This research began in Montpellier, in the south of France. I wanted to work on medieval disability, following a long family history that made me very curious about this issue in pre-modern times. A meeting with Mr. Julien Théry, who introduced me to supplications and papal letters, in which I found a formidable cache of material for the cultural history of the medieval period, marked the beginning of the long path that is the writing of a book. I ‘go up’ to Paris to meet Mr. Henri-Jacques Stiker, whose book, Corps infirmes et société, was always at my bedside. He introduced me to Mr. Didier Lett, in whom I found a thesis director, in the noblest sense of the word. His help and advices allowed me to give substance to my ideas. I would also like to thank Mrs. Maaike van der Lugt, Mrs. Irina Metzler, Mr. Charles de Miramon, and Mrs. Myriam Winance, who did me the honor of reading and discussing this work.

This book would never have seen the light of day without the financial, but also human and logistical support of the University of Paris Diderot, and more particularly of the ICT laboratory and its successive directors, Mrs. Liliane Hilaire-Pérez, Mrs. Anna Caiozzo, and Mrs. Charlotte de Castelnau-l’Estoile as well as Mrs. Laurence Griffoul. I particularly thank the ED 382, its former director, Mr. Jean-Pierre Guilhembet, and its former co-director, Mrs. Florence Binard, for the training I received during the thesis. I would also like to thank the students of the University of Paris Diderot for the pleasure I took in teaching them medieval history, historiography, and historical methodology. I feel honoured to have seen them grow and flourish in contact with the teaching staff and their nascent or already affirmed passion.

My research benefited from three grants from the École française de Rome, during which I was able to build up my corpus of documents. I would like to thank Mrs. Catherine Virlouvet, Mr. Pierre Savy, and Mr. Stéphane Gioanni for having welcomed me, as well as those in charge of the library of the French School, Mrs. Annie Coisy and Mr. Clément Pieyre, for their letters, which allowed me to enter the Vatican Apostolic Archives. I took great advantage of the ideal setting offered by the French School, which gave rhythm to my research during my stays.

Abstract

This chapter moves to examine the consequences of the ‘failure’ of such disability tests and of clerics’ disclosures of impairment in petitions. In such cases, gracious papal letters sometimes allowed for the relaxation of ecclesiastical regulations to accommodate the disabled cleric's conditions, if he himself desired to remain in the clergy and was deemed capable enough. The process of supplication was used to improve clerics’ lives by adapting existing statutes to their personal situations.

Keywords: Coadjutors; Monastic Rules; Transfers; Mobility

The cover of the book you have in your hands, reader, represents a sick bishop, bedridden, who dictates his wishes to a notary, located at the bottom of his bed, as close as possible to the viewer. Behind the sick man stands another bishop, who helps him to write the letter, and, on the right, the recipient of the letter, the Pope. From this iconographic representation, and from the text that inspired the illustration, we can determine that the sick bishop is addressing a supplication to the Pope in order, no doubt, to delegate some (if not all) of his attributions to his colleague, who will become coadjutor or substitute bishop. Indeed, the preamble to cause 7 of Gratian's Decree, illustrated here, speaks of what a bishop overwhelmed by a long illness should do:

The text continues with chapter 1, ‘the pain of the body does not deprive the bishop of his honour’, which is exemplified in the miniature since the bishop is depicted in his sickly state, certainly, but still wearing all the attributes worthy of his office. Whether he is in the process of relinquishing some of his prerogatives or abdicating altogether, it is indeed the act of supplication of a sick bishop who seeks to adapt his duties to his physical condition that is depicted here.

This chapter expands on issues raised in earlier chapters, to consider in depth the accommodations offered and/or authorized by the pontifical institution that allowed impaired clerics to remain in the clergy. Through the supplication process, the Curia facilitated the inclusion of disabled petitioners, by adapting regulations to their personal situations.

