Authenticating Marriage: The Decree Tametsi in a Comparative Global Perspective

The most common form of global history traces the growing power of the West and tries to explain it. There is a parallel story of the expansion of Christianity, in which the influence of the Council of Trent on the world as a whole deserves a more prominent place than it has received. But there is another kind of global history: the comparative sort. This article looks at the Council of Trent’s solution to the problem of clandestine marriages in a comparative perspective, showing how the prob- lems it faced are paralleled in three other societies, but also that a unique mechanism for dealing with them was created, the Congregatio Concilii

Carnal relations: embodied sight in Roger Bacon, Merleau-Ponty and St Francis

Book synopsis: This article attempts a medieval Christian rereading of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s enigmatic and unfinished text, The Visible and the Invisible. Along the way, it complicates current notions of ocularcentrism, as well as the idea of an embodied gaze. The privileged term in these historical fragments is flesh: in Merleau-Ponty and in medieval Christianity, a carnal presence insinuates itself into the relations between bodies, between things and thoughts, self and world. In the end, the speculative encounter between the two central studies offers a new perspective on debates about the historiography of vision and the peculiar potency of the visual world