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This book provides the first English translation of the Chronicle of the city of Genoa by the thirteenth-century Dominican Jacopo da Varagine (also known as Jacobus de Voragine). While Jacopo is better known for his monumental compilation of saints’ lives, the Golden legend, his lesser known Chronicle of Genoa exemplifies the important medieval genre of the civic chronicle. The work mixes scholarly research about the city’s origins with narrative accounts based on Genoese archival sources, more didactic and moral reflections on the proper conduct of public and private life, and personal accounts of Jacopo’s own experience as archbishop of Genoa from 1292 until his death in 1298. Divided into twelve parts, the work covers the history of Genoa from its ancient origins up to Jacopo’s own day. Jacopo’s first-hand accounts of events in which he himself participated—such as the great civic reconciliation of 1295, over which he himself presided—provide a valuable contrast to the more scholarly and didactic sections of the work. Together they form an integrated, coherent approach to urban history, which illustrates some of the most important styles of historiography in the Middle Ages.
Paradoxically, Jacopo da Varagine may be one of the least-known authors of the Middle Ages. As Jacobus de Voragine —the commonest Latin form of his name 1 —the collection of saints’ lives he compiled in the 1260s, which came to be known as the Golden legend ( GL ), became one of the great medieval ‘bestsellers’. The work was translated into most of the European vernaculars, survives in
Jacobus de Voragine in the Legenda Aurea and two Middle English examples, from John Mirk’s Festial and the Speculum Sacerdotale.3 The consecration ceremony remained virtually unchanged through the later Middle Ages and there is neither the room here nor the need to provide a liturgical history; rather my aim is to draw out the major strategies and performative practices through which the ritual created and shaped the medieval understanding of sacred space.4 Writers such as Durandus established what Hayes calls a ‘learned concept’ of sacred space, and this is crucial for
of St Helena of Britain and her invention of the True Cross, Jacobus de Voragine recounts an even odder journey: ‘Pope Callixtus … relates that about the year 1100 a certain citizen of Barcelona went in pilgrimage to Saint James, and besought him for one favour, namely that he should never be taken captive. Returning by way of Sicily, he was captured at sea by the Saracens, and sold
de Voragine parsed Leonard’s name this way: ‘ Leonardus means the perfume of the people, from leos , people, and nardus , which is a sweet-smelling herb; and Leonard drew people to himself by the sweet odor of his good renown.’ 4 Sweet-smelling Leonard’s feast day was 6 November. Viola greets Olivia with a wink at Leonardus on his feast day
containing the Divine Office. 46 A thirteenth-century collection of saints’ lives by Jacobus de Voragine, printed in English translation by William Caxton in 1483. 47 A popular late medieval almanac containing
albigeoise ( Paris, 1951 ) J. Hamilton and B. Hamilton , eds, Christian Dualist Heresies in the Byzantine World, c. 650–c. 1405 ( Manchester, 1998 ) Jacobus de Voragine [James of Varazze], The Golden Legend , ed. V. G. Ryan, 2 vols ( Princeton, 1993 ), I, pp. 254–66 (Peter Martyr); II, pp. 44–58 (Dominic) Jordan of Saxony, On the Beginnings of the Order of Preachers , ed. S. Tugwell ( Dublin, 1982 ) C. Léglu , R. Rist and C. Taylor , eds, The Cathars and the Albigensian Crusade
, revealed as a Christian, was sentenced to death. According to Jacobus de Voragine's thirteenth-century Legenda aurea , which circulated vastly in the later Middle Ages, Vitalis was executed by order of the judge, Paulin, by half-drowning and burial under the seabed in a curious conflagration of water, earth, air, and fire: Then said Paulin: Bring him [Vitalis] for to do sacrifice, and if he do it not, make a deep pit unto the water and put his head thereunder. And so they did, and there buried him
–6. 16 Other examples I have found in the collection of the Bodleian Library include a Franciscan Missal (MS. Douce 313), fol. 257 v ; and two Flemish psalter calendars (MS. Douce 49), fol. 4 v ; and (MS. Auct. D. 4. 2), fol. 4. 17 Jacobus de Voragine, The golden
The church as sacred space places the reader at the heart of medieval religious life, standing inside the church with the medieval laity in order to ask what the church meant to them and why. It examines the church as a building, idea, and community, and explores the ways in which the sanctity of the church was crucial to its place at the centre of lay devotion and parish life. At a time when the parish church was facing competition for lay attention, and dissenting movements such as Lollardy were challenging the relevance of the material church, the book examines what was at stake in discussions of sanctity and its manifestations. Exploring a range of Middle English literature alongside liturgy, architecture, and material culture, the book explores the ways in which the sanctity of the church was constructed and maintained for the edification of the laity. Drawing on a wide range of contemporary theoretical approaches, the book offers a reading of the church as continually produced and negotiated by the rituals, performances, and practices of its lay communities, who were constantly being asked to attend to its material form, visual decorations, and significance. The meaning of the church was a dominant question in late-medieval religious culture and this book provides an invaluable context for students and academics working on lay religious experience and canonical Middle English texts.