Journal articles on the topic 'Documents, Medieval latin documents of Southern Italy'

Abstract This study uses treebanking to investigate how spoken language infiltrated legal Latin in early medieval Italy. The documents used are always formulaic, but they also always contain a ‘free’ part where the case in question is described in free prose. This paper uses this difference to measure how ten linguistic features, representative of the evolution that took place between Classical and Late Latin, are distributed between the formulaic and free parts. Some variants are attested equally often in both parts of the documents, while perceptually or conceptually salient variants appear to be preserved in their conservative form mainly in the formulaic parts.

This study presents five little-known bathing chambers from the region of Amalfi in southern Italy. Dating from the thirteenth century, the baths define with remarkable consistency a type of structure that has not previously been identified or considered in histories of medieval architecture in the West. The study begins with an analysis of the five bathing chambers and their specific architectural features, technological remains, and domestic contexts. The diverse antecedents of the buildings, which appear in ancient Roman, medieval Italian, Byzantine, and Islamic architecture, are explored, along with the implications of this eclecticism for the history of southern Italy. Utilizing the rich array of surviving medieval documents for the region, including episcopal charters, royal decrees, and medical treatises, the study then reconstructs the economic, social, and scientific significance of the baths within medieval Amalfi. As monuments outside the traditional contexts of art production in southern Italy, the baths challenge long-standing characterizations of southern Italy's art and architecture, and point to the existence of a Mediterranean-wide balneal culture in which Byzantine, Islamic, and southern Italian communities participated.

The study aims to present legal aspects of the medieval and premodern history of Rășinari, the greatest pastoral village in Mărginimea Sibiului (lying at the foot of the Southern Carpathians), whose inhabitants (mărgineni) were considered the richest Romanian transhumant shepherds. Based on methods pertaining to Cyrillic and Latin palaeography, ecdotics, and legal history, we analyse precious documents discovered in the Church Museum of Rășinari, contained in the 18th century Orthodox Bishops’ House: 1. the extract of a deed of donation made in 1383 by Voivode Radu Negru to the Saint Paraschiva Church in Rășinari; 2. the Book of village boundaries of 1488, describing a perambulation for the separation of boundaries between the Romanian village and the Saxon one of Cisnădie; 3. the manuscript volume Transmissionales in causa Possessionis Resinar contra Liberam Regiamque Civitatem Cibiniensem 1784 (1,318 pages), a veritable legal mirror reflecting juridical relations, procedures and lawsuits specific to South Transylvania under Habsburg suzerainty. The examination of the medieval Cyrillic-Romanian documents’ variants, late copies and even 18th century Latin translations highlights the conclusion regarding the special historical, linguistic and legal value of the treasures hidden in the Bishops’ House of Rășinari.

Abstract In Medieval Latin, the adjective armelinus, -na and the noun armelinus are attested in notarial documents and other texts from different regions of Western Europe, in a wide chronology. At first glance, both the name and the adjective are related to the classical Latin demonym Armenius, but this etymon does not explain several aspects of its form and function. The present paper reviews all the etymological hypotheses suggested so far and arrives at the proposal that armelinus could be the result of the adaptation of the Andalusian Arabic armaní ~ arminí ‘Armenian (tissue)’, after converging semantically with armini ~ ermini, derived from the Latin armenius ‘(skin of the) Mustela ermine’. The authors suggest that both terms – adjective and noun – could arise in the territories corresponding to the linguistic domain of Catalan and that they passed from there to Italy and the rest of Western Europe.

