur le ‘césaropapisme’ byzantin, 1996. Jacques Gouillard translated a brief selection from the Philokalia: Petite philocalie de la prière de cœur, 1953. A full edition in French was begun in 1979 and completed in 1986 (trans. Jacques Touraille). It was also partly translated into English, first by E. Kadloubovsky and G. E. H. Palmer (1951) and later gradually by G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard and Kallistos (Timothy) Ware (4 vols. since 1979). Jacques Gouillard published a study about the liturgical text “Synodicon of Orthodoxy” (“Le synodikon de l’Orthodoxie. Edition et commentaire,” Travaux et mémoires 2 (1967): 1–316). A lot of information about Byzantine religiosity and everyday life we find in: Phaidon Koukoulès, Byzantinon Bios kai Politismos, 8 vols., 1947–1957. The question of ‘philosophical theology’ was debated in: Basil Tatakis, La philosophie Byzantine, 1949 (the first monograph on Byzantine philosophy) and more particularly in: Gerhard Podskalsky, Theologie und Philosophie in Byzanz, 1977; see also, Endre von Ivánka, Plato Christianus, 1964; Georgi Kapriev, Philosophie in Byzanz, 2005. For the relation to ethical philosophy, see: Georges Arabatzis, Éthique du bonheur et orthodoxie à Byzance, 1998. Jacques Gouillard edited and commented on the trial of the philosopher John Italos for impiety in the 11th c.: “Le procès officiel de Jean l’Italien, les Actes et leurs sous-entendus,” Travaux et mémoires 9 (1985): 133–73. On that period see: Lysimaque Oeconomos, La vie religieuse dans l’Empire Byzantin au temps des Comnènes, 1918, and Michael Angold, Church and Society in Byzantium under the Comneni, 1081–1261, 1995. The relations between theology and education are treated in studies such as J. M. Hussey, Church and Learning in the Byzantine Empire, 867–1185, 1937. On the relations between Hellenism and Christianity from an Orthodox point of view, see John Zizioulas, Hellinismos kai Christianismos. Hè synantisi ton dyo kosmon, 2003. Byzantine spiritualism was approached by Irénée Hausherr, La méthode d’oraison hésychaste, Orientalia Christiana, IX, 1927; Hans Urs von Balthasar, Kosmische Liturgie: Das Weltbild Maximus’ des Bekenners, Einsiedeln, 2nd ed. 1961. The Greek Panayotis Chrestou edited the complete works of Gregorios Palamas and inaugurated in Thessaloniki a book series of high scholarly quality (Analekta Vlatadon); The iconoclasm constitutes a separate field of study, see: Edward James Martin, A History of the Iconoclastic Controversy, 1930; and more recently an overview of the literature: Leslie Brubaker, John Haldon, Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era (ca 680–850): The Sources, an annotated survey, with a section on “The Architecture of Iconoclasm: the Buildings” by Robert Ousterhout, 2001. For the philosophical

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foundations of the iconoclastic crisis, see: Marie-José Mondzain, Nicéphore: Discours contre les iconoclastes, 1989. Besides the great heresies of the times of the formation of Dogmas, a more recent heresy like Paulicianism (7th–9th c.) has been studied in: Paul Lemerle, “Histoire des Pauliciens d’Asie Mineure d’après les sources grecques,” Travaux et Mémoires, 5 (1973): 1–144. The Paulician texts were edited in: Charles Astruc, Wanda Wolska-Conus, Jacques Gouillard, Paul Lemerle, Denise Papachryssanthou, Joseph Paramelle, Travaux et mémoires 4 (1970): 2–227; see also: Dmitri Obolensky, The Bogomils, 1948; Nina G. Garsoïan, The Paulician Heresy: A Study of the Origin and Development of Paulicianism in Armenia and the Eastern Provinces of the Byzantine Empire, 1967; Janet and Bernard Hamilton, Christian Dualist Heresies in the Byzantine World, c. 650 – c. 1405, 1998. An outline of the evolution of heresies is Jacques Gouillard’s, “L’hérésie dans l’empire byzantin des origines au XIIe siècle,” Travaux et Mémoires 1 (1965): 299–325. The outcome of the soviet research on Byzantine theology has been bibliographically summed up in sections of the French series Travaux et mémoires. The circle of the Russian theologians exiled in the West after the rise of Communism was very prolific and influential and rightly called the ‘Russian Renaissance’. Interesting figures as to the study of Byzantine theology are: Georges Florovsky (1893–1979; St Gregory Palamas and the Tradition of the Fathers, 1961; Collected Works. Vol. 8: Byzantine Fathers of the Fifth Century; Vol. 9: Byzantine Fathers of the Sixth to Eighth Centuries; Vol. 10: Byzantine Ascetic and Spiritual Fathers, 1972) and Vladimir Lossky (1903–1958), a familiar of the French historian of medieval philosophy Étienne Gilson, who wrote the very influential Essai sur la théologie mystique de l’église de l’orient, 1944. John Meyendorff (1926–1992) was issued from the circle of the Russian exiled; he wrote abundantly on subjects related to Byzantine theology and spiritualism: Imperial Unity and Christian Divisions: The Church 450–680, 1989; St Gregory Palamas and Orthodox Spirituality, 1974; (with Aristeides Papadakis), The Christian East and the Rise of the Papacy: The Church 1071–1453, 1994. To John Meyendorff we owe a summa on Byzantine theology: Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes, 1974. For particular topics, see: Agostino Pertusi, Fine di Bisanzio e fine del mondo. Significato e ruolo storico delle profezie sulla caduta di Constantinopoli, 1988; Gerhard Rottenwöhrer, Unde malum? Herkunft und Gestalt des Bösen nach heterodoxer Lehre von Markion bis zu den Katharen, 1986; Alexander Böhlig, Mysterion und Wahrheit: Gesammelte Beiträge zur spätantiken Religiongeschichte, 1968. On the question of the relations between clerical organization and theology some of the relevant publications are: Hans-Georg Beck, “Kirche und Klerus im

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staatlichen Leben von Byzanz,” Revue des études byzantines 24 (Mélanges V. Grumel, I) (1966): 1–24; Luciana Mortari, Consacrazione episcopale e collegialità. La testimonianza della Chiesa antica, 1969; André Guillou, “L’évêque dans la société méditerranéenne des VI–VII siècles. Un modèle,” Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes 131 (1973): 5–19. Guillou wrote also on the central sentiment of piety (eusebeia) in the Byzantine orthodoxy: “Piété filiale, piété impériale,” Mélanges P. Lévêque 1, 1988, 143–53, offering an approach based on the subjects of mentality and emotions. Separate studies on Byzantine theology we find in the following journal series: Analecta Bollandiana, Brussels, 1882ff.; Acta Sanctorum, ed. Socii J. Bolandi, Antwerpen, 1643ff.; Byzantinoslavica, Prague, 1929ff.; Byzantinische Zeitschrift, Leipzig, 1892ff, Munich, 1950ff.; Byzantion, Brussells, 1924ff.; Dumbarton Oaks Papers, Washington DC, 1941ff.; Ekklesiastikè Aletheia, Constantinople, 1880–1923; Echos d’Orient, Paris-Constantinople, 1897ff.; Epetèris Etaireias Byzantinon Spoudon, Athens, 1924ff.; Neos Hellenomnemon, 1904–1917, 1920–1927; Nea Sion, Jerusalem, 1901ff.; Orientalia Christiana Periodica, Rome, 1935ff.; Revue d’études Byzantines, Paris, 1943ff., etc. From the philologism of the early 20th century that remains a dominant trend in research, and through the outburst of the historical emphasis, we pass to the postmodernism of studies focusing on the peripheral, the decentred, the research on genre literature (Margaret Mullett) and on the relations between knowledge and power in Byzantine theology. See the precursory, Robert Browning, “Enlightenment and Repression in Byzantium in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries,” Past and Present 69 (1975): 3–23, and Paul J. Alexander, “Religious Persecution and Resistance in the Byzantine Empire of the 8th and 9th Centuries: Methods and Justifications,” Speculum 52 (1977): 238–64; Orthodoxie, Christianisme, Histoire, ed. Susanna Elm, Éric Rébillard and Antonella Romano, 2000; Averil Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of the Empire: The Formation of Christian Discourse, 1991; Dion Smythe, “Alexios I and the Heretics,” Alexios I Komnenos, ed. M. Mullett, D. Smythe, 1996, 232–52; Paul Speck, Ich bin’s nicht: Kaiser Konstantin ist es gewesen: Die Legenden vom Einfluss des Teufels, des Juden und des Moslem auf den Ikonoklasmus, 1990; for a different perception of a Cappadocian Father: Gregory of Nazianzus: Images and Reflections, ed. Jostein Bortnes and Thomas Hägg, 2006; and for another basic writer of Byzantine theology: Andrew Louth, St John Damascene: Tradition and Originality in Byzantine Theology, 2002; and also, Byzantine Orthodoxies, ed. Andrew Louth and Augustine Casiday, 2006. In spite of the plurality and abundance of studies, the fragmentation of the Byzantine religious tradition by various scientific disciplines, and in first place by philology, had been so successful that the research often lost track of the specific character of Byzantine spirituality.

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Select Bibliography Albert Ehrhard, “Theologie,” Geschichte der byzantinischen Literatur, ed. Karl Krumbacher 2 vols. (Munich: Beck, 2nd ed. 1897; 1st ed. of 1891, but without the section of Ehrhard; rpt. Burt Franklin Bibliographical Series XIII, New York: Burt Franklin), 37–218; Hans-Georg Beck, Kirche und theologische Literatur im byzantinischen Reich (Munich: Beck, 1959); The Cambridge Medieval History, vol. IV: The Byzantine Empire, Part II: Government, Church and Civilisation, ed. Joan Mervyn Hussey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967; of special interest are the chapters: Emil Herman S.J., “The Secular Church,” 105–34, J. M. Hussey, “Byzantine Monasticism,” 161–84, J.M. Hussey and T.A. Hart, “Byzantine Theological Speculation and Spirituality,” 185–205); John Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes (New York and London: Fordham University Press/Mowbrays, 1974); J. M. Hussey, “The Orthodox Church in the Byzantine Empire,” Oxford History of the Christian Church ed. Henry and Owen Chadwick (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986); La théologie byzantine et sa tradition, vol. II, XIIIe–XIXe siècle, ed. Carmelo Giuseppe Conticello and Vassa Conticello (Turnhout: Brepols (Corpus Christianorum), 2002) (two more vols. are expected).

