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On March 11, 1793, about a thousand counterrevolutionary rebels converged on the small French town of Machecoul and over the next six weeks killed many of its revolutionary officials and supporters. The massacres at Machecoul marked the beginning of a popular insurgency in western France called the War of Vendee, in turn igniting the ferocious republican response known today as the Terror. This story explores why these small-town massacres occurred, how they may have unfolded, and what the local and national repercussions of the murders were. The author Edward J. Woell argues that more than any other factor, religion stood at the center of the massacres: in their origins during the late Old Regime, in their enactment amid the wider revolutionary tumult, and in their remembrance over the century that followed. Claiming a greater significance to the episode than most historians have acknowledged, Woell shows that the Machecoul massacres \"not only raise the most fundamental, profound, and perplexing questions that scholars have sought to answer, but they also embody the quintessential themes of the French Revolution.\".

Two remarkably similar depictions of spiders survive in Middle English and French sources from the middle of the thirteenth century. Both of these vernacular versions of the Physiologus deviate so wildly from their sources when it comes to describing these creatures that their editors have declared these passages to be entirely original. And yet, the spiders who survive in the Middle English Physiologus and the long version of the Bestiaire attributed to Pierre de Beauvais perform such similar work that their originality may be called into question. The Physiologus’ and Bestiaire’s descriptions of spiders’ violent hunting methods were likely informed by the burgeoning of natural history writing that accompanied the recovery of Aristotle’s History of Animals, but for these texts’ allegorical interpretations I argue that we should look to Odo of Cheriton’s Latin fables from earlier in the thirteenth century. There is an explicit link between Odo’s fables and the Middle English Physiologus and implicit connections with the French Bestiaire. Together, these analogues demonstrate a small but coherent tradition of emphasizing the diabolical violence of spiders in the multilingual environment of thirteenth-century England and France.

This article explores the relationship of the discourse of secrets and courtly politics during Alfonso X's rule in Castile and León (1252–1284). This piece argues that Alfonso's imperial aspirations may be the key to better understand the reasons encouraging the complilation of the Liber Razielis at the Alfonsine court. In this work, we can find three main elements that were useful to legitimize Alfonso's project: the discourse of secrets and its relationship to the royal institution, the identification between the wise Solomon and Alfonso, and, finally, the use of natural philosophy as a means to portray the figure of the eagle as a defining element of the empire. Finally, this essay concludes that the figure of the eagle and the strategic meaning of Solomon also appear in several later works of the Alfonsine corpus in similar political terms.

This essay investigates the transitional character of the Livonian Rhymed Chronicle (German: Livländische Reimchronik), a Middle High German verse history composed around 1290, which describes the conquest of the eastern Baltic lands by German crusaders and military-religious orders during the thirteenth century. Although it was first composed as a written text, the chronicle shows numerous features characteristic of oral-formulaic poetry: stock epithets, fixed nominal pairs, repeated discourse markers, and syntactic formulas used to introduce persons and places. The analysis is followed by an investigation of the probable audience and performance situation of the work. It is argued that the highly formulaic features of the work were designed to aid comprehension by listeners who were not necessarily familiar with the language variety in which the chronicle was composed. Este trabajo investiga el carácter transicional de la Crónica rimada de Livonia (en alemán: Livländische Reimchronik), una historia versificada en alto alemán medio compuesta hacia 1290, que relata la conquista de las tierras bálticas orientales por cruzados y órdenes religiosas militares alemanes durante el siglo XIII. Aunque se compuso originalmente como texto escrito, la crónica muestra numerosos rasgos de la poesía oral formular: epítetos estereotipados, parejas nominales fijas, marcadores discursivos repetidos, y fórmulas sintácticas para presentar personas y lugares. Al análisis sigue una investigación de la probable audiencia y contexto de ejecución de la obra. Se argumenta que los rasgos marcadamente formulares de la obra estaban dirigidos a favorecer la comprensión de oyentes que podían no estar familiarizados con la variedad lingüística en que se compuso la crónica.