ABSTRACTThis paper investigates the development of land registry traditions in the medieval Mediterranean by examining a distinctive aspect of Latin, Greek and Arabic formularies used in boundary clauses. The paper makes particular reference to Islamic and Norman Sicily. The argument begins by recalling that the archetypal way of defining limits according to Classical Roman land surveyors was to begin ab oriente. Many practices from Antiquity were discontinued in the Latin West, but the idea of starting with or from the East endured in many cases where boundaries were assigned cardinal directions. In the Byzantine Empire, the ‘Roman’ model was prescribed and emulated by Greek surveyors and scribes too. But in the Arab-Muslim Mediterranean, lands were defined with the southern limit first. This contrast forms the basis of a typology that can be tested against charter evidence in frontier zones – for example, in twelfth-century Sicily, which had been under Byzantine, Muslim and Norman rulers. It concludes that, under the Normans, private documents drawn up in Arabic began mainly with the southern limit following the ‘Islamic’ model. However, Arabic descriptions of crown lands started mainly in the ‘Romano-Byzantine’ way. These findings offer a higher resolution view of early Norman governance and suggest that such boundary definitions of the royal chancery could not have been based on older ones written in the Islamic period.

The aim of the paper is to examine the concept that was crucial for the Novgorod’s political identity in the time of independence — ‘Novgorod the Great’ (Veliky Novgorod). The author takes into account not only mentions of this phrase in Novgorodian medieval documents and narratives, but also considerable and highly important evidence originating from other Russian lands and abroad (Hanseatic and Lithuanian documents written in Middle Low German and Latin). A review of the relevant publications shows that, at present, the issue still remains a controversial one. The author comes to the following conclusions. In Hanseatic documents, written in Middle Low German, ‘Novgorod the Great’ was already being mentioned since at least 1330s, which is more than sixty years earlier than is considered in the current conventional view. For the first time ‘Novgorod the Great’ is mentioned not in a Novgorodian text but in a Kievan one — in the account from the Hypatian Chronicle of 1141. In the second half of the 12th century it appeared in the principality of Vladimir-Suzdal, and only much later was adopted by Novgorodians themselves. While in Southern and North-East Rus’ ‘Novgorod the Great’ was initially used to distinguish Novgorod on the Volkhov River from local and smaller Novgorods (Novgorod-Seversky and Nizhny Novgorod), Novgorodians employed it to glorify their polity. In this case it could stand for three different things: the city of Novgorod, the whole polity (Novgorod republic), and ‘the political people’ of Novgorod, i.e. those of the Novgorodians who enjoyed full citizenship rights.

This article explores two often poorly connected fields in a quite touchy symbolic conception. On one side is the complex ramification of the County of Savoy and its family therein at a period when Savoy become a Duchy under the protection of the German Holy Empire with the patronage of Saint Maurice, while on the other side is the complex and prolific secular compositions of Guillaume Dufay and its subtle style of performance. In many cases, little is known by Historians about medieval music. Therefore, Musicologists interested in metrics and comparison between manuscripts could easily obliterate the subtle diplomacy of the patrons of this period. To complicate even more, Savoy historians are in France and Italy (with most documents in Latin and French), and Dufay specialists are mainly in England and the United States. This essay also evocates a medieval Black saint, Maurice, considered a positive symbol, an idea not so evident in Savoy nowadays but probably also shortly after in the Protestant Alps, a period when visual representation could be easily destroyed. Hence this study enquires into this controversial subject and finds interesting new materials connected with music. This could be anecdotal if these pieces were not already so well-known and influential in the History of music.

Medieval Italian city-states with access to the sea, most notably the Venetian and Genoese, were in need of safe ‘stopovers’ that would allow their inhabitants to travel to distant places across the territories in which they conducted commerce. As the most important ‘stopover’ and centre of consumption, Constantinople became a point of attraction for Italian merchant colonies, particularly after the eleventh century. Among these, the most powerful one with the largest settlement was the Venetian colony. Following a decree dated 1082 (Chrysoboullos) that granted them certain privileges, the Venetians settled across the southern shores of the Golden Horn. In terms of administration, it appears that, until the Latin period (1204–1261), no formal officers were appointed to the Venetian Merchant Colony. ‘The bailo’ was first instituted in Constantinople only after the treaty of 18 June 1265. The mention of a house owned by the bailo dates as late as 1277. Documents on the residence of the bailo remain silent until the early fifteenth century. It is unclear if the palace of the bailo mentioned in fifteenth-century documents and the house allocated to the bailo in 1277 are the same building. Despite the Turkish conquest of Constantinople in 1453, the Venetians, albeit with interruptions, continued to live on the historic peninsula. However, it is no longer possible to speak of a Venetian settlement similar to the one that had existed in Byzantine times. Per the agreement signed on 16 August 1454, the Venetians were granted a house and a church that ‘once’ belonged to Anconitans. The possible location and architectural features of the residences of the bailo, which have left behind no archaeological data, are discussed here through written sources including Ottoman documents.

