December Liberties:Playing with the Roman Poets in the High-Medieval Schools

This essay discusses how and to what ends eleventh- to early thirteenth-century writers from the schools, monastic as well as secular, more or less explicitly incorporated elements from and allusions to the canon of classical Roman poetry into their own work. What function did these elements have, beyond literary embellishment and erudite showing-off? This essay remains a historian's view and represents a historian's attempt to grapple with the meaning and function of this classicising literature in its particular social setting – namely that of the northern European educational milieus of the two centuries after the first millennium. The hypothesis is that these intertextual references played a crucial part in making it possible to engage in very direct and often outrageous satire – which functioned as a clever pedagogical tool to enliven teaching, but also seems to have had a connection to a specific time in the school calendar, namely the Christmas season, during which the unwritten rules of decorum and restrictions that governed social interaction in the school community were momentarily relaxed. It is my contention that these texts were not an aberration from a more solemn and serious norm, but integral parts of a didactic and distinctly performative practice, which included a deliberate, subtly regulated playing with roles of power and authority and, not least, role-reversals. This seems particularly to be the case in the correspondence (real or imagined) consisting of letter-poems – often erotically explicit – between teachers and their students. A select number of examples of this intriguing literature, from various milieus and settings, are presented, and the essay addresses the question of how we as modern scholars should interpret it – particularly if our aim is to use it as a repository of historical source material regarding the social life of the high-medieval learned milieus. It is contended that these remarkable and sometimes outrageous texts, as well as being vehicles of the teaching of Latin composition, became a tool for negotiating and defining intimate relationships between people within these learned milieus, whether between equals, between superiors and subordinates, or between men and women

Stefka Georgieva Eriksen (ed.): Intellectual Culture in Medieval Scandinavia, c. 1100–1350.

The book contains thirteen essays mainly by Nordic scholars covering an eclectic array of topics, such as grammatical treatises, visual arts, liturgy, vernacular as well as Latin texts, the sagas, poetry, and manuscript fragments. The individual, often highly specialized contributions are divided into three sub-sections, following the two introductory essays “Intellectual Culture and Medieval Scandinavia” by Stefka Georgieva Eriksen (the editor) and Gunnar Harðason’s survey of Old Norse intellectual culture. The first sub-section contains essays dealing with various processes of identity formation, introduced by a survey of aspects of the thirteenth-century intellectual milieu in Paris by Ian P. Wei. Like the former, the second section, “Thinking in figures” is headed by a broad essay by a leading scholar in the field, Rita Copeland. The third and final section deals with the juxtaposition of earthly existence and heavenly salvation

Rediscovery and Canonization: The Roman Classics in the Middle Ages

Issue 3 of Interfaces: A Journal of Medieval European Literatures explores the theme of the rediscovery and canonization of the Roman classics in medieval Western European literary culture, beginning in the eleventh century and reaching a wide impact on literary and intellectual life in the twelfth century. It is headed by an article by Birger Munk Olsen whose immense and comprehensive work of cataloguing and analyzing the entire record of manuscripts containing Roman classics copied before 1200 is nearing completion (L‘étude des auteurs classiques aux XIe et XIIe siècles, 5 vols). Within our journal’s scope of medieval European literature we have found it both rewarding and fitting to take Munk Olsen’s work as a prism for what is a striking literary phenomenon across most geographies and chronologies of medieval Europe: the engagement with the pre-Christian classics.The catalogue and the synthesis by Munk Olsen put many kinds of new studies on a firm footing. In this issue of Interfaces we present three 'frontiers' or types of scholarship on the rediscovery and canonization of the Roman classics all taking their cue from the meticulous way L’étude has charted out this territory