Transcultural Approaches to the Bible: Exegesis and Historical Writing across Medieval Worlds

264 Pages·2021·2.342 MB·English

by  Patrick S. Marschner

Transcultural Approaches
to the Bible
TRANSCULTURAL MEDIEVAL STUDIES
General Editors
Matthias M. Tischler, ICREA/Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Bellaterra, Spain
Alexander Fidora, ICREA/Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Bellaterra, Spain
Kristin Skottki, Universität Bayreuth, Germany
Kordula Wolf, Deutsches Historisches Institut in Rom, Italy
Editorial Board
Esperanza Alfonso Carro, Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales, CSIC, Madrid, Spain
Alexander Beihammer, University of Notre Dame, South Bend, USA
Nicola Carpentieri, University of Connecticut, Storrs, USA
Aline Dias da Silveira, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Florianópolis, Brazil
Harvey J. Hames, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Be’er Sheva, Israel
Patrick Henriet, École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris, France
Konrad Hirschler, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany
Christian Høgel, Syddansk Universitet, Odense, Denmark
Daniel G. König, Universität Konstanz, Germany
Nicholas E. Morton, Nottingham Trent University, United Kingdom
Klaus Oschema, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany
Helmut Reimitz, Princeton University, USA
Joan-Pau Rubiés Mirabet, ICREA/Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain
Roland Scheel, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Germany
Gerrit Jasper Schenk, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany
Dittmar Schorkowitz, Max-Planck-Institut für ethnologische Forschung, Halle, Germany
Angela Schottenhammer, Paris-Lodron-Universität Salzburg, Austria
Ryan Szpiech, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA
Daniel Ziemann, Central European University, Vienna, Austria
Volume 1
Transcultural Approaches
to the Bible
Exegesis and Historical Writing
in the Medieval Worlds
Edited by
Matthias M. Tischler and
Patrick S. Marschner
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Matthias M. Tischler is ICREA Senior Research Professor at the
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Bellaterra.
Patrick S. Marschner is Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute for
Medieval Research of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna.
© 2021, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of the publisher.
D/2021/0095/32
ISBN: 978-2-503-59285-5
e-ISBN: 978-2-503-59286-2
DOI: 10.1484/M.TMS-EB.5.122065
Printed in the EU on acid-free paper
Contents
List of Illustrations vii
Editorial – Scientific Challenges in a Changing World:
Transcultural Medieval Studies in the Twenty-First Century
MATTHIAS M. TISCHLER 1
1. Bible, Exegesis, and Historiography in the Medieval Worlds:
Crossing Histories from a Transcultural Point of View
MATTHIAS M. TISCHLER and PATRICK S. MARSCHNER 9
The Iberian World
2. Reframing Salvific History in a Transcultural Society:
Iberian Bibles as Models of Historical, Prophetic,
and Eschatological Writing
MATTHIAS M. TISCHLER 17
3. The Bible of Vic (1268): Textual and Theological Value of its
Glosses in the Context of the Barcelona Disputation (1263)
EULÀLIA VERNET I PONS 49
4. The Chronicle of Sampiro, the Arabs, and the Bible:
Eleventh-Century Christian-Iberian Strategies of
Identifying the Cultural and Religious ‘Other’