Contrary to many expectations, medieval intellectuals were rather deeply concerned with linguistics, etymology, and the history of languages, especially as they pertained to regional, territorial, and ‘national’ identity. England proves to be a particularly fertile ground in that regard because of the various languages spoken there from early on, with the Anglo-Saxons having marginalized the ancient Celtic population in the fourth and fifth centuries, with the Normans imposing their form of French on the land after the conquest in 1066, with Vikings and Flemish arrivals throughout the centuries and leaving their mark, etc., not to forget the continued presence of Welsh and Cornish. Sara Harris offers a detailed investigation of the intellectual debate about the various languages as they were encountered in the documents and in reality, and which regularly served the commentators to reflect upon the country’s past, at least in the southern half of the island, although the linguistic connection, among many others, to the Continent via French and Latin continued strongly throughout the centuries.

While interest in land use in the prehistoric periods in Italy has received attention, that cannot be said of the Post-Medieval period. The general view is that all activities and objects from the last 300–500 years or so are so indecipherable from their contemporary counterparts and that there is no need to study them. There is, in fact, very little Post-Medieval archaeological work done in the south of Italy, which is the focus of this paper. The landscape of southern Calabria has changed radically over the centuries. The distribution of dense macchia forests was diminished in the late 18th and 19th centuries for building railroads and ships, and more recently, arson has been used as social or political revenge. The removal of the macchia led to erosional landscapes and the loss of archaeological footprints. This paper explores agricultural practices and forest exploitation in the early 19th and 20th centuries by the citizens of Bova to better understand the social and economic dynamics that continue to influence the lives of people living in the community. It utilizes cadastral records, archival documents from the early 1800–1900s, and spatial analysis to better understand the potential economic and social dynamics in this community. Consideration is also given to how social status and power, represented by Church-owned vs. lay citizen-owned properties, was reflected in local land use. The overall paucity of archaeological materials from this period across the landscape supports and complicates the overall picture while also supporting an interpretation of a very local and insular community poorly integrated into the greater Italian economy of the day.