Letting it Happen

“Signò Masaniello! SignòMasaniello!” Friar Sebastiano (Alessandro Molini) had beenrobbed of bread and he sought justice. It was the morning of 9 July.Masaniello came to the window of his house, heard what had happened, andinvited the friar up. Then he reassured him: he ordered the crowd to findthe thief who had barely escaped from the friar’s hand, and, in notime, it goes without saying, the man was delivered to Masaniello.“You are the first and I forgive you.” And then he said to me[the friar recounts], ‘Go with this man who will give you your bread,and if he will not give it to you come back to me, and I will give youjustice. My Fra’ Sebastiano, you know that I love you and if you needanything, give me the order’.”

Masaniello, on 9 July, two days into the uprising, now that Perrone’sand Palumbo’s stars had set, was already the capo,the chief, as emerges from this and other stories, which relate how heclimbed onto the stage and intervened. He reiterated, above all, the orderthat no one “dare to rob or disturb the city,” threateningthose who disobeyed that he would have “their ears cut off.”The first to be caught in the act were five military captains of the people,“who had not carried justly some goods taken in some houses orderedby him. He had their long hair cut and forgave the amputation of the ear, atthe prayers of many of his friends.”

The distinction between internal and external spaces, public and private, was not a fundamental characteristic of the environments at the time. Interior rooms often opened outwards, displaying their decorative setup on the façades; exterior courtyards were dressed as internal chambers instead. Various devices were put in place to recreate these micro-architectures, from tapestries used as structural walls, to architectural apparatuses that simulated ephemeral scenes, to sideboards used as display furniture. This hybridisation characterises the habits of the time, in which the concepts of the public and the domestic place were often unpredictable and ephemeral or dependent on specific social constructs.

*Ubi Papa, Ibi Roma: Furniture and Display Apparatus

One of the first temporary and ephemeral exhibition spaces can be found in the tent (skené) erected by Ptolemy II Philadelphus and described by Athenaeus of Naucrati (2nd–3rd century CE) in I Deipnosofisti. Inside the tent, walls were decorated with fabrics and hides, while the architrave supporting the ceiling was covered with tapestries interspersed with painted panels. In this setup, the exhibiting role of the structure met the decorative function, thus defining a temporary and modular micro-architecture.

The relationships between Nizami’s poetic narrative, manuscript painting and textile design present more inconsistencies when taking a close look at the other set of Khamsa lovers, Layla and Majnun. Unlike the close comparison to illustrations from Nizami’s ‘Khusrau and Shirin,’ which retain the basic elements of the narrative in each rendition of the design, silk textiles depicting the characters Layla and Majnun differ from illustrations of Nizami’s text and do not retain the same level of iconographic consistency as a group. In fact, they do not seem to be corresponding to the same Khamsa, presenting new interpretations of identity, patronage and provenance for this sub-group of silks. This chapter will compare poetry and paintings of Layla and Majnun in Nizami’s original to the Khamsa composed as javab-gui by the late-thirteenth-century poet Amir Khusrau Dihlavi in India, who altered the narrative of love and separation as he traversed his own Sufi path. Careful examination of the iconography in painting and silks leads to new conclusions in the potential provenance of silks depicting the lovers. The chapter culminates in a study of the poetry woven into the silks, and poetic metaphors of weavers and textile-making.

The legend of Layla and Majnun is dated as early as the seventh century CE and originates from the northern Arabian Peninsula.

In the opening to his article ‘History, Power, and Incomplete Epistolarity in Post-Soviet Cinema’, scholar Seth Graham claims that one of the fundamental features of epistolarity as presented in the cinema of the Soviet and post-Soviet spaces is the absence of an obligatory reciprocity between letter-writer and letter-recipient. If, traditionally, the epistolary exchange between self and other is sustained by the subsequent alternation of first- and second-person positions among interlocutors, in Soviet and post-Soviet cinema, Graham argues, this precondition is problematized, challenged, and even rejected. Such films, he claims, not only feature letters that do not fit within orthodox descriptions of the medium – ‘open letters, forged letters, letters to dead or unreal addressees’ etc. – but also have their ontological status modified through the interference of specifically cinematic techniques. To film a letter is to make decisions about how to present it, to alter it, and hence to shape both its contents and the projected self-image of the parties involved.

