One of the major accomplishments of Constant Mews is his effort to establish Heloise as a thinker and a writer in her own right. Long before he joined her name to that of her husband in the title of a volume dedicated to ‘great medieval thinkers’, he had already pinpointed her intellectual impact on Abelard in an important article devoted to their readings of Jerome. Of the pair, she clearly was the one who had a greater familiarity with the Church Father. Asserting this fact was instrumental in Mews's identification soon afterwards of Heloise as the woman in the Epistolae duorum amantium, whose intimate knowledge of Jerome is remarkable. Jerome is also a central reference in what has to be considered as Heloise's intellectual masterpiece. Her famous ‘Dissuasion from marriage’ (‘dehortatio matrimonii’), inserted within Abelard's Historia calamitatum, relies heavily on arguments to that effect borrowed from Jerome's Contra Jovinianum. It is unfortunate that the study of misogynistic prejudices is itself sometimes encumbered by misogynistic preconceptions. Scholars often doubted that Heloise could have really built on her own a complex argumentation, putting to use a large number of classical examples. Since Abelard also used many of them in his Theologia christiana (written in or soon after 1122), it seemed logical to infer that he first gathered them at that time, before putting them to use again in the Historia calamitatum (around 1131). Yet, a closer textual analysis reveals that, in that chapter of the Historia, Abelard is indeed reporting extracts of the authentic letter Heloise had sent him around 1117, while refusing the wedding plans he had made with her uncle Fulbert.

Since at least the 1990s, scholars of the medieval and early modern periods in Europe have been attentive to constructions of female authority, drawing women out of the shadows to which they had been consigned by most contemporary chroniclers. Applications of alternative definitions of power and examinations of texts, accounts, inventories, and images that had previously attracted little interest are verifying that queens, female authors, and abbesses were often as involved in government as their male counterparts. Constant Mews's meticulous readings of the documents associated with Heloise, those she wrote and those written about her, have revised our understanding of a woman who for centuries was represented as a lovesick virgin pining away in her convent. Coaxing Heloise's erudition out of her and Abelard's letters, Mews also draws attention to her skillful redeployment of classical male authorities, Ovid and Cicero in particular, to structure arguments about friendship and love. Moreover, he situates her in a network of figures who appreciated her piety and intellect.

In what follows, I hope to contribute to studies of medieval and early modern women as authority figures by tracing the influence of representations of the classical goddess Diana on the development of the French political royal mistress. Modern historians rarely linger over the fact that under a series of French kings, the royal mistress wielded significant power: that is, a woman with no blood connection to the royal family not only brokered favors for her clients but advised the king, forged alliances, and negotiated with foreign diplomats. And yet, even though kings everywhere have always had mistresses and, in some exceptional cases, powerful ones, only in France did the role become a tradition. True, even in France, most royal mistresses were not politically active.

Introduction

This chapter explores the tension between two moral paradigms ascribed to Plato and zealously embraced by medieval thinkers, especially Petrarch: virtue is realized when, having perceived cosmic music, humans strive to attune to it; yet, at the same time, virtue is perfected in silence. I start by examining Plato's references to man's musical nature and to cosmic harmony, including his odd description of the role of the Sirens in generating it. Although Plato did not discuss the ideal of quiet reflection in an overt or systematic manner, ‘Platonic silence’, as the expert way to grasp philosophical truth, is already advocated by Cicero. Both concepts were advanced in the Neoplatonic tradition in which Augustine was steeped and through whom the notion of silent contemplation was firmly transplanted in Christian philosophical thought. In the second part of the chapter, I trace the milieu of ‘Platonic silence’ in Petrarch, arguing that he joined a long line of earlier thinkers who, having interpreted the Platonic Sirens in a specific way, believed that their music marked an initial stage of spiritual awakening and that the wise man ultimately ought to overcome the appeal of music in favor of silence.