The oldest Catholic cathedral is the five-nave Archbasilica of St. John in Lateran erected in Rome, but the Lateran Palace (Latin: Palatium Apostolicum Lateranense) was given as a present to Bishop (Latin: episcopus) of Rome for his residence (from 4th until 14th cent.). The perimeter building set up the structural complex of L-shaped layout where the Lateran Castle and the Archbasilica were included. In Western Europe largest cities were also archbishoprics’ centres, in which neighbourhood Catholic church-states, or bishoprics were founded. Local conditions and relationships between the ruler and inhabitants determined the development of Christianity centres. Its main structural objects included in the fortified building complex were the Catholic cathedral which altarpiece (Latin: presbyterium) by the main altar was turned toward the east facing the rising sun, headquarters of the Canonical Chapter (German: Domkapitel) and Bishop's strong fortified residence resembled a lower tower, or a palace separated from the town, or built outside the town. In the late 12th century, bishoprics began to establish on the Baltic Sea southern coast at subjugated lands of the Balts and the Baltic Finns. At bishoprics’ centres Bishops’ fortified yards (German: der Bischofshof) were formed. A housing combined with a sacral structure was included in the perimeter building around the spacious court and integrated into the unified defensive system of the structural complex. In Riga, the Germans established centres of secular and spiritual power, as well as the main military economic base for the Baltics’ expansion. The political and economic dualism was created. The representation of civil authority became the third alternative force. Each of centres characterized by its own structural elements. The main cult building for city inhabitants was the church of citizen’s parish. Research problem: the development of the Catholic cathedral building-type in bishoprics’ towns on the southern bank of the Baltic Sea during the 13th – 14th centuries has been studied insufficiently. Research topicality: the impact of cathedral building complexes on formation of medieval urban structures on the Baltic Sea south coastal lands during the 13th – 14th centuries. Research goal: analysis of the structure and layout of Catholic cathedrals in Livonia and the Prussians’ lands to determine common and diverse features. Research novelty: evolution of the layout and structure of Catholic cathedrals on lands inhabited by the Baltic ethnic groups have been analysed in regional and European context. Results: study formation of the Catholic cathedrals’ layout and structure on the Baltic Sea south coastal lands during the 13th – 14th centuries. Main methods: inspection of cathedrals in nature, analysis of archive documents, projects, cartographic materials.

The "Illyrian heraldry", as a phenomenon of the invented tradition, encompasses the rolls of arms - armorials, which appear in Dalmatia, Italy, Spain and Austria at the end of the XVI and beginning of the XVII century. These armorials contained Serbian and other southern Slav monarchic, territorial and family coats of arms. The authenticity, heraldic sources and origins of these armorials are extremely complex problems that can be traced back to the medieval heraldic heritage of the Serbs, on the one hand, and reveal the intricate web of political circumstances in the XVI and XVII centuries. Illyrian heraldry is also closely linked to the personal and political ambitions of the Spanish admiral, Don Pedro Ohmučević Grgurić, from Slano near Dubrovnik. One cannot, however, link the entire Illyrian heraldry movement only to the daring ambitions of Petar Ohmučević Grgurić In in the XVI and XVII centuries historical constructions, inspired for the most part by sincere Slav patriotism, emerged that proved the unity of the Illyrians and the Slavs, revealed the alleged Slav origins of famous figures (Alexander the Great, Justinian), or simply extolled the splendor and magnitude of a lost Slav kingdom, that could be restored again. Much as it was developing within the spiritual scope of the Catholic church, this "Slovine" movement found its historical basis in the medieval statehood of Serbia and Bosnia, particularly in the powerful empire of Stephan Dushan (1331-55), in the Serbian potentates, heroes, their glitter and opulence, which used to glorify the Slav world. Since the XVII century till today, despite their doubtful authenticity, the Illyrian armorials have been considered important genealogical and heraldic documents. Many families relied on the information in Illyrian heraldic collections when claiming their true, or, more often purported, ancient hereditary rights, titles and lands. The Illyrian armorials were transcribed and reprinted in books that were important for the national identity of the southern Slav peoples, such as Orbini's Kingdom of the Slavs (1601), Stemmatographia or the Drawing, Description and Renewal of Illyrian Coats of Arms by Pavao Riter Vitezović, published in Vienna in 1701, and Stemmatographia by Hristifor Žefarović, published in 1741. After the liberation of Serbia and Montenegro from the Turks, heraldry was granted official sanction, and the coats of arms are based on the tradition preserved in Illyrian heraldry.

