Name der Zeitschrift: Frühmittelalterliche Studien Jahrgang: 48 Heft: 1 Seiten: 389-412.

One of the most controversial episodes in early medieval hagiography was the legend of the Roman Emperor Trajan, who escaped hell by the intercession and the prayers of Pope Gregory. Was there a way out of hell? How could this legend be interpreted without disrupting core ideas of Western scholastic theology like the eternity of damnation? This paper takes this example and provides a diachronic overview of the gradual emergence of this new capacity for understanding hagiography from the early Middle (...) Ages to the Early Modern Period. It draws special attention to a group of lesser-known Early Modern theologians like Alonso Salmeron, Alonson Chacón, Caesar Baronius or Alexandre Noël, whose contributions to the debate over the fate of Trajan’s soul are illustrative of a process of negotiation wherein innovative scholarly methods were interwoven with an overarching drive to purify theology. The result was a situation in which a problematic authority that could not be demolished by way of rational arguments based on its own internal logic could at least be brought down by undermining the value and legitimacy of its genre. (shrink)

Was there a chant of swans? Greek and Latin poets had established the idea of the swan singing in the moment of its death as a part of their self- representation, while ancient zoologists argued for the reality of the phenomenon. How did medieval and early modern natural scientists and philosophers deal with the cantus cygnorum? Following his classical sources, a scholar like Albertus Magnus defended the singing swan in his zoology. The discussion was still alive when the Italian anatomist (...) Ulysses Aldrovandi in the late 16th century discovered the swan’s enlarged windpipe and interpreted it as the final demonstration of the chant’s reality. (shrink)

Medieval literature inherited from the Latin pastoral tradition exemplified by Virgil and others the motif of an ideal landscape, a paradise of shepherds. The Arcadia of classical tradition, inhabited by nymphs, satyrs and the heathen gods, became for the medieval mind a garden of love, where Amor held council (as developed by the French allegorists, for example), or a philosophical paradise, where man was recreated and restored. At the same time, medieval historians and theologians found themselves confronted by a different (...) kind of pagan paradise, namely the famous fairy hill of Romano-Celtic origin, which was inhabited not by fictional, but by real creatures such as elves and fairies. The Church Fathers condemned the fairy hill as a demonic illusion and the fairies as diabolical phantasms. This article will demonstrate that the literary description of the fairy hill in Latin tradition was strongly influenced by the idea of bucolic landscape, although it changed its character significantly: what once had been a literary model, now became a metaphysical reality and a concrete alternative to the contemporary world. (shrink)

Stretching from Late Antiquity to the 18th century and including figures such as Leibniz as well as his Jesuit contemporaries, this book offers a survey of the extensive discussion devoted to the language of angels, one of the most lively and long lasting controversies in Medieval and Early Modern philosophy of language.

Name der Zeitschrift: Frühmittelalterliche Studien Jahrgang: 49 Heft: 1 Seiten: 275-298.

Name der Zeitschrift: Frühmittelalterliche Studien Jahrgang: 46 Heft: 1 Seiten: 437-484.