The mid-fourteenth century, once a somewhat neglected period in Iceland's medieval history, has recently become a focus of research for a growing number of scholars, whose interests encompass such fields as palaeography and codicology, literature, history, church history and politics, as well as the prosopographical study of elite secular and ecclesiastical networks among the leaders of Icelandic society in the century after the beginning of Norwegian rule on the island. While it is possible, with the help of a variety of documents, such as annals, letters and land grants, to trace the networking of a small group of educated individuals who moved between Iceland and Norway, and sometimes further abroad, in pursuit of ecclesiastical advancement and new learning, the linking of these individuals to the writing of specific works of literature remains speculative for the most part, even though their authorship has been assumed by many, sometimes on rather flimsy grounds.

There is no doubt, however, that the mid-fourteenth century in Iceland was a period of intense intellectual activity and literary production, to judge by the various texts of different kinds that appear to have been authored in the period from c. 1320 to c. 1370, many of them probably produced in the two bishoprics of Skálholt and Hólar and in the several monasteries and canonries on the island. Although now mostly lost, some of these texts were probably in Latin.

In 1752, Jakob Friedrich von Bielfeld (1717–70) published his passionate defence of German culture in Progres des allemands dans les sciences, les belles lettres et les arts, particulierement dans la poesie, l’eloquence et le theatre. Bielfeld was an honourable member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences and aimed to defend the value of German culture and literature against those ‘Foreigners who have no inkling of our language, condemn our authors without listening to them.’ Voltaire famously remarked about Germany that ‘[t]his agglomeration which still calls itself the Holy Roman Empire, was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire.’ Nevertheless, Bielfeld calls upon the common ‘national spirit’, ‘German spirit’, not to ignite a vain nationalism but to inspire progress, creativity, and innovation in his fellow citizens.

In 1780, Friedrich II (Frederick the Great, 1712–86) published his pamphlet De la litterature allemande (translated into German in the same year and published by the royal printer Decker), a tract which incited a lengthy debate about German culture in the period. It somewhat echoed Bielfeld's wish to ignite cultural progress and productivity, but was very dismissive of contemporary German literature, particularly Goethe. Responses (direct and indirect) to this pamphlet were manifold.

In his essay, published anonymously, Friedrich styled himself as a ‘philosopher king’, who evaluates the state of literature and culture in the German regions and the origins and usage of the German language, ‘demi-barbare’, as a patriotic gesture.

Sir.

Among the valuable Circumstances, which have brought you into Knowledge and Esteem with Men of Letters, as far off as the Regions beyond Thyle, and even on the Western shore of the wide Atlantic, One is, the Relation you sustain unto a SOCIETY, which is one of the most Illustrious in the World.

It was very much by your favourable Recommendation, that an Admission into that SOCIETY has been granted unto an American, of so obscure a Character, that a Place in the Academy of the Nascoti at Milain, or the Innominati at Parma, or the Incogniti at Venice, would by their Titles doubtless have been more suitable for him, than a Room among your Honourable Virtuosi.

And for These, as well as other Causes, an Inscription to YOU, belongs unto a Performance, which was hereby awakened & animated, and which now prayes for a favourable Reception with you.

No Man of any Reasonable Thought can consider, your Noble Undertaking; How worthy it is to be pursued by Gentlemen who would shew themselves Men; How useful it ha's already been to Mankind, & capable of being yett more applied unto the best of Purposes; a Tendency it has to Refine and Sweeten the Minds of Men, and Reconcile them unto Just Regards for True Merits in one another; with an Extirpation of that noxious Clamour-Wort, the Party-Spirit: And, finally, how generously the more polite Literators of the World go on in it, with a decent Contempt on the Banters of the Bruitish among the People; but the Result of his Consideration will be, that it will be a greater Honour to be taken into the List of your Servants, than to be mixed with the great Men of Achaia.