The documentary reconstruction of the history of the life and martyrdom of Thomas Becket of Canterbury has proven among the most vexing challenges for historians of twelfth-century Europe. Contemporary reports (those composed within fifteen or so years of the archbishop's fateful murder on 29 December 1170) abound, including accounts by his intimates and other participants in key events of Becket's career. But these voices speak in a bewildering and exasperating cacophony, as might be expected by the sheer number of vitae, as well as letters and other important pieces of evidence, available to the modern reader. At the end of the nineteenth century, Edwin Abbott, in his masterful attempt to collate the multitude of accounts of one crucial moment in Becket's career – the few hours surrounding his actual death – stated with evident frustration that examination of the extant narratives shows ‘how even eye-witnesses may have been misled, and may have misled others, as to important details, and also how easy and natural it was for the miraculous to intrude, even within five years of the Martyrdom’. Yet, recent scholars have doggedly sought to separate the wheat from the chaff so as to create a single coherent tale about Becket's procession from birth to afterlife, applying the critical tools of the modern historian to the rich body of evidence afforded by the many reports of the saint's deeds and words.

Peter Abelard (1079-1142), the pre-eminent French philosopher and theologian of the twelfth century, was also a fine poet and musician. Perhaps best known to his contemporaries for his contentious and litigious means of discussion, the modern audience generally remembers him for his tragic love affair with Heloise, and the wonderful letters between the two lovers. While it may not be essential to understand the nature of this relationship in an examination of Abelard's philosophical and theological works, it is essential to include it when considering his musical activity since it is almost all bound up with Heloise; the love poems were for her, the hymns and sequences were commissioned by her and it is likely that the planctus were dedicated to her. It was this tumultuous relationship which inspired Abelard's production of a treasury of song.

There seem to be two phases of musical activity: 1) the period of his love songs, around 1116-1118; and 2) the period of his sacred song writing, 1130-1135. The early love songs were the product of new and developing love, but after the discovery of their affair, the birth of their son Astrolabe, the secret marriage between the two, and ultimately his castration, Abelard spent many years distancing himself from Heloise. A turning point occurred with the dissemination of his autobiographical Historia Calamitatum (1132?).

Giovanni Boccaccio's Latin anthology of 106 female biographies, De mulieribus claris, completed around 1361, includes only six post-classical women. The author explains why in the conclusion of the work: ‘As is apparent, I have now come to the women of our own time. But so small is the number of those who are outstanding that I think it more honorable to end here rather than continue with the women of today’. One hundred and thirty years later, the Bolognese writer, Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti, took a very different view of the women of his era. In the preface of Gynevera de le clare donne, a collection of 31 lives, Arienti distinguishes his approach from that of his Tuscan predecessor: ‘one can say that many women have lived excellently in our age and are certainly no less deserving of having poems or histories written about them than the ancient and noble women who were glorified for their memorable deeds by famous writers’. With one exception, the individuals profiled in the Gynevera had died by the time Arienti wrote about them, a choice he claims to have made to avoid charges of seeking to ingratiate himself with the living. However, many of his subjects existed only a generation or two before his own. Their names would have been entirely familiar to late-fifteenth-century readers, since they were associated with some of Italy's most powerful families – the Visconti, Sforza, Este, Gonzaga, and Montefeltro and the Aragonese monarchs of Naples.

Apart from their near contemporaneity, the women of the Gynevera present another notable contrast to those in De mulieribus claris. Boccaccio considered fame to be the achievement of ‘a reputation throughout the world for any deed whatsoever’.

‘All learning takes place within some kind of community’. This observation was the organizing principle around a conference planned by Constant Mews in 2010, itself a wonderful example of a community of learning. The conference's contributions were edited into a book by him and his friend and colleague, John Crossley, under the title Communities of Learning: Networks and the Shaping of Intellectual Identity in Europe, 1100-1500. The core insight was the idea that a communal network, whether it be a formal place of instruction, religious community, or an informal network of two or three friends, was a crucial framework for consideration when seeking to understand how ideas are developed and exchanged. Such communities are generally attached to a discipline of learning or to a particular set of texts, and those who participated often come to share a particular identity. But this does not mean that there is a homogenous view or unanimity of opinion in any specific community. At their heart are discussion, debate, continuing development, refinement, and, indeed almost inevitably, revision of current ideas. The way in which Constant Mews approached the idea of communities of learning can bookend this wonderful collection of essays in his honour: Constant thrives in contexts of the sociable, communal exchange of ideas.

