Saint Jerome. Hartmann Schedel, Liber cbronicarum (Nuremberg Chronicle). Nuremberg: Anton Koberger, 1493, p. 135r.
See Masegne Brothers
Jacobus da Voragine (Jacopo da Varazze, c. 1228-1298) was a Dominican writer, administrator, and archbishop; his name suggests that he or his forebears came from Varazze, a town near Genoa. He entered the Order of Preachers—i.e., the Dominican order—as a youth, in 1244. After completing his education, he is reputed to have distinguished himself both as a public preacher and as a teacher of preachers in training, and also to have been prior (local head) of the Dominican community in Genoa. From 1267 on, his career is more clearly documented. His fellow Dominicans repeatedly elected him prior of the entire province of Lombardy, a post he held from 1267 to 1277 and again from 1281 to 1286. Both the order and the papacy entrusted him with sensitive diplomatic missions. From 1292 until his death, he was archbishop of Genoa, and he had such an exemplary reputation in this office that he was eventually beatified (in 1816).
Among the literary works Jacobus wrote or compiled, the earliest and most famous is a Legenda sanctorum, or anthology of readings about the saints, generally called Legenda aurea (Golden Legend). After the Legenda, Jacobus composed four large sets of Latin sermons, which evidently circulated as models for other preachers to use: Sermones de sanctis, on major saints and festivals of the church year; Sermones de tempore, on the Sunday gospels for the year; Sermones quadragesimales, on the weekday gospels for Lent; and Mariale, or Laudes deiparae virginis, sermons in praise of the Virgin Mary. Jacobus's sermons survive in numerous manuscripts and early printed editions and thus must have enjoyed a wide and long-lasting popularity. His last major work, Chronicle of Genoa, which he wrote as archbishop, is noteworthy for the local history and hagiography it preserves and for some autobiographical passages that shed light on his own life.
See also Dominican Order; Genoa; Legenda Aurea
SHERRY REAMES
Kaeppeli, Thomas. Scriptores Ordinis Praedicatorum medii aevi, Vol. 2. Rome: Ad S. Sabinae, 1975, pp. 348-369.
Monleone, Giovanni. lacopo da Varagine e la sua Cronaca di Geneva dalle origini al MCCXCVII, 3 vols. Rome: Tipografia del Senato, 1941.
Sermones aurei ...,2 vols., ed. Rudolph Clutius. Augsburg and Cracow: Apud Christophorum Bard, 1760. (Latin edition; includes all four sets of sermons.)
Jacomo dei Tolomei (Iacomo di messer Lottorengo de' Tolomei; nicknamed Granfione, Graffione; fl. 1250—1300) lived in Siena and was one of the earliest Italian comic poets. His one extant sonnet, Le favole, compar, ch'om dice tante ("The many fables, my friend, that are told"), found in the Vatican Codex Barberino Latino 3953, is a parody of the bestiary similes that pervaded the serious love poetry of the time. In this sonnet, Jacomo compares animals and other creatures that populate Aesop's fables to several personages from Siena (including the comic poet Nicola Muscia, also known as Muscia da Siena), thus "proving" that Aesop's mythical creatures really existed. The comic comparison of beasts to humans was a theme first made popular by Rustico Filippi.
See also Italian Poetry: Comic; Muscia, Nicola; Rustico Filippi
JOAN H. LEVIN
Marti, Mario, ed. Poeti giocosi del tempo di Dante. Milan: Rizzoli, 1956, pp. 297-299.
Massera, Aldo Francesco, ed. Sonetti burleschi e realistici dei primi due secoli, 2 vols. Bari: Laterza, 1920, Vol. 1, p. 139.
Vitale, Maurizio, ed. Rimatori comico-realistici del Due e Trecento, 2 vols. Turin: UTET, 1956, Vol. 2, pp. 71-76.
The poet Jacopo d'Aquino (d. after 1306) was the son of Ade-nolfo (giustiziere> or executioner, of Sicily in 1231; d. 1243) and the grandson of Tommaso I, count of Acerra. After the death of Frederick II in 1250, Jacopo rebelled against Emperor Conrad IV, who later pardoned him and reinstated him in his possessions. Jacopo was forced by Charles of Anjou to abandon his fiefs in 1266, and his name is encountered in Charles's proscription lists for 1269-1270. Scandone (1904) uncovered a document showing that Jacopo was still alive in 1306.
Only one poem can be definitively attributed to Jacopo d'Aquino: Al cor m'énato e prende uno disio ("A desire is born in and takes hold of my heart"). Another, Allegramente eo canto ("Joyfully I sing"), though attributed to him in the Florentine Codex Laurenziano-Rediano 9, is more likely by Jacopo Mos-tacci, as established in the Vatican Codex Lat. 3793.
See also Charles I of Anjou; Frederick II Hohenstaufen; Italian Poetry: Lyric; Scuola Poetica Siciliana
FREDE JENSEN
Scandone, Francesco. "Notizie biografiche di rimatori della scuola siciliana." Studi di Letteratura Italiana, 5, 1904, pp. 285-311.
Torraca, Francesco. Studi sulla lirica italiana del Duecento. Bologna: Zanichelli, 1902, pp. 191-194, 200.
The Italian composer and music theorist Jacopo da Bologna (fl. northern Italy, 1340-c. 1360) was a member of the first generation of Italian Trecento musicians. He was evidently a native of Bologna and worked with Giovanni da Cascia at the Veronese court of Mastino II della Scala (d. 1351). Earlier, he had been linked to the Milanese court of Luchino Visconti (r. 1339— 1349); and after 1352 he apparently reentered the service of the Visconti family. The poet Petrarch may have been personally acquainted with Jacopo, whose madrigal Non al suo amante ("Not to her lover") is the only known contemporary setting of a Petrarch text. The music treatise L 'arte del biscanto misurato secondo el maestro Jacopo da Bologna was influenced by French notational theory and raises the possibility that Jacopo may have been a university teacher. He may have lived beyond 1360; certain Aragonese records in Spain mention a similar personage between 1378 and 1386.
Thirty-four musical works can be positively attributed to Jacopo: twenty-five two-voice madrigals, seven three-voice madrigals and cacce, a lauda-ballata, and a motet. Most of his surviving work is contained in the Squarcialupi Codex (I-Fl 87). His popularity as a composer is attested to by the wide circulation of his music in northern Italian and Tuscan sources, and by mentions of his work in sources into the early fifteenth century. Many of his musical texts are autobiographical and hint at associations with Floriano, Philippe de Vitry, and Marchetto da Padova.
Jacopo's contributions to the development of the Italian madrigal include his textual emphasis, his motivic development between voices through imitation, and his use of monophonic transitional phrases between two lines of text. Tonal structure is important in Jacopo's music: most of his compositions begin and end on the same pitch. Three-voice madrigals make their first appearance in his compositions, and the first known lauda-ballata was also composed by him. Jacopo da Bologna's works had a profound influence on the next generation of Trecento composers—Francesco Landini and Bartolino da Padova.
See also Ars Nova; Ballata; Bartolino da Padova; Caccia; Giovanni da Cascia; Landini, Francesco; Lauda; Madrigal; Mar chetto da Padova; Petrarca, Francesco; Squarcialupi Codex
BRADFORD LEE EDEN
Marrocco, W. Thomas, ed. The Music of Jacopo da Bologna. Berkeley and Los Angeles, Calif.: University of California Press, 1954.
, ed. Italian Secular Music by Magister Piero, Giovanni da Firenze, Jacopo da Bologna. Polyphonic Music of the Fourteenth Century, 6. Monaco: Editions de l'Oiseau-Lyre, 1967.
Fischer, Kurt von. Studien zur italienischen Musik des Trecento und früben Quattrocento. Berne: P. Haupt, 1956.
"Jacopo da Bologna." In New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Washington, D.C.: Grove's Dictionaries of Music, 1980, Vol. 9, pp. 449-451.
Martinez-Gollner, Marie Louise. Die Musik des frühen Trecento. Tutzing: H. Schneider, 1963.
Jacopo (fl., late thirteenth century), a poet from Lèvane, near Montevarchi in Tuscany, was among the first to use a comic style. His eight sonnets, all contained in the Vatican Codex Latino 3793, show the influence of two contemporaries—Guit-tone d'Arezzo and Rustico Filippi. Jacopo's best-known sonnet is Segnori, udite strano malificio ("Gentlemen, listen to the unusual scheme"), in which he mocks Rustico Filippi in the comic style that Rustico first popularized. Rustico's influence is also seen in three sonnets in dialogue form, in the tradition of serious courtly love poetry. Jacopo's Contessa è tanto bella e saggia e cónta ("Contessa is so beautiful and wise and gracious") is reminiscent of Guittone. Guittone, in his canzone Comune perta fa comun dolore ("Common loss makes for common grief'), praised Jacopo as a great poet.
See also Guittone d'Arezzo; Italian Poetry: Comic; Rustico Filippi
JOAN H. LEVIN
Contini, Gianfranco, ed. Poeti del Duecento. Milan and Naples: Ricciardi, 1960, Vol. 2, p. 365.
Marti, Mario, ed. Poeti giocosi del tempo di Dante. Milan: Rizzoli, 1956, pp. 95-104.
Massèra, Aldo Francesco, ed. Sonetti burleschi e realistici dei primi due secoli, 2 vols. Bari: Laterza, 1920, Vol. 1, pp. 31-35.
Vitale, Maurizio, ed. Rimatori comico-realistici del Due e Trecento, 2 vols. Turin: UTET, 1956, Vol. 1, pp. 201-218.
Levin, Joan H. Rustico di Filippo and the Florentine Lyric Tradition. American University Studies, 2(16). New York: Peter Lang, 1986, pp. 105-108.
Suitner, Franco. La poesia satirica e giocosa neli'eta dei comuni. Padua: Antenore, 1983, pp. 121-147.
The Franciscan lector Jacopo da Milano (Jacob of Milan, James of Milan, Jacobus Mediolanensis, Giacomo da Milano; thirteenth century) was the author of the original version of a spiritual classic in Latin, Stimulus amoris (Prick of Love). Much has been surmised but little is known for certain about Jacopo. From the date of the earliest evidence for the Stimulus amoris, and from the acquaintance it shows with the writings of Saint Bonaventure, Jacopo must have composed it in the second half of the thirteenth century. Jacopo has been plausibly but not conclusively identified with a Brother James of Milan recorded as a lector at the Franciscan convent at Domodossola in 1305. Some scholars have thought him identical or possibly identical with a mid-thirteenth-century Milanese theologian who was known until 1979—incorrectly—as Giacomo Capelli or de Capellis; but this person is no longer credibly a Jacopo. Jacopo could well have been the renowned Franciscan, formerly a lector in Milan, who sometime after 1296 read and approved Arnaldo of Foligno's Memorial on the mystic and visionary Angela of Foligno. One modern scholar has ascribed to Jacopo a meditation on the hymn Salve Regina, transmitted in some of his manuscripts and at times attributed to Bernard of Clairvaux (among others), but this idea has not found widespread acceptance.
Recent investigation has revealed Stimulus amoris in its Jacopean form to be an unstable "open text" whose very title is uncertain. As now edited, it consists of a prologue and twenty-three brief chapters; the first nine chapters guide the reader toward divine rapture, and the rest deal with other aspects of the contemplative life. The writing style is often intense and rhetorically effective; it combines direct address, exclamation, and figures of repetition with an intentionally simple vocabulary. Chapter 14, an especially vivid meditation on Christ's passion, is thought by some to have furnished the theological basis for the imagery in the window of the Glorification of Saint Francis in the upper church of Francis's basilica at Assisi. However, the ideas in question were common in later thirteenth-century Franciscan contexts, and the dating of both the window and the earliest version or versions of the text is uncertain.
Jacopo's Stimulus circulated with Bonaventure's works, was soon mistakenly attributed to Bonaventure, and was expanded twice in the fourteenth century by persons unknown. Modern scholars differentiate these texts by calling the original Stimulus (amoris) minor and the expansions (treated as a single version) Stimulus (amoris) maior. The maior was more widely read: there are more than 130 manuscripts of it, as opposed to some ninety manuscripts of the minor. A recent suggestion that the maior was actually the original seems unpersuasive. Starting in the later fourteenth century, this very different larger version was translated into other European languages, including English. A fourteen th-century translation (now lost) of Stimulus minor into Tus can dialect is thought to underlie its first printing in Italian (Venice, 1521).
JOHN B. DILLON
Fathers of the College of Saint Bonaventure, eds. Stimulus amoris fr. Iacobi Mediolanensis—Canticum pauperis fr. loannis Peckam. Bibliotheca Franciscana Ascetica Medii Aevi, 4. Quaracchi: Collegium S. Bonaventurae, 1905, pp. vi-xvii, 1-132. (Reprint, 1949).
Aiberzoni, Maria Pia." 'L'approbatio: Curia Romana, ordine minoritico e Liber." In Angèle de Foligno: Le dossier, ed. Giulia Barone and Jacques DaJarun. Collection de 1'École Fran^aise de Rome, 255. Rome: École Franjaise de Rome, 1999, pp. 293-318. (See especially pp. 311-114.)
Canal, Jose M., "El Stimulus amoris de Santiago de Milán y la Meditatio in Salve regina." Franciscan Studies, 26, 1966, pp. 174-188.
Cremaschi, Chiara Giovanna, trans. "Introduzione" and Stimulus (Giacomo da Milano, 11 pungolo dell'amore). In I mistici: Scritti dei mistici francescani. Assisi: Editrici Francescane, 1995-, Vol. 1, pp. 795-881.
Eisermann, Falk. "Diversae et plurimae materiae in diversis capitulis: Der 'Stimulus amoris' als literarisches Dokument der normativen Zentrierung.'* Friihmittelalterliche Studien, 31, 1997, pp. 214-232.
. Stimulus amoris: Inhalt, lateinische Uberlieferung, deutsche Ubersetzungen, Rezeption. Miinchener Texte und Untersuchungen zur Deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters, 118. Tubingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2001.
Mostaccio, S. "Giacomo da Milano." In Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, Vol. 54. Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 2000, pp. 221-223.
Piana, Celestino. "II 'fr. lacobus de Mediolano lector' autore dello pseudo-Bonaventuriano Stimulus amoris ed un convento del suo insegnamento." Antonianum, 61, 1986, pp. 329-339.
Poulenc, Jerome. "Saint Francois dans le 'vitrail des anges' de 1'eglise superieure de la basilique d'Assise." Archivum Franciscanum Historicum, 76, 1983, pp. 701-713.
Wessley, Stephen E., "James of Milan and the Guglielmites: Franciscan Spirituality and Popular Heresy in Late Thirteenth-Century Milan." Collectanea Franciscana, 54, 1984, pp. 5-20.
Jacopo (Jacobus, fl. 1275-1322) was born in the small town ol Cessole, near Asti, in Piedmont. He entered the Dominican order, probably at the convent of Santa Maddalena near Asti. From 1317 to 1322, he lived in Genoa, where he became vicar of the Inquisition attached to the convent of San Domenico. At the request of fellow Dominicans and several laypeople, he wrote his only extant work, De moribus hominum ed de officiis nobilum super ludo scaccorum (On the Customs of Men and Their Noble Actions with Regard to the Game of Chess), known simply as Ludus scaccorum.
Ludus scaccorum is a moralized explanation of chess based on the medieval estates, whereby each chess piece represents a different social class. It consists of twenty-four chapters divided into four sections (tractatus). The first section consists of three chapters that narrate when, how, and by whom chess was invented. The narrative, in the form of a medieval exemplum, recounts how a Greek philosopher named Xerxes or Perses invented the game to show his cruel king Evilmerodach "the maners and conditicions of a kynge of the nobles and of the comun people and of theyr offices and how they shold be touchid and drawen. And how he shold amende hymself & become vertuous." Xerxes explains that he invented the game to keep the king from "ydlenesse," which can induce men to sin, and to satisfy man's desire for "noueltees & tydynges," which in turn sharpen the mind. The exemplum ends with Evilmerodach's eventual conversion, thus setting a precedent for using chess to teach people how to behave.