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C Classics and Mythography Although not all Greek and Latin works concern themselves with religion or what later epochs called mythology, myth forms the foundation of classical history and the allusive backcloth to most classical literature. The general study of the classics in the Middle Ages and classical mythology per se, therefore, necessarily overlap. Yet while mythologists and classicists specializing in the Middle Ages both took philological study of European culture as their starting point, their theories and methodologies soon diverged. A. The theory that myth, grammar, and culture share cognate structures, what would later be called structuralism, was a notion born among early nineteenth century German comparative philologists standing at the confluence of historical linguistics and anthropology. Jakob Grimm’s Deutsche Mythologie (2 vols., 1835), which pursued the etiologies of German myths to classical fonts and beyond, transformed a folklore archive into a cultural and linguistic history and source of paradigms for his later philological work, the Geschichte der deutschen Sprache (2 vols., 1848), and Deutsche Grammatik (4 vol., 1819–1837). Alongside other 19th-century scholars such as Franz Bopp in comparative grammar (Vergleichende Grammatik des Sanskrit, Send, Armenischen, Griechischen, Lateinischen, Litauischen, Altslavischen, Gothischen und Deutschen, 3 vol., 1857–1861), and in comparative religion Max Müller (Lectures on the Science of Language, 2 vols., 1862–1865), Anthropological Religion (2 vols., 1890), and James Frazer (The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion, 1892), Grimm helped pioneer an approach to human culture through an analysis of the deep structures that unite culture’s linguistic and psycho-social aspects, structures that reveal themselves at their most naked and unmediated in myth. Further developed in Vladimir Propp’s work on folklore, Morphology of the Folktale (1927), as well as that of that of Annti Aarne and Stith Thompson (The Types of the Folktale: A Classification and Bibliography, 1961), this line of inquiry matured into the myth-based anthropology of Claude LéviStrauss (Anthropologie Structurale, 1958; Mythologiques, I–IV, 1964–1971), and the formalist genre theory of Northrop Frye (The Anatomy of Criticism, 1957).

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Preferring historicism to structuralism, twentieth century medievalists tended not to make distinctions of manner or matter between classical mythology and classical literature. Their scholarly interests ran rather to Rezeptionsgeschichte, that is to the history of rhetoric through the Middle Ages as the conduit through which classical cultural and aesthetic ideals were transmitted to and appropriated by a Christian Europe hungry for sophistication. Ludwig Traube, who coined the terms aetas virgiliana, horatiana, and ovidiana to characterize the 8th–9th, 10th–11th, and 12th–13th centuries respectively (Vorlesungen und Abhandlungen, vol. 2, 1909–1920, 113), popularized the notion that medieval cultural history can be correlated to a canon of classical authors whose particular stylistic influence imprinted an indelible stamp on all aspects of artistic expression in a given age. The cultural homology that Traube found in the medieval Latin inheritance – Europe’s shared romanitas – took shape in and against the climate of racial and cultural division of World Wars I and II, finding oblique expression in Ernst Robert Curtius’s epitome of classical rhetoric in medieval literature European Literature in the Latin Middle Ages (1948). Curtius’s work remains to this day the highwater mark of medieval Geistesgeschichte in which ethics and aesthetics form a unified category accessible entirely through Christianized classicism. The post-war period witnessed a polemicization of medieval source and influence study and the emergence of critical schools of reception. Building on the work of patristic scholars such as Pierre Courcelle (Recherches sur les Confessions de St. Augustin, 1950) and Henri de Lubac (Exégèse médiéval, 1959), D. W. Robertson Jr. argued that Augustinian hermeneutics served as the ineluctable lens through which classical mythology passed into medieval culture: all medieval literature and art taught the distinction cupiditas and caritas, and all classical literature was allegorised tendentiously in the service of Christian morality (“The Doctrine of Charity in Mediaeval Literary Gardens,” Speculum 26 [1950]: 24–49; A Preface to Chaucer, 1963). While detractors chafed at the critical, not to mention cultural reductivism of Robertsonian exegetical historicism, it furnished an acute corrective to wayward interpretations of classical doctrines of love, particularly Ovidian, and their relation to “courtly love” as articulated by such classicizing medievalists of the previous generation as C.S. Lewis (The Allegory Of Love, 1936). If Curtius’ Middle Ages favored a timeless classicism whose aesthetic continuity is extra-historical, and Robertson’s a classicism whose aesthetic is historically contingent, Hans-Robert Jauss offered a compromise. In his 1967 essay “Literaturgeschichte als Provokation der Literaturwissenschaft” (reprinted in Rezeptionsästhetik, ed. Rainer Warning, 1994, 126–62), the medievalist argued that literary historicity exists only at the point of recep-

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tion by the contemporary reader, but that it is possible to derive historically objective local meanings from classical and medieval texts through a system of expectations (Erwartungshorizonte) encoded in the text’s generic, formal and thematic gestures as well as through its aesthetic distance from the source of imitation. With reception theory, Jauss breathed new life into the superannuated study of classical influence in the Middle Ages weakened by the depredations of Marxists and historicists. To be sure, other scholars of classical influence were working independently toward a similar shift from influence to reception in apparent ignorance of Jauss. Thomas Greene’s The Light in Troy (1982), which applies his theory of “dialectical imitation” to late medieval and Renaissance reception of Latin classics, is likewise dedicated to bridging the gap between the historical and aesthetic treatment of literature, while David Quint’s more recent Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (1993) explores the ways in which political ideology is transmitted in myth and encoded in genre. Indeed, Jauss’s theoretical presence among classicists and medievalists grew slowly beginning in the 1980s (J. E. Müller, Literaturwissenschaftliche Rezeptionstheorien und empirische Rezeptionsforschung, 1981; Udo Frings, Antike Rezeption im altsprachlichen Unterricht, 1984; Peter Leberecht Schmidt, “Reception Theory and Classical Scholarship: A Plea for Convergence” Hypatia [1985]: 67–77), eventually achieving a degree of prominence in the work of Charles Martindale who has edited several important collections of essays (Virgil and his Influence, 1984; Ovid Renewed: Ovidian Influences on Literature and Art from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century, 1988; Classics and the Uses of Reception, 2006). The last noteworthy approach to classics and mythology in the Middle Ages is one that has not yet earned a critical cognomen, although somatic theory will suffice provisorily. In The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism (1986), Leonard Barkan traces the reception not of Ovid per se, but of the idea of the metamorphic body as a figural microcosm of larger social, cosmological, and poetic issues present in medieval and Renaissance art and literature. The body, in effect, becomes a metaphor for the connection between social or anthropological evolution of a culture and the classical mythological corpus that both effects and records that change. Barkan’s approach has been refined and extended by Lynn Enterline in The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare (2000), Bruce Holsinger in Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture (2001), particularly in the final chapter on Orpheus, and Gregory Heyworth in Desiring Bodies: Ovidian Romance and the Cult of Form (2009).

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B. Bibliography and Transmission Of course, all theoretical work in classical reception in the Middle Ages must be built first on a material knowledge of sources – what texts were available, when, and where – and then, at one remove of abstraction, on a diachronic understanding of the history of manuscript diffusion that defines a textual tradition. Cataloguing the material records of the medieval appropriation of classical literature is a project in many ways more vast and daunting than understanding the cultural and poetic theories guiding that appropriation. Much of the research in the field of classics in the Middle Ages in the past century has been dedicated to the less-than-glamorous disciplines of bibliography and textual transmission. These, in turn, make possible the study of reception. Catalogues of manuscript holdings in classics are an essential instrument for research into influence, reception, and the connections of medieval intellectual life to antiquity. But as Albert Derolez notes (Les catalogues de bibliothèques, 1979), a record of the existence of a classical text at one point in time affords little insight into its history of use, and hence its influence. Thus, while catalogues provide the raw bibliographical repertories, they are only as informative as the collateral data that accompany them. Some of the first bibliographies of classical manuscript holdings to attempt a more ambitiously contextual account are Hans Meier’s two-volume A Bibliography of the Survival of the Classics (1931–33), a project thereafter abandoned, and Max Manitius’s Handschriften antiker Autoren in mitteralterlichen Bibliothekskatalogen (1935). Hilda Buttenwieser’s Master’s thesis “The Distribution of the Manuscripts of Latin Classical Authors in the Middle Ages” (1930) while never published, is a useful resource particularly for the thirteenth century, and is augmented by her subsequent article “Popular Authors of the Middle Ages: The Testimony of the Manuscripts” (Speculum 17 [1942]: 50–55). For Latin manuscripts prior to the ninth century, there is E. A. Lowe’s Codici Latini Antiquiores, vol. 1–12, (1934–1971), supplemented with addenda and corrigenda in 1985 by Bernhard Bischoff and V. Brown (Mittelalterliche Studien 47, 317–66). The next significant bibliographical contribution is a two-volume collection of essays published as La cultura antica nell’Occidente latino dal VII all’XI secolo (1975), a resource rendered nugatory by its extreme scarcity. During the 1980s, the Danish scholar Birger Munk Olsen, the premier bibliographer of classical reception in the Middle Ages, published his four-volume L’étude des auteurs classiques aux XIe et XIIe siècles (1982–1989). Olsen details European manuscript holdings and fragments by author in both public and private collections, important bibliographic material treating each author, and essays on the history of significant collections and col-

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lectors. Paul Oskar Kristeller’s Iter Italicum: A Finding List of Uncatalogued or Incompletely Catalogued Humanistic Manuscripts of the Renaissance in Italian and Other Libraries, vol. 1–6 (1963–1992), while describing mainly late manuscripts, gives a wealth of references to classical texts not found in other catalogues. Finally, there is Bernhard Bischoff’s Manuscripts and Libraries in the Age of Charlemagne (trans. Michael Gorman, 1994), which serves both as a catalogue and as a work of intellectual history. Specialized catalogues of individual libraries abound. Their contribution to bibliography in classical literature of the Middle Ages is narrow, and yet those covering the most important collections deserve mention. Such are Colette Jeudy’s and Yves François Riou’s, Les manuscrits classiques latins de bibliothèques publiques en France (vol. 1, 1989), and Les manuscrits classiques latins de la Bibliothèque Vaticane (ed. Elisabeth Pellegrin, vol. 1–4, 1975–1991). Similarly narrow but important for the study of mythology are the single author manuscript lists for Ovid’s Metamorphoses by Franco Munari (Catalogue of the MSS of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. BICS supplement 4 [1957]); and the supplements by Munari (“Supplemento al catologo dei manoscritti delle ‘Metamorfosi’ ovidiane,” Rivista di filologia e di istruzione classica, 93 [1965]: 288–97; id. “Secondo supplemento al catalogo dei manoscritti delle ‘Metamorfosi’ ovidiane,” Studia florentina A. Ronconi oblata [1970]: 275–80), and Frank Coulson (“Newly Discovered Manuscripts of Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’,” Scriptorium 46 [1992]: 285–88). Also important is Frank Coulson’s and Bruno Roy’s Incipitarium ovidianum: A Finding Guide for Texts in Latin Related to the Study of Ovid in the Middle Ages (2000). For medieval manuscripts of Vergil, see L. Holtz’s “La redécouverte de Virgile aux VIIIe et IXe siècles d’après les manuscrits conservés” (Lectures médiévales de Virgile: Actes du colloque organisé par l’Ecole française de Rome, 1985, 9–30), and his “Les manuscrits carolingiens de Virgile (Xe et XIe siècles),” (La fortuna di Virgilio: Atti del Convegno internazionale, 1986, 127–49); and G. C. Alessio “Medioevo – tradizione manoscritta,” (Enciclopedia virgiliana, vol. 3, 1987, 432–43). Much of the work in classical transmission and textual tradition in the Middle Ages has been undertaken in article form and published diffusely. Several books, however, present the subject in epitome. R. R. Bolgar’s The Classical Heritage and its Beneficiaries: From the Carolingian Age to the End of the Renaissance (1954) is essential, as is his subsequent edited volume Classical Influences on European Culture A.D. 500–1500 (1971). Also seminal are Herbert Hunger’s Geschichte der Textüberlieferung (2 vols., 1961–1964), Leighton Reynold’s and Nigel Wilson’s Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature (2nd ed. 1974), and Reynold’s later Texts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics (1983). For the study of textual trans-

