Matthew Paris

Matthew Paris is one of the best known and most controversial of medieval historians. A Benedictine monk, he was chronicler of St. Alban‘s Abbey from around 1236 until his death in 1259. The aim of this article is to examine Matthew’s value as an historian in one important area: events in the Holy Land from 1229 to 1259, of which he was a contemporary. Matthew is an important source for the history of the Holy Land during this period. His writings reveal him to have been very much in favour of Latin Christian control of the holy places in Palestine. But he was hotly critical of the failure of those whose duty it was to protect them: the crusaders and the military orders. The problems of interpretation that his works present are common to monastic chronicles. His reporting of events was distorted; partly because his informants were not always reliable, but mainly by his own prejudices. Because of his hatred of the pope, the king, foreigners, the friars and others, he sometimes misinterpreted his information. He has been accused of forging some of the documents he inserted into his chronicle. He passed off his own personal view as general opinion. At the same time, however, Matthew’s prejudice is interesting in itself. It offers us a window into the thoughts of one well-informed thirteenth-century English monk, and casts some light on the prejudices of his immediate audience. For this reason, Matthew Paris’ treatment of the Templars and Hospitallers is particularly revealing and significant for historians of the crusades and of the military orders.
This article was written in 1992 for a journal aimed at high school children. Suggesting that Matthew Paris was the medieval equivalent of a modern gutter press leader-writer, it opens with a mock tabloid-press headline. The reference to the ‘evil emperor’ was intended to echo the then recent fall of the USSR, which the British tabloid press had labelled an ‘evil empire’.

As the first cultural history of the sea in medieval English literature, this book traces premodern myths of insularity from their Old English beginnings to Shakespeare's Tempest. Beginning with a discussion of biblical, classical and pre-Conquest treatments of the sea, it investigates how such works as the Anglo-Norman Voyage of St Brendan, the Tristan romances, the chronicles of Matthew Paris, King Horn, Patience, The Book of Margery Kempe and The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye shape insular ideologies of Englishness. Whether it is Britain's privileged place in the geography of salvation or the political fiction of the idyllic island fortress, medieval English writers' myths of the sea betray their anxieties about their own insular identity; their texts call on maritime motifs to define England geographically and culturally against the presence of the sea. New insights from a range of fields, including jurisprudence, theology, the history of cartography and anthropology, are used to provide fresh readings of a wide range of both insular and continental writings.

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First published in 1999 in the Online Reference Book for Medieval Studies, this article asked whether the military-religious orders` contemporaries during the period 1119–1291 viewed them as knights genuinely serving Christ, knights of Christ? It concludes that during this period no one doubted that they served Christ. Only once during this period did a pope suggest that some of the Hospitallers were guilty of heresy, and the accusation was never repeated or elaborated. The Templars and Teutonic knights and the other military orders were never accused of error in their religious beliefs. Although there was criticism that the brothers had put money before their service of Christ, or had proved themselves unworthy in other ways, they could still be redeemed. After the final loss of Acre in May 1291, when Pope Nicholas IV asked the Church for suggestions as to how the Holy Land could be recovered, his bishops made many suggestions as to how the military orders could be reformed to make them more efficient, but no one suggested that they be abolished. The concept of the military order remained unquestioned, and they were still expected to spearhead the recovery of the Holy Places which they had fought so long to protect.

Medieval documents can provide information about the types of gems in use at that time and their terminology. Some such texts show a level of sophistication regarding what we might consider to be early gemmology, prompting questions as to how such knowledge was passed on. This
article considers the range of gems used in thirteenth-century England and the level of gemmological knowledge at the time, based on an inventory of the treasures owned by St Albans Abbey that was drawn up in 1257 (British Library, Cotton MS Nero D I). The compiler was the monk and polymath Matthew Paris (ca. 1200–1259), and the inventory is noteworthy for its detailed descriptions and colour paintings of each object. From these we can learn about the range of gems familiar during that period, as well as the way in which different qualities and origins were described, and even some terminology used for jewellery settings.