The second section is divided into five chapters describing, espectively, the five different chess pieces in the first row: (1) dng, (2) queen, (3) alphinus (judge), (4) knight, and (5) rook 'legate). Each piece is described in terms of its clothing, its symbols of power, the moral significance of those symbols, and— nost important—the way a represented by the piece must benave in society. Jacopo narrates several exempla to illustrate the dnd of behavior he has in mind for each person.
The third section deals with the pawns and is divided into sight chapters, each taking up a particular group of commoners (one pawn representing one group): (1) laborers (farmers), (2) smiths, (3) notaries, (4) merchants, (5) physicians, (6) innkeepers, (7) city watchmen and guards, and (8) ribalds and town couriers. Each pawn is described in terms of the tools of its trade, its relationship to the chess piece behind it, and how the person represented should behave. For each group of commoners, Jacopo narrates one or more exempla, illustrating either appropriate or inappropriate behavior of that group.
The fourth section is also divided into eight chapters. The first chapter describes the chessboard as an allegorical representation of Babylon, where the game was presumably invented. The next six chapters deal with the actual moves of each chess piece on the chessboard. These moves reflect the rules of chess that were then in effect in Lombardy and are allegorized to illustrate i moral. For example, when a pawn becomes a queen, the fact chat many great rulers had humble origins is illustrated. In the eighth chapter in this section—the final chapter—Jacopo reiterates the history of the origins of chess, reminding his readers that chess is a social allegory of the various classes of medieval society working together for the common good.
As Kaeppeli (1960) noted, the convent or San Domenico in Genoa produced a considerable amount of popular religious literature. It is not surprising, therefore, that Ludus scaccorum spread rapidly throughout western and eastern Europe; there were even a Scottish translation and a Czech translation. When Ludus scaccorum was translated from Latin into a vernacular, or from one vernacular into another, the content was sometimes modified to reflect a country's particular ways of representing its own social classes (Buuren 1997).
The diffusion arid popularity of Ludus scaccorum during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries are reflected in the numerous manuscripts and early printed editions of the work. It was the second book to be printed in the English language: William Caxton printed an English translation of Jehan de Vignay's French translation (c. 1350) of Ludus scaccorum in 1474. Despite the popularity of Ludus scaccorum in the late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance, there are no critical editions in print of the Latin original, nor are there any modern translations in either English or Italian. There are, however, modern critical editions of Jean Ferron's French translation of 1347 (the best of the medieval French translations), and of the Middle Scots translation of c. 1515.
STEVEN GROSSVOGEL
Burt, Marie Anita. "Jacobus de Cessolis: Libellus de moribus hominum et officiis nobilium acpopularium super ludo scachorum." Dissertation, University of Texas, Austin, 1957.
Jacobus de Cessolis. Libellus de ludo scachorum, ed. Ernst Köpke. Mittheilungen aus den Handschriften der Ritter-Akademie zu Brandenburg a. H., 2. Brandenburg a. d. Havel: G. Matthes, 1879.
Das Schachbuch des Jacobus de Cessolis: Codex Palatinus Latinus 961, 2 vols. Belser Faksimile Editionen aus der Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 74. Zürich: Belser Verlag, 1988.
Vetter, Ferdinand, ed. Das Schachzabelbuch Kunrats von Ammenhausen, Monchs, und Leutpriesters zu Stein am Rbein, nebst den Schachbiichern des Jakob von Cessole und des Jakob Mannel. Frauenfeld: Huber, 1892.
Caxton, William. The Game and Play of Chesse (1474), intro. N. F. Blake. London: Scolar, 1976.
Caxton's Game and Playe of the Cheese, 1474: A Verbatim Reprint of the First Edition with an Introduction by William E. A. Axon. London: Elliot Stock, 1883.
The Game of the Cheese by William Caxton-. Reproduction in Facsimile with Remarks by Vincent Figgins. London: John Russell Smith, 1860.
Volgarizzamento del libro de' costumi e degli offizii de' nobili sopra il giuoco degli scacchi di frate Jacopo da Cessole: Tratto nuovamente da un codice Magliabechiano, ed. Pietro Marocco. Milan: Dalla Tipografia del Dott. Giulio Ferrario, 1829.
Buuren, Catherine van, ed. The Buke of the Chess: Edited from the Asloan Manuscript (NLS MS 16500). Edinburgh: Scottish Text Society, 1997.
Collet, Alain, ed. Le Jeu des Eschaz Moralise: Traduction de Jean Ferron (1347). Paris: Honoré Champion, 1999.
Di Lorenzo, Robert D. "The Collection Form and the Art of Memory in the Libellus super Ludo Scaccorum of Jacobus de Cessolis." Mediaeval Studies, 35, 1973, pp. 205-221.
Kaeppeli, Thomas, O.P. "Pour la biographie de Jacques de Cessole." Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum, 30, 1960, pp. 149-162.
Mann, Jill. Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973.
Murray, Harold James R. A History of Chess. Oxford: Clarendon, 1913, pp. 537-549. (Reprints, 1961, 1987.)
Jacopo Mostacci (fl. 1230-1260) was the author or four canzoni, written in a refined, Provençalizing style, and he participated with Giacomo da Lentini (the Notary) and Pier de la Vigna in a tenzone on the nature of love. Jacopo is referred to as messere, a title indicating a man of considerable social status. Some scholars suggest that he may be identical with the falconer whom Frederick II sent on an expedition to Malta in 1240, and who, in 1262, accompanied Manfred's daughter Costanza on her wedding journey to Aragon. Scandone (1904) traced the Mostacci family to Messina, and Torraca (1902) suggested Lecce as its place of origin. The scribe of manuscript Palatino 418 (Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, now Banco Rari 217) proposed that Jacopo was of Pisan extraction, but this theory has few adherents.
See also Frederick II Hohenstaufen; Giacomo da Lentini; Italian Poetry: Lyric; Manfred; Pier de la Vigna; Scuola Poetica Siciliana; Tenzone
FREDE JENSEN
Contini, Gianfranco, ed. Poeti del Duecento, 2 vols. Milan and Naples: Ricciardi, 1960, Vol. 1. p. 141.
Lazzeri, Gerolamo, ed. Antologia dei primi secoli della letteratura italiana. Milan: Hoepli, 1942, p. 502.
Monaci, Ernesto, ed. Crestomazia italiana dei primi secoli, rev. ed., ed, Felice Arese. Rome, Naples, and Citta di Castello: Societa Editrice Dante Alighieri, 1955, p. 90.
Pasquini, Emilio, and Antonio Enzo Quaglio. II Duecento dalle origini a Dante. Bari: Laterza, 1970, p. 183.
Scandone, Francesco. "Notizie biografiche di rimatori della scuola siciliana." Studi di Letteratura Italiana, 5, 1904, pp. 212-223.
Torraca, Francesco. Studi sulla lirica italiana del Duecento. Bologna: Zanichelli, 1902, pp. 128-139.
The Franciscan friar and mystic Jacopone da Todi (Jacobus de Benedictis, Jacopus de Tuderto, Jacopo de' Benedetti, Giaco-pone de' Benedetti; c. 1230 or 1236—1306) is considered by some to be Italy's greatest poet before Dante. The principal type of verse that Jacopone used is the lauda, a nonliturgical song of praise in vernacular ballad form, although some works in Latin are also attributed to him.
Details about Jacopone's life before his religious conversion are sketchy, but it is generally accepted that he was born (as his name implies) in Todi, Umbria, to a family of the lesser nobility. He received an education typical of his time and social class (he may have studied at the University of Bologna) and then is believed to have practiced the profession of notary in Todi and, in his mid-thirties, to have married Vanna di Bernardino di Guidone, of the counts of Collemedio (or Coldimezzo). According to early vitae (lives) of Jacopone, Vanna's accidental death at a party devastated him, provoked a profound psychological crisis, and led to his religious conversion in 1268. The precipitating factor in this rapid chain of events appears to have been his discovery that Vanna, like many others during this tumultuous period of Italian history, had practiced self-mortification as a form of religious penance—in her case, by wearing a hairshirt under her beautiful and costly outer garb. To the consternation of his family and the disbelief of his fellow citizens, Jacopo divested himself of all his worldly goods and habits and became a bezocone, or mendicant Franciscan tertiary (Laude, ed. Mancini, 1974, 151). For the next ten years, he traveled the highways of Umbria, singing God's praise and preaching salvation, not in the Latin of the church but in the language of the people, as was the custom of the Franciscans. In 1278, on his second request, he was finally admitted to the order of Friars Minor (i.e., the Franciscan order; Casolini 1966,620). He thus became Fra Jaco-pone—a name that can be translated as Big Jim or Big Jake.
In the years following the death of Saint Francis (1226), the Franciscans split into two opposing camps. The Spirituals believed in the strict interpretation of Francis's rule, which called for complete poverty; the Community, sometimes referred to as the Conventuals, supported a more relaxed interpretation that permitted ownership of property and other material comforts. Jacopone sided with the more extreme Spirituals and, as a consequence, found himself locked in the bitter and sometimes dangerous struggle between the two factions. When Boniface VIII became pope, Jacopone allied himself with the Colonna family, Boniface's enemies. Jacopone's open and virulent opposition to the powerful new pope earned him excommunication and five years of solitary confinement.
While he was in prison, Jacopone wrote many laude. In one of therm—Que farai, fra Iacovone? ("What will you do, Brother Jacopone?" number 55 in Ageno's edition, 53 in Mancini's)—he comments with mordant irony on the dire conditions of his imprisonment. We know from two laude—O papa Bonifazio/io porto el tuo prefazio ("O Pope Boniface, I bring your sentence," number 56 in Ageno and 55 in Mancini) and Lo pastor per mio peccato/posto m' à for de l'ovile ("Because of my sin the shepherd has cast me out of the sheepfold," number 57 in Ageno and 67 in Mancini)—that Jacopone twice begged the pope for absolution. Although the pope granted absolution to many in the jubilee year of 1300, Jacopone was not among them. In 1303, however, Jacopone received personal liberty and release from religious censure from Boniface's more compassionate successor as pope, Benedict XI.
The elderly Jacopone then retired to the convent of San Lorenzo in Collazzone, where he died on Christmas eve, 1306. In 1433, his remains were discovered in the convent of Santa Maria di Montecristo, and in 1596 his tomb in the crypt of the Franciscan church of San Fortunato in Todi was dedicated. Although he has not been beatified or canonized by the church, Jacopone is inscribed in the Franciscan martyrology and is popularly referred to and venerated as "blessed" or "saint."
Jacopone wrote approximately 100 laude in the Umbrian vernacular that express the mystic's innermost sentiments about the state of his soul and seek to instruct others who are seeking greater closeness to God. Unlike many iaude composed by others at this time (which was the form's most fertile period), Jacopone's hymns were written not for the general lay public but for his own personal use, and possibly for his Franciscan brothers. Jacopone's laude treat a wide range of subjects and present a variety of tones and moods. His important themes include the following (for each example, the number in Ageno is followed by the number in Mancini): praise of God (e.g., La bontade enfinita, "The infinite goodness," 79, 21), Christ (Adl'amor ch'è venuto, "To the Love that came," 65, 86), and the Virgin Mary (O Vergen piú che femina, "O Virgin more than woman," 2, 32); Saint Francis and the Franciscan ideal of poverty (Povertade enamorata, "Beloved poverty," 59, 47); the condemnation of all types of secular temptation (Guarda che non caggi, amico, "Be careful not to fall, my friend," 6, 20); detailed descriptions of disease, death, and dying (Quando t'alegri, "When you are glad," 25, 61); soul-searching self-criticism (Que farai, fra Iacovone? "What will you do, Brother Jacopone?" 55, 53); extreme self-abnegation (O Signor, per cortesiajmandame la malsanìa, "O Lord, please infect me with disease," 48, 81); biting political satire (Que farai, Pier da Morrone? "What will you do, Pier da Morrone?" 54, 74); laments on the state of the church (Piange la Ecclesia, "The church weeps," 53, 35); descriptions of the mystical state of ecstasy, akin to madness, that the poet entered during his spiritual meditation (Senno me pare e cortesia, "It seems to be wise and courteous," 84, 87); and the passionate praise of divine love (O iubilo del core, "O heartfelt joy," 76, 9; and Sopr'onne lengua amore, "Ineffable love," 91, 92). Misogyny is patently evident in some of his laude (e.g., O femene, guardate, "Women, beware," 8, 45), revealing Jacopone to be a man of his time. However, there is also evidence that he gave some thought to the difficult living conditions of many women in the late thirteenth century (e.g., O vita penosa, "O sorrowful life," 24, 58). One simple yet supremely elegant lauda—Donna del paradiso ("Lady of Paradise," 93, 70)—is important because it represents the pinnacle of Jacopone's poetic art and also because it constitutes a crucial step in the evolution of Italian religious theater: it has four speakers, and many scholars consider it the first religious drama in Italy.
Although critics are not in complete agreement regarding Jacopone's authorship of a number of works in Latin, the following have variously been attributed to him: the famous sequence Stab at mater dolorosa, now a part of the Roman Catholic liturgy; pithy moral sayings known as the Dettk and Trattato {Treatise), whose subject is mystical union with God.
See also Boniface VIII, Pope; Celestine V, Pope; Colonna Family; Italian Literature: Religious; Lauda
V. LOUISE KATAINEN
Contini, Gianfranco, ed. Poeti del Duecento, 2 vols. Milan and Naples: Ricciardi, 1960, Vol. 2, pp. 61-166.
Jacopone da Todi. Le laude, ristampa integrate della prima edizione (1490), ed. Giovanni Papini. Florence: Libreria Editrice Fiorentina, 1923.
—. Le laude secondo la starnpa riorentina del 1490, ed. Giovanni Ferri. Bari: Laterza, 1930.
—. Laudi, Trattato, e Detti, ed. Franca Ageno. Florence: Le Monnier, 1953.
—. Le laude, ed. Luigi Fallacara. Florence: Liberia Editrice Fiorentina, 1955.
—. Laude, ed. Franco Mancini. Bari: Laterza, 1974,
Menesto, Enrico, ed. Le vite antiche di Iacopone da Todi. Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1977.
—, ed. Le prose latine attribuite a Jacopone da Todi. Bologna: Patron, 1979.
Ugolini, Francesco A., ed. Laude di Jacopone da Todi tratte da due manoscritti umbri. Turin: Istituto Editrice Gheroni, 1947.
Jacopone da Todi. The Lauds, trans. Serge Hughes and Elizabeth Hughes. New York: Paulist, 1982.
Underhill, Evelyn. Jacopone da Todi: Poet and Mystic 1228-1306: A Spiritual Biography. London: Dent; and New York: Dutton, 1919. (Reprint, Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries, 1972.)
Ageno, Franca. "Modi stilisdci delle laudi di Iacopone da Todi." La Rassegna d'ltalia, 5, 1946, pp. 20-29.
—. "Motivi francescani nelle laudi di Iacopone da Todi." Lettere Italiane, 2, I960, pp. 180-184.
Apollonio, Mario. Jacopone da Todi e la poetica delle confraternite religiose nella cultura preumanistica. Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1946.
Bettarini, Rosanna. Jacopone e il Laudario Urbinate. Florence: Sansoni, 1969.
Casolini, Fausta. "Iacopone da Todi." Biblioteca Sanctorum, 7, 1966, pp. 617-628.
Convegni del Centra di studi sulla spiritualità medievale: Jacopone e il suo tempo (13-15 ottobre 1957). Todi: Accademia Tudertina, 1959.
DAscoli, Emidio. II misticismo nei canti spirituali di fra Iacopone da Todi. Recanati: n.p., 1925.