Medieval Dubrovnik was rich in Romanesque figural and decorative sculpture but only a small group of fragmentary carvings has been preserved to date due to the fact that the town suffered a devastating earthquake in 1667. The earthquake completely destroyed the monumental Cathedral of the Assumption of the Virgin which had been considered “la piu bella in Illyrico” on the basis of its sculptural abundance. Archaeological excavations undertaken beneath the present-day Baroque Cathedral, consecrated in 1713, unearthed several thousand fragments of high-quality sculptures. Their analysis has confirmed the close connections between Dubrovnik and artistic centres in Apulia, which are well known from archival records. This article re-assesses the results of the excavations and the information from the primary sources in a new light and deepens our knowledge about the date, authorship and reconstruction of the thireenth-century pieces under consideration.The article opens with a discussion about the archival record informing us that Eustasius of Trani came to Dubrovnik in 1199 to work as a protomagister of Dubrovnik Cathedral. The document in question was the reason why art historians attributed to him a number of rather damaged, narrative reliefs which replicate the models and forms that can be seen on the portal of Trani Cathedral. Since the sculptor responsible for that portal was not known and given that the contract preserved in Dubrovnik referred to Eustasius as a son of “Belnardi, protomagistri civitati Trani”, the two artists came to be considered as the builders of the Cathedral of S. Nicola Pellegrino at Trani and of several other churches in the Terra di Bari. The sculptures produced by Eustasius and his father were convincingly deemed to display the artistic influence of southern and central France and the same can be observed in Dubrovnik. The article assigns the figure of Christ the Judge from a portal lunette depicting the Last Judgement, which has no parallels in Apulia, to the same group of sculptures and interprets the subject matter as being inspired by the iconography of numerous pilgrimage churches to which Dubrovnik Cathedral also belonged. The assessment of the formal qualities evident in all the carvings demonstrates that they are less refined than those on the portal of Trani Cathedral. Furthermore, the article separates the works of the father from those of the son and suggests that Bolnardus introduced the aforementioned French-style carving method, which had already taken root in Palestine, and that Eustasius followed it. The starting point in the proposed chronology was the Fall of Jerusalem in 1187 and the associated withdrawal of western master carvers alongside the Crusaders. During their stopover at Trani, around 1190, Boltranius was in charge of the carving of the portal of Trani Cathedral where he was helped by his son who left for Dubrovnik in 1199. Based on the visual characteristics of the fragments of architectural decoration, Eustasius is identified as being responsible for the building of Dubrovnik Cathedral according to Apulian taste which appealed to the local patrons as a consequence of their constant exposure to it through numerous trade links and the overall cultural milieu. In fact, Apulian taste was a symbiosis of Byzantine traditions and Romanesque novelties introduced by the Normans, and its allure was grounded in the fact that both the Terra di Bari and Dubrovnik acknowledged the supreme power of these two political forces albeit not at the same time and in unequal measure.The vernacular current in the Romanesque sculpture of Dubrovnik during the second quarter of the thirteenth century can be noted in a small number of works which influenced the decoration of Gothic and Renaissance public buildings. The source of this diffusion can be identified in the decoration of the Cathedral which epitomized the strong artistic connections with southern Italy from where typological and morphological models were borrowed. The redecoration of the Cathedral’s interior, especially the pulpit – recorded for the first time in 1262 – the archaeological remains of which reveal a polygonal structure resting on twelve columns, drew on those very models. Together with the ciborium above the altar in the main apse, the pulpit was praised by local chroniclers and foreign travel writers during the fifteenth century but also by the earliest church visitation records of the mid-seventeenth century. These two monuments belonged to a group of standard Apulian-Dalmatian ciboria and pulpits which also included those that can today be seen in the cathedrals of Trogir and Split but also in many south Italian churches. Some scholars have argued that the source model for this group can be found in Jerusalem but this article suggests that the ciborium from the church of S. Lorenzo fuori le mura in Rome, dated to 1148, presents a more likely option. Particular attention is given to the naturalistic workmanship of a polygonal capital from Dubrovnik Cathedral, which is assigned to the aforementioned pulpit. It is argued that the style of the capital inspired a series of capitals carved à jour on both sides of the Adriatic and that they display characteristics consistent with the manner of carving of Pietro di Facitolo seen at Bisceglie. The exceptional workmanship of the eagle from the same pulpit is attributed to Pasquo di Pietro who was recorded as a protomagister of the Cathedral from 1255 to 1282 and who well regarded as a master carver. His good reputation earned him the citizenship and an estate; he and his son were mentioned in the local documents as “de Ragusio”. The author of the article hypothesizes that Pasquo may have been Pietro di Facitolo’s son, with which he concludes the outline of the sculptural development of the Apulian Romanesque in Dubrovnik and Dalmatia in general.The final part of the article focuses on the only known work of Simeonus Ragusinus who signed himself as “incola tranensis” on the portal of the church of S. Andrea, that is, S. Salvatore at Barletta. The hybrid artistic expression of this eclectic sculptor with a limited gift, who gathered his knowledge from a variety of sources, reveals that he may have borrowed some iconographic motifs from Eustasius’ portal of Dubrovnik Cathedral or from the other two portals. Overall, the article corroborates several hypotheses that were previously expressed in the scholarship while dismissing and rerouting others. At the same time, it emphasizes the scarcity of solid evidence because of the fragmentary nature of the material. The main goal of the article is to present new research findings and widen our perspective on the issue. The article is a revised version of a brief paper presented at the international conference “Master Buvina and his Time” which was held at Split in 2014 and which will be published in a foreign language. I hope that with the addition of new comments and the scholarly apparatus the article will be a useful point of reference to Croatian researchers of similar topics and that it will contribute towards the creation of syntheses about the medieval art in the Adriatic.