This contribution reconstructs the history of volvelle in movable books; books created for a wide range of different purposes (teaching, mnemonics, play, divining, etc.) including mechanical or paratextual devices demanding or soliciting the interaction of the reader. The investigation runs from handwritten books, considering some specific editorial genres, including calendars, books of fate, anatomical flap books, navigation handbooks etc.

This contribution reconstructs the history of movable books, books created for a wide range of different purposes (teaching, mnemonics, play, divining, etc.) including mechanical or paratextual devices demanding or soliciting the interaction of the reader. The investigation runs from hand-written books to the most courageous paper-engineering experiments of the 20th century Avant-Garde, considering some specific editorial genres, including calendars, “libri di sorti”, anatomical books, navigation handbooks etc., and animated children's books. In particular, it demonstrates how the happy season for animated paper production and publishing of the 19th century would not have been possible without the scientific inheritance of optical studies and vision sciences, precursors a short time before the invention of the Lumière brothers (1895). The study also examines some literary works using combinatorial mechanisms, experimenting the semiotic potential of expressive codes and very different techniques and materials: the reference is to books of Futurism and Dadaism, the "artists' book", and other avant-garde texts from the second half of the 20th century.

This essay embodies research that has been intermittently ‘in progress’ for nearly twenty years (beginning with Clark 2002). A shortened version of this text was published under the title ‘Trojans at Totnes and giants on the Hoe’ (Clark 2016), but the current complete text also incorporates more recent research, together with the relevant part of another unpublished essay ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth, Dartmouth, crusaders and tin’ (Clark 2020).
Geoffrey of Monmouth’s largely fictional History of the Kings of Britain, written in the 1130s, set the landing place of his legendary Trojan colonists of Britain with their leader Brutus on ‘the coast of Totnes’ – or rather, on ‘the Totnesian coast’. This paper considers, in the context of Geoffrey’s own time and the local topography, what he meant by this phrase, which may reflect the authority the Norman lords of Totnes held over the River Dart or more widely in the south of Devon.

L'effondrement du mont Granier, dans le massif de la Chartreuse, en Savoie, à la fin de l'année 1248, eut un retentissement considérable en Occident. Neuf textes de six auteurs différents (Étienne de Bourbon, Fra Salimbene, Mathieu Paris - qui fournit quatre versions du drame - Martin le Polonais, Annales dominicaines d'Erfurt, Géraud de Frachet), écrits entre 1250 et 1283, ont été réunis et analysés dans le but de montrer comment l'événement a été présenté et expliqué. La thèse du séisme proposée par Mathieu Paris doit être comprise en référence à la science de son temps. C'est le récit de Martin le Polonais qui a eu le plus de succès dans la tradition historiographique internationale, le récit d'Étienne de Bourbon recueillant une faveur plus régionale. De nouveaux éléments apparurent, sans doute dès la fin du Moyen Âge, s'ancrant à la chapelle de Myans, épargnée par la catastrophe ; les protagonistes principaux de ces récits - les diables et la sainte Vierge - étaient absents des versions médiévales. L'accent fut mis désormais non plus sur la vengeance divine mais sur la miséricorde de Notre-Dame.

This paper aims to propose new identifications for some settlements depicted in the Iter de Londinio in Terram Sanctam by Matthew Paris, traditionally considered to be placed incorrectly by the copyist or by the same author. In this way, a central role of medieval Apulia in the historical and ideological project of the Chronica majora, one of the great historiographical texts of the mid-thirteenth century, emerges most clearly.

The system of papal provision – through which medieval clergy were appointed to ecclesiastical benefices across Christendom – has remained controversial ever since its inception in the 12th century. Xenophobic contemporary commentators, such as the 13th-century English chronicler Matthew Paris, lambasted the appointment of large numbers of foreign clergy to church livings through papal intervention – criticism that has endured in the modern historiography on papal provisions. The predominant historiographical interpretation remains that popes proactively developed an autocratic and nepotistic system of provision, expanding their own powers to reserve benefices through encyclicals such as Licet ecclesiarum, so as to increase their authority over the western Church, and to finance the curia by rewarding cardinals and kinsmen with valuable benefices in local churches throughout the West. An unresolved tension in the historiography has been created, however, by a newer approach that emphasises the importance of petitioners, rather than the popes, in fuelling the development of curial institutions. This article maps the state of the historiography, synthesises the differing scholarly traditions and suggests avenues for future research.