Dick, Bradley B. "Jacopone da Todi and the Poetics of Franciscan Spirituality." Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1993.
Furia, Paola. "Sulla lingua delle 'laude' di Iacopone da Todi." Cultura e Scuola, 28(110), 1989, pp. 44-49.
Katainen, V. Louise. "Jacopone da Todi, Poet and Mystic: A Review of the History of the Criticism." Mystics Quarterly, 22, 1996, pp. 46-57.
Lograsso, A. H. "Jacopone da Todi." In New Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: McGraw Hill, 1967.
McGinn, Bernard. The Fbwering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism (1200-1350). The Presence of God: A History of Western Mysticism, 3. New York: Crossroad, 1998.
Menesto, Enrico, ed. Atti del convegno storico iacoponico in occasione del 750 anniversario della nascita di Iacopone da Todi: Todi, 29-30 novembre 1980. Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1981.
Neri, Ferdinando. "La pazzia e la poesia di Jacopone da Todi." In Saggi di Letteratura Italiana, Francese, Inglese. Naples: n.p., 1936.
Parodi, Ernesto Giacomo. "II Giullare di Dio." II Marzocco, 19(26), 1915. (Reprinted in Poeti antichi e moderni: Studi critici. Florence: Sansoni, 1923, pp. 129-141.)
Peck, George T. The Fool of God: Jacopone da Todi. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1980.
Petrocchi, Giorgio. Scrittori religiosi del Duecento. Florence: Sansoni, 1974.
Russo, Luigi. "Jacopone da Todi mistico-poeta." In Studi sul Due e Trecento. Rome: Edizioni Itaiiane, 1946, pp. 31-57.
Sapegno, Natalino. Frate Jacopone. Turin: Baretti, 1926.
Toschi, Paolo. II valore attuale ed eterno del'la poesia di Jacopone. Todi: Res Tudertinae, 1964.
Triplo, Gary. "Mysticism and the Elements of the Spiritual Life in Jacopone da Todi," Ph.D. dissertation, Rutgers University, 1994.
Ungaretti, Giuseppe. "Sulla vita di Iacopone da Todi e la poesia di Iacopone da Todi." In Invenzione della poesia modema: Lezioni brasiliane di letteratura, ed. Paola Montefoschi. Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Itaiiane, 1984, pp. 41-68.
James II of Agagon (James I of Sicily, James the Just, James the Honest; 1264-1327) played a crucial role in the history of the Italian islands, and this aspect of his career will be emphasized here. He was the second son of Peter III of Aragon, under whose will he inherited Sicily (1285), while his elder brother Alfonso became king of Aragon and Valencia and count of Barcelona. James's task was therefore to sustain the Hohenstaufen inheritance of his mother, Constance, during the bitter war of the Sicilian Vespers against the claims of the house of Anjou. His reign in Sicily began with a coronation at Palermo in February 1286, during which he promised to respect the liberties of his subjects. However, he also had to face papal conspiracies to subvert the island, and his offer to become a papal vassal was sternly rejected by Pope Honorius IV, who considered the offer presumptuous and excommunicated James. The pope also rejected peace initiatives supported by Charles II of Naples, a captive in Catalan hands. An attempt by the papacy to capture Augusta in Sicily met with humiliating failure (1287) when the Aragonese trounced the Angevins in the waters off Naples.
James's wish for peace cook a new turn in 1291, when he inherited the Spanish lands of his childless brother Alfonso; the return of Sicily to the Angevins in exchange for another territory became fundamental to the ensuing negotiations. James refused to agree to the terms of Alfonso's will, according to which he would cede Sicily to their youngest brother Frederick, who was merely appointed lieutenant-governor. The Sicilians were displeased by the negotiations to return the island to the Angevins and expressed their displeasure in 1295 by elevating Frederick to the throne. By 1297, James had maneuvered himself into a position where Boniface VIII granted him the title to Sardinia and Corsica in exchange for a promise that James would abandon Sicily. Sardinia—a potentially valuable source of grain, silver, and pastoral products—had been an objective of the Aragonese since at least 1267, when James I of Aragon had tried to secure the island for his second son, James of Majorca. After 1297, James II of Aragon added to his titles that of rex Sardinee et Corsice. However, as a result, James had to join the Guelf-Ange-vin war against his brother in Sicily. He provided some troops for the war, though never on a very large scale. He also led his armies, unsuccessfully, in an assault on eastern Sicily (1298), and thereafter spent some time on the mainland; but he returned to Spain in 1299. His admiral Roger de Lauria did inflict a severe defeat on the Sicilian navy at Cape Orlando in 1299. By now, however, James had clearly secured most of what he really wanted. His letters continued to show affection for his brother Frederick even while they were officially at war. James's attention shifted to Sardinia once the treaty of Caltabellotta (1302) had secured Aragonese rights in Sicily in the medium term.
Sardinia was dominated by Pisan and Genoese interests, and the Pisans' fears of intervention by the Aragonese led to proposals that Pisa should submit to Aragonese rule, in the hope of being able to share the benefits of conquest. These proposals did not come to anything. In 1323, however, James exploited an alliance with the powerful native judges of Arborea to invade Sardinia. The Arboreans were hoping to play off the Aragonese against the Pisans, a declining force on the island since their defeat at Genoese hands at Meloria (1284). It would be more accurate to call this an invasion than a conquest, since the Aragonese soon broke with their Arborean allies, and James began to distribute prizes to those who had supported him in the campaign: Catalan soldiers, Majorcan merchants, and Jewish businessmen from Spain. The Pisans managed to hold onto some lands in the south, but the Genoese vigorously opposed the invasion, and these events marked the beginning of a long, bloody, and bitter rivalry between Genoa and the Catalans in the western Mediterranean. Sardinia (and notionally Corsica, which was not attacked until the next century) was subsumed into the "Privilege of Union" of 1319, according to which, whoever was king of Aragon and Valencia, was also count of Barcelona; unlike Majorca and Sicily, it never acquired a cadet ruler from the house of Barcelona. However, the Catalan settlers soon grew discontented with their lot in the harsh setting of an island that lacked the sophistication of earlier Aragonese conquests such as Sicily and Valencia, and Sard rebellions prompted many to return home to Spain.
James s great strength lay in able diplomacy, which secured him control of the Val d'Aran in the Pyrenees (1312). He was an effective administrator and an enthusiastic letter writer. His role alongside Castile in the conquest of Muslim territories in Spain revealed high ambitions, but they were dashed. The campaign of 1309 against Almeria and Gibraltar did not secure its objectives. Increasingly, James's involvement in Sardinia distracted him from grandiose plans for crusades in Spain and North Africa. His relations with his nephew James II of Majorca, whom he would gladly have dispossessed, were often poor. On the other hand, he had good relations with Islamic rulers in the Levant, gaining recognition from the Mamluks of Egypt and Syria of his protectorate over Christian churches in the east. He was a patron of the mystic and missionary Ramon Llull and of the mystic and physician Arnau de Vilanova. Indeed, James's hypochondria knew no bounds, and it was said that by the end of his life he would not go two paces without a doctor at hand. By the time he died, in 1327, James had proved that his wiliness could produce enormous dividends. Sicily had not, after all, returned to the house of Anjou, and he had gained Sardinia all the same.
See also Angevins Dynasty; Boniface VIII, Pope; Frederick II Hohenstaufen; Honorius IV, Pope; Sicily
David Abulaha
Abulafia, David. The Western Mediterranean Kingdoms, 1200-1500: The Struggle for Dominion. London and New York: Longman, 1997,
Bisson, Thomas N, The Medieval Crown of Aragon: A Short History. Oxford: Clarendon, 1986.
Casula, Francesco Cesare. La Sardegna aragonese, Vol. 1. Sassari: Chiarella, 1990.
McVaugh, Michael R. Medicine before the Plague: Practitioners and Their Patients in the Crown of Aragon, 1285-1345. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Muntaner, Ramon. The Chronicle of Muntaner, trans. Lady Goodenough, 2 vols. London: Hakluyt Society, 1920-192!.
Runciman, Steven. The Sicilian Vespers: A History of the Mediterranean World in the Later Thirteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958.
Jaufre Rudel (c. 1100-c. 1147) was lord (princeps, prince ) of Blaye at the northern shore of the Gironde River in France; he participated in the crusade of 1147, from which he seems not to have returned. Like his overlord and model, William IX, count of Poitiers and duke of Aquitaine, he cultivated literature.
Jaufre's name is associated with two topoi (literary commonplaces) in which the paradox of courtly love is concretized: love from afar and passion for a lady the poet has never actually seen. Six poems ascribed to him in the manuscripts are authentic; a seventh is doubtful. These poems have a mystical background and demonstrate a refined sensuality, especially in their descriptions of hopeless longing, as in the famous Lanquan li jorn son lone en mai ("When the days are long in May, /1 love the sweet song of the birds heard from afar, / and when I have left from there, / I remember a love from afar"). The yearning for love from afar led to a well-known legend of a lady whom Jaufre had never seen, the countess of Tripoli; he is said to have endured a difficult sea voyage in order to see her and to have died in her arms. This legend has inspired writers since the thirteenth century, including Petrarch, Stendhal, Heinrich Heine, and Giosuè Carducci. However, other troubadours, contemporary and later, attacked Jaufre for using mystical elements ordinarily reserved for religious poetry and for being too restrained toward women.
See also Italian Poetry: Lyric
HANS-ERICH KELLER
Jeanroy, Alfred, ed. Les chansons de Jaufre Rudel, 2nd ed. Paris: H. Champion, 1924. (Reprint, 1965.)
Pickens, Rupert T., ed. The Songs of Jaufre Rudel. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1978. (Synoptical edition of all the manuscripts with English translation.)
Summing, Albert, ed. Der Troubadour Jaufre Rudel: Sein Leben und seine Werke. Kiel: Schwerssche Buchhandlung, 1873.
Wolf, George, and Roy Rosenstein, eds. The Poetry of Cercamon and Jaufre Rudel. New York and London: Garland, 1983, pp. 93-173. (Hendrik van der Werf, ed. The Music of Jaufre Rudel pp. 175-202.)
Burger, Andre. "Lanquand li jom son lone en mar. Une chanson d'amour et de croisade." In Mélanges offerts á René Crozet à l'occasion de son soixante-dixième anniversaire. Poitiers: Société d'Études Médiévales, 1966, Vol. 2, pp. 777-780.
Cravayat, Paul. "Les origines du troubadour Jaufré Rudel." Romania, 79, 1950, pp. 166-178.
Lefevre, Yves. "L Amors de Terra Lonhdana dans les chansons de Jaufre Rudel." In Melanges offerts à Rita Lejeune, professeur a I'Universite de Liége. Gembloux: Duculot, 1969, pp. 185-196.
Lejeune, Rita. "La chanson de l' 'amour de loin' de Jaufre Rudel." In Studi in onore de Angela Monteverdi. Modena: Societá Tip. Editrice Modenese, 1959, Vol. 1, pp. 403-443.
Spitzer, Leo. L'amour lointain de Jaufre Rudel et le sens de la poésie des troubadours. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1944. (Revised in Leo Spitzer. Romanische Literaturstudien 1936-1956. Tubingen: M. Niemeyer, 1959, pp. 363-417.)
Saint Jerome (Eusebms Hieronymus, c. 331—30 September 420) was born into a wealthy Christian family at Stridon in Dalmatia. He was the eldest of three children. All the sources reveal that Jerome was a difficult man: he was irascible and held strong opinions that made him quick to participate in any controversy. These characteristics made his life somewhat stormy, but the controversies generated a volume of Christian literature that was profoundly influential.
Jerome apparently received an education in the best classical Roman tradition and went to Rome to continue his studies in the early 340s. He stayed in Rome for ten to twenty years. During that time he became friends with Christians who advocated strict asceticism—notably Rufinus, with whom he later engaged in a bitter dispute. We have little information about Jerome's early years in Rome. However, we know that they ended with one of his perennial conflicts. Jerome had become involved in a scandal about which we have no details but which was enough to make him leave Rome to seek an ascetic life in the east.
In 372, he went to Antioch, where he was well received by Emperor Valens. While Jerome was in Antioch, he had a dream in which Christ accused him of being a disciple of Cicero, not of Christ. This famous dream expressed a conflict that confronted many classically educated Christians. Jerome responded by applying his talents more vigorously to Christian literature, although he later returned to his beloved classics.
A few years later, he retreated to the Syrian desert (near Chalcis) to lead an ascetic life. During this retreat, he kept his extensive library and continued his studies. He learned Hebrew, a skill that would have far-reaching consequences for his biblical scholarship.
Around 377, Jerome discovered that his retreat in the desert had not allowed him to avoid contention. He became involved in a Trinitarian dispute with other monks, and the bitterness of the conflict led him to leave the desert for Antioch and then Constantinople. Finally, c. 382, he returned to Rome and took a central place in Roman Christian society.
Saint Jerome. Hartmann Schedel, Liber cbronicarum (Nuremberg Chronicle). Nuremberg: Anton Koberger, 1493, p. 135r.
In Rome, Jerome worked as secretary to Pope Damasus I. However, Jerome had an even stronger influence within the great Roman families. Several aristocratic widows were drawn to an ascetic life, and Jerome became a spiritual guide to some of them. Two of these women—Marcella and Paula—offered their households as meeting places for other religious women, and Jerome often attended the meetings, teaching scripture and encouraging the women's educational and ascetic pursuits. Paula and one of her daughters, Eustochium, of the noble family of the Aemilii, became Jerome's close companions until their deaths.
Jerome advocated a rigorous asceticism that required extreme fasts, reclusiveness, and a profound regard for chastity. He defended these positions vehemently against all critics. In 383, Helvidius (a figure about whom we have little information) published a pamphlet trying to vindicate marriage in the face of a growing tendency to exalt celibacy; he argued that Mary had lived a full married life after the birth of Jesus. Jerome's tract Against Helvidius was influential in making belief in the perpetual virginity of the Virgin Mary orthodox. A decade later, Jerome again responded to a critic of Christian celibacy—Jovinian, a Roman monk. Jovinian argued that chastity brought no religious advantage over fidelity within marriage and, echoing Helvidius, claimed that Mary had not remained a virgin after Jesus' birth. Jerome responded so vigorously in his tract Against Jovinian that many members of Roman society accused him of being opposed to marriage. Such tracts and Jerome's voluminous correspondence with ascetic men and women form a body of thought that remained a force in monasticism and asceticism throughout the Middle Ages.
Jerome's acerbic style continued to cause him trouble. His satiric comments and his often self-righteous prose offended many, and his uncompromising advocacy of strict asceticism created further problems. One of Paula's daughters, Blesilla, had been widowed when she was twenty years old. Under Jerome's influence, she undertook such severe bodily mortification that she died four months later. Many people in Rome blamed Jerome for her death. Furthermore, Jerome's close friendship with Paula had raised questions of propriety. Therefore, in 385, after the death of his patron Pope Damasus, Jerome left Rome again for the Holy Land. Paula and Eustochium followed him, and the three founded monasteries and settled in Bethlehem. Jerome would not return to Italy, but he continued to influence the west through his correspondence.
In Bethlehem, Jerome completed his most influential works. He prepared a new Latin translation of the Old Testament and the Gospels. For the Old Testament, Jerome translated from Hebrew scriptures instead of from the Greek Septuagint with which the west was most familiar. During his lifetime, he probably received the most criticism for presuming to tamper with the scriptures. Even Augustine wrote to him, asking him to avoid using the Hebrew texts and to work only with the Septuagint. Perhaps fortunately, Jerome did not receive Augustine's cautionary letter, so these two church fathers remained on good terms, and Jerome continued his significant translating. Augustine's concerns reflected the feelings of many Christians of the time about new scriptural translations, yet Jerome's biblical work was his most enduring achievement. His Latin translation formed the major part of the Vulgate version of the Bible that was accepted for centuries.