PATRICK S. MARSCHNER 75
vi Contents
Latin Europe and the Near East
5. Scripture, Hierarchy, and Social Control:
The Uses of the Bible in the Twelfth- and Thirteenth-
Century Chronicles and Chansons of the Crusades
SINI KANGAS 109
6. Condemned Sisters, Effeminate Brothers, and Damned Heretics:
Ezekiel 23 and the Negotiation of Clerical Sexuality
in the Thirteenth Century
LYDIA M. WALKER 145
The Baltic World
7. How do the ‘Livs’ Fit into Sacred History?
Identifying the Cultural ‘Other’ in the Earliest
Latin Sources Depicting the Livonian Crusade
PETER FRAUNDORFER 173
8. Wolves in the Wilderness: Biblical Typology and the
Envisioning of Lithuanian Pagans in the Thirteenth
and Fourteenth Centuries
STEFAN DONECKER 201
Indices
Manuscripts and Archival Sources 233
Bible 235
Ancient, Patristic, and Medieval Authors and Works 240
Persons 244
Geographical Names 250
List of Illustrations
The Bible of Vic (1268) — Eulàlia Vernet i Pons
Figure 3.1. Bible of Vic, colophon (Vic, Arxiu i Biblioteca
Episcopal, Ms. 4 [XXV], fol. 291v), 1268. ...................................51
Figure 3.2. Bible of Vic, ‘Incipit iiii Liber Regum’ (Vic, Arxiu
i Biblioteca Episcopal, Ms. 2 [XXIII], fol. 115r), 1268. ....................52
Figure 3.3. Notarized document signed by Pere d’Eres in 1260
(Vic, Arxiu i Biblioteca Episcopal, Arxiu de la Cúria Fumada,
Arm. 7/2, doc. 230). ..........................................................55
Figure 3.4. Notarized document signed by Pere d’Eres in 1261
(Vic, Arxiu i Biblioteca Episcopal, Arxiu de la Cúria Fumada,
Arm. 7/2, doc. 234). ..........................................................56
Figure 3.5. Bible of Vic, Isaiah, ch. 20–21 (Vic, Arxiu i
Biblioteca Episcopal, Ms. 3 (XXIV), fols 120v/121r), 1268. ..............57
Figure 3.6. Bible of Vic, ‘Explicit liber Iosue. Incipit liber Iudicum’
(Vic, Arxiu i Biblioteca Episcopal, Ms. 2 [XXIII], fol. 264v), 1268. ......57
Figure 3.7. Bible of Vic, Isaiah, ch. 28–29 (Vic, Arxiu i
Biblioteca Episcopal, Ms. 3 [XXIV], fol. 127r), 1268. .....................57
Figure 3.8. Bible of Vic, II Samuel, ch. 7–8 (Vic, Arxiu i
Biblioteca Episcopal, Ms. 2 [XXIII], fol. 53r), 1268. .......................58
Figure 3.9. Bible of Vic, Jeremiah, ch. 6–7
(Vic, Arxiu i Biblioteca Episcopal, Ms. 3 [XXIV], fol. 170v), 1268. ......58
viii list of iLLUSTRATIONS
Figure 3.10. Bible of Vic, Exodus 4. 20–21 (Vic, Arxiu i
Biblioteca Episcopal, Ms. 1 [XXII], fol. 68v), 1268. ........................60
Figure 3.11. Bible of Vic, Exodus 16. 1 (Vic, Arxiu i Biblioteca
Episcopal, Ms. 1 [XXII], fol. 73r), 1268. ....................................61
Figure 3.12. Bible of Vic, Isaiah 59. 15–16 (Vic, Arxiu i Biblioteca
Episcopal, Ms. 3 [XXIV], fol. 111v), 1268. .................................61
Figure 3.13. Bible of Vic, Leviticus 2. 6 (Vic, Arxiu i Biblioteca
Episcopal, Ms. 1 [XXII], fol. 103r), 1268. ..................................63
Figure 3.14. Bible of Vic, IV Rg 16. 18 (Vic, Arxiu i Biblioteca
Episcopal, Ms. 2 [XXIII], fol. 136r), 1268. .................................63
Figure 3.15. Bible of Vic, I Par 2. 24 (Vic, Arxiu i Biblioteca
Episcopal, Ms. 2 [XXIII], fol. 153r), 1268. .................................64
Figure 3.16. Bible of Vic, Gn 26. 3 (Vic, Arxiu i Biblioteca
Episcopal, Ms. 1 [XXII], fol. 23v), 1268. ....................................65
Figure 3.17. Bible of Vic, Idc 5. 14 (Vic, Arxiu i Biblioteca
Episcopal, Ms. 2 [XXIII], fol. 251r), 1268. .................................66
Figure 3.18. Bible of Vic, Is 26. 18 (Vic, Arxiu i Biblioteca
Episcopal, Ms. 3 [XXIV], fol. 125r), 1268. .................................67
Figure 3.19. Bible of Vic, Is 37. 3 (Vic, Arxiu i Biblioteca
Episcopal, Ms. 3 [XXIV], fol. 134v), 1268. .................................68
Editorial – Scientific Challenges
in a Changing World
Transcultural Medieval Studies
in the Twenty-First Century
Matthias M. Tischler
Changing Worlds: Global Challenges
and the Response of Academic Research
The last decades have seen considerable changes with regard to our globalizing
world, many of which challenge academic education and scholarly research in
various, if not all, disciplines. Among these challenges, interreligious encoun-
ters, transcultural exchanges, and entangled histories are most prominent. The
question is how the scholarly community will embrace these challenges and
how we can conceive and work out a suitable framework of what we today
call ‘Transcultural Studies’. In order to face all these academic challenges
and questions in an adequate manner, we decided to launch the book series
‘Transcultural Medieval Studies’ (TMS).
