Table Of ContentTHE NEW MIDDLE AGES
BONNIE WHEELER,Series Editor
The New Middle Agesis a series dedicated to transdisciplinary studies of medieval cultures,with
particular emphasis on recuperating women’s history and on feminist and gender analyses.This
peer-reviewed series includesboth scholarly monographs and essay collections.
PUBLISHED BY PALGRAVE: Crossing the Bridge:Comparative Essays on
Medieval European and Heian Japanese
Women in the Medieval Islamic World:Power,
Women Writers
Patronage,and Piety
edited by Barbara Stevenson and
edited by Gavin R.G.Hambly
Cynthia Ho
The Ethics of Nature in the Middle Ages:
Engaging Words:The Culture of Reading in
On Boccaccio’s Poetaphysics
the Later Middle Ages
by Gregory B.Stone
by Laurel Amtower
Presence and Presentation:Women in
Robes and Honor:The Medieval World of
the Chinese Literati Tradition
Investiture
by Sherry J.Mou
edited by Stewart Gordon
The Lost Love Letters of Heloise and Abelard:
Representing Rape in Medieval and Early
Perceptions of Dialogue in Twelfth-Century
Modern Literature
France
edited by Elizabeth Robertson and
by Constant J.Mews
Christine M.Rose
Understanding Scholastic Thought with Foucault Same Sex Love and Desire Among Women in
by Philipp W.Rosemann the Middle Ages
edited by Francesca Canadé Sautman and
For Her Good Estate:The Life of Elizabeth
Pamela Sheingorn
de Burgh
by Frances A.Underhill Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages:
Ocular Desires
Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in
by Suzannah Biernoff
the Middle Ages
edited by Cindy L.Carlson and Angela Listen,Daughter:The Speculum Virginum
Jane Weisl and the Formation of Religious Women in
the Middle Ages
Motherhood and Mothering in
edited by Constant J.Mews
Anglo-Saxon England
by Mary Dockray-Miller Science,the Singular,and the Question of
Theology
Listening to Heloise:The Voice of a by Richard A.Lee,Jr.
Twelfth-Century Woman
edited by Bonnie Wheeler Gender in Debate from the Early Middle Ages to
the Renaissance
The Postcolonial Middle Ages edited by Thelma S.Fenster and
edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen Clare A.Lees
Chaucer’s Pardoner and Gender Theory:Bodies Malory’s Morte Darthur:Remaking Arthurian
of Discourse Tradition
by Robert S.Sturges by Catherine Batt
The Vernacular Spirit:Essays on Medieval The Texture of Society:Medieval Women in the
Religious Literature Southern Low Countries
edited by Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, edited by Ellen E.Kittell and
Duncan Robertson,and Nancy Warren Mary A.Suydam
Popular Piety and Art in the Late Middle Charlemagne’s Mustache:And Other
Ages:Image Worship and Idolatry in England Cultural Clusters of a Dark Age
1350–1500 by Paul Edward Dutton
by Kathleen Kamerick
Troubled Vision:Gender,Sexuality,and Sight in
Absent Narratives,Manuscript Textuality,and Medieval Text and Image
Literary Structure in Late Medieval England edited by Emma Campbell and
by Elizabeth Scala Robert Mills
Creating Community with Food and Drink in Queering Medieval Genres
Merovingian Gaul by Tison Pugh
by Bonnie Effros
Sacred Place in Early Medieval Neoplatonism
Representations of Early Byzantine Empresses: by L.Michael Harrington
Image and Empire
The Middle Ages at Work
by Anne McClanan
edited by Kellie Robertson and
Encountering Medieval Textiles and Dress: Michael Uebel
Objects,Texts,Images
Chaucer’s Jobs
edited by Désirée G.Koslin and
by David R.Carlson
Janet Snyder
Medievalism and Orientalism:Three Essays on
Eleanor of Aquitaine:Lord and Lady
Literature,Architecture and Cultural Identity
edited by Bonnie Wheeler and John
by John M.Ganim
Carmi Parsons
Queer Love in the Middle Ages
Isabel La Católica,Queen of Castile:
by Anna Klosowska Roberts
Critical Essays
edited by David A.Boruchoff Performing Women:Sex,Gender and the
Medieval Iberian Lyric
Homoeroticism and Chivalry:Discourses of Male
by Denise K.Filios
Same-Sex Desire in the Fourteenth Century
by Richard Zeikowitz Necessary Conjunctions:The Social Self in
Medieval England
Portraits of Medieval Women:Family,Marriage, by David Gary Shaw
and Politics in England 1225–1350
by Linda E.Mitchell Visual Culture and the German Middle Ages
edited by Kathryn Starkey and Horst
Eloquent Virgins:From Thecla to Joan of Arc Wenzel
by Maud Burnett McInerney
Medieval Paradigms:Essays in Honor of Jeremy
The Persistence of Medievalism:Narrative duQuesnay Adams,Volumes 1 and 2
Adventures in Contemporary Culture edited by Stephanie Hayes-Healy
by Angela Jane Weisl
False Fables and Exemplary Truth:Poetics and
Capetian Women Reception of a Medieval Mode
edited by Kathleen Nolan by Elizabeth Allen
Joan of Arc and Spirituality Sacred and Secular in Medieval and Early
edited by Ann W.Astell and Bonnie Modern Cultures:New Essays
Wheeler edited by Lawrence Besserman
SACRED AND SECULAR
IN MEDIEVAL AND EARLY
MODERN CULTURES
NEW ESSAYS
Edited by
Lawrence Besserman
SACREDANDSECULARINMEDIEVALANDEARLYMODERNCULTURES
© Lawrence Besserman,2006.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2006 978-1-4039-6732-9
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any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case
of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
First published in 2006 by
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ISBN 978-1-349-53000-7 ISBN 978-1-4039-7727-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781403977274
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sacred and secular in medieval and early modern cultures :new
essays / [edited] by Lawrence Besserman.