Jerome also began a series of Biblical commentaries that were very influential. These commentaries relied heavily on an allegorical interpretation of the Bible that owed much to the Alexandrian theologian Origen (c. 185-254), whom Jerome and his friend Rufinus admired. Jerome's debt to Origen led him into yet another controversy, which ended his longtime friendship with Rufinus. In 393, the bishop of Salamis found certain errors in Origen—Origen's view of the Trinity, his belief in the preexistence of souls, and his allegorical interpretations of creation and paradise—and consequently banned Origen's writings. Jerome immediately renounced Origen, to whom, however, Rufinus and an influential companion, Melania the Elder, remained loyal. Jerome and Rufinus were to spend the rest of their lives defending their respective positions. In 400, the Origenist controversy spread to Rome. Jerome translated and circulated John Chrysostom's renewed condemnation of Origenist thought, and Pope Anastasius I confirmed the condemnation. The Romans followed the continuing controversy through a public correspondence between Jerome and Rufinus.
Jerome took up his next major dispute in 411, when Pelagius came to Palestine from Rome. Pelagius's ideas had been condemned in Rome, and Jerome continued a debate that Augustine had begun. Pelagius attacked what he believed was Jerome's deprecation of marriage in Against Jovinian, and he further offended the contentious Jerome by claiming (quite correctly) that Jerome's biblical commentaries had been influenced by Origen. Jerome built on Augustine's anti-Pelagian writings as he articulated the orthodox position on the importance of grace to human will. Jerome's most famous anti-Pelagian work is Dialogue against Pelagius.
In 416, Jeromes monasteries in Bethlehem were attacked and burned. Jerome, Eustochium, and Paula's granddaughter (also named Paula) escaped unharmed. Pelagians were accused of the attack, and the accusation caused the weight of public opinion in the Holy Land to shift away from Pelagius; the heresiarch had to leave Jerusalem. This incident ended Jerome's involvement in the Pelagian controversy. Jerome and Eustochium continued to live in the damaged monastery at Bethlehem.
Jerome's works continued to be read after his death in 421), and as time passed they became even more influential. In the eighth century, Jerome was acclaimed as one of the four doctors of the church (the others were Ambrose, Augustine, and Gregory the Great); Pope Boniface VIII formally ratified the title in 1295. This acclamation meant that the church considered Jerome's writings worthy of study by the faithful.
Jerome was primarily a scholar. He devoted himself to his books and writings; as we have seen, he took both into the desert with him when he sought an eremetic life. During the Renaissance, humanist scholars admired his scholarship and recognized him as a Latin stylist. Erasmus published the first collected edition of Jerome's writings. The many scholarly writings by Jerome, particularly his contribution to the Vulgate Bible, advanced Christian theology and devotion. Jerome was also influential in helping to legitimize monasticism in the west as a central Christian institution. Finally, Jerome's advocacy of asceticism, celibacy, and veneration of the Virgin Mary left an enduring mark on medieval Christianity.
See also Ambrose, Saint; Augustine, Saint; Bible; Biblical Exegesis; Heresy and Religious Dissent; Jovinian; Monasticism; Pelagius and Pelagianism
JOYCE E. SALISBURY
Jerome. Opera. Corpus Christianorum Series Latina, 72-75A, 77— 80. Turnhout: Brepols, 1958- .
Jerome. In A Select Library of Nicene and post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, Series 2(6), ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace. New York: Christian Literature, 1893.
—. Letters of Saint Jerome, trans. Charles Christopher Mierow. Ancient Christian Writers: The Works of the Fathers in Translation, 33. New York: Newman, 1963.
—. The Homilies of Saint Jerome, 2 vols., trans. Marie Liguori Ewald. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1964-1966.
—. Dogmatic and Polemical Works, trans. John N. Hritzu. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1965.
Kelly, J. N. D. Jerome: His Life, Writings, and Controversies. London: Duckworth, 1975. (A particularly complete and objective study.)
Steinmann, Jean. Saint Jerome and His Times, trans. Ronald Mathews. Notre Dame, Ind.: Fides, 1959. (Chronological panegyric of Jerome's life and works; includes excerpts from his writings.)
By the fourth century, the Jewish communities of Italy were undergoing various changes for the worse. After more than 400 years of successful acculturation (despite occasional setbacks) to the relatively tolerant and polytheistic society of Rome, their status and numbers declined progressively during the Christianizing of the Roman empire. Recognized as a religio licita (a legal entity) by pagan Rome, Jews had enjoyed citizenship, as individuals or collectively, since a decree of Caracalla in 212. Jewish prosclytism was still allowed and was even effective in the late empire, especially among noblewomen. Jews interacted in all areas of pre-Christian Roman society from jurisprudence and academics to shipping and manufacturing. The majority of Jews, however, were proletarian and, though found throughout the population centers of Roman Italy, were centered in urban Rome. Their overall number has been estimated at 50,000 during the second century. The pre-Christian rulers beginning with Julius Caesar allowed Jews certain privileges based on traditional Jewish religious laws, and these privileges continued to structure the status of Jews through the Middle Ages. Yet the Jews of Rome were continually reminded of their lost independence: the Arch of Titus (still extant) recorded their exile; and the sacred objects of Jerusalem's destroyed temple, depicted on the arch, reposed in the templum pacis (temple of peace) on the Capitoline hill until the fifth century.
Scholars have reconstructed the legal and social status of the Jews during the fourth and fifth centuries from the Theodosian code, the writings of the church fathers, and Christian councils. The emperors from Constantine I to Theodosius II restricted the rights of Jews as Roman citizens. Constantine began the process of excluding Jews from the military, political, legal, social, and economic life of the empire. His law of the decurions was a burden on wealthy Jews but attests to their economic success in urban centers. Constantius, his Arian successor, prohibited marriage between Jews and Christian female workers in imperial garment factories. Jews were prohibited from circumcising slaves and from proselytizing in general. Although this hostility toward Jews on the part of the Christian emperors was reversed by Julian (361-363), it was reintroduced by Theodosius I (383), who actively promoted Christianity against pagans and Jews. The code of Theodosius II concretized the earlier (generally ad hoc) laws to establish second-class citizenship for Jews. Undoubtedly, many Jews converted to the dominant religion during the century from Constantine to Theodosius II.
The Christianization of the empire was aggressively promoted by the newly developed monastic movement. Pagan temples and synagogues were sanctified as churches, often forcibly, if not destroyed. Theodosius I protested these unlawful actions, particularly in the case of the synagogue of Callinicum (388). However, he did not punish the perpetrators but backed down in the face of a spirited protest from Ambrose of Milan. Therefore, in 393 Theodosius had to repeat his prohibition of the interdiction of Jewish practice and the destruction of their synagogues. Jews were restricted by law from building new synagogues but were generally allowed to repair older buildings.
Church councils in Italy and throughout the empire listed anti-Jewish canons intended to segregate Jews from Christians, These included bans on marriage, sexual relations, eating or bathing together, discussing the scriptures, and even exchanging gifts on holidays. The intent in the fourth century seems to have been to protect a developing Christianity. By the fifth century, the church had become the official religion of the empire, and its canons were treated as law by the emperor. Thus twofold legislation against Jews and Judaism can be traced in the secular md ecclesiastical literature of the fourth and fifth centuries. Judaism, however, remained a religio licita, and the Jews maintained their status as Roman citizens despite the increasing restrictions placed on them.
During the fifth- and sixth-century invasions or Italy, the jews suffered along with their fellow citizens, but under the Arian Goths their situation improved. Breviaries of the Theodosian code, including some of its anti-Jewish laws, were interpreted liberally by both kings (e.g., Theodoric) and popes (e.g., Gelasius); and the Orthodox Christians' animosity toward Jews was muted because the Arian kings used Jews for administrative and economic support. During the Byzantine reconquest of Italy, Jews fought alongside the Goths, especially during Belisari-us's siege of Naples in 536. After the Byzantine reconquest, Justinian further denigrated Judaism in his code and placed restrictions on Jews, including an interdiction against the teaching of rabbinic Judaism. Despite these setbacks, though, Byzantine Italy was to remain the main area of Jewish settlement.
I he Jewish community of Rome, which maintained an unbroken continuity from the days of the republic through the twentieth century, entered a new stage under the papacy. Gregory I (590-604) mentioned the Jews in twenty-eight of his letters, and these formed the basis of later popes' attitudes toward them. Officially, Jews were allowed to fully enjoy their circumscribed status as defined in the Theodosian Code, but no more than that. This phraseology, initiated by the words sicut Judaeis, was to prefix every papal bull to the Jews beginning with Calixtus II (1119-1124). Gregory, as the last bureaucratic representative of the empire in the Latin west, protected the economic and religious rights of the Jews in Italy (especially in Rome, Naples, and Ravenna, but also in Sicily) and southern France against forced conversion and the destruction of their synagogues, while permitting them some leeway in the slave trade (the latter out of necessity, since the papal estates needed slaves). At the same time, he authorized his overseers in Sicily to bribe poor Jews to convert, arguing that the children of the converts would become good Christians. This policy gave effect to Augustine's balanced treatment in his homiletic commentary on Psalm 59:12: "Slay them [the Jews] not, lest My people [the Christians] forget."
Inscriptions by Jews in Greek, Latin, and (increasingly from the seventh century on) Hebrew attest to their presence in southern Italy, especially in Venosa. An eleventh-century Hebrew chronicle in rhymed prose known as Megillat ahimaaz provides a folklorish narrative of a prominent Jewish family in Oria through the ninth and tenth centuries. Written in the contemporary style of hagiography and emphasizing the mystical and the miraculous, it is our primary source for tracing Jewish fortunes in Byzantine Italy as well as for outlining the beginnings of a renaissance of Hebrew literature and poetry. Subsequent research in the rich liturgical collections emphasized the continuity of Palestinian poetic traditions in southern Italy and the role of southern Italy as an intermediary in the further development of these traditions in the German Rhineland from the eleventh century on. The classical piyyut of Palestine was codified, so to speak, during the tenth and eleventh centuries and was succeeded by the new poetry of Spanish Jewry's golden age. Alongside this Sephardic tradition the new Italian poetry of the thirteenth century was absorbed into Hebrew, producing a mellifluous Italian legacy to Renaissance Jewry.
Historiography reached its high point with the appearance of Sepher yosippon, an extraordinary history of ancient Israel derived from the Vulgate and from Josephus, and written in a superlative mix of biblical and later Hebrew. The anonymous author interweaves the legendary history of Rome with biblical and postbiblical events down to the destruction of the Second Temple and Jerusalem in 68 (according to medieval Italian reckoning). Fragments of the book of Maccabees and a chronicle of ancient rulers to 962 were also produced. In medicine, astronomy, and mysticism, the works of Shabbetai Donnolo of Oria rank as extremely important, not least for their continued use by Jews and Christians throughout the medieval period. Valuable collections of rabbinic texts also make their appearance. In the eleventh century, a Hebrew rendering of Pseudo-Callisthenes's Deeds of Alexander attests to an interest in general culture. This Hebrew renaissance is characterized by a twelfth-century pun on Isaiah (2:3) substituting two southern Italian cities for Zion and Jerusalem—"The teaching (of Moses) came forth from Bari and the word of the Lord from Otranto."
From another perspective, this renaissance witnessed the migration of Jews (e.g., Kalonymos ben Kalonymos of Lucca) to the Rhineland at the invitation of the Saxon emperors. The immigrant Jews were to found, or reinforce, communities in Speyer, Worms, and Mainz that flourished until their destruction during the First Crusade. At the same time, there were vicissitudes under the Macedonian house in Constantinople: forced conversions by Basil I (873—874) and Romanus I Lecapenus (932-936) and inevitable disruptions during the Italian wars of Alexander and Constantine Porphyrogenitus (Bowman 1986, 54-57) and during the Muslim conquest of Sicily, Apulia, and Calabria. (Shabbetai Donnolo, for example, was enslaved by an Arab raiding party in 925, an experience that allowed him to study medicine and astronomy from Arabic as well as Greek sources.) Islam had a generally more tolerant attitude toward Jews; as a result, their condition improved during the tenth and eleventh centuries despite the imposition of land (kharadj) and poll (jizya) taxes. Sicilian Jews were to maintain an Arabic culture well after the Christian reconquest. The destruction of Bari in 1071 signaled the beginning of a shift of Jewish centers to Rome and later, at the end of the thirteenth century, to northern Italy.
Under the qualified protection of the popes, the Jews of Rome flourished from the eleventh century on, producing important medical, financial, and literary figures. Nathan ben Yehiel min ha-anavim created his Arukh, an encyclopedia of postbiblical Hebrew that is still valuable. Later generations of the Anav family produced important scholars in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Nathan's nephew, Yehiel Anav, was a financial administrator for Pope Alexander III (r. 1159-1185). A scion of an eleventh-century convert to Christianity (Benedict, or Baruch, of Rome) became the popular antipope Anacletus II (Pietro Pier-leoni, r. 1130-1138); and Anacletus's family, the Pierleoni, remained prominent in Roman politics and finances. Two earlier Pierleoni popes were Gregory VI and Gregory VII. Menahem ben Solomon produced an important homiletic commentary on Psalms in 1139 and concretized the liturgy of the so-called Roman or Italian prayer book. Many papal physicians through the Renaissance were Jews. By virtue of their presence at the papal court, the Jewish community of Rome—numbering about 1,000 and centered in Trastevere—provided an intercessionary voice for Jews of Roman Catholic and other Christian lands.
In the thirteenth century, the papacy became more aggressive, and Gregory I's ambivalent policy toward the Jews was sharpened. Innocent III, through the Fourth Lateran Council, imposed a yellow star on Jews (as well as on Muslims). The newly established Inquisition was invited by the Jews of Provence to consider whether the writings of the renowned philosopher and religious thinker Maimonides were blasphemous; the inquisitors went on to condemn the Talmud (the codified corpus of rabbinic commentary on the Bible), which would be periodically burned over the next few centuries. The recently established Dominican order began to study Jewish religious writings and, with the aid of apostates, engaged Jews in public disputations, especially in Spain. On the other hand, the popes vigorously, if ineffectually, condemned popular hysteria regarding Jews, trying to discredit accusations that the Jews practiced blood libels (stealing Christian children to use their blood for making unleavened bread at Passover), poisoned wells, and desecrated the host wafer (the eucharistic bread). Popes also challenged the Holy Roman emperors on the question of jurisdiction over the Jews. This controversy may be seen as part of the larger investiture controversy; it also had important economic ramifications, since jurisdiction involved taxation as well as protection. The Hohenstaufen emperors, for their part, redefined the Jews in their realm as servi camerae and placed Jews under the protection of the king's peace along with ecclesiastics and women.
Jewish life in southern Italy and Sicily received a mortal blow in 1290 with the forced conversion of its still Arabized communities. Presumably, the victims also included the colony of Jews whom Roger II had kidnapped from Corinth in 1172 and brought to Palermo to create a silk industry. This persecution ended the school of philosophers and translators that had flourished during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
The center of Jewish life in Italy had shifted permanently to northern Italy by the end of the thirteenth century, although Italian Jewry would always have a voice in Rome. The developing economies of the northern cities attracted Jews whose value to the economy eventually overcame barriers against their settlement. Jews were banned by law from politics and were excluded from competitive manufacturing by the Christian guild system. Their public economy therefore developed in the area of essential services: medicine (prohibited by church canon), loans (challenged as usury by the church), general retail merchandising, and secondhand clothing. Indeed, most of the Jews were involved in the garment industry, which involved both domestic use and a minimal trade. The Jewish community was also served by its own ritual slaughterers, tanners, religious functionaries, teachers, and judges. Loan banks were the major source of income for the small percentage of wealthy Jews. Jewish pawnshops were a familiar institution in most Italian cities, welcomed by the mass of poor Christians who could not possibly afford the exorbitant rates charged by the Lombard banking houses. During the fourteenth century, Jews were periodically expelled, but popular demand always brought them back. Jews began to gain privileges, protection, and occasionally citizenship from the new city governments: in Urbino (beginning of the fourteenth century), Rome (1310), Naples (1311), Montefiascone (1312), Mantua (1386), Milan (1387), etc.