"The present work focuses on Matthew Paris, XIII century chronicler and artist of the Benedictine abbey of Saint Albans, in the attempt to better define the still problematic role of the monk in relation to his cultural and social context. Most of what is known about him, given the substantial lack of biographical information, is accounted for by later chronicler Thomas of Walsingham, whose reliability, though, has been heavily questioned, at least for what concerns Matthew Paris’s actual artistic skills; this work states that Walsingham’s words have been read with a biased, partial or naive approach.
Here it is proposed a careful examination of written sources, especially of chronicles written by Matthew Paris himself, in order to establish in a more objective way his competence, his possible training as an artist in general, and as a goldsmith in particular.
"

This article is the first to analyse the role of papal executors in scrutinising the veracity of petitions for papal graces (such as provision to a Church benefice, or dispensation from illegitimate birth) in thirteenth-century England. It sheds light on the office of executor – the linchpin of the papal provisions system – which has traditionally remained obscure for this period. By demonstrating that executors could and did refuse papal mandates for provision, this article draws into question the arguments of scholars who claim that swathes of illiterate foreign providees were crippling English pastoral care and exporting huge sums of ecclesiastical revenue from England.

This contribution reconstructs the history of movable books, books created for a wide range of different purposes (teaching, mnemonics, play, divining, etc.) including mechanical or paratextual devices demanding or soliciting the interaction of the reader. The investigation runs from hand-written books to the most courageous paper-engineering experiments of the 20th century Avant-Garde, considering some specific editorial genres, including calendars, “libri di sorti”, anatomical books, navigation handbooks etc., and animated children’s books. In particular, it demonstrates how the happy season for animated paper production and publishing of the 19th century would not have been possible without the scientific inheritance of optical studies and vision sciences, precursors a short time before the invention of the Lumière brothers (1895). The study also examines some literary works using combinatorial mechanisms, experimenting the semiotic potential of expressive codes and very different techniques and materials: the reference is to books of Futurism and Dadaism, the “artists’ book”, and other avant-garde texts from the second half of the 20th century.

The paper deals with the description of Britain in the Natural History of Pliny the Elder. The author traces the sources of Pliny
and the place of his description in the classical geographical tradition.
The Roman author had the opportunity to rely on a number of predecessors, starting with the semi-legendary Pitheas of Massalia (fourth
century BCE) who allegedly navigated to the north along the western
coast of Europe. Though by the time Pliny wrote Britain had already
been a Roman province, the author of the Natural History mostly uses
scholarly tradition rather than eyewitness accounts. The Natural History became the basis for most of the Late Antique and medieval descriptions of Britain (by Solinus, Orosius, Gildas, Bede etc.). It included several of the usual topoi: Britain is an island in the Ocean, it is situated at the edge of the known world, it is remote and hard to reach,
but is also fertile and rich in nature resources. For Roman authors,
the conquest of Britain was a natural end to the spread of the power
of the Eternal City to the remotest limits of the world. The last part of
the article is devoted to an analysis of Plinian influences on medieval
views on the geography of Britain. It is demonstrated that at least
some 12th and 13th-century writers (including the chronicler Matthew
Paris) drew information directly from Natural History and sometimes
compared various sources, noting their discrepancy.