While Graham's thesis was almost certainly not designed with the cinema of Kira Muratova specifically in mind – prominent in his discussion are analyses of Kalatozov's Letter Never Sent (1960) as well as post-Soviet works from outside the Russian Federation and Ukraine – her work supports his account. Muratova's cinema features not only a plethora of epistolary forms presented in various formats – read out loud, dictated, shown on screen – but her work also importantly questions the primacy of the connection between the letter and the written word.

In June 1647, before the so-called Masaniello revolt broke out, an unnamedauthor wrote that a placard (cartello) had surfaced,issuing threats against the city’s nobles and the“mayors” (sindaci). According to the author,should new gabelle (taxes) be brought in, these persons would be“dragged” across the entire city. On the other hand, he ratherdoubted that such an uprising would occur, “if there is nobody totake charge and stir it up, there is no need to fear the outcome, becausethe People are too abased.” He was unaware that a young man of theLavinaio quarter had already opted to risk his life for the cause. On July 71647, Tommaso Aniello d’Amalfi led hundreds of youths to theviceregal palace to compel the viceroy to abolish thegabella on fruit, and all other state charges oncomestibles. For several days, especially after an attack that aimed to killhim, Masaniello became a sort of viceroy or king of the peninsula’smost populous city, one of Europe’s biggest. The chroniclerAlessandro Giraffi explains the many means by which Masaniello pushed thepeople towards revolt:

It was thus thanks to Masaniello that on the second day of the uprising, thepeople could count on some 150,000 men in arms. Masaniello was killed on 16July, but officially the revolt lasted until 6 April 1648, when the new\viceroy made his entrance into the city. News of the uprising soonspread beyond the borders of the Kingdom of Naples: the revolt was yet onemore ulcer on the great, afflicted body of the Spanish monarchy in the lastspasms of its exhausting war against the United Provinces(1568–1648), after the Catalan revolt of May 1640, the Portuguesesecession (1640–1641), and the Sicilian revolts (1646–1647).The Kingdom of Naples was the most important source of financialcontributions for the Spanish monarchy among its Italian domains: since 1619(the beginning of the Thirty Years’ War), Spain’s demand formoney had grown; confronted with revolts in Catalonia and Portugal, and thewar with France, Philip IV was constrained to ask for new contributions.

If ever an event in the history of Napes, before the revolution of 1799, lefta resounding echo, it is the so-called Revolt of Masaniello, which began on7 July 1647, and ended with the city’s surrender to the Spaniards on6 April 1648. The revolt at once seemed exceptional. In a matter of days,Masaniello, a young man born in Naples, dressed as a sailor – redcloth hat, white loose leggings – became “head” of theentire city, so populous a place that it ranked alongside London or Paris.The written words of witnesses show their astonishment at the absoluteobedience this young man commanded. The Venetian resident (the proper titlefor ambassadors not to a sovereign, but to a mere viceroy) laid it all outplainly: on 10 July, the people’s head was

There is now a great body of scholarly literature about the revolt. It runsfrom the works of Michelangelo Schipa, La cosi detta rivoluzione diMasaniello and La mente di Masaniello, datingfrom 1913 and 1918, to those by Rosario Villari on the origins of the event,on its assorted moments, and on the writings that arose throughout itscourse: his La rivolta antispagnola a Napoli. Le origini1585–1647 and Per il re per lapatria, to name but two. There is the volume by Aurelio Musi,La rivolta di Masaniello nella scena politica barocca(1989) and his many essays. There are also the Masaniello pages of FrancoBenigno in Specchi della rivoluzione (1994), and, finally,there is Giuseppe Galasso’s reconstruction of the entire revolt, inthe volume of the Storia d’Italia devoted entirelyto the Kingdom of Naples.