The studies to which this epilogue is appended gesture to the many communities of learning that have flourished under the inspiration of Constant Mews. The tributes of the authors stand as a testimony to his role in developing and disseminating a seemingly endless array of ideas and projects. The names attached to the essays in this volume only hint at the number, richness, and eclecticism of the networks that he has engendered. As Clare Monagle wrote, when she invited me to write a coda to this volume: ‘Just like Constant himself, the contributions in his honor are an eclectic bunch’. Ideas of all kinds arouse his curiosity. Almost a leitmotif in any conversation about a person's research or intended project is his rejoinder: ‘I am very interested in that!’ New ideas excite him, and with his capacious knowledge, he is instantly alert to many marvellous potential connections between what is known and what is proposed.

Constant Mews’ research on relics and on Abelard and Heloise intersect in the second part of the Roman de la Rose by Jean de Meun. Mews discusses specifically how Jean de Meun refers to an exchange of letters between the famed lovers where Heloise, in declaring her love for Abelard, affirms that she would rather be his whore (meretrix) than the empress of Augustus (imperatrix). Jean's allusion to this passage later assumed particular prominence during the late fourteenth-century quarrel over the Roman de la Rose. It is, however, first useful to turn the clock back a century from the translation of Thomas’ relics in France in 1368-1369 to the 1270s, when Jean de Meun appears to have written his continuation of the Roman de la Rose, to a time and place when both Thomas and Jean took up the question of relics themselves, admittedly from very different perspectives. The intersection between Mews’ work on relics and on the fortune of Heloise’s and Abelard's correspondence (which Jean de Meun also translated) leads to the underlying question of this chapter in Mews’ honor: did Jean de Meun’s references in the Rose to relics as a euphemism for genitals actually allude to a much larger debate in Paris between 1250 and 1280 about significatio in general, and about the religious and political significance of relics in particular, a debate in which Thomas Aquinas played an important role? After all, the opening of Guillaume de Lorris’ part of the Rose proclaims that dreams contain significance (v. 16, ‘songes est senfiance,’ which also can mean ‘a dream is a sign’), and Jean de Meun spends thousands of lines repeatedly promising, but never delivering, the glose of this dream.

Among the theorists of the Eucharist in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Guiard of Laon is overshadowed by his more famous contemporaries Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure. Few histories of the development of the sacrament mention him, and he appears as a minor figure in histories of scholastic theology. Nonetheless, the evidence assembled by his modern biographer, Peter Boeren, suggests that among his contemporaries he had a reputation as an expert on the Eucharist. Recent scholarship knows him best as a supporter of the movement to establish the feast of Corpus Christi. He was among the experts consulted by Juliana of Mont Cornillon, the holy woman whose inspiration lay behind the feast, and seems to have been favorable to it himself.

Guiard's contemporaries also celebrated him as a preacher; over 400 sermons are attributed to him in Schneyer's Repertorium, most of which are preserved in university sermon collections. Apart from a handful of quaestiones, these sermons constitute the written record of his work. Arguably, though, his most successful sermon was one which did not find its way into those collections, and which circulated mainly in French, Dutch, and German translations. The thirteenth-century French version was particularly successful: eleven copies have now been identified, three of which date from the thirteenth century and a further six from 1300 to 1317. There are also two later translations into French. One is embedded in Robert the Carthusian's Le Chastel perilleux, written in the fourteenth century for his cousin Rose, a nun at Fontevrault. The other is found in a late-fifteenth-century manuscript of the Chastel, and is different from both Robert's version and the earlier one.

When I first started working at Monash University in 2007, having just completed my doctorate, I found out that the institution had metrics called ‘Performance Targets’. Each staff member was expected to achieve a level of research funding, publish a designated amount of publications, and achieve a certain level of teaching competency as measured through student evaluations. The criteria were scaled according to academic level, with full professors seemingly being expected to scale Everest, cure cancer, invent lucrative patentable technology, as well as nurture a new generation of scholars who would also go on to scale Everest. I exaggerate, but the targets through which the performance of a scholar was to be assessed seemed to me at the time to be so unreachable as to be absurd. I confessed my shock to a colleague, who said, ‘Don't worry, nobody in the entire faculty reaches those targets’. I breathed a sigh of relief, but then my colleague exclaimed ‘with the exception of Constant Mews’. I already knew Constant well, having studied with him as an honors and masters student. And having long been in awe of his intellectual energies, his erudition, his work ethic, and his deep knowledge of the medieval past, I was not surprised that of the myriad excellent scholars at Monash at the time, he was the one who was rumored to be climbing mountains.