p.cm—(New Middle Ages)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1.Civilization,Medieval.2.Literature,Medieval—History and
criticism.3.Secularism in literature.4.Holy,The,in literature.
5.Christianity in literature.6.Church and state—Europe—History—
To 1500.I.Besserman,Lawrence L.,1945– II.New Middle Ages
(Palgrave (Firm))
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CONTENTS
List of Contributors ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Preface xv
Introduction Sacred and Secular in Medieval and Early Modern
Cultures:Issues and Approaches 1
Lawrence Besserman
Part I Medieval and Early Modern
Literature:Lyric,Narrative,and Drama
1. The Imitation of Hagiographic Formulas in
Occitanian Vidas(Lives of the Troubadours) 19
Cyril Aslanov
2. “Quid Hinieldus Cum Christo?”:The Secular
Expression of the Sacred in Old and Middle English Lyrics 29
Thomas G.Duncan
3. Reading Radical Metonymy in Pearl 47
Alan J.Fletcher
4. Purchasing Pardon:Material and Spiritual Economies
on the Canterbury Pilgrimage 63
Alastair Minnis
5. Sacred and Secular in The Merchant ofVenice 83
Murray Roston
viii CONTENTS
Part II Medieval and Early Modern History:
Church and State
6. The Communal Body,the Corporate Body,and the
Clerical Body:An Anthropological Reading of
the Gregorian Reform 101
Lior Barshack
7. Sacred,Secular,and Impure:The Contextuality of Sensations 123
Esther Cohen
8. Secular and Sacred:The History of Rhetoric and
Religious Community in the Middle Ages 135
Rita Copeland
9. Sacred Authority and Secular Power:The Historical
Argument of the Gesta Episcoporum Cameracensis 149
Robert M.Stein
10. The Space of the Altar 167
Miri Rubin
Notes 177
Index 227
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
Cyril Aslanovis Associate Professor of French Language and Literature at
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.He has published a study of André
Chouraqui’s translation of the Bible (Pour comprendre la Bible:la leçon d’André
Chouraqui,Monaco,Editions du Rocher,1999) and a monograph on the
fourteenth-century Provençal Jewish lexicographer Joseph Kaspi
(Leprovençal des Juifs et l’hebreu en Provençe:le dictionnaire Sharshot ha-Kesef de
Joseph Caspi,Paris-Leuven:Peeters,2001).
Lior Barshack is a senior lecturer in legal and social theory at the
Radzyner School of Law in the Interdisciplinary Center,Herzliya,Israel.
He has written many articles on the place of legal rituals and fictions in civil
religion.He is currently working on a book on civil religion and editing
together with Peter Goodrich and Anton Schutz a collection of essays on
the work of Pierre Legendre.
Lawrence Besserman is Professor of English at The Hebrew University
of Jerusalem.He has taught at Harvard,New York University,and Columbia.
His publications include The Legend of Job in the Middle Ages (Cambridge,
MA,1978),Chaucer and the Bible (New York,1988),and Chaucer’s Biblical
Poetics(Norman,OK,1998).He has also edited The Challenge of Periodization:
Old Paradigms and New Perspectives (New York,1996);and he is the general
editor of the first anthology of European medieval literature in Hebrew
translation, An Anthology of Medieval Literature (Tel Aviv: Dvir-The Israel
Council for Translation of the Classics,1991).
Esther Cohenis Professor of Medieval History at The Hebrew University
of Jerusalem. Her publications include The Crossroads of Justice: Law and
Society in Late Medieval France (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1993); Peaceable Domain,
Certain Justice:Crime and Society in Fifteenth-Century Paris(Hilversum:Verloren,
1996);and “The Animated Pain of the Body,”American Historical Review105
(2000),36–68.
Rita Copeland is Professor and Chair of Comparative Literature at the
University of Pennsylvania.Her publications include Rhetoric,Hermeneutics,