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mission in the Middle Ages, three single-author histories deserve mention: Birger Munk Olsen’s “Ovide au Moyen Age (du IXe au XIIe siècle)” (Le Strade del Testo, ed. Guglielmo Cavallo, 1987, 65–96), L. Holtz’s “La survie de Virgile dans le haut moyen âge” (Présence de Virgile: Actes du colloque des 9, 11, et 12 décembre 1976, ed. Raymond Chevallier, 1978, 209–22), and Robert Kaster’s The Tradition of the Text of the Aeneid in the Ninth Century (1990). As bibliographers and textual historians were compiling the material evidence of medieval classical influence and reception, so philologists were recording vernacular borrowings from classical sources. Studies of source, influence, and reception all concern themselves with imitatio in one sense or another, but the object of source study, the earliest intervention in the field, was analogue. Uninflected by theories of intertextuality, classicizing medievalists collected literal, verbatim borrowings in a preliminary effort to demonstrate the habits of medieval classical appropriation. Foremost among these was Edmond Faral whose Recherches sur les sources latines des contes et romans courtois du moyen âge (1913) pioneered investigations into the relationship of the medieval romance to classical models. In general, source study treats medieval popular literature, which is to say genres involved in the invention of a medieval vernacular mythology, namely romance and the fabliau. While source studies modulated relatively early into influence studies as scholars turned their attention from genres to the relationship of individual classical and medieval authors, they endured in work on fabliaux. Thus, Edmond Faral’s “Le Fabliau Latin au Moyen Age” (Romania 50 [1924]: 321–85) was supplemented fifty years later by Peter Dronke’s “The Rise of Medieval Fabliau: Latin and Vernacular Evidence” (Romanische Forschungen 85 [1973]: 275–97), and even today articles on the fabliau and classical influence still appear. C. Reception Medieval culture in Western Europe rests upon the twin pillars of the Bible and classical mythology. Each contributes a discrete aesthetic and ethos. One of the major tasks of medieval scholarship, then, has been to understand the differences and confluences of Christian and pagan mythoi through the literature and art that employ them. The opus is vast. First, the classical sources of mythology are many, the most important of which are Ovid, Vergil, Statius, Homer (or pseudo-Homer), Plato, Varro, Horace, Lucan, Hyginus, Aesop and the late antique authors Boethius, Macrobius, and Martianus Capella. The influence of these canonical authors is in turn mediated by important commentators, Chalcidius or Guillaume de Conches on Plato, Arnulf of Orleans or Alexander Neckam on Ovid, Servius or Bernardus Silvestris on

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Vergil, Remigius or Trivet on Boethius to name but a few, as well as by patristic interpreters and encyclopedists such as Augustine and Isidore of Seville, and christianizing mythographers and allegorizers such as Fulgentius, Lactantius, Claudian, Dracontius, the Vatican mythographers, and Petrus Berchorius. It is not within the scope of this essay to give more than an overview of the most important these. C.1. Ovid Often called collectively the “poet’s Bible,” Ovid’s main mythographic works – Metamorphoses, Ars amatoria, Remedia amoris, Heroides, Fasti – constituted the primary reference manuals for classical myth and Augustan culture in the Middle Ages, acting also as the cultural counterpoise to the Christian Bible. The tension between rival aesthetic and moral systems especially as concerns love, is at the crux of the earliest influence studies. Articulated by Edward Rand (Ovid and His Influence, 1925) and Salvatore Battaglia (“La tradizione di Ovidio nel Medioevo,” Filologia romanza 6 [1959]: 185–224), the dichotomy has endured to the present as manifest in Robert Edward’s The Flight from Desire: Augustine and Ovid to Chaucer (2006). Many early and mid-century studies of Ovid’s medieval Nachleben indulged an actuarial penchant for source-spotting and allusion-counting, a practice that fell into disregard after the publication of Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence (1973) which encouraged critics to search for creative misreadings rather than faithful ventriloquism. Subsequent work in the field has focused therefore on “appropriation” whereby medieval authors consciously recontextualize and culturally reinflect canonical texts rather than forge allegorical harmony from literal discord. John Fyler’s Chaucer and Ovid (1979), a book that treats nearly exclusively Ovid’s amatory writings, represents this trend, as well as that of dual author influence studies. More recently still, Ovidian influence has been considered diachronically in books of collected essays each treating the dialogue of such authors as Chaucer, Gower, Dante, Petrarch with Ovid (Ovid Renewed, ed. Charles Martindale, 1988; The Poetry of Allusion: Virgil and Ovid in Dante’s ‘Commedia,’ ed. Rachel Jacoff and Jeffrey Schnapp, 1991; Desiring Discourse: The Literature of Love, Ovid through Chaucer, ed. James Paxson and Cynthia Gravlee, 1998). The drawback of these essay collections is that they lack a unifying argument that comprehends Ovidian reception as something more than a series of local readings of mythic transformations. The dilemma facing Ovidian commentators and imitators of the Middle Ages turned on how to reconcile his stylistic attractions with his ostensible immorality, or more subtly whether his mores should be understood themselves as a stylistic posture. Early Christians intent on appropriating, or

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merely perpetuating, the sophistication of the classical cultus, what Origen called “plundering the Egyptians,” produced a series of influential allegorizations of the major authors designed to resolve that problem, most prominently of Ovid and Vergil (Jon Whitman, Allegory: The Dynamics of an Ancient and Medieval Technique, 1987). Research into Ovidian commentators and allegorizers falls into two categories: descriptive (historical) and interpretive, the former tracing the various traditions of allegory, and the latter the idea of allegory as a poetic theory or cultural response to paganism. Among the former, Fausto Ghisalberti made seminal early contributions on Arnulf of Orleans (Arnolfo d’Orleans: Un cultore di Ovidio nel secolo XII, 1932) and John of Garland (Integumenta Ovidii: Poemetto Inedito del Secolo XIII, 1933), and Lester Born gives an overview in “Ovid and Allegory” (Speculum 9 [1934]: 362–79), while Jane Chance provides useful, well-documented accounts in chapters one and two of Medieval Mythography (vol. 2, 2000). Among the latter, Jon Whitman’s book (see above) treats medieval allegoresis generally, while Robert Levine (“Exploiting Ovid: Medieval Allegorizations of the Metamorphoses” Medioevo Romanzo XIV [1989]: 197–213), Judson Boyce Allen (“Commentary as Criticism: The Text, Influence, and Literary Theory of the ‘Fulgentius Metaphored’ of John Ridewall” Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Amstelodamensis, ed. P. Tuynman, G. Kuiper, and Eckhard Kessler, 1979, 25–47), and Ralph Hexter (“Medieval Articulations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses: From Lactantian Segmentation to Arnulfian Allegory,” Medievalia 13 [1987]: 63–82) explore issues of poetics and cultural appropriation specific to Ovidian allegoresis. The final important line of inquiry into medieval readings of Ovid has sought to understand popular interpretations through records of Ovid’s corpus and Ovidian commentary as school texts. E. H. Alton’s and D. E. W. Wormell’s “Ovid and the Medieval Schoolroom” (Hermathena 94 and 95 [1960–1961]: 21–38; 67–82), and Ralph Hexter’s Ovid and Medieval Schooling (1986) underscore the primary importance of Ovid’s erotic writing in schools, often interpreted, as Hexter demonstrates, in a frank and literal manner. Gregory Hays gives a brief account of the reception of the most important, late-antique Ovidian commentator as a school text in “Tales out of School: Grammatical Culture in Fulgentius the Mythographer” (Latin Grammar and Rhetoric: From Classical Theory to Medieval Practice, ed. Carol Dana Lanham, 2002, 22–47).

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C.2. Virgil A pagan as near as possible to sainthood as Dantean providence could allow and widely credited in the Middle Ages for prophesying the advent of Christ in the fourth Eclogue, Virgil was never the catalyst of controversy and division that Ovid was. Untainted by problems of irony, political heterodoxy, and moral turpitude, Virgilian influence in the Middle Ages has generated commensurately fewer lines of research, a fact exacerbated first by the overshadowing presence of two works of critical influence, and second, by the lack of a thorough and reliable modern edition of Servius’ commentary. In 1872, Domenico Comparetti published Virgilio nel medioevo which, in its numerous translations and editions, dominated studies of medieval Vergil until Pierre Courcelle’s monumental Lecteurs païens et lecteurs chrétiens de l’Enéide (2 vols., 1984). Both books incline more toward source studies than influence studies and are complementary. Volume one of Courcelle updates Comparetti, compiling Virgilian readings by both patristic and secular authors while volume two provides detailed descriptions and discussions of manuscript illustrations of mythographical themes between the 10th and 15th centuries, the latter serving as a useful prequel to Jean Seznec’s The Survival of the Pagan Gods: The Mythological Tradition and Its Place in Renaissance Humanism and Art (1953). The primary focus of research into the medieval Vergil has been to assess the allegorical interpretations of his major works, particularly the Aeneid and the Eclogues. The Aeneid’s main allegorical interpreters – Fulgentius (6th c.), Bernardus Silvestris (12th c.), and Cristoforo Landino (15th c.) – agree on three salient points: (1) that Vergil followed “Platonic” moral doctrine; (2) that the epic is a Bildungsroman depicting Aeneas’s maturation into pietas or “grace;” (3) that book 6 illustrates a crucial descent to knowledge motif (J. W. Jones, Jr., “The Allegorical Traditions of the Aeneid,” Vergil at 2000: Commemorative Essays on the Poet and His Influence, ed. John D. Bernard, 1986, 107–32; Winthrop Wetherbee, Platonism and Poetry in the Twelfth Century, 1972, 105–06). The Eclogues, by contrast, were read, especially by Servius, as biographical allegory of the author’s political and financial fortunes (James Zetzel, “Servius and Triumviral History in the Eclogues,” Classical Philology 79 [1984]: 139–42; Raymond Starr, “Vergil’s Seventh Eclogue and its Readers,” Classical Philology 90 [1995]: 129–38). While Servius’s biographical conjectures about Vergil were an attempt at an allegorical historicism, non-allegorical readers used the Aeneid, particularly Book 6, as material for medieval legends about Vergil himself as psychopomp, magician (L. virga = magician’s wand), and genius. This latter tradition is taken up by John Spargo in Virgil the Necromancer: Studies in Virgilian Legends (1934), and Jane

