Pound, Ezra. “The Seafarer.” Poetry Foundation. Accessed 26 May 2020.
Further Reading
Bergvall, Caroline. Drift. Nightboat Books, 2014.
Greenfield, Stanley B. “Sylf, Seasons, Structure, and Genre in The Seafarer.” Anglo-Saxon England, vol. 9, 1981, pp. 199-211.
Lees, Clare A., and Gillian R. Overing. The Contemporary Medieval in Practice. UCL Press, 2019.
The Lighthouse. Directed by Robert Eggers, performances by Robert Pattinson, Willem Dafoe, and Valeriia Kalaman, A24, 2019.
Matto, Michael. “True Confessions: ‘The Seafarer’ and Technologies of the ‘Sylf.’” The Journal of Germanic and English Philology, vol. 103, no.2, 2004, pp. 156-79.
Olsen, Alexandra, and Burton Raffel, eds. “The Seafarer.” Poems and Prose from the Old English. Yale UP, 1998. P. 10.
Treharne, Elaine, ed. “The Seafarer.” Old and Middle English c. 890-c. 1450: An Anthology. Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. pp. 48-53.
Erin T. Dailey, ‘Misremembering St. Radegund’s Foundation of Sainte-Croix in Poitiers’, in Erfahren, Erzählen, Erinnern: Narrativ Konstruktionen von Gedächtnis und Generation in Antike und Mittelalter, ed. Benjamin Pohl et al. (Bamberg: University of Bamberg Press, 2012), pp. 117–40.
Discussion Questions
What were the possibilities and limitations of monastic life for early medieval women?
What might this letter tell us about Merovingian women’s literacy?
What is asceticism? How is it depicted in this letter?
Bibliography (available as e-books through library subscriptions)
Angelo Di Berardino, ed. Encyclopedia of Ancient Christianity (Downers’ Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 1994-2013), pp. 1:407 (biography of Caesaria) and 3:374 (biography of Radegund).
Jo Ann McNarama and John E. Halborg, with E. Gordon Whately, Sainted Women of the Dark Ages (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992), pp. 112-8.
Further Reading (available online through library subscriptions)
Magdalena Elizabeth Carrasco, “Spirituality in Context: The Romanesque Illustrated Life of St. Radegund of Poitiers (Poitiers, Bibl. Mun., MS 250).” The Art Bulletin 72: 3 (1990), pp. 414–435.
Jennifer C. Edwards, Superior Women: Medieval Female Authority in Poiters’ Abbey of Sainte-Croix (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 25-59.
Mussis, Gabriele de’. “The Arrival of the Plague.” In The Black Death, ed. Rosemary Horrox, 14-26. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1994.
Muisis, Gilles. “The Plague Seen from Tournai.” In The Black Death, ed. Rosemary Horrox, 45-47. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1994.
Villani, Giovanni. “Chronicle.” In John Aberth, The Black Death: The Great Mortality of 1348-1350: A Brief History with Documents, 19-20. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
Discussion Questions
In this petition, the inhabitants of Caffa ask for money, soldiers, and a bishop. Why do they need each of those things? Why do they turn to the doge of Genoa for help?
At the time when this petition was written, had anyone in Caffa shown symptoms of plague? If so, which symptoms? If not, why did the petition mention “an endless plague of death”?
Compare what this source says about the early transmission of the Black Death with the account of Gabriele de’ Mussis. Based on what you know about modern medical research on plague transmission, which version makes more sense? Based on what you know about medieval ideas about disease and contagion, which version would make more sense to medieval readers?
Compare what this source says about the early transmission of the Black Death with another source from the list of Further Reading – Primary Sources. How are the two accounts similar? How are they different? What do you think the differences imply?
In the video, I talk about unequal taxation, partly as a result of the Black Death, as one cause of anti-noble feeling among commoners. How else might demographic decline have destabilized social relations?
How different was urban and rural life for late medieval commoners? What kinds of tensions might have arisen between urban and rural rebels as a result?
In addition to Paris, other northern French towns, such as Senlis, Amiens, Orléans, and Rouen, had involvement in the revolt. What can you tell about their actions based on the map?
Further resources
Translations of some sources for the Jacquerie in Samuel K. Cohn, jr., Popular Protest in Late Medieval Europe: Italy, France, and Flanders, Manchester Medieval Sources (Manchester, 2004), pp. 143-200.