STANLEY JAKI: Science and Faith in a Realist Perspective by Alessandro Giostra. Rome, Italy: IF Press, 2019. 144 pages. Paperback; $24.24. ISBN: 9788867881857. *The subject of this short introduction--Father Stanley L. Jaki (1924–2009), a giant in the world of science and religion--is more important than this book's contents, a collection of conference papers and articles published between 2015 and 2019. *Readers of this journal should recognize Jaki, a Benedictine priest with doctorates in theology and physics, 1975–1976 Gifford lecturer, 1987 Templeton Prize winner, and professor at Seton Hall University, for his prolific, valuable work in the history of the relations between theology and science. He sharply contrasted Christian and non-Christian/scientific cosmologies and unfortunately, often slipped into polemics and apologetics. The title of Stacy Trasanco's 2014 examination of his work, Science Was Born of Christianity, captures Jaki's key thesis. Science in non-Christian cultures was, in Jaki's (in)famous and frequent characterizations, "stillborn" and a "failure" (e.g., see Giostra, pp. 99, 113). Incidentally, Giostra seems unaware that various Protestant scholars shared Jaki's key thesis and arguments. *The Introduction begins with a quotation from Jaki that so-called conflicts between science and religion "must be seen against objective reality, which alone has the power to unmask illusions." Jaki continued, "There may be clashes between science and religion, or rather between some religionists and some scientists, but no irresolvable fundamental conflict" (p. 15). *This raises two other crucial aspects of Jaki's approach: his realist epistemology and his claim that, properly understood, science and Christian theology cannot be in conflict. Why? Because what Jaki opposed was not science itself--which he saw as specific knowledge of the physical world that was quantifiable and mathematically expressible--but ideologies that were attached to science in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that is, materialism, naturalism, reductionism, positivism, pantheism, and atheism. *For Jaki, the real problem for Christian approaches to the natural world was the scientism which dismissed theology, especially Catholicism, as superstition, dogmatism, and delusion. Jaki followed the groundbreaking work of Pierre Duhem in arguing that the impetus theory of the fourteenth-century philosopher John Buridan was the first sign of the principle of inertia, the first law of Newtonian physics. One of the foundational shifts in the birth of a new "revolutionary" science in the Christian West was a post-Aristotelian understanding of bodies in motion (both uniform and uniformly accelerating: see chapter three for more details). *The first chapter is a bio- and bibliographical essay by an admiring Antonio Colombo that traces and situates Jaki the historian as a man of both science and faith. Chapter two lays out Jaki's critical realism and theses about the history of science and theology, in contrast to scientisms past and present that claim scientific reason as the sole trustworthy route to legitimate knowledge. The roles played by the doctrine of creation ex nihilo and the Christology of the pre-existent Logos in Jaki's cosmological thinking are also outlined. *Many readers will be most interested in the third chapter which surveys Jaki's writing about the notorious case of Galileo, condemned by the church in 1633 for defending Copernicus. Jaki detected scientific and theological errors in the positions of both Galileo and the church. For instance, Galileo did not provide proof of the motion of the earth around the sun. Nor did the church understand errors in Aristotelian science. Galileo was right, however, in arguing that the Bible's purpose was not to convey scientific knowledge; while the church's rejection of heliocentric cosmology was correct, given the dearth of convincing evidence for it. *Chapter four is of wider interest than its title, "The Errors of Hegelian Idealism," might suggest. Jaki's belief that only Christian theology could give birth to the exact sciences is reviewed, along with his rejection of conflict and concord models of faith and science. His critiques of Hegelian and Marxist views of the world are thoughtfully discussed. *Jaki was unrelentingly hostile to all types of pantheism, and Plato was the most influential purveyor of that erroneous philosophy. Chapter five outlines Jaki's objections to Platonism, as well as to Plotinus's view of the universe as an emanation from an utterly transcendent One, and to Giordano Bruno's neo-Platonic animism and Hermeticism. *Jaki's interpretation of medieval Islamic cosmologists is the subject of the fifth chapter, in which the Qur'an, Averroes, and