The presbytery vault at St Albans is one of only two thirteenth-century wooden vaults over a main span to survive in England. A programme of cleaning and conservation carried out between 1997 and 2002, coupled with an analysis of the source and date of the timber used in its construction , significantly advanced our understanding of both the late thirteenth-century presbytery campaign at St Albans and thirteenth-century timber vault construction generally. As the inevitable density and restricted circulation of the final report on that work has hindered its wider reception, the following paper offers a summary, drawing attention to two features that may have wider implications for an appreciation of vaulting in timber. The first is that, although the general form adopted at St Albans is one associated with masonry vaulting, the wooden boards used for the vault webbing required a junction between the wall and the ridge rib, meaning that shallow liernes were originally deployed to run parallel to the central ridge. It is difficult to see this as imitative of vaulting in stone; rather it is likely to be the result of carpenters developing their own solutions to the constraints imposed by timber. Secondly, the late medieval remodelling of the vault replaced these liernes with false tiercerons, and rather nicely illustrates the ease with which timber vaulting could be modified. The dendrochronology gives a date range of 1273-93, and a date of around 1285 is suggested for the primary build. The major late medieval alterations are here associated with the second abbacy of John of Wheathampstead (1452-65).

Completed about 1250, the version of La Estoire de Seint
Aedward le Rei preserved in Cambridge University Library MS
Ee.3.59 is the only known illustrated Anglo-Norman life of St.
Edward, the last Anglo-Saxon king from the House of Wessex.
!e Cambridge manuscript was likely copied from the now-lost
presentation copy made by Matthew Paris that was given to
Eleanor of Provence following her marriage to King Henry III of
England in 1236. Because the original was created amid Henry’s
growing devotion to his saint-king ancestor and his renovation
of Edward’s church at Westminster, much of the scholarship on
the Estoire has centered on Henry’s religious and political inclinations.  This focus has emerged despite the poem’s explicit
dedication to Eleanor of Provence, which the Cambridge manuscript retains. The present study aims to reorient research on this manuscript by considering how the epithalamium introduces Eleanor as a reader of the Estoire and thus presents thirteenth-century English queenship through the eleventh -century figures of Emma, Gunnilda, and Edith. Although Eleanor may never have possessed the Cambridge manuscript, its text and illustrations can be understood as speaking directly to her, thereby shaping the image of English queens for contemporary readers.  Because similar saints’ lives circulated among the English aristocracy, it is critical to our understanding of the Cambridge manuscript to explore how this undercurrent of queenship in the Estoire would have been received by a potentially broad audience. Read in this way, the Estoire becomes a compilation of text and image that places Eleanor of Provence both alongside these readers and in a succession of virtuous royal women in the life of St. Edward.

This essay will bring a postcolonial gaze to an eclectic array of subjects, including medieval and modern images and texts, and modern scholarship thereon. It is the result of my thinking not so much about medieval geographical images and texts, like the small gem that is the Psalter Map, Matthew Paris’s Map of the Holy Land and the Book of Sir john Mandeville, to which I will shortly turn, but rather, with and through them, because doing so has led me increasingly to think about certitude, about the feeling of deeply rooted certainty (or the wilful quest to achieve it through repeated assertions thereof). There are several types of certitude that I would like to think about, here. There is the certitude of the colonial viewpoint, secure in its superiority over the Other, of the correctness of its own perspective; of the medieval geographical enterprise; and of the historical and art historical viewpoint brought thereto, ever seeking the correct answer to the 'problems' art presents, especially art of a presupposed benighted culture at a remove from our own in place or time. I will tackle each of these briefly, in an attempt to explore some of the issues that I believe underlie many discussions of medieval art, especially of medieval images of maps and monsters. In so doing, though, I hope to make a few broader assertions about the value of postcolonial thinking, within and beyond art history. I will begin, though, with a medieval book.