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Chance Nitzsche, The Genius Figure in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (1975, esp. 42–64). C.3. Statius Second in influence only to the Ovidian corpus, Statius’ Thebaid and Achilleid served as mythological sourcebooks throughout the Middle Ages (C. Landi, “Stazio nel Medio Evo,” Atti dell’Accademia Padovena 37 [1921]: 201–32). Influence on Dante, Boccaccio, and Chaucer form the central thrust of research into the medieval Statius. Dante is attracted to Statius less poetically than personally, both because of the legend that he converted to Christianity after reading Vergil’s fourth Eclogue and because he may have found his own poetic career echoed in that of Statius (Winthrop Wetherbee, “Dante and the Thebaid of Statius,” Lectura Dantis Newberryana, ed. Paolo Cherchi and Antonio Mastrobuono, vol. 1, 1988, 71–92). Boccaccio’s Thebaid makes a romance of epic, substituting amatory motives (the love of Emilia) for political ones, as does Chaucer’s remaniement of Statius via Boccaccio (David Anderson, Before the Knight’s Tale: Imitation of Classical Epic in Boccaccio’s “Teseida,” 1988). The pseudo-Fulgentian commentary Super Thebaiden, which allegorizes the Thebaid as a psychomachia with Thebes as the soul, ruled by virtue (Laius) and vitiated by carnal desire (Oedipus), may also be of influence on Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale (Boyd Wise, The Influence of Statius on Chaucer, 1967, rpt. of 1911). C.4. Plato The “renaissance” of the twelfth century, as Charles Homer Haskins described it in his classic The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (1927), was fueled intellectually in large measure by the confluence of Ovidian mythology and Platonic philosophy. Plato’s Timaeus, widely read, provided poets and philosophers with a powerful myth of a rational cosmos, a world of seeming flux superintended by a divinely ordained figure of natural order, what in the Platonising Boethius appears allegorically in the figure of Lady Philosophy, in Alanus Insulis as Nature, and the Romance of the Rose as Raison. Not only did Plato’s rational cosmology of the Timaeus jibe neatly with Biblical genesis, as Thierry of Chartres endeavored to demonstrate in his Heptateuch, but, mediated by the in bono commentary of Arnulf of Orleans on the first book of the Metamorphoses, with Ovidian cosmology and ideology of metamorphosis (Winthrop Wetherbee, Platonism and Poetry in the Twelfth Century, 1973, 11–73). Recent research into medieval Plato, particularly into his influence upon literature and mythography, has failed to discover new lines of inquiry.

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Scholars of the field in the mid- to late 20th century took on the task of distinguishing the various ways in which Plato was used in the service of art, theology and literature – as philosopher, moralist and cosmographer – and with distinguishing among the schools of thought and commentary he provoked – Middle Platonism, neo-Platonism, the School of Chartres. Raymond Klibansky’s overview The Continuity of the Platonic Tradition in the Middle Ages (1939), has been superseded by Stephen Gersh’s Middle Platonism and NeoPlatonism: The Latin Tradition (2 vol., 1986). Of Plato’s readers, St. Augustine is the most influential purveyor of the moral imperative to transcend the worldly for the supersensual that becomes the corner stone of Christian theology (Etienne Gilson, History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages, 1955). Numerous works have treated the commentary on the Timaeus, and the connection between cosmography and myth in the twelfth century, the best of which remain Marie-Dominique Chenu, La théologie comme science au XIIe siecle (1957), and Brian Stock, Myth and Science in the Twelfth Century (1972). C.5. Boethius Writing in the fifteenth century, the Italian humanist Lorenzo Valla commented astutely that Boethius was the “last of the Romans, and first of the scholastics,” accurately placing him between commentator and poetic innovator. Translator and exegete of Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, theorist of music and arithmetic, and theologian, his single most influential work in the Middle Ages was the Consolation of Philosophy. Second in popularity perhaps only to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the Consolation of Philosophy served as an ideological and mythological counterpoise to the latter (Durant Waite Robertson, A Preface to Chaucer, 1962, 27) for authors such as Jean de Meun, Chaucer, and Petrarch. With more than 400 extant manuscripts of the Consolation of Philosophy alone, and a commentary vaster and more complex still, Boethian scholarship is still in the early stages of sorting out textual history, and editing various commentary traditions as a preliminary step toward authoritative reception study. In the meantime, early studies treating synoptically the life, works and literary influence of Boethius provide a useful general overview. Howard Patch’s The Tradition of Boethius: A Study of his Importance in Medieval Culture (1935), with short chapters on biography and biographical legend, philosophy, translations and influence, is meager. Henry Chadwick’s Boethius: The Consolations of Music, Logic, Theology and Philosophy (1981) is strong on biography, cultural context and and gives the most thorough discussion of Boethian philosophy and logic, omitting the literary influence. Fortunately, the latter is treated thoroughly by Pierre Courcelle La Conso-

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lation de Philosophie dans la tradition littéraire: Antécedents et Posterité de Boèce (1967). The most sophisticated literary and rhetorical interpretation of Boethius’ work in late antique and medieval context, particularly of the Consolation, comes from Seth Lerer (Boethius and Dialogue: Literary Method in the ‘Consolation of Philosophy,’ 1985) who reads Boethius’ dialogical structure as a response to dialogues of Cicero, Augustine and Plato (Timaeus), while making intertextual readings of mythographic technique and motif in Fulgentius (on Aeneas) and Seneca (on Orpheus and Circe). The Latin and vernacular commentary traditions of Boethius – Remigius, Trevet, William of Conches, Alfred – as well as the translations of the Consolation of Philosophy, the most famous of which by Chaucer and Jean de Meun, are a subject too complex for a single author. Overviews of the traditions by Alistair Minnis (The Medieval Boethius: Studies in the Vernacular Translations of the ‘De Consolatione Philosophiae,’ 1987; Chaucer’s ‘Boece’ and the Medieval Traditions of Boethius, 1993) and Maarten Hoenen and Lodi Nauta (Boethius in the Middle Ages: Latin and Vernacular Traditions of the ‘Consolatio Philosophiae,’ 1997) both present the subject in its Hydra-headed enormousness, and correct earlier misconceptions of the commentators (such as Courcelle’s notion that Trevet was an anti-Platonist) was by placing them in the context of medieval scholastic debates. The commentaries of King Alfred are the subject of the ongoing collaborative Alfredian Boethius Project centered in Oxford and directed by Malcolm Godden. D. Mythography Mythography, the systematic collection and critique of a culture’s mythos, begins for Greco-Roman antiquity in Homer, Hesiod, and Pindar, but has its critical origins in Herodotus and Plato who first theorized the relationship of myth to history, literature, and philosophy (Felix Buffière, Les mythes d’Homère et la Pensée Grecque, 1956). In the Middle Ages, Platonic and neo-Platonic interpretation of myth served as the model upon which Christian mythographers systematized classical mythology (Jean Pépin, Mythe et Allegorie: Les origines grecques et les contestations judéo-chrétiennes, 1976; Robert Lamberton, Homer the Theologian: Neoplatonist Allegorical Reading and the Growth of the Epic Tradition, 1986). From Cicero’s De natura deorum, medievals had received the notion that myth was euhemerized history, a theory that flourished in the early medieval mythography of Orosius and Isidore of Seville (Jacques Fontaine, Isidore de Seville et la culture classique dans l’espagne wisigothique, vol. 2., 1959). The long standing connection between astrology and the Olympian pantheon promulgated influentially by Eratosthenes’s Catasterismi and popularized in Latin by Hyginus’s Astronomica, was a mythographic ideology

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opposed by such late antique and early medieval writers as Boethius and Augustine who argued that divine providence and man’s free will can overcome the influence of pagan cosmic deities. The pagan mythographer Macrobius also opposed astrological interpretation of myth after a fashion, arguing for a kind of monotheism whereby all the gods are expressions of the Sun, the cardinal deity. Christian apologists, hungry for classical sophistication, were caught in a desperate quandary: because mythology served as the single frame of reference for classical physics, philosophy, literature, and ethics, Christian apologists wary of irreligion could not simply dismiss it or wholly reinvent it according to a Christian mythos (Gerard Ellspermann, The Attitude of Early Christian Latin Writers Toward Pagan Literature and Learning, 1949, 9). The alternative was to impose a new ideological hermeneutic upon it through allegory. Allegoresis, justified by Biblical precedent, and theorized by patristic writers, became the predominant method of mythography among Christian mythographers beginning with Fulgentius and continuing in the work of the Vatican mythographers (Paule Demats, Fabula: Trois études de mythographie antique et médiévale, 1973; Richard Krill, “The Vatican Mythographers: Their Place in Ancient Mythography,” Manuscripta 23 [1979]: 173–77). Modern research into medieval mythography begins with Thomas Muncker’s annotated edition Mythographi Latini (1681) reprinted and augmented by August van Staveren (1742), that anthologizes Hyginus, Fulgentius, Lactantius Placidus, and Alberic of London. From the late nineteenth century onward, the study of mythography has been shared among the disciplines of art history and philology with the former as the motive force. Aby Warburg and the art historical library and institute he founded at the turn of the twentieth century effectively established iconography as a central modern concern of mythography, a tendency expressed in the work of Fritz Saxl, the Warburg Library’s first curator (Verzeichnis astrologischer und mythologischer illustrierter Handschriften des lateinischen Mittelalters, 2 vols., 1915–1927), and other art historians in Warburg’s circle, among whom Erwin Panofsky (Studies in Iconology, 1939; Meaning in the Visual Arts, 1955). The classic work on the history and iconography of mythography from the Warburg-circle remains Jean Seznec’s La survivance des dieux antiques (= Studies of the Warburg Institute 11, 1940). Scholars of allegory have benefited as well from the iconography of classical myth, particularly the Robertsonians (D. W. Robertson, Preface to Chaucer, 1962; id. and Bernard Huppé, Fruyt and Chaf: Studies in Chaucer’s Allegories, 1963; John Fleming, The Roman de la Rose: A Study in Allegory and Iconography, 1969), and independently Rosemond Tuve (Allegorical Imagery: Some Medieval Books and their Posterity, 1966).