Further Reading
Firnhaber-Baker, Justine, “The Eponymous Jacquerie: Making Revolt Mean Some Things,” in The Routledge History Handbook of Medieval Revolt, ed. Justine Firnhaber-Baker with Dirk Schoenaers (Abingdon and New York, 2017), pp. 55-75.
Firnhaber-Baker, Justine, “Soldiers, Villagers, and Politics: Military Violence and the Jacquerie of 1358,” in Routiers et mercenaires pendant la guerre de Cent ans: Hommage à Jonathan Sumption, ed. Guilhem Pépin, Françoise Lainé, and Frédéric Boutoulle (Bordeaux, 2016), pp. 101-14.
Coming soon!
Firnhaber-Baker, Justine, “The Social Constituency of the Jacquerie Revolt of 1358.” Speculum, vol. 95, no. 3 (2020).
Firnhaber-Baker, Justine, The Jacquerie Revolt of 1358: Violence, Politics, and Society in Medieval France, Oxford Studies in Medieval European History (Oxford, 2021).
English translation of Picatrix: A Medieval Treatise on Astral Magic. Trans. Dan Attrell and David Porecca, Pennsylvania State UP, 2019. Google Books snippet view, p. 146-7 and 193-4
What comparisons can be made with earlier Iberian texts featuring older women go-betweens? Consider Trotaconventos with Don Melon y Doña Endrina in Juan Ruiz’s 14c Libro de bueno amor, and Celestina with Calisto and Melibea in Fernando de Rojas’s 16c La Celestina/La Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea. Consider strategies used by the go-betweens, the linguistic or material tools used, the punishments that occurred, and possible motivations.
Why is the necromancer portrayed as Moorish in the historical context of the Morisco expulsion (1609-1614)? What does distancing of magical practice do?
Compare this novela and earlier or contemporaneous Iberian Arabic grimoires. Consider love spells in texts like the Picatrix (13c translation of 10c Arabic Ghāyat al-Hakīm) or the 16/17c Aljamiado Libro de dichos maravillosos. What items were necessary for the spells—both in the novela and the grimoires—and what were the intended results? Are such comparisons fruitful?
Consider the novelas in the context of contemporary movements like #metoo. Are these stories similar? How is the complexity of gender relations nuanced as both men and women contributed to doña Inés’s unjust suffering?
*Warning:* This video contains some graphic and disturbing descriptions which may not be suitable for all viewers.
Primary Source Document
A translation of the remission letter granted to Antonie van Claerhout in 1455 can be found in Peter Arnade and Walter Prevenier, Honor, Vengeance, and Social Trouble. Pardon Letters in the Burgundian Low Countries, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2015, p. 116–18.
Discussion questions
1. Read a pardon letter or a petition for pardon. What do you notice about the rhetorical techniques and legal arguments used by the petitioner to support their demand for pardon?
2. How is violence described in pardon letters? What does that tell us about the medieval attitudes to violence?
3. Why could it be in the interest of a king or a prince to grant pardons? Does the late medieval use of pardoning threaten to deteriorate public order?
4. To what extent was royal pardon connected to the Christian notions of justice and mercy? Check the related vocabulary used in a pardon letter to elaborate on this question.
Online Resources
The Himanis Project website, transcribing and indexing some of the French Trésor des chartes that recorded remission letters.
The Calendars of the patent rolls preserved in the Public record office, available on the HathiTrust website, describe royal pardons granted by the English Crown.
Other Readings (available to purchase as e-books or online via library subscriptions)
Gregory of Tours, The History of the Franks, trans. Lewis Thorpe (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974).
Erin T. Dailey, Queens, Consorts, Concubines: Gregory of Tours and the Women of the Merovingian Elite (Leiden: Brill, 2015).
Guy Halsall, ‘The Preface to Book V of Gregory of Tours’ Histories: Its Form, Contents, and Significance’ The English Historical Review 122:496 (2007), pp. 297-317.
Alexander C. Murray, Gregory of Tours: The Merovingians (Peterborough: University of Toronto Press, 2006).
Alexander C. Murray, ed., A Companion to Gregory of Tours (Boston: Brill, 2016).
Ian Wood and Kathleen Mitchell, eds, The World of Gregory of Tours (Boston: Brill, 2002).