“To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” wrote Theodor Adorno in 1949, yet in later years he partially recanted this statement; in his Negative Dialectics, for example, he argued that suffering is entitled to representation in the same way that a tortured individual is entitled to scream. However, in the same context Adorno diagnosed the impasse that Western culture found itself in: on the one hand, the decline of classical Enlightenment, which after fascism had retreated into barbarism, and on the other hand, the essential dishonesty of contemporaneous art and its reclusive silence. Under these conditions, Adorno argued, those who maintain the culture of the past become unwitting accomplices, and those who barricade themselves against culture participate in the barbarity of its dissolution. In his eyes, true art is not dissociated from society and culture, and the power of lyricism resides in its ability to expose that which ideology conceals.

Luist Valancy, in her research on historical memory, points out that there are many ways of processing great traumas and laying the foundations for collective memory. Memorial services are an ancient, time-honoured, and effective technique; yet, in Valancy's view, such ritualized ceremonies tend to erode, like living memory itself, when the direct participants are gone. Aestheticization is another way of transmitting memory, and in her view, Adorno's famous dictum should be reversed: we must acknowledge art's power to convey that which has happened, communicate it to future generations, and reveal, if not the meaning, then at least the intensity of those events. Moreover, when words are too weak and banal to invoke an inconceivable tragedy, art shoulders the burden of conveying and relieving the pain. Yosef Haim Yerushalmi stated in his book Zakhor:

Reaching a brilliant culmination in the sixteenth century, Renaissance composers created sonic monuments that probed liminal spaces seemingly approaching the ends of musical architecture. Painting music on enlarged canvases was evident in the Missa Puer natus est nobis (‘Unto us a child is born’), based upon a familiar Christmas Introit and designed for an expanded ensemble of seven instead of four choral parts. The composer was Thomas Tallis (1505–85), a Tudor musician who, together with his student William Byrd (1543–1623), dominated the turbulent English musical landscape of the Anglican Reformation and early Stuart period. Tallis's biographer Kerry McCarthy has described this Mass as possibly the ‘most enigmatic piece Tallis ever composed’. In addition to its lavish part writing, the music concealed an unusual rhythmic encipherment in its cantus firmus-bearing tenor voice, fifth from the top:

The duration of each note is determined by the vowel to which it is sung in the original chant, with A (as in natus) equal to one unit of length, E (as in puer) equal to two units, I equal to three, O equal to four, and U equal to five … Things become even more complicated for the tenor in the second half of the mass: the chant is sung backwards in the Sanctus, the numerical code is inverted in the Benedictus (with the vowel U now producing the shortest notes), and the melody is radically redistributed in the last Agnus, with a complex interlocking scheme of notes that leaves the tune unrecognizable.

This chapter focuses exclusively on Charlemagne's appearances on the battlefield. However, even in this limited scenario it is not always easy to differentiate between the emperor's various functions. In the system established by Georges Dumézil, the ruler is a fusion of all three functions, priestly dispenser of justice, victorious warrior and guarantor of his people's wealth and fertility, standing in some fashion above the rest of the social organization. This blending of functions is evident from as early as the Chanson de Roland in the insular ‘Oxford’ version, reflected in the later continental redactions. Although Charles is in Spain at the head of his army, in many ways he is there as ruler. For the moment suffice it to say that his charismatic and autocratic persona do not differ in the opening scene from what we see when he organizes his army for the final battle against Baligant or when he presides over his court at Ganelon's trial. Similarly, even when at the head of his army and when personally engaged in combat, he maintains his essential link to the divine, although, as we have seen, this relationship is not always unproblematic. This overlaying of functions – it would not be correct to refer to these superimposed strata as confusions between functions – recurs in all songs, the vast majority of the corpus, in which Charlemagne leaves his palace to command his army in person. A rare but not unique example of Charles having no warrior function at all is Huon de Bordeaux. In others there is always a fine judgement to be made between Charlemagne as army commander, an extension of his role as emperor, and as actively engaged warrior. Such cases will be discussed individually as they arise.