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Theorists of allegoresis, who represent the other main thrust of research into mythography, recognize the importance of the image to mythic narrative, hence Peter Dronke’s notion of the fabula as interchangeably narrative and iconic (Fabula: Explorations into the Uses of Myth in Medieval Platonism, 1974). Purely textual studies of mythography continue to appear, most focusing on the vernacular tradition (Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Reading Myth: Classical Mythology and Its Interpretation in Medieval French Literature, 1997; Jane Chance, The Mythographic Art: Classical Fable and the Rise of the Vernacular in Early France and England, 1990; Jane Chance, The Mythographic Chaucer: The Fabulation of Sexual Politics, 1995). Lacking, however, is a study that combines the art historical and philological approaches to mythography. Jane Chance’s two-volume Medieval Mythography (1994–2000), manages at once to be compendious and superficial, useful for its comprehensive overview of mythographic commentary and for its bibliography, but poor (or wrong) in its interpretation of the sources it covers. Meanwhile, the field awaits the scholar or group of scholars to provide a panoptic view of myth and its medieval reception both in its vastness and minuteness. Select Bibliography Leonard Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986); Pierre Courcelle, Lecteurs païens et lecteurs chrétiens de L’Enéide, 2 vols. (Paris: Imprimerie Gauthier-Villars, 1984); Ernst Robert Curtius, Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter (Bern: A. Francke, 1948); Birger Munk Olsen, L’étude des auteurs classiques latins aux XIe et XIIe siècles (Paris: ed. Du C.N.R.S, Imprimerie Daupeley-Gouverneur, 1982); Jean Pépin, Mythe et allégorie: Les origines grecques et les contestations judéo-chrétiennes (Paris: Editions Montaigne, 1958).

Gregory Heyworth

Codicology and Paleography Introduction: the Beginnings The analysis and history of ancient and medieval writing and book making may be the fields of historical investigation that underwent the most dramatic transformation over the past century. They changed status within the realm of historical studies, passing from ancillary techniques (“sciences auxiliaires de l’histoire” in French; “Hilfsdisziplin” in German) to disciplines of their own. It is a tradition, however, to consider that paleography obtained a

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proper status with the work on ancient Greek writing by the French Benedictine Bernard de Montfaucon (1655–1741), Palaeographia graeca, sive, De Ortu et Progressu Literarum Graecarum: et De variis omnium saeculorum Scriptionis Graecae generibus: itemque de Abbreviationibus & de Notis variarum Artium ac Disciplinarum, Additis Figuris & Schematibus ad fidem manuscriptorum Codicum … 1708 (rpt. [1970]). Whatever the contribution of Montaucon might have been, the interest in, and a certain level of analysis of manuscripts (all medieval) and their writing started as early as the Renaissance, and took much more time to lead to a discipline than the historiographical narrative in the style of the Founding Fathers attributing the origin of paleography to one specific person (in the specific case, to Montfaucon) wants. For practical reasons (principally, the quantity of available studies, the recent expansion of the field, and, consequently, the unavoidable specialization), this essay focuses more on Greek manuscripts and their study in Western scholarship (for a synthetic presentation of manuscript studies, see, for example and recently: The Book Encompassed: Studies in Twentieth-Century Bibliography, ed. Peter Davison, 1992, particularly the following three chapters: Christopher De Hamel, “Medieval Manuscript Studies” [37–45]; Tom Davis, “The Analysis of Handwriting: An Introductory Survey” [57–68]; and John Bidwell, “The Study of Paper as Evidence, Artefact, and Commodity” [(69–82]). With some exceptions, however, it does not consider Latin paleography and codicology (however active the field might have been; for a bibliographic survey, see Leonard E. Boyle [1923–1999], Medieval Latin Palaeograhy: A Bibliograhic Introduction, 1984, and, for an overview of current trends, see for example: Id., Integral Palaeography, 2001, and Classica et Beneventana: Essays Presented to Virginia Brown on the Occasion of her 65th Birthday, ed. Frank Thomas Coulson and Anna Grootjans, 2008; for an instance of specialized study, see Albert Derolez, The Palaeography of Gothic Manuscript Books from the Twelfth to the Early Sixteenth Century, 2003), or any other linguistic area of the Middle Ages. A. Renaissance Collectionism and Knowledge of Manuscripts During the Renaissance, existing collections were further developed and several others were created by individuals often wealthy but also of any rank in society, acting on their own or on behalf of a patron, as well as by all sorts of institutions (civil, religious, or political). Whatever the case, collections were developed or created by transferring a private collection to a civil institution (as it happened, for example, in Venice with Bessarion’s collection [below]), by acquiring entire collections or large group of manuscript (sometimes in loco, for example, from Greeks selling the family collection, as in the case of

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Antônios Eparchos [below], but also by sending agents to the East [e. g., the Greek Janos Laskaris for Lorenzo de’ Medici [below]), by purchasing manuscripts on the market or having them newly copied (intramurally or overseas [for example, Michaêl Apostolês in Creta [below], by copyists hired by a wealthy patron or working independently, alone or in the context of a scriptorium duly organized [see below on copyists and scriptoria]), or simply by seizing entire manuscript collections (by confiscation, peace treatises at the conclusion of a conflict, or any other kind of agreement not necessarily fair). All this happened in Italy and in the trans-alpine world (Andreas Darmarios, for example, in Spain [below]). Much research has been devoted since the 1830s until recently to the search (often presented as a discovery process) and study of manuscripts in the Renaissance with both detailed and synthetic studies. Among the synthetic studies, one could mention the following (chronological order of publication; to allow for contextualization, author’s names are followed [whenever possible] by the years of birth and death at their first mention, except for contemporary scholars): Remigio Sabbadini (1850–1943), La scoperta dei codici latini e greci ne’ secoli XIV e XV, 1905; Robert Ralph Bolgar (1913–1985), The Classical Heritage and its Beneficiaries, 1954; Nigel Guy Wilson, From Byzantium to Italy: Greek Studies in the Italian Renaissance, 1992 (on Greek manuscripts, more specifically); or Paul Oskar Kristeller (1905–1999), “The Search for Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 120 (1976): 307–10. As for detailed studies, many publications have dealt with specific collections (alphabetical order of owners’ name [followed, here as in the whole essay, by the years of birth or death of the collectors in order to allow for historical contextualization; the list is not exhaustive, either for the collectors or for the publications, but aims to be representative of the history of the book and its research; in each section, the selected works are listed in chronological order of publication): Bessarion (1399/1400–1472) Heni Omont (1857–1940), “Inventaire des manuscrits grecs et latins donnés à Saint-Marc de Venise par le Cardinal Bessarion en 1468,” Revue des Bibliothèques 4 (1894): 129–87; Lotte Labowsky (1905–1991), “Manuscripts from Bessarion’s Library Found in Milan,” Medieval and Renaissance Studies 5 (1961): 108–31; Tullia Gasparrini Leporace (1910–1969), and Elpidio Mioni (1911–1991), Cento codici Bessarionei, 1968; Tullia Gasparrini Leporace, “L’ordinamento della bibliotheca Nicena,” Medioevo e Umanesimo 24 (1976): XIII–XX; Lotte Labowsky, Bessarion’s Library and the Biblioteca Marciana: Six Early Inventories, 1979; Concetta Bianca, Da Bisanzio a Roma: Studi sul cardinale Bessarione, 1999 (see especially 43–106: chapter 3: “La formazione della biblioteca latina del Bessarione”); Marino Zorzi,

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“Bessarione e i codici greci,” L’eredità greca e l’ellenismo, ed. Gino Benzoni, 2002, 93–121; Jean Hurault de Boistaillé (†1572): Karl Wilhelm Mueller (1801–1874), “De Boëstallerii bibliotheca greca,” Analecta Bernensia 1 (1839/1840): 2–19 (reproduced in Id., “Der Katalog der griechischen Bibliothek von Boistaillé,” Serapeum 19 [1858]: 161–64, 169–72, and also in Pandôra 20 [1869]: 117–18, 138–40); Henri Omont, “Inventaire des manuscrits de Hurault acquis pour la bibliothèque du roi en 1622,” Anciens inventaires et catalogues de la Bibliothèque nationale, vol. 2, 1909, 404–15; Donald Jackson, “The Greek Manuscripts of Jean Hurault de Boistaillé,” Studi italiani di filologia classica 4th ser., 2 (2004), 209–52; Marie-Pierre Laffitte, “Une acquisition de la Bibliothèque du roi au XVIIIe siècle: Les manuscrits de la famille Hurault,” Bulletin du bibliophile 2008, 42–98; Federico de Montefeltro (1422–1482): Cesare Guasti (1822–1889), “Inventario della Libreria Urbinate compilato nel secolo XV da Frederigo Veterano,” Giornale storico degli archivi toscani 6 (1862): 127–47; 7 (1863): 46–55, and 130–54; Antonio Valenti, Sul trasferimento della biblioteca ducale d’Urbino a Roma: Memorie critiche, 1878; Stanislaus Legrelle, “De ordinibus codicum urbinatum,” Codices Urbinates Latini, ed. Cosimo Stornajolo (1849–1923), vol. 3, 1921, VI*-XXIX*; Fugger family: Paul Lehmann (1884–1954), Eine Geschichte der alten Fuggerbibliotheken, 2 vols., 1956–1960; Johann Jakob Fugger (1516–1585): Brigitte Mondrain, “Copistes et collectionneurs de manuscrits grecs au milieu du XVe siècle: Le cas de Johann Jakob Fugger d’Augsbourg,” Byzantinische Zeitschrift 84 (1991–1992): 354–90; Domenico Grimani (1461–1523): Henri Omont, “Notes sur quelques manuscrits grecs de la Bibliothèque archiépiscopale d’Udine provenant du Cardinal D. Grimani,” Zentralblatt für Bibliothekswesen 12 (1895): 415–16; Theobald Freudenberger (b. 1904), “Die Bibliothek des Cardinals Domenico Grimani,” Historisches Jahrbuch 56 (1936): 15–45; Giovanni Mercati (1866–1957), Codici Latini Pico Grimani Pio e di altra biblioteca ignota del secolo XVI, 1938; Donald F. Jackson, “Grimani Greek Manuscripts in Vienna,” Codices Manuscripti 27/28 (1999): 3–7; Aubrey Diller (1903–1985), Henri Dominique Saffrey, Leendert G. Westerkink (1913–1990), Bibliotheca graeca manuscripta Cardinalis Dominici Grimani (1461–1523), 2003; Diego Hurtado de Mendoza (1503–1575): Gregorio De Andrés, “Dos listas inéditas de manuscritos griegos de Hurtado de Mendoza,” La Ciudad de Dios 174 (1961), 381–96; Id., “La biblioteca de Don Diego Hurtado de Mendoza (1576),” Documentos para la Historia del Monasterio de San Lorenzo el Real de El Escorial, vol. 7, 2, 1964, 235–324; Isodoros of Kiev (between 1380 and 1389–1463): Giovanni Mercati, Scritti d’Isodoro, il cardinale Ruteno e codici a lui appartenuti che si conservano nella Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana, 1926; Otto Kresten, Eine Sammlung von Konzilsakten aus dem Besitze des