Because of their ubiquity, Jews were seen both positively and negatively in Italian culture, depending on the prejudice of the observer. One factor exacerbating the negative image was an influx of French, German, and Spanish Jews who had been persecuted in or expelled from their homelands. The immigrants established their own separate congregations and synagogues, but there was persistent tension regarding religious and communal matters. More positively, Jews participated in the development of local languages; an Italian translation of Hebrew poems is extant, as are Hebrew-Italian word lists. Apparently, the weekly reading of the Pentateuch in some synagogues was in Italian. Immanuel ben Solomon ha-Romi (c. 1270-c. 1330) composed poems in Italian and sonnets in Hebrew and produced a Hebrew version (Topbet ve-eden) of Dante's Inferno. The tradition of religious and secular poetry continued to flourish, as did talmudic studies, especially in Rome, where great efforts resulted in a Hebrew translation of the nearly lost commentary to the Mishnah of Maimonides. Philosophers, too, were prominent among scholars. For example, Judah ben Moses, known as Judah Romano, was part of the circle of translators of King Robert of Naples, along with Kalonymos ben Kalonymos and Shemaryah Ikriti, an erstwhile Roman. There was fierce competition between pro-Maimonidean and anti-Maimonidean factions; this was to last for centuries and included the newly developing kab-balistic (mystical) trends emanating from Spain.
1 he last generation of the fourteenth century saw a decline in Jewish scholarship. Plagued by natural disasters and economic difficulties and burdened with extraordinary taxes, the Italian communities of Rome, Bologna, Padua, and Ferrara founded a committee of collective relief in 1416. Italian Jewry, a composite of French, German, Spanish, and Italian congregations with a rich cultural background, was now organized to participate fully in the Renaissance.
Most of the scholarship on Italian Jewry is in either Italian or Hebrew (see Encyclopedia Judaica, 9, 1146). The works listed in the bibliography below are, however, limited to English publications and translations, with the exception of Milano (1954). The Jewish Encyclopedia (1901), Universal Jewish Encyclopedia (1939), and Encyclopedia Judaica (1971) are recommended for general and specific subjects.
See also Anacletus II, Antipope; Belisarius; Calixtus 11, Popes; Dominican Order; Gelasius, Pope; Gregory I, Pope; Gregory VI, Pope; Gregory VII, Pope; Immanuel Romano; Innocent III, Pope; Investitute Controversy; Italian-Hebrew Literature; Justinian I; Roger II; Rome; Theodoric
STEVEN B. BOWMAN
Benjamin of Tudela. Sefer Masa'ot, trans, and with commentary Marcus Nathan Adler as The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela. London: Henry Frowde, 1907. (Reprinted from Jewish Quarterly Review, old series, 16-18, 1904-1906.)
The Church and the Jews in the Thirteenth Century: A Study of Their Relations during the Years 1198-1254, Based on the Papal Letters and the Conciliar Decrees of the Period, ed.. and trans. Solomon Grayze). Philadelphia, Pa.: Dropsie College for Hebrew and Cognate Learning, 1933.
The Jews in Roman Imperial Legislation, ed. and trans. Amnon Linder. Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1987.
Reichert, Victor, trans. The Mahberot: Fourteenth canto, The Inheritance/Immanuel of Rome. Cincinnati, Ohio, 1982.
Salzman, Marcus. The Chronicle of Ahimaaz. New York: Columbia University Press, 1924.
Schwartz, Leo, ed. Memoirs of My People through a Thousand Years. Philadelphia, Pa.: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1943.
Tophet and Eden (Hell and Paradise) in Imitation of Dante's Inferno and Paradiso, from the Hebrew of Immanuel ben Solomon Romi, Dante's Contemporary, trans. Hermann Gollancz. London: University of London Press, 1921.
Bacnrach, Bernard a. Early Medieval Jewish i policy in Western Europe. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977.
Baron, Salo. The Jewish Community: Its History and Structure to the American Revolution, 3 vols. Philadelphia, Pa.: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1942.
—. A Social and Religious History of the Jews, 2nd ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 1957-1973, Vols. 3-15.
Bowman, Steven. "A Survey of Recent Scholarship in Hebrew on Byzantine Subjects (1970-1984)." Byzantine Studies/Etudes Byzantines, 13, 1986, pp. 41-68.
Finkelstein, Louis. Jewish Self-Govemment in the Middle Ages. New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1924.
Fortis, Umberto. Jews and Synagogues: Venice, Florence, Rome, Leghorn—A Practical Guide. Venice, 1973.
Friedenwald, Harry. "Jewish Physicians in Italy: Their Relation to the Papal and Italian States." Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society, 27, 1922, pp. 551-612. (Reprints: In Harry Friedenwald. The Jews and Medicine: Essays, Vol. 2. Baltimore, Md.: Publications of the Institute of the History of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University, 1944. Also: New York: Ktav, 1967.)
Gowen, Herbert H. "Immanuel of Rome and the Jew as Middleman in Literature." Sewanee Review, 32, 1925, pp. 266-283.
Gregorovius, Ferdinand. The Ghetto and the Jews of Rome, trans. Moses Hadas. New York: Schocken, 1948.
Italia Judaica: Atti del I Convegno Intemazionale Bari 18-22 maggio 1981. Rome: Ministero per i Beni Vulturali e Ambientali, 1983. (See especially Moshe Gil, "The Jews in Sicily under Muslim Rule in the Light of the Geniza Documents," pp. 87-134;
Ezra Fleischer, "Hebrew Liturgical Poetry in Italy: Remarks Concerning Its Emergence and Characteristics," pp. 415-426;
Isidore Twersky, "The Contribution of kalian Sages to Rabbinical Literature," pp. 383-400.
See also English summaries of other valuable papers in this volume and a subsequent congress held in Genoa 10-15 June 1984. Rome: Ufficio Centrale per i Beni Archivistici, Divisione Studi e Pubblicazioni and Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, 1986. The papers are a valuable guide to research on Italian Jewry.)
Katz, Shmuel. "Pope Gregory the Great and the Jews." Jewish Quarterly Review, n.s. 24, 1933, pp. 113-136.
Leon, Harry J. "The Jews of Venusia." Jewish Quarterly Review, n.s. 44, 1953-1954, pp. 267-284.
—. The Jews of Ancient Rome. Philadelphia, Pa.: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1960.
Leveen, J. "A Pharmaceutical Fragment of the Tenth Century in Hebrew by Shabbethai Donnolo." Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, 21, 1921-1928, pp. 1397-1399.
Lewis, Harry. "Immanuel of Rome." Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research, 6, 1935, pp. 277-308.
Lieber, Elinor. "Asafs Book of Medicines'. A Hebrew Encyclopedia of Greek and Jewish Medicine, Possibly Compiled in Byzantium on an Indian Model." Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 38, 1984, pp. 233-249.
Mann, Vivian B„ ed. Gardens and Ghettos: The Art of Jewish Life in Italy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.
Marcus, J. "Studies in the Chronicle of Ahima'atz." Proceedings of the Academy of Jewish Research, 5, 1933-1934, pp. 85-91.
Milano, Attilio. Bibliotheca Historica Itab-Judaica. Florence: Sansoni, 1954. With supplement, 1954-1963, Florence: Sansoni, 1964;
and addenda in La Rassegna Mensile di Israel, November 1966.
Neubauer, Adolph. "The Early Settlement of the Jews in Southern Italy." Jewish Quarterly Review, old series, 4, 1892, pp. 606-615.
Parkes, James. The Conflict of the Church and the Synagogue: A Study in the Origins of Antisemitism. London: Soncino, 1934.
Rabinowitz, Jacob J. "Jewish and Lombard Law ."Journal of Jewish Studies, 12, 1950, pp. 299-328.
—. Jewish Law: Its Influences on the Development of Legal Institutions. New York: Bloch, 1956.
Roth, Cecil. Venice. Philadelphia, Pa.: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1930.
—. The History of the Jews of Italy. Philadelphia, Pa.: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1946.
—. Jews in the Renaissance. Philadelphia, Pa.: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1959.
—, ed. The Dark Ages: Jews in Christian Europe, 711-1096. World History of the Jewish People. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1966. (See especially Bernard Blumenkranz, "The Roman Church and the Jews," pp. 69-99;
Cecil Roth, "Italy," pp. 100-121;
H. J. Zimmels, "Scholars and Scholarship in Byzantium and Italy," pp. 175-188;
J. Schirmann, "The Beginnings of Hebrew Poetry in Italy," pp. 249—266.)
Sacerdote, Gustavo. "The Ninth Mehabberoth of Emanuele da Roma and the Tresor of Peire de Corbiac." Jewish Quarterly Review, old series, 7 (London), 1895, pp. 711-728.
Schein, Sylvia. "An Unknown Messianic Movement in Thirteenth Century Italy." Italia, 5, 1985, pp. 98-103.
Sharf, Andrew. The Universe of Shabbetai Donnolo. New York: Ktav, 1976.
Shulvass, Moses A. The Jews in the World of the Renaissance, trans. Elvin I. Kose. Leiden: Brill, 1973.
Starr, Joshua. The Jews in the Byzantine Empire, 641-1204. Athens: Verlag der "Byzantinisch-Neugriechischen Jahrbucher," 1939.
—. "Johanna II and the Jews." Jewish Quarterly Review, n.s. 31, 1940, pp. 67-78.
—. "The Mass Conversion of the Jews in Southern Italy 1290-1293." Speculum, 21, 1946, pp. 203-211.
Synan, Edward A. The Popes and the Jews in the Middle Ages. New York: Macmillan, 1965.
Toaff, Ariel. The Jews in Medieval Assist: 1305—1487: A Social and Economic History of a Small Jewish Community in Italy. Florence: Olschki, 1979.
Vogelstein, Hermann. Rome, trans. Moses Hadas. Philadelphia, Pa.: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1940.
Joachim of Fiore (Flora, Floris; c. 1135-30 March 1202) was a biblical exegete and the founder of the order of San Giovanni in Fiore, commonly known as the Florensians. Joachim's attempts to explain the patterns of Christian history gained him a reputation as a prophet in the thirteenth century, as well as a following among the Spiritual faction of the Franciscan order. His reputation as a prophet made his thought very influential in the later Middle Ages, but some people considered him a heretic because of his Trinitarian doctrine and his adoption by the Spirituals.
Joachim was bom in Celico, near Cosenza in Calabria. As a young man, he trained to be a notary like his father, and for some years he served in this capacity at the Corte del Giustiziere in Calabria and later at the court of King William II of Sicily in Salerno. Around 1167, a serious illness led Joachim to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, where he decided to become a monk. On his return to Calabria, Joachim retired first to the Cistercian monastery of Sambucina and then to the monastery of Corazzo, near Catanzaro. There he professed and was ordained in 1168. Sometime before 1177, he was elected abbot. Joachim found administration arduous; and when negotiations to have Corazzo officially accepted by the Cistercian order led to a two-year residence at the Cistercian monastery of Casamari (1182-1184), he took advantage of the respite to begin two major works of biblical exegesis. These were Liber de concordia Novi ac Veteris Testarnenti (Book on the Concordance between the Old and the New Testaments) and Expositio in Apocalypsim (Exposition of the Apocalypse). Now convinced that exegesis was his real calling, Joachim turned to the papacy to obtain a release from administration. When Pope Lucius III took up residence in nearby Veroli during 1184, Joachim obtained Lucius's permission to devote himself to writing for a year and a half. He received a renewal of this permission from Pope Urban III in 1186, and another from Pope Clement III in 1188. Clement also seems to have approved Joachim's resignation as abbot of Corazzo, which was now fully incorporated into the Cistercian order.
In the mid-1180s, Joachim became dissatisfied with the Cistercian life. He moved to a hermitage at Petraiata, and then to San Giovanni in Fiore, in the Sila mountains. Meanwhile, his reputation as a prophet was growing. In 1191, he was summoned to an interview with Richard I Coeur de Lion (Lion-Heart) at Messina; later that year he was summoned to another, with Emperor Henry VI near Naples. The Cistercian leadership did not approve of Joachim's activities, however. In 1192, the order's chapter general declared that if Joachim and his companion Ranier of Ponza did not return to Corazzo by the feast of John the Baptist in 1193, they would be considered fugitives. Joachim ignored the deadline and instead founded his own order at Fiore. Again he turned to the papacy to legitimize his actions. The rule of Joachim's new order, based on that of the Cistercians but more austere, was approved by Pope Celestine III in 1196. Joa-chim also received a charter for his monastery and an annual stipend from Emperor Henry VI. The new order spread rapidly, establishing thirty-eight houses in Calabria and twenty-two elsewhere within the first few decades of its existence. But its growth stopped in the mid-thirteenth century, apparently because of competition from the Mendicant orders. It was united with the Cistercian order in 1570.
Joachim died at the Florensian monastery of San Martino di Giove near Canaie. In 1240, his body was translated to San Giovanni, where it became the center of a local cult.
Joachim's fame rests on his novel method of scriptural exegesis. He sought understanding of what he called concordia—harmony between the Old Testament and the New Testament, manifested in parallel events. Joachim described this as "a similarity of equal proportion between the Old and the New Testaments, equal, I say, as to number, not as to dignity." The idea of concordia had no real precedent in earlier Christian exegesis. Typology had been used to argue that certain Old Testament events and figures foreshadowed Christ and that Christ was therefore the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies, but Joachim's concordia presumed a steady parallel between Old Testament and Christian history. Moreover, Joachim treated Christ as one of many parallel figures and events in scriptural concordia, whereas previous exegetes had seen Christ as the only figure foreshadowed in the Old Testament. It has been suggested that Joachim's concordia derived from a desire, common in the twelfth century, to find meaning and pattern in human history. In this sense, Joachim's exegesis was very much in the spirit of his time.
Joachim believed that three visions had given him the spiritual insight to perceive scriptural concordia. His study of concordia revealed, in turn, the patterns of history. These were overlapping numerical sequences of events, arranged mainly in twos, threes, and sevens. The two most important were the synchronous diffinitio alpha and diffinitio omega. Diffinitio alpha divided history into three status or states, corresponding to the persons of the Trinity and symbolizing the spiritual progress of humanity. Diffinitio omega was arranged in two stages corresponding to the Old Testament on the one hand, and the New Testament, the Christian era, and a final period of special spiritual understanding on the other. This final period would be the completion of the Christian era. The first status of diffinitio alpha was marked by an order of married people and the second by an order of clerics; the third would be characterized by an order of monks. This third status would be a time of joyous contemplation and understanding of the scriptures, in which the church would become truly spiritual. Joachim thought that the second status was gradually giving way to the third in his own time. On the basis of the pattern of twos that he saw throughout the Old and New Testaments, he predicted that the church would be led into the new status by two new orders of spiritual men: one an order of hermits, the other of preachers. These orders would not end the Roman church but would, rather, lead its transition to a higher quality of spiritual life. There would be a period of peace before the last great persecution preceding the last judgment.
Joachim subdivided the stages of historical diffinitiones into lesser overlapping patterns, also numerically based. For example, the first status featured twelve patriarchs who founded twelve tribes, the second had twelve apostles who founded twelve churches, and the third had twelve great religious who founded twelve monasteries. Although each set of twelve dominated its own status, it also had roots in the previous status, thus producing the overlap. By far the most important of these lesser sequences was a pattern of sevens arranging the Old and New Testament stages of history. There was some precedent for this among previous exegetes, who had often divided history into seven periods. But whereas traditional commentators such as Augustine envisioned the seventh period as a time of peace beyond the end of history, Joachim placed his seventh age before the last judgment. He considered this seventh age to be concomitant with the third status. Joachim was also original in imposing a pattern of concordant double sevens subdividing the seven ages: one a sequence of seven seals that appeared during the second and third ages, the other a sequence of seven openings of the seals that occurred in the sixth age. Joachim believed that he was living at the end of the sixth age and near the end of the fifth seal-opening, so he speculated a good deal on the identity of contemporaries who might figure in the transition to the next age. This established an important precedent for his followers.