Although no longer a sticking point in comparative Medieval Studies, we
may still be confronted with the question of the surplus of ‘trans’-perspectives
in comparison to the traditional viewpoint of ‘inter’-relationships. Recent
criticism of an exaggerated focus on ‘transcultural’ or ‘transnational’ visions of
communities appears to be unjustified when looking at the painstaking heu-
ristic problems we are confronted with in our still ongoing use of intercultural
‘Occidental’, ‘European’ or ‘Western’ categories of historical understanding:
only the ‘trans’-perspective allows us to avoid the well-known pitfalls of essen-
tialism when approaching historical reality by means of analytic categories
such as ‘religion’, ‘culture’, ‘state’, ‘nation’, or ‘law’, temporal concepts such as
‘(Late) Antiquity’, the ‘Middle Ages’, the ‘Renaissance’, and ‘Early/Premodern
Times’, and their medial representations such as genres of texts and images or
Matthias M. Tischler ([email protected]) ICREA/Universitat Autònoma de
Barcelona, Bellaterra, Spain.
Transcultural Approaches to the Bible: Exegesis and Historical Writing in the Medieval Worlds, ed. by
Matthias M. Tischler and Patrick S. Marschner, TMS 1 (Turn hout: Brepols, 2021) pp. 1–8
BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.TMS-EB.5.122502
2 Matthias M. Tischler
other semiotic systems. We know that all these categories, concepts, and rep-
resentations are not originally self-contained units, but ever-changing results
of permanent processes of intra- and transcultural exchanges of traditions and
practices (‘culture as permanent performance’) that create collective and indi-
vidual identities and memories. ‘Culture’ thus may be understood in its broad-
est sense as an ever-changing bundle of values, attitudes, and patterns of per-
ceiving the other’s world with the purpose of shaping one’s own identity and
memory through material and media-related practices and representations, a
concept that must be considered without privileging the elites’ cultural or intel-
lectual efforts while overlooking or disparaging more popular activities in these
areas of human life. We therefore strongly suggest a pragmatic and empirical
approach to cultural and religious phenomena.
Under the influence of ethnological and anthropological studies, the last
decades have witnessed the development of significant concepts within the
field of historical anthropology that have had a scholarly impact first and fore-
most in non-medieval contexts. In the meantime, however, these concepts are
also being heavily applied to established topics of ‘medieval’ research, generat-
ing valuable insights into all possible forms of mobility, encounter, and entan-
glement, whether those be travel, trade and diplomatic missions, migration,
pilgrimage, crusades and (re)conquest, or educational journeys and stays pro-
voking multilateral processes, modes, forms, and media of transfer and trans-
formation of knowledge, know-how, and techniques, such as perception and
reception, brokerage, translation, and dis/integration; dialogue, polemics, and
conversion; and religious books and laws, maps, and historical writing.
In this very context, the notion of ‘translation’ in particular has sharpened
our awareness of the complexity of these processes of cultural transfer and
transformation by distinguishing within the model of communication between
closer (linguistic) and wider (cultural) modes of translation and by making us
aware of the semantic shifts of cultural representations produced by changing
contexts. Thus, recent scholarly attention has shifted towards analysing the
multilateral relationships of human agents in order to elucidate the processes
of identity-building.
Transcultural Studies
Our focus will be on processes of exchange and phenomena of connectivity,
as well as on modes of integration and disintegration, and their effects on the
entanglement, hybridization, and transformation — if not manipulation —
of previous and present cultural layers. Culture has always been ‘hybrid’ to a