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Kardinals Isidoros von Kiev, 1976; Ioannês Laskaris (1445–1535): Pierre de Nolhac (1859–1936), “Inventaire des manuscrits de Jean Lascaris,” Mélanges d’archéologie et d’histoire 6 (1886), 251–74; Léon Dorez (1864–1922), “Un document nouveau sur la bibliothèque de Jean Lascaris,” Revue des Bibliothèques 2 (1892), 280–81; Graham Speake, “Janus Lascaris’ Visit to Mount Athos in 1491,” Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 34 (1993), 325–30; Basile Markesinis, “Janos Lascaris, la bibliothèque d’Avramis à Corfou et le Paris. gr. 584,” Scriptorium 54 (2000), 302–306; Nicolao Leoniceno (1428–1524): Daniela Mugnai Carrara, La biblioteca di Nicolò Leoniceno: Tra Aristotele e Galeno: cultura e libri di un medico umanista, 1991; Stefania Fortuna, “A proposito dei manoscritti di Galeno nella biblioteca di Nicolò Leoniceno,” Italia medioevale e umanistica 35 (1992): 431–38.; Ead., “Sui manoscritti greci di Galeno appartenuti a Nicolò Leoniceno e al cardinale Bessarione,” ‘In partibus Clius’: Scritti in onore di Giovanni Pugliese Carratelli, ed. Gianfranco Fiaccadori, 2006, 189–211; Matthias Corvinus (1443–1490): Csaba and Klára Csapodi, Bibliotheca Corviniana, 1967 (in Hungarian; several translations: The Corvinian Library: History and Stock, 1973; Bibliotheca Corviniana: La Bibliothèque du roi Mathias Corvin de Hongrie, 1982); Otto Mazal (1932–2008), Königliche Bücherliebe: Die Bibliothek des Matthias Corvinus, 1991; de’ Medici family: Enea Piccolomini (1844–1910), “Delle condizioni e delle vicende della libreria medicea privata dal 1494 al 1508,” Archivio storico italiano 3rd ser., 19 (1874): 101–29; Id., “Documenti intorno alle vicende della libreria medicea privata dal 1494 al 1508,” ibid., 254–81; Id., “Inventario della libreria medicea privata compilato nel 1495,” ibid. 20 (1874): 51–94; Id., “Richerche intorno alle condizioni alle vicende della libreria medicea privata dal 1498 al 1508,” ibid. 21 (1875), 102–12, 282–96 (the articles in all three issues have been reproduced in 1875 as a monograph with the same title); Francis AmesLewis (b. 1943), “The Inventories of Piero de’ Medici’s Library,” La Bibliofilia 84 (1982): 103–142; Id., The Library and Manuscripts of Piero di Cosimo de’ Medici, 1984; Edmund Boleslav Fryde (1923–1999), Greek Manuscripts in the Private Library of the Medici 1469–1510, 2 vols., 1996; Lorenzo de’ Medici (1449–1492): Enea Piccolomini, “Due documenti relativi ad acquisti di codici fatti da Giovanni Lascaris per conto di Lorenzo de’ Medici,” Rivista di Filologia Classica 2 (1874): 401–23; Karl Konrad Mueller (1854–1903), “Neue Mitteilungen ueber J. Laskaris und die Mediceische Bibliothek,” Zentralblatt für Bibliothekswesen 1 (1884): 333–413; G. Del Guerraiorgio (1905–1979), “I manoscritti greci di Lorenzo il Magnifico e il rinascimento medico italiano,” Rivista di Storia delle scienze mediche e naturali 43 (1952): 225–34; Donald F. Jackson, “Fabio Vigili’s Inventory of Medici Greek Manuscripts,” Scriptorium 52 (1998), 199–204; Id., “A New Look at an Old

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Book List,” Studi italiani di filologia classica, 3rd ser., 16 (1998): 83–108; Id., “Janus Lascaris on the Island of Corfu in A.D. 1491,” Scriptorium 57 (2003): 137–39; Markesinis, “Janos Laskaris …” (above); Guillaume Pellicier (1498/1499–1568): Richard Foerster (1843–1922), “Die griechischen Handschriften von Guillaume Pellicier,” Rheinisches Museum für Philologie 40 (1885): 453–61; Henri Omont, “Catalogue des manuscrits grecs de Guillaume Pellicier,” Bibliothèque de l’Ecole des Chartes 6 (1885): 45–83 and 594–624; Id., “Catalogue des manuscrits grecs de Guillaume Pélicier, ambassadeur de François Ier à Venise (1539–1542),” Catalogues des manuscrits grecs de Fontainebleau sous François Ier et Henri II, 1889, 393–427; Id., “Inventaire de la bibliothèque de Guillaume Pellicier évêque de Montpellier (1529–1568),” Revue des Bibliothèques 1 (1891): 161–72; Annaclara Cataldi Palau, “Manoscritti greci della collezione di Guillaume Pellicier, Vescovo di Montpellier (ca. 1490–1568): Disiecta membra,” Studi italiani di filologica classica, 3rd ser., 3 (1985): 103–15; Ead., “Les vicissitudes de la collection de manuscrits de Guillaume Pellicier,” Scriptorium 40 (1986): 32–53; Annaclara Palau, “Les copistes de Guillaume Pellicier, évêque de Montpellier,” Scrittura e civiltà 10 (1986): 199–237; Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494): Pearl Kibre (1900–1985), The library of Pico della Mirandola, 1936; Mercati, Codici latini Pico … (above); Hermann Walter, “Per la biblioteca di Giovanni Pico della Mirandola: L’inventario anonimo nel cod. Va. lat. 3436, foll. 263r–296v,” Studi Umanistici Piceni 24 (2004): 119–28; Gian Vincenzo Pinelli (1535–1601): Adolfo Rivolta (b. 1876), Contributi a uno studio sulla biblioteca di Gian Vincenzo Pinelli, 1914, and Id., Catalogo dei codici Pinelliani dell’Ambrosiana, Milano, 1933; Angelo Poliziano Ambrogini (1454–1494), more commonly known as Poliziano: Mostra del Poliziano nella Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana: Manoscritti, libri rari, autografi e documenti, ed. Alessandro Perosa (1910–1999), 1954; Augusto Campana (1906–1995), “Contributi alla biblioteca del Poliziano,” Il Poliziano e suo tempo: Atti del IV convegno internazionale di studi sul rinascimento, 1957, 173–229; Ida Maïer, Les manuscrits d’Ange Politien: Catalogue descriptif, avec dix-neuf documents inédits en annexe, 1965; Niccolò Ridolfi (1501–1550): Henri Omont, “Un premier catalogue des manuscrits grecs du Cardinal Ridolfi,” Bibliothèque de l’Ecole des Chartes 49 (1888): 309–24; Giovanni Mercati, “Indici di Mss. Greci del Card. N. Ridolfi,” Mélanges d’archéologie et d’histoire 30 (1910): 51–55; Roberto Ridolfi (1899–1991), “La biblioteca del cardinale Niccolò Ridolfi (1501–1550),” La Bibliofilia 31 (1929): 173–93; Donald F. Jackson, “Unidentified Medici-Regii Greek Codices,” Scriptorium 54 (2000): 197–208; Royal Library, Paris: Henri Omont, Catalogues des manuscrits grecs de Fontainebleau sous François Ier et Henri II, 1889; Janos Számboki (Johannes Sambucus) (1531–1584): Hans Gerstinger

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(1885–1971), “Johannes Sambucus als Handschriftensammler,” Festschrift der Nationalbibliothek zur Feier des 200 jährigen Bestehens des Gebäudes, 1926, 251–400; Henry (1549–1622) and Thomas (d. 1593 Saville: Mark Sosower (1949–2009), “Greek Manuscripts Acquired by Henry and Thomas (d. 1593) Saville in Padua,” The Bodleian Library Record 19 (2006): 157–184; Henry Scrimgeour (ca. 1505–1572): John Durkan, “Henry Scrimgeour, Fugger Librarian: A Biographical Note,” The Bibliotheck: A Scottish Journal of Bibliography and Allied Topics 3 (1960): 68–70; Id., “Henry Scrimgeour, Renaissance Bookman,” Edinburgh Bibliographical Society Transactions 5 (1978): 1–31; Nicolò Leonico Tomeo (1456–1531): Fabio Vendruscolo, “Manoscritti greci copiati dall’umanista e filosofo Nicolò Leonico Tomeo,” Odoi Dizêsios, Le vie della ricerca: Studi in onore di Francesco Adorno, ed. M. Serena Funghi, 1996, 543–55; Giorgio Valla (1447–1500): Johan Ludvig Heiberg (1854–1928), Beiträge zur Geschichte Georg Vallas und seiner Bibliothek, 1896. No less important, the search of manuscripts, their collection and circulation, and their use among printers and publishers, often in collaboration with scholars and scribes. Although research on Renaissance printers and editions of classical work started early (see, for example, Antoine Augustin Renoir (1765–1853), Annales de l’imprimerie des Aldes, ou Histoire des trois Manuce et de leurs éditions, 1803), the identification of the manuscript source(s) of their editions has only recently become an object of study particularly illustrated by Martin Sicherl (1914–2009), Handschriftliche Vorlagen der Editio princeps des Aristoteles, 1976. The same scholar pursued this type of research and published several studies, which he reproduced later in a volume of collected studies: Id., Griechische Erstausgaben des Aldus Manutius: Druckvorlagen, Stellenwert, kultureller Hintergrund, 1997. Among the many similar publications, one could single out Annaclara Cataldi Palau, Gian Francesco d’Asola e la tipografia aldina: La vita, le edizioni, la biblioteca dell’Asolano, 1998, on the editions by the successor of Aldo Manuzio (1449–1515), Gian Francesco d’Asola (ca. 1498–1557/1559). It is true that the search of manuscripts, collectionism, and the use of the texts found in manuscripts (be it for scholarly studies or for the preparation of printed editions) did not necessarily translate into a specific science. Nevertheless, there was a certain level of practical expertise and knowledge of manuscripts, particularly thanks to the scribes and craftsmen specialized in the business of book (be they local or Greek immigrants) who collaborated to the development or creation of collections. Furthermore, manuscripts were objects of prestige and were used for display of opulence and culture, and thus needed to be properly showcased, something that required to have at least some information on their history, textual interest, and cultural value.