Joachim's Trinitarian concerns led him to question Peter Lombard's commonly accepted description of the unity of the Trinity, vera et propria, suggesting instead collectiva et similitudi-naria. This formulation was condemned as tritheistic at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. The council's failure to comment on the rest of Joachim's doctrines created uncertainty about his orthodoxy, and this uncertainty was never really resolved. While many were drawn to Joachim's vision of a coming spiritual age, others remained suspicious of his doctrine. In the mid-thirteenth century and the early fourteenth, Joachim's reputation suffered further blows. His predictions regarding the two orders of spiritual men who would herald the new status attracted the interest of the newly founded Dominicans and Franciscans. Soon radical Franciscans had woven their own apocalyptic notions around Joachim's thought. Gerard of Borgo San Donnino's Eternal Evangel was condemned as heretical in 1255. The doctrines of the Spiritual Franciscans met a similar fate in the 1310s. Both were deeply rooted in Joachim's teachings, and their censure increased doubts about his orthodoxy.
Joachim's double reputation as a prophet and a heretic continued into modern times. Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and the sixteenth-century historian Cesare Baronius all considered him heterodox; Dante, Boccaccio, and the usually skeptical Bol-landist Daniel Papebroch considered him a prophet. Early Protestant writers were similarly divided. During the Enlightenment, attacks on the notion of prophecy drastically diminished Joachim's influence, but in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it could still be found in figures as diverse as Auguste Comte and Carl Jung.
See also Dante Alighieri; Franciscan Order; Henry VI Hohenstaufen; Heresy and Religious Dissent; Italian Literature: Religious
THOMAS TURLEY
Joachim of Fiore. Liber de concordia Novi ac Veteris Testamenti, ed. E. Randolph Daniel. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 73(8). Philadelphia, Pa.: American Philosophical Society, 1983.
—. Enchiridion super Apocalypsim, ed. Edward Kilian Burger. Studies and Texts, 78. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1986.
Bloomfieid, Morton. "Recent Scholarship on Joachim of Flora and His Influence." In Prophecy and Millenarianism: Essays in Honour of Marjorie Reeves, ed. Ann Williams. Essex: Longman, 1980, pp. 23-52.
Daniel, E. Randolph. "The Double Procession of the Holy Spirit in Joachim of Fiore's Understanding of History." Speculum, 55, 1980, pp. 469-483.
Emmerson, Richard K., and Bernard McGinn, eds. The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992.
Lee, Harold, Marjorie Reeves, and Giulio Silano. Western Mediterranean Prophecy: The School of Joachim of Fiore and the Fourteenth-Century Breviloquium. Studies and Texts, 88. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1989.
McGinn, Bernard. The Calabrian Abbot: Joachim of Fiore in the History of Western Thought. New York: Macmillan, 1985.
Potesta, Gian Luca, ed. IIprofetismo gioachimita tra Quattrocento e Cinquecento: Atti del III Congresso Internazionale di Studi Gioachimiti, S. Giovanni in Fiore, 17-21 settembre 1989. Genoa: Marietti, 1991.
Reeves, Marjorie. The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages: A Study in foachimism. Oxford: Clarendon, 1969.
—. Joachim of Fiore and the Prophetic Future. London: SPCK, 1976.
—. "The Originality and Influence of Joachim of Fiore." Traditio, 36, 1980, pp. 269-316.
Reeves, Marjorie, and Beatrice Hirsch-Reich. The Figurae of Joachim of Fiore. Oxford-Warburg Studies. Oxford: Clarendon, 1972.
West, Delno C„ ed. Joachim of Fiore in Christian Thought: Essays on the Influence of the Calabrian Abbot, 2 vols. New York: Burt Franklin, 1974.
West, Delno C„ and Sandra Zimdars-Swartz. Joachim of Fiore: A Study in Spiritual Perception and History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983.
Joanna (Joan, Joanne, Giovanna; 1326-1382, r. 1343-1382) was queen regnant of Naples. She was the elder daughter of Robert the Wise, king of Naples, and was married four times: to Andrew of Hungary (in 1340), Louis of Taranto (1347), James of Majorca (1362), and Otto of Brunswick (1375). She had no surviving issue.
In 1345, Andrew was assassinated. His death provoked an invasion by his brother, Louis the Great of Hungary, who accused Joanna of complicity in Andrew's murder and claimed the throne for himself (as the grandson of Charles Martel, firstborn son of Charles I of Anjou). Louis entered Naples in 1348. Few Italians opposed him, and some, including Cola di Rienzo, were actively supportive. (Cola, however, fell before the Hungarian triumph, his defeat having been partly engineered by Joanna's supporters.) Joanna, seeking allies, married one cousin, Louis of Taranto, secretly and without papal sanction (she and Louis were related closely enough to require a dispensation in order to marry); and appointed another cousin, Charles of Du-razzo (d. 1348), guardian of her son, though Charles played an equivocal role in the invasion. As the Hungarians approached, Joanna and Louis fled to their overlord, Pope Clement VI, at Avignon. To recover his support after their marriage and the murder of Andrew and to obtain money with which to renew the fight against Hungary, Joanna sold Avignon to Clement for 80,000 florins, considerably less than its worth. Meanwhile, the black death broke out, and the Hungarians, much reduced in number, returned home, taking as hostage Joanna's son (who died in Hungary) but leaving Joanna and Louis of Taranto in possession of the Regno. The Hungarians returned later, but never successfully. By 1352, Louis of Taranto, with help from the papacy, was recognized in Naples and had also established his rights against his wife's claims to sovereignty. Organized by the grand seneschal, Niccoló Acciaiuoli, the Regno experienced a brief period of recovery before war was renewed. The war was undertaken again partly in an unsuccessful attempt to reunite Sicily (which had been under Aragonese rule since 1285) with the Regno, and partly because of renewed rebellion by the Durazzo branch of the Angevins, who resented the dominance of Louis of Taranto.
Louis died in 1362. Joanna's third husband, James of Majorca, was given no authority in government. James—who had recently escaped from fourteen years' imprisonment in an iron cage by his uncle, Peter IV of Aragon—was half mad and periodically violent. He soon returned to Spain, and from 1362 to 1375 Joanna ruled alone. Despite minor rebellions initiated by her sister Maria, who was the widow of Charles of Durazzo, and by Maria's sons, the realm achieved a measure of peace. In 1368-1370, Urban V briefly returned to Italy from Avignon, with Joanna's protection.
In 1378, Urban VI, formerly archbishop of Bari and Joanna's subject, became pope and quickly indicated his intention to revive and support the Hungarian claim to Naples. Accordingly, when a rival pope, Clement VII, was elected, Joanna took Clement's part; and her next husband, Otto of Brunswick, proved entirely willing to persecute Urban's followers. Urban reacted by excommunicating Joanna and conceding her throne to Louis of Hungary. Charles III of Durazzo (nephew of Maria and the late elder Charles) encouraged Louis, so, although Charles III was her nearest relative, Joanna excluded him from the succession. Instead, with Clement VII's approval, she bequeathed all her rights to Louis of Anjou, eldest brother of Charles V of France (in January 1380). In 1381, Urban, despairing of the Hungarians, crowned Charles III of Durazzo king of Naples. In the ensuing civil war, Charles was successful: in August Otto was taken prisoner and Joanna surrendered. She died in prison, probably stifled to death on Charles's orders, in July 1382, while her adopted heir, Louis of Anjou, was coming over the Alps to her rescue.
Joanna's lament "I regret only one thing, that the Almighty did not make me a man" has some justification. Urban VI's main complaint against her was apparently that he disliked queens regnant. She had some devotees, notably Giovanni Boc-caccio, but she was more usually scorned as immoral and incompetent. Still, she did her best work when she ruled alone: although her reign was a disaster, the problems were not all of her making.
See also Acciaiuoli Family; Angevin Dynasty; Black Death; Boccaccio, Giovanni; Charles I of Anjou; Clement VI, Pope; Cola di Rienzo; Robert of Anjou; Urban V, Pope; Urban VI, Pope
CAROLA M. SMALL
Caracciolo, Tristan, Vita Joannae primae Neapolis regina, ed. Giuseppe Paladino. Rerum ItaJicarum Scriptores, 22. Bologna: Zanichelli, 1933, pp. 1-18.
Dominicus de Gravina. Cronicon de rebus in Apulia gestis, 1333-1350, ed. Albano Sorbelli. Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, 12. Città di Castello: Tipi dell'Editore S. Lapi, 1903.
Villani, Matteo. Cronica, 5 vols., ed. Ignazio Moutier. Florence: Magheri, 1926.
De Feo, Italo. Giovanna d'Angiò, regina di Napoli. Naples: F. Fiorentino, 1968.
Leonard, Emile G. Histoire de Jeanne Ire, reine de Naples, comtesse de Provence (1343-1382), 3 vols. Paris: Picard, 1932-1936.
—. Les Angevins de Naples. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1954.
Louis the Great, King of Hungary and Poland, ed. S. B. Vardy, Geza Grosschmid, and Leslie. S. Domonkos. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.
Johannes Andreae (d. 1348) was the one layman among the great canonists of the Middle Ages. He studied in Bologna with Guido de Baysio, the archdeacon, receiving his doctorate c. 1298. Pope Boniface VIII issued the decretal collection Liber sextus decretalium in 1298, and about three years later Johannes composed the ordinary gloss to it. Johannes taught most often at the University of Bologna, and he achieved prominence in the affairs of that city. Shortly after 1317, when Pope John XXII reissued the Constitutiones clementinae (Clementines) of his predecessor, Clement V, Johannes composed a commentary on that collection; this commentary, too, achieved the status of an ordinary gloss, found with most copies of the compilation. Johannes also composed a Novella, or new commentary, on the Decretals of Gregory IX. Late in life, he published a Novella on Liber sextus, supplementing his earlier gloss; and he left notes for an update of his commentary on the Clementines. When he died of the plague, Johannes also left behind numerous opinions, disputations, and procedural works, as well as later commentaries on decretal collections, especially Liber sextus and the Clementines, merely adding to his work. The tale that he had a beautiful daughter, Novella, who lectured in his absence, is doubted by scholars.
See also Boniface VIII, Pope; Canon Law Collections and Ordinary Glosses; Clement V, Pope; John XXII, Pope
THOMAS IZBICKI
Brundage, James. Medieval Canon Law. London: Longman, 1995.
Kuttner, Stephan. "Johannes Andreae and His Novella on the Decretals." Jurist, 24, 1964, pp. 393-408.
—. "The Apostillae of Johannes Andreae on the Clementines." In Études d'bistoire du droit canonique dédiés á Gabriel Le Bras, Vol. 1. Paris: Sirey, 1965, pp. 195-201.
Pope John VIII (d. 16 December 882, r. 872-882) was chosen following the death of Pope Hadrian II. John had long been a member of the Roman clergy and was an adviser to Pope Nicholas I. As pope, John struggled to maintain the integrity of the papacy through a period of mounting turbulence. His immediate problems were military, diplomatic, and ecclesiastical. Saracen raids had become a growing menace to many areas of Italy, compelling him to build fortifications around Roman churches outside the walls. More broadly, he cultivated the Carolingian rulers Louis II and Charles the Bald in hope of securing their military aid. This brought him into complicated controversies with rival Carolingian princes that did not end until John's coronation of Charles the Fat as emperor (881); and in any event military support from the Franks did not prove forthcoming.
Hoping to obtain support instead from Byzantium, John sought to resolve a long dispute between Rome and Constantinople over the controversial patriarchate of Photius. John was willing to concede recognition of the restoration of Photius by the new emperor, Basil I, but the outcome was complicated by the issue of ecclesiastical jurisdiction over Bulgaria, a Slavic kingdom. Bulgaria had turned from Constantinople to Rome in order to receive Christianization, and Bishop Formosus, a bitter rival of Pope John, had successfully pursued papal missionary work there. Then, disillusioned in turn with their Roman connections, the Bulgarians suddenly turned back to Constantinople. In 879, there was a meeting of the council in Constantinople; John had sent legates, but behind their backs the patriarch and the emperor maneuvered to secure the adherence of the Bulgarian church to the east. John was foiled not only in this matter but also over certain fine points; however, he accepted these defeats with the consolation of renewed good relations between the great sees, as well as some military help from the Byzantines in Italy. At the same time, John was concerned about the independence of the German clergy in central Europe; to restrain them, he continued Nicholas I's policy of supporting the work of the Byzantine missionary Methodius in Moravia against them.
Faced with increasing violence in Rome and with the dissidence of his political opponents, John was betrayed by his retinue, who first tried to poison him and then beat him to death.
See also Charles the Bald, Emperor; Prankish Kingdom; Hadrian II, Pope; Louis II, Emperor; Nicholas I, Pope; Photian Schism
JOHN W. BARKER AND CHRISTOPHER KLEINHENZ
Dvornik, Francis. The Pbotian Schism: History and Legend. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948.
Endgreen, F. E. "Pope John VIII and the Arabs." Speculum, 20, 1945, pp. 318-330.
Kelly, J. N. D. The Oxford Dictionary of Popes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.
Pope John X (d. 929, r. 914-928) had been archbishop of Ravenna and was chosen as pope in early 914 with the backing of the clan of Theophylact. In the summer of 915, John led a Christian coalition to the battle of the Garigliano, where he fought with distinction. This success sealed John's alliance with Theophylact's faction in Rome. Not until after 924, when his Roman protectors and Berengar (whom John had crowned emperor in 915) were dead, did John's position in Rome weaken. The pope desperately sought new allies but lost favor in Rome; he was deposed by Marozia in June 928. John was imprisoned and died mysteriously in 929.
John realistically tolerated the Roman dynasts' influence on the papacy but also held to an exalted concept of the popes' role in Christendom. He intervened in the affairs of numerous European and eastern churches and worked to incorporate the Dalmatian and Croatian churches in Latin Christendom. He idealized the empire as an antidote to the Roman factions and gave imperial leaders considerable authority in ecclesiastical matters. John's contemporaries, and later writers, maligned him for moral faults and for his Roman politics.
Johns letters as archbishop are in Loewenfeld (1883); his papal letters are in Migne (1880) and Regesta Pontificum Roman-orum (1885). Councils held during his pontificate are recorded in Mansi (1778).
See also Garigliano, Battle of; Papacy; Pornocracy; Ravenna
PAOLO SQUATRITI
II Chronicon di Benedetto monaco di Sant' Andrea del Soratte, e il Libellus de imperatoria potestate in urbe Roma, ed. Giuseppe Zucchetti. Rome: Tipografia del Senato, 1920. (Stresses John's reliance on Alberic.)
Flodoard of Reims. Historia Remensis Ecclesiae (4.20), ed. I. Heiler and G. Waitz. Monumenta Germaniae Historica Scriptores, 13. Hannover: Hahn, 1881, pp. 578-581. (On relations with Reims.)
Invectiva in Romarn pro Formoso papa. In Gesta Berengarii Imperatoris, ed. Ernst Dümmler. Halle: Veriag der Buchhandlung des Waisenhauses, 1871, pp. 137-154. (Shows animosity towards the "usurper" John early in his pontificate.)
Leo Marsicanus. Chronica Monasterii Casinensis (1.52), ed. Hartmut Hoffman. Monumenta Germaniae Historica Scriptores, 34. Hannover: Hahn, 1980, pp. 132-135. (Describes events at the battle of Garigliano.)
Liber pontificalis, Vol. 2, ed. L. Duchesne. Paris: E. de Boccard, 1892, p. 240. (Reticent account.)