Of course, assessing the achievements of a scholar through the expectations of the contemporary university is a dubious exercise at best. As Constant has himself shown in his research, the University as an institution has always reflected the values, preoccupations, and desires of the community within which it lives, for better or for worse.

Music theory in the thirteenth century was very different from today. While it was acknowledged that music provided sensory pleasure, it was believed that the senses were inadequate to provide a theoretical foundation for music. For this only the Platonic heaven of numbers was appropriate. This meant that music theory was part of mathematics. Jacobus, who wrote a massive encyclopedia of music theory, held this view and not only revisited but also dramatically extended the earlier work of Nicomachus (living c 100 CE; from Jerash, in modern Jordan) and Boethius (c 480-524). In this chapter I concentrate on two of his concerns: the problem of dividing a tone into two equal parts and his enormous extension of the Boethian characterization of musical intervals by numerical ratios.

In the fledgling thirteenth-century University of Paris, music theory was taught as one of the seven liberal arts in a framework that owes its origins to Boethius. Boethius had transferred the legendary Pythagorean theory of music, which had been put on a rigorous footing by Nicomachus of Gerasa, expanding, and clarifying it. Jacobus de Ispania (c 1260-c 1330), otherwise known as Jacques de Liège, worked in Paris in the 1290s, and he undertook to revise Boethian music theory, adding explanations where he felt them necessary. His time in Paris seems to have been crucial to the development of his version of music theory. In discussing Jacobus it is vital to consider his context – in many senses of the word – if we are to understand his motivations and limitations when he wrote his great work, the Speculum musicae. The only complete copy of this huge work is a fifteenth-century manuscript of 293 folios (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, latin 7207).

Between 1252-1253 and 1254-1255, Thomas Aquinas lectured on the Sentences of Peter Lombard as baccalaureus in Paris. Following a practice already developed in the faculty of theology of the University of Paris, after a first year of lecturing on a book of the Bible, Aquinas devoted his first teaching activity to the four books of Peter Lombard, which had become the veritable textbook for the study of theology in Paris. In introducing his lecture on the Sentences, the young Dominican friar offers a general introduction to the structure of the work as well as to its contents. In particular, Aquinas organizes his prologue as more than a general presentation of the Sentences: he devotes a quaestio of five articles to the examination of the nature of knowledge, which is accessible through the four books. It is in article three that the Dominican friar notes that the so-called sacra doctrina, that is, theology, can be called ‘science’. Theology has all the features required by the Aristotelian notion of science and thus plainly it has to be included within the system of disciplines.

Aquinas's argument on the nature of theology is a crucial witness to the direction taken by a debate whose roots went back to the decades before the arrival of the Dominican friar in Paris. Several authors had devoted their attention to the definition of theology, especially in the 1240s. In the context of the Parisian faculty of theology, such a debate was stimulated also by the increasing role of Peter Lombard's Sentences in the teaching practice of the masters. Several researchers show how the work of Peter Lombard was at the center of intellectual interest following its ‘publication’ between 1158 and 1160.

Among the works found in the libraries of the women mentioned by Christine de Pizan in the Cité des dames, a couple stand out as particularly popular. One is the Miroir des dames, a French translation of the Speculum Dominarum compiled by the Franciscan, Durand de Champagne, during the last decade of the thirteenth century; another is La Somme le roi, compiled a little earlier, in 1279, by a Dominican called Laurent. Following the hunch that Christine did not have privileged access to the library of Charles V prior to the duke of Burgundy's commission to write the panegyric biography of this king in 1403, but was using books she owned or that were available in the libraries of the aristocratic women with whom she was acquainted, I here discuss the probable influence of these two earlier moral manuals on Christine's Epistre Othea, thus updating and to an extent contesting the pioneering efforts of P.G.A. Campbell and Curt Bühler. There is no doubt that one finds echoes of the Miroir des dames in Christine's Livre de paix and in other political treatises, but the situation with regard to the Othea is rather more complicated.

Studying the sources of the Othea is important for assessing the originality of Christine's ideas, and the extent of their diffusion during the fifteenth century. For the conclusion of my investigation is that, rather than, as Bühler surmised, Christine having borrowed from the work which he initially called the Fleurs des toutes vertus, in fact, a rather later version of this work, which has been designated the Chapelet des vertus, borrows passages from Christine's Othea without acknowledgement.