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B. Pre-Montfaucon History In their rediscovery of ancient literature (be it Greek or Latin) through manuscripts – whose circulation, for the Greek ones, increased dramatically in the West after the Fall of Constantinople (29th May 1453) without starting at that moment, however, contrary to an ancient historical interpretation – Humanists, whoever they were, used paleographical and codicological parameters to estimate the value of manuscripts as testimonies of the text(s) they were reading, studying and possibly also editing. In so doing, they followed the philological approach to ancient literary works (including medieval) developed (but not necessarily created) by Poliziano in his Miscellanea, published in two Centuriae (1489 for the first, while the second [achieved between 1493 and 1494] remained unpublished, and was rediscovered only recently and published in 1972: Poliziano, Miscellaneorum centuria secunda, ed. Vittore Branca [1913–2004], and Manlio Pastore Stocchi, 1972 [on this discovery, see Lucia Cesarini Martinelli, and Alessandro Daneloni, “Manoscritti e edizioni,” Pico, Poliziano e l’umanesimo di fine Quattrocento: Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, 4 novembre-31 dicembre 1994, ed. Palolo Vitti, 1994, 308–09]). A sign of this early paleographical and codicological interest can be found in the many critical editions of classical authors by 16th-century humanists: in their triumphalist titles, scholars claimed to have used manuscripts defined as antiquissimi, vetustae antiquitatis, and other paleographicocodicological descriptions supposed to guarantee the quality of the newly published critical editions precisely thanks to the antiquity of the manuscript(s) they were based on (on the humanist meaning of these and similar terms, see Silvia Rizzo, Il lessico filologico degli umanisti, 1973, passim). For a remarkable example, see Conrad Celtis’s discovery of the religious plays and narratives by the 10th-century canoness Hrotsvita of Gandersheim (ca. 935–ca. 1002)in 1493 and his re-edition of her works in 1551. In spite of the subordination of such paleographico-codicological considerations – whatever their value – to the work of critical edition, manuscripts were the object of a more specific interest. They were soon listed and inventoried in more or less systematic ways, with different purposes: private use, heritage, and also consultation by external readers. A fundamental work – though not the first – was by the Swiss polymath Conrad Gesner (1516–1565) often qualified with the title of Father of Bibliography (according to the historiography of the Founding Fathers already evoked, even if such attribution is not necessarily correct) in his Bibliotheca Uniuersalis, siue Catalogus omnium scriptorum locupletissimus, in tribus linguis, Latina, Graeca, & Hebraica extantium & non extantium, veterum & recentiorum in hunc usque diem, doctorum & indoctorum, publicatorum & in Bibliothecis latentium. Opus nouum, & non Bibliothe-

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cis tantum publicis priuatisque instituendis necessarium, sed studiosis omnibus cuiuscunque artis aut scientiae ad studia melius formanda utilissimum, 1545 (with a summary ten years later: Epitome Bibliothecae, 1555). In many cases, the interest in manuscripts at that time was more directly oriented toward the search of texts to be edited and printed, particularly because the printing press was making technical progress and allowed for the reproduction of texts previously known only in manuscript form. The circulation of manuscripts, the printed editions of Latin translations, and commentaries of several classical authors have been studied in the volumes of the Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum (8 volumes published so far, 1960–2003), originally edited by Paul Oskar Kristeller (1905–1999). The diffusion of ancient scientific works during the century of 1450–1550, for example, has been the object of an inventory by Margaret Bingham Stillwell (1887–1984), The Awakening Interest in Science during the First Century of Printing 1450–1550: An Annotated Checklist of First Editions viewed from the Angle of their Subject Content, 1970. Catalogues of collections and libraries appeared shortly thereafter with such works as Giacomo Filippo Tomasini’s (1595–1655), Bibliothecae Patavinae Manuscriptae publicae et privatae quibus diversi scriptores hactenus incogniti recensentur ac illustrantur, 1639, and Id., Bibliothecae Venetae manuscriptae publicae et privatae quibus diversi scriptores hactenus incogniti recensentur, 1650. Immediately after (1653), the French Jesuit Philippe Labbé (1607–1677) published a list of libraries (and their holdings), together with a list of bibliographies of all kind (Nova bibliotheca mss librorum, sive Specimen antiquarum lectionum latinarum & graecarum in quatuor partes tributarum, cum coronide duplici, poetica et libraria, ac supplementis decem, 1653, with a second edition of the list of libraries in 1657 under the title Novae bibliothecae manuscript. librorum tomus …. In 1664, he published the list of bibliographies as a separate volume, entitled Bibliotheca bibliothecarum curis secundis auctior: Accedit Bibliotheca nummaria …). Published catalogues of manuscripts were not necessarily just lists of codices whose content was cursorily listed, but they began to offer some description of the manuscripts and their texts. Among the catalogues published during the post-Labbé and pre-Montfaucon era, one can list the following examples, with different levels of completion (selection, chronological order of publication [first volume]; for the clarity, the name of the library and city follows the date): 1665, Vienna, Imperial Library: Peter Lambeck (1628–1680), Commentarium de augustissima bibliothecae Caesareae Vindobonensi, 1665–1679; 1676, Leipzig, Library of the Academy: Joachim Feller (1628–1691), Oratio de Bibliotheca Academieae Lipsiensis Paulina: in so-

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lemni XIX. Philosophiae Baccalaureorum renonciatione d. XV. April. Anno Aer. Chri. M.DC.LXXVI. habita, cui duplex subjunctus est catalogus Alter Manuscriptorum membranaceorum, alter manuscriptorum chartaceorum, in eadem bibliotheca extantium; 1690, Vienna, Imperial Library: Daniel De Nessel (1644–1700), Breviarium et Supplementum Commentariorum Lambecianorum sive Catalogus aut Recensio specialis Codicum Manuscriptorum Graecorum, necnon Linguarum Orientalium Augustissimae Bibliothecae Caesareae Vindobonensis, cum locupletissimis Indicibus et selectissimis Additamentis. Partes I–V; 1697, England and Ireland: Edward Bernard (1638–1696), Catalogi codicum manuscriptorum Angliae et Hiberniae in unum collecti, cum indice alphabetico. Characteristically, during the three decades covered by the publication of these catalogues, a reflection started on the impact of available manuscripts on the reading of the texts they contain. Two (almost contemporary) scholars played a fundamental role in these new developments: the Frenchmen Jean Mabillon (1632–1707) and Richard Simon (1638–1712). A Benedictine monk of the Congregation of Saint-Maur, Jean Mabillon formulated first rules for a critical evaluation of manuscripts as testimonies of the texts they contain in his edition of the life of St Bernard (1091–1153) (Sancti Bernardi … Opera omnia …, 9 vols., 1667) and in the Acta Sanctorum Ordinis S. Benedicti to the publication of which he collaborated (several volumes, by century: 1st c.: 1668; 2nd c.: 1669; 3rd c. [2 vols.]: 1672; 4th c. [2 vols.]: 1677–1680; 5th c.: 1685; 6th c. [2 vols.]: 1701). Also, on the basis of his examination of charts and archival documents related to the history of the Church (some of which of discussed authenticity) he laid down the basis of diplomatics in his 1681 treatise De re diplomatica whose title deserves to be quoted in full, as it makes explicit the work performed by Mabillon: De re diplomatica libri VI, in quibus quidquid ad veterum instrumentorum antiquitatem, materiam, scripturam, et stilum; quidquid ad sigilla, monogrammata, subscriptiones, ac notas chronologicas; quidquid inde ad antiquariam, historicam forensemque disciplinam pertinet, explicatur et ilustratur. Accedunt commentarius de antiquis regum Francorum palatiis; veterum scripturarum varia specimina, tabulis LX comprehensa; nova ducentorum, et amplius, monumentorum collectio (with a supplement in 1704 and several re-editions from 1709). Typically, Mabillon traveled to explore library and archive collections for his further works – and in some cases also to acquire manuscripts for the royal collection of France (Flanders, 1672; Switzerland and Germany, 1683; Italy, 1685–1686), reporting the results of his travels in different works: (Flanders) Iter Burgundicum, 1685; (Germany) Iter germanicum anni 1683, s.l.n.d., and also Libri Germanicum or Itererarium Germanicum, 1685 (in the 5th vol. of the Analecta, with a reproduction in 1717 by Johann Albertus Fabricius [1668–1736] under the title Io. Mabillonii

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Iter Germanicum et Io. Launoii De Scholis celebribus a Carolo M. et post Carolum M. in Occidente instauratis liber …); (Italy): Iter italicum litterarium … annis 1685 et 1686, 1687 (with a reproduction of the first part of the 1st vol. as Museum italicum, seu Collectio veterum scriptorum ex bibliothecis italicis, 2 vols., 1687–1689). His major work was his Vetera analecta (Veterum analectorum tomus I[-IV] complectens varia fragmenta et epistolia scriptorum ecclesiasticorum, tam prosa, quam metro, hactenus inedita. Cum adnotationibus et aliquot disquisitionibus, 4 vols., 1675–1685). Richard Simon, studying the text of the Old and New Testament, was less prolific, but not less influential, as he laid down the basis of textual criticism in five seminal studies (in French) published first in Paris and then in Rotterdam because of the opposition of his religious order with a final volume in Paris again: Histoire critique du Vieux Testament, 1678; Histoire critique du texte du Nouveau Testament où l’on établit la vérité des actes sur lesquels la religion chrétienne est fondée, 1689 (rpt.1968); Histoire critique des versions du Nouveau Testament où l’on fait connaître quel a été l’usage de la lecture des Livres sacrés dans les principales Eglises du monde …, 1690; Histoire critique des principaux commentateurs du Nouveau Testament depuis le commencement du christianisme jusqu’à notre temps, avec une Dissertation critique sur les principaux actes manuscrits qui ont été cités dans les trois parties de cet ouvrage …, 1693; Nouvelles observations sur le texte et les versions du Nouveau Testament, 1695. C. The Montfaucon Era Bernard Montfaucon (above) was a contemporary of both Mabillon and Simon, though slightly younger. As early as 1702 he published a Diarium Italicum, sive Monumentorum Veterum, Bibliothecarum, Musaeorum, etc. Notitiae singulares in Itinerario Italico Collectae; adiectis Schematibus ac figuris (rpt. [1968] and 1982) in which he related a travel he made to Italy (1698–1701), collecting information on antiquities, libraries, and any other curiosity worth of notice. With this travel, he confirmed Mabillon’s paradigm for collecting information on library collections and manuscripts. In Italy, he gathered the information that enabled him to publish his 1708 Palaeographia greca, in which he formalized the study of ancient writing, particularly Greek. The antiquarian component present in Montfaucon’s travel to Italy (and dating back to the Renaissance, if not earlier) shaped the work of Johann Albertus Fabricius , whose monumental Bibliotheca Graeca (14 vols. in the original ed.: Bibliotheca Graeca, sive notitia scriptorum veterum graecorum quorumcunque monumenta integra, aut fragmenta exita exstant: tum plerorumque e MSS. ac deperditis, 1705–1728) is a sum of all available information on ancient Greek literature, including data coming from the manuscripts that had been