Liudprand of Cremona. Antapodosis, ed. J. Becker. Monumenta Germaniae Historica Scriptores Rerum Germanicarum in Usum Scholarum. Hannover, 1915. (Detailed but hostile account.)
. Works of Liudprand of Cremona, trans. F. A. Wright. London: Routledge, 1930.
Loewenfeld, S. ed. In Neues Archiv, 9, 1883, pp. 513-540. (Letters of John.)
Mansi, J. Concilia, Vol. 18. Venice, 1778, pp. 315-350.
Migne, J. Patrobgia Latina, 132. Paris, 1880, cols. 799-814.
Regesta Pontificum Romanorum, Vol. 1, ed. P. Jaffe and W. Wattenbach. Leipzig, 1885, pp. 449-553. (Letters of John.)
Duchesne, Louis. The Beginnings of the Temporal Sovereignty of the Popes, a.d. 754-1073, trans. Arnold Harris Mathew. London: Kegan Paul, 1908.
Falco, Giorgio. The Holy Roman Republic: A Historic Profile of the Middle Ages, trans. K. V. Kent. London: Allen and Unwin, 1964.
Gregorovius, Ferdinand. History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages, Vol. 3 (Book 6, ch. 1), trans. Mrs. Gustavus W. Hamilton. London: G. Bell, 1903.
Llewellyn, Peter. Rome in the Dark Ages. London: Faber, 1971.
Mann, Horace K. Lives of the Popes of the Early Middle Ages, Vol. 4. London: K. Paul, 1910.
Prinz, Friedrich. Klerus und Krieg im früheren Mittelalter: Untersuchungen zur Rolle der Kirche beim Aufbau der Königsherrschaft. Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1971.
Teilenbach, Gerd. The Church in Western Europe from the Tenth to the Early Twelfth Century, trans. Timothy Reuter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. (See chs. 1 and 2.)
Toubert, Pierre. Les structures du Latium médiéval: Le Latium méridional et la Sabine du IXe siécle à la fin du XIIe siècle. Rome: Ècole Française de Rome, 1973.
Ullmann. Walter. A Short History of the Papacy in the Middle Ages. London: Methuen, 1972. (See ch. 5.)
Venni, T. "Giovanni X." Archvio della Real Deputazione Romana di Storia Patria, 49, 1936, pp. 1-136.
Vlasto, A. P. The Entry of the Slavs into Christendom: An Introduction to the Medieval History of the Slavs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970.
Wickham, Chris. Early Medieval Italy: Central Power and Local Society, 400-1000. London: Macmillan, 1981.
Pope John XII (Octavian; c. 937-964, r. 955—964) was the son of Alberic, a petty Roman warlord. Alberic's larger ambitions were curbed by Hugh of Provence, but Hugh was unable to dislodge Alberic from Rome. Alberic had his adolescent son, Octavian, elected pope in 955.
As pope, John was menaced by Berengar of Ivrea, who had driven Hugh of Provence from Italy. Repeating the actions of earlier popes, John called on a powerful northern ruler, Otto I, who was married to Adelaide, the widow of Hugh's son Lothar. Otto was looking for an excuse to invade Italy and did so in 961, posing as the pope's champion. John, in gratitude, crowned Otto emperor in February 962. The pope soon regretted his action and plotted against Otto, possibly asking the Magyars and the Byzantines for aid. Otto in turn deposed John and chose another pope, Leo VIII. John was driven from Rome but recaptured the city when Otto left. However, John died soon thereafter, evidently from a beating by an outraged husband whose wife had been caught with the pope. John XII, a dissolute and incompetent youth who was said to have toasted the devil's health when drunk, was probably the worst pope in history.
John Xll's surviving official documents (and at least one forgery) are collected in Regesta Imperii (Zimmermann 1998).
See also Liudprand of Cremona
MARTIN ARBAGI
Jaffe, Philip, and Wilhelm Wattenbach, eds. Regesta Pontificum Romanorum, 2nd ed. Leipzig, 1885-1888. (Superseded by Zirnmermann.)
Liudprand (Liutprand), Bishop of Cremona. Antapodosis and Liber de Rebus Gestis Ononis. In Die Werke Liudprands von Cremona, ed. Joseph Becker. Scriptores Rerum Germanicarum in Usum Scholarum ex Monumentis Germaniae Historicis, 3rd ed. Hannover and Leipzig: Hahnische Buchhandlung, 1915. (Liber de Rebus Gestis Ononis is not a history of the entire reign of Otto I, who outlived Liudprand; it focuses on the Italian incursion of 961-962, which resulted in Otto's imperial coronation and his conflict with John XII.)
Regesta Imperii, Vol. 2, part 5. In Papstregesten 911-1024, ed. Harald Zimmermann. Vienna: Böhlau, 1998.
Regino of Prüm. Chronicon, ed. F. Kurze. Scriptores Rerum Germanicarum in Usum Scholarum ex Monumentis Germaniae Historicis Separatim Editi. Hannover and Leipzig: Hahnische Buchhandlung, 1890.
Liudprand of Cremona. Antapodosis, or, Tit-for-Tat and Liber de Rebus Gestis Ononis, or, A Chronicle of Otto's Reign. In The Works of Liudprand of Cremona, trans. F. A. Wright. Broadway Medieval Library. London: Routledge, 1930. (Lively and accurate but unannotated.)
Arbagi, Martin. "A Tenth-Century 'Emperor Michael of Constantinople.' " Speculum, 48, 1973, pp. 538-544. (Finds that a document attributed to John XII—and often taken as showing that John turned to the Byzantines for aid before he became involved with Otto—is actually an eleventh-century forgery.)
—. "Byzantium, Germany, the Regnum Italicum, and the Magyars in the Tenth Century." In Studies in Honor of Peter Charanis Offered by His Students on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday, ed. John Barker. Byzantine Studies/Études byzantines, Special Issue, 6(1-2), 1979, pp. 35-48.
Bouchard, Constance. "The Bosonids, or, Rising to Power in the Late Carolingian Age." French Historical Studies, 15, 1988, pp. 407-431. (Mostly about Hugh of Provence's family, but contains some information on Alberic and his son; the focus is social.)
Hiestand, Rudolf. Byzanz und das Regnum Italicum im 10. Jahrhundert. Zurich: Fretz and Wasmuth, 1964.
Kreutz, Barbara M. Before the Normans: Southern Italy in the Ninth and Tenth Centuries. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991.
PrevitéOrton, Charles. "Italy in the Tenth Century." In The Cambridge Medieval History, 3, Germany and the Western Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922, ch. 7.
Pope John XXI (Petrus Juliani, Petrus Hispanus, Peter of Spain; d. 1277, r. 1276-1277) was Portuguese. He studied in Paris, receiving his degree in the arts c. 1240. After teaching medicine in Siena c. 1246-1250, he became dean of Lisbon and an archdeacon. Pope Gregory X made Peter his physician. Peter became a cardinal in 1273 and took part in the Second Council of Lyon in 1274. Following Hadrian V's brief pontificate, Peter was elected pope in Viterbo, in riotous circumstances. Although (owing to a scribal error) there had been no John XX, uncertainty about the correct numeration of the popes led to his being cal led John XXI.
John was a scholar, not a politician, and he left many decisions to Cardinal Giovanni Gaetano Orsini, Charles of Anjou lost favor; and negotiations were resumed with the Greeks, in part to thwart the Angevins' ambitions in the east. Rudolf I of Hapsburg was favored to become emperor, and negotiations for peace between France and Castile were undertaken. Papal authorization for the bishop of Paris to inquire into the teachings at the university there led to condemnations of certain errors.
John XXI died when the roof of his study in the papal palace at Viterbo collapsed. Orsini succeeded him as Nicholas HI, further undermining the Angevins' ambitions. John is best-known for a tract on logic, Summulae logicales; and for a medical compendium, Thesaurus pauperum.
See also Charles I of Anjou; Gregory X, Pope; Nicholas III, Pope
THOMAS IZBICKI
John XXI, Pope. Language in Dispute: An English Translation of Peter of Spain's Tractatus, Called Afterwards Summulae. logic ales, trans. Francis P. Dinneen. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1990.
Pope John XXII (Jacques Duése,, d'Euse, Deuze; c. 1245-1334, r. 7 August 1316-4 December 1334) was born at Cahors to a prominent bourgeois family. He studied law at Orléans and Paris, and subsequently taught canon and civil law at Cahors and Orleans. Elected bishop of Fréjus in 1300, he became the chancellor of Charles II of Anjou, king of Naples, in 1308. Pope Clement V made him bishop of Avignon two years later and a cardinal in 1312.
On his election as the second Avignonese pope, John considered a plan to return the papacy to Italy from Avignon; when that proved impractical, he took steps to establish Avignon as a long-term residence for the papal curia. John initiated a number of ecclesiastical reforms, the most important of which were fiscal and administrative. Many were intended to replace revenues that the papacy had lost when it withdrew from Italy. These measures—especially John's extension of papal authority to grant and tax benefices—were extremely effective, but they created much ill feeling toward the papacy among local clergy. John also founded the papal library at Avignon; promoted important missionary activity in Asia; established a university at Cahors; and promulgated Extravagantes communes and Constitutiones Clementinae, collections of his own decretals and those of his predecessor.
John's reign was marked by several important conflicts. His opposition to attempts by the German emperor Louis IV to assert imperial rights in Italy led to a long struggle. In 1324, Louis was excommunicated; in 1328, he invaded Italy and installed an antipope at Rome. Although the antipope submitted to John in 1330, Louis remained an enemy of the Avignon papacy until his death in 1347. During the 1320s, John's efforts to resolve disputes within the Franciscan order over the nature of apostolic poverty led to a clash with the order's leadership. By the end of the decade the Franciscan minister-general and other prominent Franciscans had defected to the court of Louis IV.
John's obstinate, contentious nature is often blamed for the severity of these disputes. In 1331, he created a controversy single-handedly when he insisted on proposing for public discussion among theologians a personal and highly problematic theory regarding the beatific vision. Despite accusations of heresy from his political opponents and despite the overwhelmingly negative appraisals of his interpretation by consulting theologians, John asserted until he was on his deathbed his right to hold the doctrine as a personal opinion. The episode did considerable damage to his own reputation and to that of the Avignon papacy.
See also Avignonese Papacy; Charles II of Anjou; Franciscan Order; Lewis of Bavaria; Papacy
THOMAS TURLEY
Baluze, Ectienne, Vitae paparum Avenionensium, 4 vols., ed. Guillaume Mollat. Paris: Letouzey et Ane, 1914-1927, Vol. 1, pp. 107-194.
Mollat, Guillaume. The Popes at Avignon, 1305-1378, trans. Janet Love. New York: Harper and Row, 1963.
Renouard, Yves. The Avignon Papacy, 1305-1403, trans. Denis Bethell. Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1970.
Valois, Noël. "Jacques Duèse, pape sous le nom de Jean XXII." Histoire Littéraire de la France, 34, 1914, pp. 391-630.
Weakland, John E. "Administrative and Fiscal Centralization under Pope John XXII, 1316-1334." Catholic Historical Review, 54, 1968, pp. 39-54, 285-310.
. "John XXII before His Pontificate, 1244-1316: Jacques Duése and His Family." Archivum Historiae Pontificiae, 10, 1972, pp. 161-185.
The chronicler Jordanes (Jornandes, sixth century) was of Gothic origin. He is first attested to as a notary (secretary) in the service of an Ostrogothic general named Gunthigis qui et Baza in the early sixth century. Jordanes eventually converted from Arianism to Catholicism and seems to have become a cleric. Some historians identify him with a contemporary bishop, Jordanes of Croton.
Around 550, Jordanes composed On the Origin and History of the Goths, usually called the Getica, which summarized the now lost Gothic History written by the Roman senator Cassiodorus. He also wrote A Survey of the Times, or, On the Origin and History of the Roman People, usually referred to as the Romana. This work is in two parts: the first part covers the history of the world up to the beginning of the Roman empire, and the second covers the Roman empire. The Romana was partially based on another lost history, that of the Roman senator Aurelius Memmius Symmachus, although not nearly to the extent once thought. The suggestion has been made that Jordanes's works, which are both in Latin, were written in Constantinople.
Jordanes gives the earliest extant account of barbarian history written from the barbarians' viewpoint, and his works include much material that is found nowhere else. His underlying intention was to justify the Gothic domination over the Romans.
See also Cassiodorus; Ostrogoths
RALPH W. MATHISEN
Croke, Brian, "A.D. 476: The Manufacture of a Turning Point." Chiron., 13, 1983, pp. 81-119.
Goffart, Walter A. The Narrators of Barbarian History (A.D. 550-800): Jordanes, Gregory of Tours, Beck, and Paul the Deacon. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988.
Mierow, Charles Christopher, trans. The Gothic History of Jordanes in English Version. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1915.
Mommsen, Theodor, ed. Auctores Antiquissimi. Monumenta Germaniae Historica, 5 (part 1). Berlin, 1882.
The medieval church is known for its emphasis on monasticism and asceticism, but in the fourth century that emphasis was still a subject of dispute. The opinion which was to prevail became solidified in Italy in part during a controversy generated by Jovinian (d. before 406). Jovinian was a monk and ascetic who practiced celibacy, chastity, and bodily mortification. However, he came to the conclusion that such actions were irrelevant to true Christian belief, and so he abandoned his asceticism for a moderate life and wrote pamphlets encouraging other Christians to do the same.
None of Jovinian's writings survive; we know his position only from his opponents, primarily Jerome, Ambrose, Pope Siricius, and Augustine. From their works, it appears that Jovinian advocated the following positions: (1) There is no difference between baptized Christians who are married or chaste, and there will be no differential reward in heaven. (2) There is no advantage to fasting. (3) Mary conceived Jesus as a virgin but lost her virginity bearing him. These points directly contradicted the position of the powerful ascetic party (represented by Ambrose, Jerome, and other influential Romans), but they were popular with many people. According to Pope Siricius, under Jovinian's influence numerous dedicated virgins abandoned their vows in order to marry, and numerous ascetics abandoned their rigors for a more balanced life.
Jovinian and his ideas were condemned at a Roman synod presided over by Pope Siricius in 389 or 392. A year later, the condemnation was repeated at a synod in Milan guided by Ambrose. The medieval church rejected the moderate position advocated by Jovinian, but the questions he raised regarding the value of virginity and the nature of a Christian life did not disappear.
See also Ambrose, Saint; Augustine, Saint; Heresy and Religious Dissent; Jerome, Saint
JOYCE E. SALISBURY
Jerome, "Against Jovinianus. In A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, Series 2, Vol. 6, ed. Philip SchafF and Henry Wace. New York: Christian Literature Company, 1893, pp. 346-386. (This tract offers the most complete description of the heresiarch's thought.)
Brown, Peter. The Body ana Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988.
Callam, Daniel. "Clerical Continence in the Fourth Century: Three Papal Decretals." Theological Studies, 41, 1980, pp. 3-50. (Contains an excellent short summary of Jovinian and his thought.)
Pagels, Elaine. Adam, Eve, and the Serpent. New York: Random House, 1988. (Places Jovinian within a discussion of the options that existed for the direction of early Christian thought.)
Valli, Francesco. Gioviniano: Esame delle fonti e dei frammenti, Urbino: Scuola Tipografica Bramante, 1953.
The first year of jubilee, or Holy Year, was officially proclaimed by Pope Boniface VIII on 22 February 1300 by means of the bull Antiquorum habet. Who may lay claim to the decisive initiative for the proclamation is a question that cannot be answered unequivocally. There is no question, however, that at the beginning of the year 1300 the streams of the faithful flowing into Rome had quite unusual expectations about obtaining indulgences and that these expectations were associated with the special character of the year as marking the beginning of a new century. Boniface VIII responded to the expectancy of the masses, but his own positive disposition stemmed from a variety of motives. Alongside the pastoral care of souls, power politics was certainly significant: the superior position of the successor to the prince of the apostles should have made clear to all—especially to temporal rulers of the stripe of a Philip the Fair of France—that expectations at the turn of the century were being used to enhance the pope's political power. Moreover, economic considerations were favorable for the inauguration of the jubilee year.