Avicenna are examined and found wanting. Monotheism by itself could not lead to science. Incorrect theology blinded those without an understanding of the world as God's creation or of Christ as Word and Savior from seeing scientific truth. This chapter is curious in several respects. On page 98, Giostra equates Christ as the only begotten Son with Jesus as the only "emanation from the Father." Emanationism is a Gnostic, Manichaean, and neo-Platonic concept; it is not, to my knowledge, part of orthodox Catholic Trinitarian discourse. On pages 101–2, the presence of astrology in the Qur'an disqualifies it as an ancestor of modern science. But astrology then was not yet divorced from astronomy. Astrological/astronomical imagery and terminology were integral to ancient cosmologies and apocalypses, including Jewish, Christian, and Muslim ones. Lastly, pages 104–5 feature quotations in untranslated Latin. *Chapter seven is a review of the 2016 edition of Jaki's Science and Creation; this is one more example of content repeated elsewhere in the book. "Benedict XVI and the limits of scientific learning" is the eighth and final chapter. The former pope is presented as a Jaki-like thinker in his views of science and faith. Strangely, Benedict does not cite Jaki; this absense weakens Giostra's case somewhat. *Jaki--whose faith was shaped by the eminent French theologian and historian of medieval thought, Etienne Gilson--was a diehard Roman Catholic, wary of Protestant thought, defender of priestly celibacy and of the ineligibility of women for ordination. On the other hand, his study of both Duhem and Gilson probably sensitized Jaki to ideological claims made by scientists. *As a historian of science, Jaki was meticulous and comprehensive in his research with primary documents. His interpretations of historical texts were as confident and swaggering as his critiques of scientists and scientism were withering. Among Jaki's more interesting and helpful contributions to scholarship are his translations and annotations of such important primary texts as Johann Heinrich Lambert's Cosmological Letters (1976), Immanuel Kant's Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (1981), and Bruno's The Ash Wednesday Supper (1984). *Personally, I have found much of value in Jaki's The Relevance of Physics (1966); Brain, Mind and Computers (1969); The Paradox of Olbers' Paradox (1969); The Milky Way (1972); Planets and Planetarians (1978); The Road of Science and the Ways to God (1978); Cosmos and Creator (1980); Genesis 1 through the Ages (1998); The Savior of Science (2000); Giordano Bruno: A Martyr of Science? (2000); Galileo Lessons (2001); Questions on Science and Religion (2004); The Mirage of Conflict between Science and Religion (2009); and the second enlarged edition of his 1974 book, Science and Creation: From Eternal Cycles to an Oscillating Universe (2016). *Jaki also published studies of figures whose life and work most impressed him personally. These include three books (1984, 1988, 1991) on the Catholic physicist and historian of cosmology, Pierre Duhem, author of the ten-volume Système du Monde, and studies of English converts to Catholicism, John Henry, Cardinal Newman (2001, 2004, 2007) and G. K. Chesterton (1986, new ed., 2001). *Among Jaki's books not mentioned by Giostra but of interest to readers of this journal are The Origin of Science and the Science of its Origin (1979), Angels, Apes, and Men (1988), and Miracles and Physics (2004). For a complete Jaki bibliography, see http://www.sljaki.com/. *No translator is identified in the book under review; my guess is that Giostra, an Italian, was writing in English. Although generally clear and correct, the book contains enough small errors and infelicities to suggest that the services of a professional translator were not used. Not counting blank, title, and contents pages, this book has but 128 pages, including lots of block quotations. *For those unfamiliar with Jaki's work and not too interested in detailed studies in the history and philosophy of science and religion, this introduction is a decent start--and perhaps an end point as well. I strongly encourage curious readers to consult Jaki's own books, including his intellectual autobiography A Mind's Matter (2002). For other scholarly English-language perspectives on his work, see Paul Haffner, Creation and Scientific Creativity: A Study in the Thought of S. L. Jaki (2nd ed., 2009); Science and Orthodoxy [special issue of the Saint Austin Review on Jaki], vol. 14, no. 3 (2014); and Paul Carr and Paul Arveson, eds., Stanley Jaki Foundation International Congress 2015 (2020). *Reviewed by Paul Fayter, a retired pastor and historian of Victorian science and theology, who lives in Hamilton, Ontario.