"The translation of Crown of Thorns from Constantinople to Paris marked the symbolic reinvention of the object, its new owner and final destination. When the Latin Emperor Baldwin II (1217, r. 1237–1273) offered the relic to King Louis IX of France (1214, r. 1226–1270, canonized 1297), this diplomatic transaction was celebrated as gift from God. A multitude of events orchestrated in honor of the Crown's arrival in August 1239, which included public displays, sermons, vigils, and processions of the relic, signified the divine anointment of the Capetian kingdom. The acquisition of more Passion relics in 1241 appeared to confirm what the initial festivities of the Crown first revealed: That Christ had selected France for the veneration of his Passion. In the text known presenty as the Historia Susceptionis Coronae Spineae, a melodical office composed for the inaugural feast of the Crown in August 1240, Archbishop Gauthier Cornut of Sens (d.1241) explains how and why the relic came to France and provides an eyewitness description of the final stages of the Crown's journey, culminating in its joyous arrival in Paris. This monograph will explore the content and significance of the Historia, arguing that its author is responsible for a fast-flourishing and enduring cult. The representation of the Crown's translation in the 1240s glass of the Sainte-Chapelle and Tours Cathedral is examined in light of its appropriation of the Historia text for narrative design. With an in-depth analysis of the Historia, this account will expose the legacy of Cornut as the preliminary architect behind the construction of the French cult of the Crown of Thorns."

This article summarizes new research on the custom of distributing the spoils of war
amongst active military participants in the Holy Land. A letter of guarantee records an
agreement between John of Brienne, king of Jerusalem, and the Teutonic Knights right
after the capture of Damietta (1219) during the Fifth Crusade. This document is compared
with contemporary sources reporting on military actions of the Teutonic Order.
The article argues that the strength of a military order and power relations between
parties participating in military campaigns can be studied through their sharing of the
spoils of war.

This essay will bring a postcolonial gaze to an eclectic array of subjects, including medieval and modern images and texts, and modern scholarship thereon. It is the result of my thinking not so much about medieval geographical images and texts, like the small gem that is the Psalter Map, Matthew Paris's Map of the Holy Land and the Book of Sir john Mandeville, to which I will shortly turn, but rather, with and through them, because doing so has led me increasingly to think about certitude, about the feeling of deeply rooted certainty (or the wilful quest to achieve it through repeated assertions thereof). There are several types of certitude that I would like to think about, here. There is the certitude of the colonial viewpoint, secure in its superiority over the Other, of the correctness of its own perspective; of the medieval geographical enterprise; and of the historical and art historical viewpoint brought thereto, ever seeking the correct answer to the 'problems' ...

Le volume offre un fac-similé du manuscrit Ashmole 304 de la Bodleian Library d’Oxford, précédé d’une introduction substantielle (pp. 11-103). Il s’agit d’un recueil de textes de divination, copié et richement illustré par le moine de St-Albans Matthieu Paris, ante 1259. Dans l’introduction je reconstruis d’abord la biographie de Matthieu Paris, figure particulièrement complexe et connue par sa production à la fois historiographique, hagiographique et artistique. Venant ensuite à la description du codex, je présente en détail le genre littéraire auquel appartiennent les textes rassemblés, à savoir les livres de sortes. J’explique alors en détail les différentes typologies divinatoires employées (onomatomancie, cléromancie, géomancie…), tout en reconstruisant leur tradition particulière, qui remonte souvent à l’Antiquité, et leur diffusion et circulation méditerranéennes. En effet, le manuscrit a pour particularité de garder des traces linguistiques qui renvoient à des modèles arabes ou hébreux, tels que les Qur‘at al-tuyûr (Sorts des oiseaux) ou Qur‘at al mulûk (Sorts des rois) ou le livre de sorts de Sa’adya Ga’on. Tous les textes sont analysés à la fois sous l’angle artistique et sous l’angle philologique, en retraçant les modifications et réécritures qu’ils ont subies au cours du temps et leur réception dans le milieu laïque et aristocratique anglais du codex. L’introduction se termine par une démonstration concrète du « mode d’emploi » de chaque texte divinatoire et, enfin, par une description codicologique détaillée.

This is a version of my first Master's dissertation exploring the weird and wonderful things recorded in Matthew Paris's Chronica Majora. It suggests that Matthew Paris, chronicler, artist, historian and monk of St Alban's included various curious incidents in his chronicle because he believed that the world might end in the year 1250.

This eBook represents collected research into primary sources by undergraduate students from the University of Florida. It focuses on medieval political figures from thirteenth-century Europe, and considers how modern scholars should understand power and politics in the context of the Middle Ages.

For full text, see http://ufdc.ufl.edu/IR00010314/00001