Before the final proclamation, however, it had to be determined what kind of indulgence was to be attached to the Holy Year. Boniface VIII had the archives searched for precedents and had eyewitness accounts of the Holy Year 1200 examined; he finally followed the example of the indulgence for a crusade, which almost always took the form of an indulgentia plenaria, i.e., a plenary indulgence for the guilt and the punishment for sins. This was the most significant of all indulgences; and to prevent anyone from obtaining it more than once in a lifetime, there was a legally binding condition calling for a lapse of 100 years between two jubilees. Boniface granted a full indulgence of all sins, and of the punishment resulting from them, to all foreign pilgrims who, after receiving the sacrament of penance in full penitence of spirit, visited for fifteen days both the basilica of Saint Peter and the basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls. For Romans, the fifteen days were increased to thirty. These requirements were strictly maintained. In only three cases did Boniface suspend the canonically specified length of the visitation.
As expected, the city of Rome profited enormously from the rush of faithful visitors. The Florentine chronicler Giovanni Vil-lani says that 200,000 pilgrims were constantly present in Rome. Villani was probably exaggerating; and Cardinal Stefaneschi—in the only contemporary treatise, De centesimo seu iubileo anno—laments the absence of princes, who would have brought increased contributions of money. Even so, the Holy Year 1300 can certainly be numbered among the largest celebrations for the masses in medieval Christianity.
Appealing to Leviticus 25, which describes a kind of Jewish holy year celebrated every fifty years, Pope Clement VT proclaimed on 7 January 1343, in his bull Unigenitus Dei filius, a new Holy Year for 1350. Clement thus halved the interval between two Holy Years and gave more people the opportunity of obtaining a plenary indulgence. He also added Saint John Lateran to the basilicas that had to be visited. Along with the main bull, Unigenitus, there circulated two unpromulgated bulls. One of these bulls required a daily visit to five churches—Saint Mary Major and Saint Lawrence Outside the Walls were added—and allowed all religious, if they received the permission of the head of their order, to set out for Rome. The second bull {Ad memoriam reducendo) was an astonishing proclamation: it reduced penitential action to a visit to only one church; and religious—expressly including women—could make the journey to Rome without permission from the head of their order. It is not clear how widely this latter bull was followed. Clement allowed many kinds of exceptions: Elisabeth of Hungary and the English royal family received the privilege of indulgence without the pilgrimage to Rome—in return, of course, for payment of a sum equivalent to the expected cost of the trip. For the first time, a whole populace profited from the indulgence: Majorca obtained the privilege of indulgence in return for the payment of 30,000 florins. In addition, the cardinal legates present in Rome were fully empowered—in case of epidemics or shortages of provisions—to adjust the length of the pilgrims' visit.
Giotto di Bondone (1266-1336, attributed), Pope Boniface VIII Proclaiming the First Jubilee from the Lateran Loggia. San Giovanni in Laterano, Rome. Photo: © Scala/Art Resource, N.Y.
The next Holy Year reflected the church's uncertain political situation at the time of the Great Schism. The Holy Year of 1390 was an expression of the financial distress of the Roman pope Boniface IX, whose administration was intensely aware of the expected increase in revenues. Urban VI had already shortened the interval between two jubilees to thirty-three years, the length of Jesus' life. Yet in 1400, a Holy Year was celebrated that was never officially proclaimed. There is no doubt that the Holy Year had been reduced to its political and economic aspects and served as an ideological battleground for the competing popes. But Rome profited once more from the inflationary increase in Holy Years: Boniface IX instituted a church construction program, ensuring the stability of many churches and contributing not a little to the beautification of the distressed and physically neglected city.
The Holy Year of 1423 under Martin V is the least documented. It too was never officially proclaimed, because it ran counter to the regulations of the Council of Constance prescribing a Holy Year for 1450; and not until 1450 was Nicholas V able to celebrate an official Holy Year in proper form and before a suitable public. In 1468 the interval between two jubilees was reduced to twenty-five years. Other cities also offered competing Holy Years: Montmajour and Saint Jean c. 1400, Canterbury c. 1420, and Santiago de Compostella c. 1426. The Reformation, however, brought to an end all Holy Years except those in Rome and Santiago.
See also Boniface VIII, Pope; Clement VI, Pope; Papacy; Rome: Guidebooks; Villani, Giovanni
Ralf Lützelschwab
Translated by Z. Philip Ambrose
Bollario dell'Anno Santo: Documenti di indizione dal giubileo del 1300, ed. Erminio Lora. Bologna: EDB, 1998.
Schimmelpfennig, Bernhard. "Holy Year." In Dictionary of the Middle Ages, ed. Joseph R. Strayer. New York: Scribner, 1985, Vol. 6, pp. 280-281.
La storia dei giubilei, Vol. 1. Florence: Giunti, 1997, pp. 1300-1423.
Thurston, Herbert. The Roman Jubilee, History and Ceremonial: An Abridgment of "The Holy Year of Jubilee. "St. Louis, Mo.: Sands, 1925.
Justinian I (Flavius Sabbatius; c. 482 or 483-565, r. 527-565) was the sovereign of the eastern Roman, or Byzantine, empire during an age of vast transition and was a figure of both glory and paradox. Born a peasant, he appreciated the awesome Roman heritage as few others could appreciate it; but in seeking to be its steward and restorer, he also opened the way to its transformation. His reign—one of the longest in the Byzantine empire—saw achievements that were substantial and enduring but brought ruin and disaster as their price. In his very quest to restore the territorial and doctrinal unity of the Roman world, Justinian guaranteed its further fragmentation.
Justinian was of Thracian-Illyrian stock and was born in a Latin-speaking district of the Macedonian Balkans. His uncle, Justin, having achieved success as a member of the new imperial guards in Constantinople, sent for the boy and several other nephews in order to give them an education, and opportunities, in the capital. Adopting a new name in tribute to his uncle, Justinian learned Greek, took a liking to intellectual pursuits such as theology, and learned the workings of the militaiy and the court. In 518, by a quirk of fortune, Justin seized the throne, and Justinian quickly emerged as his right-hand man, becoming heir-designate in 525 and full successor two years later.
By that time, Justinian had met and married Theodora, the remarkable woman who was to be his invaluable partner in rule. He had also identified administrators and commanders on whom he could rely and had formulated the main lines of his policies. During the first four years of his reign, he was trapped in an unwanted war with his powerful eastern neighbor, Persia; and just as he was winning peace and freedom there, the devastating Nika riots of January 532 nearly swept him off the throne. He recovered quickly, however, thanks partly to the advice of Theodora and to the soldiers of the young general Belisarius, and was then in a stronger position that allowed him to initiate an array of projects. These included a codification of the Roman legal tradition as Corpus juris civilis, schemes to end the religious and political dissent of the Monophysites and other heterodox movements, and a large-scale building program that was to culminate in the triumphant cathedral of Hagia Sophia in the capital.
Justinian's chief project, though, was his program of reconquest, aimed at recovering the western provinces that had been detached by various Germanic tribes during the previous century. He was inspired in this by his duty to rescue the orthodox provincials in those districts from their Arian Christian rulers, and he was also prodded by dispossessed landowners who sought; the restitution of their property; more broadly, he was motivated by his broad perception that the barbarian "successor states" in the west were only a temporary aberration, and by a sense that he was responsible for restoring the Roman empire to its former scope, encompassing the entire Mediterranean.
Exploiting diplomatic opportunities, Justinian dispatched the brilliant Belisarius to North Africa, where the destruction of the Vandal kingdom was effected with lightning speed (533—534). Meanwhile, given the deterioration of relations with the Ostro-goths in Italy during the last years of their king, Theoderic, and the dynastic crisis attending the succession of Theodoric's daughter Amalasuntha, Justinian was next able to address the conquest of the Ostrogoth kingdom. While another general was sent to seize the Ostrogoths' holdings in the Balkans, Belisarius landed in Sicily in the summer of 535, beginning the long episode of the Gothic wars in Italy.
Uneasy about Belisarius's popularity and military prowess, Justinian vacillated in his support for his general and was then furious when Belisarius dared to entertain an offer from the Goths to take the imperial title in the west. When the settlement of 540 with the Goths broke down and a counter-offensive by Totila began undoing Belisarius's work, Justinian sent Belisarius back to Italy, though grudgingly and without adequate support or resources. Only when Belisarius asked to be recalled and the outlook in Italy seemed hopeless did Justinian commission Narses to organize a new army and complete the conquest of Italy.
Court of Justinian. Early Christian mosaic (500-525). San Vitale, Ravenna. Photo: © Scala/Art Resource, N.Y.
When Justinian's commitment to the reconquest was most intense and the reconquest itself was in full tide and was proving more prolonged than he had intended, the rapacious Persian king reopened war with the empire on a wide range of fronts. This drained the emperor's manpower and resources, which were further reduced by a plague that ravaged the Mediterranean world in 542-543. Justinian, increasingly pressed, was forced to impose oppressive taxes and to skimp on expenditures wherever he could. His economies and his withdrawals of troops particularly weakened the Balkan regions, which were exposed to raids by various peoples, notably the Huns, who menaced Constantinople several times. This weakening allowed even more disastrous penetrations of the Balkans by Avars and Slavs in the decades following Justinian's death.
Throughout his reign, Justinian strove to achieve religious unity in the face of intractable dissent and regional resistance. His continually shifting responses included persecution, conciliation, schemes for compromise, and the bullying of Pope Vigilius to win the accord of Rome. Justinian's increasing obsession with religious coercion poisoned his last years, during which the ruinous effects of his overstrained finances darkened his reputation and made his death in November 565 a relief to his subjects.
Among Justinian's achievements, for good or ill, must be reckoned his lasting impact on Italy. Although his wars of reconquest left the peninsula devastated and exhausted, he nevertheless set the pattern for its restored government through his Pragmatic Sanction of 554; and the extraordinarily comprehensive powers that he granted to Belisarius and Narses laid the foundation for the governmental agency of the exarchate, through which the Byzantine empire was to rule its Italian holdings in the face of invasions by the Lombards. The exarchs' capital, Ravenna, provided a model for imperial style and imagery for centuries and had an important influence on Charlemagne. This model was conveyed most notably through the wondrous mosaic decorations carried out under Justinian, which include the famous portraits of him and Theodora in San Vitale. As the sponsor of the great Corpus juris civilis—whose rediscovery in Italy in the eleventh century was influential in reviving Roman law and legal studies in later medieval Italy and the west in general—Justinian himself became a symbol of the traditions of Roman sovereignty. Dante was to celebrate Justinian as a paradigm of imperial majesty in Canto 6 of Paradiso.
See also Amalasuntha; Belisarius; Byzantine Empire; Dante Alighieri; Exarchate of Ravenna; Gothic Wars; Law: Roman; Lombards; Monophysite Controversy; Narses; Ostrogoths; Pragmatic Sanction; Ravenna; Theodora; Theodoric; Totila; Vigilius, Pope
JOHN W. BARKER
Barker, John W. Justinian and the Later Roman Empire. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966. (General account setting the reign in the context of the fourth-seventh centuries.)
Browning, Robert. Justinian and Theodora, rev. ed. London: Thames and Hudson, 1987. (Vivid and insightful.)
Bury, J. B. A History of the Later Roman Empire from the Death of Theodosius I to the Death of Justinian / (a.d. 395-565), Vol. 2, London: Macmillan, 1923. (Reprint, New York: Dover, 1958. Fullest modern scholarly study in English.)
Downey, Glanville W. Constantinople in the Age of Justinian. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1960. (Lively evocation of the era.)
Holmes, W. G. The Age of Justinian and Theodora: A History of the Sixth Century, 2 vols. London: G. Bell and Sons, 1905-1907. (2nd ed., 1912. Extended and detailed but somewhat uninspired and dated.)
Procopius of Caesarea. History of the Wars, Secret History, and Buildings. Loeb Classical Library Series, 7 vols. London and Cambridge, Mass.: Heinemann and Harvard University Press, 1914-1940. (With reprints. Full English translation of the complete works of the most important contemporaneous historian of Justinian.)
Ure, Percy N. Justinian and His Age. Harmondsworth and Baltimore, Md.: Penguin, 1951. (Stimulating and perceptive study.)
Little is known about the life of Decimus Junius Juvenal (c. 50 or 60-c. 127). He was probably born in southern Latium, and he evidently received a good education in rhetoric. He wrote the Satires, sixteen poems in hexameters, between 100 and 127; and it is likely that he practiced law at the same time. Juvenal died sometime after 127.
The Satires object to various aspects of Roman society, from the ostentation of the nouveaux riches to the hypocrisy of false philosophers. The best-known and most virtuosic of the Satires is the sixth, a scathing denunciation of the social and sexual habits of Roman women, aimed at dissuading a friend from marriage. This sixth Satire, like the collection as a whole, is pervaded by both indignation and nostalgia, Juvenal longs for an idealized version of the past, when propriety and moderation, rather than vice and corruption, prevailed.
Juvenal, Satyra prima. Venice: Aldus, 1501. Reproduced by courtesy of Department of Special Collections, General Library System, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Although Juvenal's work was generally neglected in the centuries following his death, he was cited more than seventy times by Servius (in the fourth century) and became a popular school author, Juvenal's disapprobation of the degeneracy of Roman society earned the admiration of early Christians, and his reputation as a moralist ensured his popularity in the Middle Ages. Juvenal's pithy style allowed his work to be excerpted and anthologized, and his poems served as important models for twelfth century Latin satire.
Dante cites Juvenal twice in Convivio and once in Monarchic, and in Purgatorio 22, Juvenal is represented as a character who, when he dies, brings news of Statius's veneration for Virgil to Limbo. However, Dante's knowledge of Juvenal's work was probably only at second hand. Boccaccio, though, was strongly influenced by Juvenal; his Corbaccio owes much of its misogynist vitriol to Juvenal's sixth Satire. Petrarch, too, seems to have been familiar with the Satires and made frequent reference to Juvenal, often identifying him as "the satirist."
JESSICA LEVENSTEIN
Juvenal. Satires, ed. James D. Duff. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951.
—. Satires, ed. Alfred E. Housman. New York: Greenwood, 1969. (Originally published 1931.)
—. Satires, ed. Wendell V. Clausen, 3rd rev. ed. Oxford: Clarendon, 1992.
Juvenal. The Sixteen Satires, trans. Peter Green. Harmondswortn: Penguin, 1967.
Juvenal and Persius. Works, trans. George G. Ramsay. Loeb Classical Library. London: Heinemann, 1918.
Courtney, Edward. A Commentary on the Satires of Juvenal. London: Athlone, 1980.
Duff, James D., ed. Fourteen Satires of Juvenal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970. (Originally published 1898; intro. Michael Coffey.)
Mayor, John E. B., ed. Thirteen Satires of Juvenal. Hildesheim: Olms, 1966. (Originally published 1888-1889.)
Braund, Susan H. Beyond Anger: A Study of Juvenal's Third Book of Satires. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Ferguson, John. A Prosopography to the Poems of Juvenal. Brussels: Latomus, 1987.
Highet, Gilbert. Juvenal the Satirist: A Study. Oxford: Clarendon, 1954.
Paratore, Ettore. "Giovenale." In Enciclopedia dantesca, 6 vols., ed. Umberto Bosco. Rome: Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana, 1970-1978, Vol. 3, pp. 197-202.
Richlin, Amy. "Invective against Women in Roman Satire." Arethusa, 17, 1984, pp. 67-80.
Winkler, Martin M. The Persona in Three Satires of Juvenal. Hildesheim: Olms 1983.