AbstractMedieval Romance texts in the Greek alphabet are generally considered a very reliable source of information about spoken vernacular varieties, mainly due to the intrinsic independence of their writers from the Latin graphic tradition. Nevertheless, as first observed by Alberto Varvaro and Anna Maria Compagna in 1983, these valuable documents, like any other kind of written evidence, are not immune from some degree of conventionality. This paper will focus on the problems raised by the codification of Romance languages in the Greek alphabet, which requires the study of multilingualism, language contact and coexistence of different (written and oral) cultural traditions. Exemplification will come from Italo-Romance texts produced in Sicily and Southern Italy before 1500, but also from texts of other Romance areas like the Gallo-Romance 13th Century

Historiographical production within twelfth-century Puglia seems to have been markedly limited, and this frustrates attempts to access internal perspectives on a region which played a pivotal socio-political and economic role within southern Italy as it fell under Norman rule, and was subsequently absorbed into the new Kingdom of Sicily in 1130. It might, however, be possible to bolster the region's twelfth-century historiographical outputs if we were to include a largely overlooked and problematic source, the so-called Fragmentary Troia Chronicle. It is a short, hybridized and fragmented Latin text usually assumed to be late twelfth-century as a result of its chronological coverage. It consists of an annalistic-style account of political and religious events mostly of relevance to the northern Pugliese city of Troia and its bishopric, and ostensibly covers 1014 to 1124/7. It is accompanied by what also seems to be an appendix of documents (some dated later than the annalistic section) associated with the city's bishopric. This article therefore offers the first extended analysis of the Troia Chronicle's place within Pugliese historiographical production. It revisits questions around its authenticity, examines potential contexts surrounding its production and content, and provides the first English translation of the narrative section of the chronicle. In so doing, it argues that we must tread carefully when using this source, but that the Troia Chronicle's existence and its main chronological focus could at the very least hold significance as a marker of an enduring remembrance of a vibrant era of episcopal, literary and urban development in this Pugliese city in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.