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brought to the attention of the scholarly community of that time thanks to printed catalogues, or were available in any other form. Catalogues of manuscripts continued to be published, in different styles and with different levels of achievement (chronological order of publication): 1715, Paris: Bernard Montfaucon, Bibliotheca Coisliana, olim Segueriana; 1734, London: David Casley (1681/82–1754), A Catalogue of the Manuscripts of the King’s Library: An Appendix to the Catalogue of the Cottonian Library: Together with an Account of the Books Burnt or Damaged by a Late Fire: One Hundred and Fifty Specimens of the Manner of Writing in Different Ages, from the Third to the Fifteenth Century, in Copper-plates: and Some Observations upon Mss, in a Preface; 1739–1744, Paris: Catalogus codicum manuscriptorum Bibliothecae regiae …; 1740, Venice: Antonio Maria Zanetti (1706–1778), and Antonio Bongiovanni (b. 1712), Graeca D. Marci Bibliotheca codicum manu scriptorum per titulos digesta …. In 1739, Bernard Montfaucon, capitalizing on his personal knowledge of collections and available catalogues, published a general inventory of manuscripts, returning, in a certain way, to the tradition of Gesner (although he no longer proceeded by authors and works, but by libraries) and to the simple listing of manuscripts, not necessarily with any kind of paleographical or codicological information: Bibliotheca bibliothecarum manuscriptorum nova: ubi, quae innumeris pene manuscriptorum bibliothecis continentur, ad quodvis literaturae genus spectantia & notatu digna, describuntur et indicantur, 1739 (rpt. 1982). Publication of catalogues was for a long time the major goal of manuscript studies as the following examples show: 1749, Turin: Joseph Pasini (1687–1770), Antonio Rivautella (1708–1753), and Francesco Berta (1719–1787), Codices manuscripti Bibliothecae regii taurinensis athenaei, per linguas digesti: & binas in partes distributi, in quatrum prima Hebraei, & Graeci, in altera Latini, italici, & Gallici, recensuerunt, & animadversionibus illustrarunt … insertis parvis quibusdam opusculis hactenus ineditis, praeter characterum specimina, & varia codicum ornamenta partim aere, partim ligno incisa, 2 vols.; 1759–1763, London: A catalogue of the Harleian Collection of manuscripts purchased by authority of Parliament for the use of the publick, and preserved in the British Museum; 1764, Paris, Collegium Claromontani (Collège de Clermont): Catalogus manuscriptorum codicum Collegii Claromontani quem excipit catalogus mss. domus professae parisiensis, 1764. 1764–1770, Florence: Angelo Maria Bandini (1726–1803), Catalogus codicum manuscriptorum Bibliothecae Mediceae Laurentianae varia continens opera Graecorum Patrum …, 3 vols. (rpt.: Catalogus codicum manuscriptorum Bibliothecae Mediceae Laurentianae. Accedunt supplementa tria ab Enrico Rostagno et Niccola [sic] Festa congesta necnon additamentum ex inventariis Bibliothecae Laurentianae

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depromptum, ed. Fridolf Kudlien, 1961); 1769, Madrid: Joannes Iriarte (1701–1771), Regiae bibliothecae matritensis codices graeci ms. …; 1780, Vienna: Peter Lambeck, Commentariorum de Augustissima Bibliotheca Caesareae Vindobonensi, liber sextus, ed. Adam Franciscus Kollar (1718–1783), 1780; and 1784, Venice, Nani family: Iohannes L. Mingarelli (1722–1793), Graeci codices manu scripti apud Nanios patricios Venetos asservati, 1784. More careful exploration of collections and increased interest in manuscripts brought to light texts previously unknown and sometimes – if nof often – incorrectly identified and unduly considered as discoveries. The titles of such editions were carefully written so as to make clear that these were first editions based on manuscripts newly located in library collections, such as Johannes Stephanus Bernard (1718–1793), Synesius de Febribus, Que nunc primum ex codice MS. Bibliothecae Lugduno Batavae edidit, vertit, notisque illustravit –. Accedit Viatici Constantino Africano interprete lib. VII. Pars, 1749. Almost fifty years later, the same author edited another medieval work from manuscripts as the title makes clear (with a major difference, however: the ed. was based on several manuscripts cursorily discussed in the Praefatio [vii-xxii], and no longer just one as in the 1749 work): Theophanis Nonni Epitome de Curatione Morborum Graece ac Latine ope codicum manuscriptorum recensuit notasque adiecit, 2 vols., 1794–1795. Also, collections of anecdota were published, for example by the French scholar Jean-Baptiste-Gaspard d’Ansse de Villoison (1750–1805), who studied first in Paris and explored the holdings of the Bibliothèque royale, before sojourning in Venice, where he frequented the Marciana library, befriended with the curator of manuscripts, and published a wealth of previously unknown and unpublished texts: Anecdota graeca e Regia Parisiensi et e Veneta S. Marci Bibliothecis deprompta, 2 vols., 1781. A similar case is provided by the German scholar Christian Friedrich Matthaei (1744–1811), who was a professor at the imperial university in Moscow and explored – and exploited – systematically the holdings of the Synodial (that is, Patriarchal) library. Among the results of his investigations, he published a critical edition of the New Testament in no less than 12 volumes: Nouum Testamentum XII tomis distinctum Graece et Latin textum denuo recensuit, varias lectiones nunquam antea vulgatas ex centum codicibus mss. variarum bibliothecarum … summa diligentia et fide collegit et vulgauit, lectionaria Ecclesiae Graecae primo accurate euoluit singulasque lectiones sedulo indicauit, plerorumque codicum specimena aere expressa exhibuit, priorum editorum … sententias examinauit, editiones etiam alias … inspexit, scholia Graeca maximam partem inedita addidit, commentarios Graecos … notauit … animadversiones criticas adiecti et edidit …, 12 vols., 1782–1788. The title is pretty different from the modest – almost

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anonymous – one of d’ansse De Villoison: Matthaei claims, indeed, to include in his edition variant readings never previously published and compiled from a hundred of manuscripts preserved in different libraries. Also, he provided tables reproducing pages of the codices he used in the preparation of the edition. Later on (1805), Matthaei published a catalogue of the manuscripts in the Synodial collection (Accurata codicum Graecorum mss. bibliothecarum Mosquensium Sanctissimae Synodi notitia et recensio, 2 vols., 1805) and, shortly after (1808), he edited a collection of medical fragments extracted from a manuscript in the Moscow collection: XXI Veterum et Clarorum Medicorum Graecorum Varia Opuscula. Prima nunc impensis Anastasii, Nicolai, Zoës, et Micahëlis, fratrum Zosimadarum Ioanninorum, de litteris graecis intra et extra patrima suam optime meritorum ex Oribasii codice mosquensi graece edidit, interpretationem latinam Io. Baptistae Rasarii item suas animadversiones et Indicem vacabulorum adjecit, 1808. More careful inspection of library holdings in many European libraries and editorial activity made it possible to renew the encyclopedias of ancient works available until then, with, among others, a new edition of Fabricius’s Bibliotheca greca that updated the original information of the author and included also new analytical chapters based on data compiled from manuscripts and from the scholarly literature available at that time: Johann Albertus Fabricius, Bibliotheca graeca sive notitia scriptorum veterum graecorum quorumcumque monumenta integra aut fragmenta edita exstant tum plerorumque e mss. ac deperditis ad auctore recognita. Editio nova variorum curis emendatior atque auctior curante Gottlieb Christophoro Harles. Accedunt Iohannis Alberti Fabricii et Christophi Augusti Heumanni (1681–1763) supplementa inedita, 5 vols., 1790–1807 (rpt. 1966–1970). Similarly, the genre of specialized encyclopedias was renewed (among other reasons thanks to a better knowledge of manuscript evidence) as shown by the scientific encyclopedias by the Swiss physician Albrecht von Haller (1708–1777), in which ancient works are abundantly mentioned and referred to (chronological order of publication): Bibliotheca botanica, 2 vols., 1771–1772; Bibliotheca anatomica, 1774; Bibliotheca chirurgica, 2 vols., 1774–1775; Bibliothecae medicinae practicae, 4 vols., 1776–1788. C. Travels, Catalogues, Ecdotics The troubled period of the late 18th and early 19th century affected many libraries as several private or institutional collections (among others those of the religious communities in France) changed owners. As a consequence, the circulation of books on the market increased dramatically. The English bibliographer Thomas Frognall Dibdin (1776–1847), for example, toured

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Europe to acquire books on this new market, and authored an Introduction to the Knowledge of Rare and Valuable Editions of the Greek and Latin Classics (1802) (on him and his activity, see Edward John O’Dwyer, Thomas Frognal Dibdin: Bibliographer & Bibliomaniac Extraordinary, 1967), while the Frenchman JacquesCharles Brunet (1780–1867) wrote his famous Manuel du libraire et de l’amateur de livres (1810), typically illustrating the renewed interest in books in the post-Napoleonic era. Awareness of the interest of the information contained in manuscripts was rising, sometimes in a community different from that of library curators, classical scholars, and book collectors. An example is provided by the English botanist John Sibthorp (1758–1796) who described the flora of Greece. In order to take advantage of historical resources before beginning his field work, he stopped in Vienna on his way to Greece in 1786 where he examined two illustrated copies of the herbal extracted from Dioscorides (1st c. C.E.), De materia medica, which was the most important botanical work produced in antiquity. One of these two copies is the early 6th-century manuscript now at the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna, medicus graecus 1, and the other the 7th-century manuscript now in Naples. Sibthorp also visited Mount Athos in 1787 where he inspected a codex of Dioscorides, which might be the mid-11th-century copy in the collection of the Megisti Lavra Monastery. Perhaps such awareness (or classicizing assumption, instead) contributed to the subsequent development of travels to visit libraries and personally inspect manuscript collections and single codices on the model of Mabillon and Montfaucon. A pioneer in the early 19th century was the German scholar Friedrich Reinhold Dietz (1804–1836) of Königsberg. In preparing critical editions of classical medical texts, he traveled throughout Germany, Italy, Spain, France, and Britain systematically searching for codices. The titles of his editions make it clear: Galeni de dissectione musculorum et de consuetudine libri: Ad fidem codicum manuscriptorum alterum secundum, primum alterum graece edidit, 1832; Analecta medica ex libris mss., 1833; Apollonii Citiensis, Stephani, Palladii, Theophili, Meletii, Damasci, Ioannis aliorum Scholia in Hippocratem et Galenum e codicibus mss. Vindobonens. Monacens. Florentin. Mediolanens. Escorialens. etc., 2 vols., 1834 (rpt. 1966); Severi Iatrosophistae De clysteribus liber: Ad Fidem Codicis Manuscripti unici Florentini primum Graece edidit, 1836. Whatever the rationale of this renewed interest, manuscript studies began to develop greatly, even though traditional cataloguing continued at the same time, with catalogues by libraries such as Ignatius Hardt (1749–1811), Catalogus codicum manuscriptorum graecorum Bibliothecae Regiae Bavaricae, 5 vols., 1806–1812, and also more comprehensive catalogues by

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areas as Gustav Friedrich Haenel (1792–1878), Catalogi Librorum Manuscriptorum qui in Bi