The film is a hymn to freedom, the freedom of individuals and entire peoples. It narrates the life of the Scots hero, William Wallace, who lived during the last decades of the 13th century and the first years of the 14th century. These were turbulent times in the history of Scotland, which was subject to the power of the King of England, its neighbour, who governed with an iron hand while the members of the Scots nobility competed and fought for the succession to the throne of Scotland, which had been left vacant.

Frente a los silencios de la documentación, la metodología de la intertextualidade ofrece la posibilidad de recuperar del corpus de nuestra lírica esquemas métricos y estróficos, rimas y rimantes, motivos y temas, semas y vocabulario que, estudiados con el rigor de la hermeneútica permiten el reagrupamiento de textos y trovadores y sirven, cuando se producen las condiciones más idóneas, para reorientar nuestras pesquisas históricas. Estudiaremos algunos de estos hechos intertextuales a través de la producción poética de trovadores gallegoportugueses de las primeras generaciones, esto es, autores que compusieron entre 1175 y 1250 grosso modo. Analizaremos una serie de casos que consideramos claros en su planteamiento y en el objetivo central de este trabajo: deshacer el silencio documental gracias a la intertextualidade a la hora de establecer ciertas relaciones entre trovadores y su cronología.

This article applies Diplomatic discipline techniques to the correspondence issued from the Nasrid Granada Court and directed to Christian monarchs and Lords. For reasons of coherence and space, it focuses only on the letters written in Arabic. The aim was to establish their extrinsic charac-teristics (paper size and colour, palaeographic type, size of the seals, presence of ʽalāma) and the in-trinsic ones (directio, intitulatio, greetings, toponymical and chronological dating styles), to character-ize them and check if the formulae reflect the social categories of the sender and the recipient. To carry the task, some 70 letters (all original) have been studied; they were submitted by the sultans or their dignitaries from Granada to the Aragon and Castile Courts, and most of them are preserved now in the Archive of the Crown of Aragon. They have been analysed to determinate the formulae which constitute the initial and final Protocols, their usual wordings and order of placement. The conclusions of the study show that these letters written in Granada in Arabic language have a characteristic structure and con-ventions of their own and that knowing them it's easy to identify them.

This article is a comparative study of the thirteen-century Chinese revenge drama The Orphan of Zhao and its European adaptations from the eighteenth century to the present. Generally considered one of China's great tragedies and the first Chinese dramatic work introduced to Europe, this play makes a good case study as intercultural theater. Unlike the earlier studies which emphasized Chinese influence on European drama, this study examines how European adapters tried to remake the Chinese play to conform to Western criteria of drama, such as the three unities. It also discusses how the dramatic actions in William Hatchett's and Arthur Murphy's adaptations reflected the conditions of England rather than China, and how Voltaire appropriated the Chinese play to articulate his ideas of European Enlightenment. In contrast to the Eurocentric eighteenth-century adaptations, the 2012 production by the Royal Shakespeare Company represents a changing European attitude toward Chinese drama and a new direction in intercultural theater. This study provides a history of cultural exchanges between East and West through a systematic analysis of transnational transmissions of an important Chinese play.

This article identifies a new Old Norse analogue to Beowulf’s battle in the mere: an episode narrated in chapters 195–197 of the courtly thirteenth-century text Þiðreks saga af Bern. It describes and examines the resemblances between this episode and Beowulf’s fight against Grendel’s mother, as well as the notorious analogue of Grettir’s fight against a troll-woman. As I hope to show, several details of the scene in Þiðreks saga make it a particularly strong analogue to the second monster fight in Beowulf. This article situates these analogues against the common Old Norse topoi of moundbreaking and land-cleansing in order to separate what is analogous from what is merely saga convention. The analogue in Þiðreks saga reveals the broad circulation and flexible use of the monster-fighting narrative in medieval Germanic literature, a narrative paradigm that sometimes attaches to legendary figures but appears to circulate independently of them.

El artículo propone una reflexión sobre una cantiga gallego-portuguesa de Johan Soarez Coelho y el ciclo poético al que dio lugar, entre los años 1241-1243, reconsiderando una de las posiciones críticas más acreditadas y proponiendo un recorrido etimológico-semántico del término clave en torno al cual se articula la retórica del texto, la palabra gallego-portuguesa ama ‘nodriza’.