It is now over seventy years since J. C. Dickinson published The Origins of the Austin Canons and their Introduction into England. Thereafter, there was something of a hiatus in scholarship on the subject until the 1980s, with the work of David Robinson and David Postles, but until comparatively recently one might well have lamented that this important group of religious continued to be overlooked. In some quarters, there still seems to be reluctance to acknowledge that regular canons constituted an element in western monasticism. In the recent Oxford Handbook of Christian Monasticism, for instance, a search in the index for ‘Augustinian’ yields one short entry on the ‘Rule of St Augustine’, and four brief mentions of Augustinians, all of them incidental, and none relating to regular canons. This seeming reticence may be because, in terms of their defining characteristics, houses of canons remain somewhat elusive. We think we know about Cistercians, what being a Cistercian meant – although recent trends in research have stressed regional and local divergences – but the Augustinians still seem to be too diverse to categorize. Terms such as ‘really a hybrid order of clerical monks’ come to mind, as well as David Knowles's assertion that the canons did not sit well within a study of the monastic order.

There are signs, however, that the historiographical tide has been turning. Within a British context a number of recent theses and subsequent publications have offered fresh insights into the canons in regional contexts, such as Garrett Ratcliff on Scotland, and Andrew Abram and Nick Nicholls on canons within English diocesan contexts.

Performatividades, repeticiones y rupturas de caminantes

Mientras escribo, escucho “Cantares” de Joan Manuel Serrat. Si no la has oído antes, te invito a que lo hagas, hay varias versiones en YouTube, es de esas canciones que una vez que la conoces, ya no te abandona. Serrat habla de cómo transcurre el tiempo humano, y de cómo las memorias se conforman a partir de las diferentes etapas por las que uno cruza en la vida. De pronto, te darás cuenta de que un estribillo no se canta, sino que se recita, y hace referencia al viaje de la vida. La canción da cuenta de cómo las personas van forjándose un camino, pero también ofrece un homenaje a Antonio Machado —el poeta que falleció en el exilio (Gibson 2021)— y a su poema “Caminante”, que se cita al inicio de este capítulo. Si bien el tema del exilio por la Guerra Civil Española también se hace presente en el estribillo de la canción, sirva esta melodía y estos tan citados versos de Machado para comprender la noción de performatividades. En el estribillo, el camino parece una progresión, un deseo de avanzar e ir cambiando año a año, parece imposible volver atrás. Sin embargo, hay momentos en que incluso cuando los caminantes vuelvan a ver sendas similares y sus actuaciones traten de repetir viejos patrones, encontrarán que hay algo diferente en la senda, porque el contexto o la forma de ver el camino ha cambiado.

The rise of an individualized Christian devotion to Christ and His mother Mary from the mid-eleventh century in most medieval communities of Western Europe encouraged the development of new genres of vernacular religious poetry. These mostly mirrored the prose genres, whether in Latin or the vernacular, that then dominated textual production: Bible translation and commentaries, saints’ lives and homilies, and later the exemplum. This generalization is as true of Iceland as of other communities, but there was a significant difference. Icelandic society had continued to sustain a prestigious tradition of vernacular poetry, the skaldic art, with its distinctive metres, genres and stylistic resources, so developing genres of Christian poetry had to be accommodated within those conventions or break new ground. At least three mid-fourteenth-century poets, as we have seen in Chapter 3, evidently felt the constraints of the skaldic tradition were impeding their ability to express themselves in religious verse, and claimed to be abandoning the old conventions and developing a new mode of clarity using ‘skýr orð’ [clear words] (Anon Lil 98/5VII).

This mini-rebellion has to be seen against the background of the medieval religious movement of affective piety, in which individual Christians were encouraged to participate emotionally in the Passion of the suffering Christ and His mother in what has been termed ‘a private drama of the heart’.