The bow is shot, the hands are lowered, the arrow transfixed into the body of the saint. Her countenance displays little emotion. With a slight furrow of the brow, she gazes down into the entry of her body. Gushes of blood flow in distinct yet dazzling drops that do little to stir any sign of distress or sorrow on her countenance; her face remains rigid, her gaze trapped in an unsettling pose of curiosity. Saint Ursula seems to linger on her wound with unnatural poise. Under the stunned gazes of the other participants, her wound becomes fertile; it overflows with blood and life. This phenomenon achieves a radical effect on her body. She is pale white, as if already drained of life; her body is brittle and evanescent – the concrete materiality of her flesh is shown to undergo a significant change; something akin to a miraculous act of transformation.

Caravaggio’s Martyrdom of Saint Ursula (1610) (Image 2) invites viewers to dwell and linger on the effects of the wound. For everything revolves around it: the saint, the soldiers, and the king, they all seem absorbed by the entry in her body. With her hands held high, the saint frames the spot as a moment of intense obscurity – a pictorial fragment from where we see the bleeding, we see the arrow in her chest; and yet, despite all our the expectations, we cannot see the laceration in her flesh.

Amsterdam, 1660

On March 29, 1660 Dominees (Reverends) Hermannus Blom and Henricus Selijns boarded De Vergulde Bever (The Gilded Beaver) in Amsterdam with the Testaments in nine volumes. The volumes contained the formula for baptism to which the directors of the Amsterdam Chamber expected the predikanten (preachers) of Nieuw Nederland (New Netherland) to adhere and a letter in which the directors informed Stuyvesant that Blom was to be sent to the Esopus and Selijns to Lange Eylandt (Long Island) to advance the gospel. Letters such as these underscore the fact that the directors of the Geoctroyeerde West-Indische Compagnie (Chartered West India Company or WIC) hoped to harvest both commercial and spiritual fruit in North America. Yet, there is no evidence to suggest that the dominees in and around Nieuw Amsterdam (New Amsterdam)—Johannes Polhemus (Lange Eylandt: 1654–1676), Henricus Selijns [Breuckelen (Brooklyn): 1660–1664; New York: 1682–1701], Samuel Megapolensis (New York: 1664–1668), Agidius Luyck (New York: 1671–1672), and Wilhelmus van Nieuwenhuysen (New York: 1671–1681)—carried on any significant missionary work among Indians in the latter part of the seventeenth century. This was due, in part, to the shortage of ministers and the deterioration of Indian–Dutch relations on the lower Muhheakantuck (Hudson River).

Nieuw Amstel, 1660

Less than two weeks after Dominees Blom and Selijns departed Amsterdam, the Council in Nieuw Amsterdam heard testimony from colonists living on the Zuid Rivier (South River—known as the Delaware by the English). They told the Council members that brandy was being openly sold to Indians throughout the region.

This book addresses the relationship between poetry and textiles by examining a unique group of narrative figural silks depicting lovers from the Khamsa (Quintet) of epic poems. Attributed to early modern Safavid Iran (1501-1722), these sumptuous silks were coveted luxury commodities while simultaneously embodying mystical concepts codified in Persian literature. Messages conveyed through figural silks will be analyzed in Safavid and Mughal courtly cultures, as well as in Sufi and Islamic traditions that guided early modern rulers, who fashioned themselves as ‘dervish kings’ through a shared visual and literary culture. By contemplating luxury dress as a form of self-expression, the portrayal of Khamsa textiles functions as an important link expressing worldly and spiritual identities.

The legendary characters depicted on the silks were codified by twelfth-century Persian-language poet Nizami Ganjavi in his Khamsa, whose enthralling tales of these historical figures were imbued with Sufi mysticism. ‘Khusrau and Shirin’ dramatizes the love story of Iranian king Khusrau and his Armenian queen Shirin, whose tumultuous royal relationship began with a fated meeting on the road between their two kingdoms. ‘Layla and Majnun’ recounts the separation and madness of the Bedouin poet-lover Qays (aka Majnun, ‘Madman’) and his beloved Layla, and his transformation from insanity to sublimity as he wandered through the wilderness. Hailed as one of the great classics of Persian literature, illustrated manuscripts of Nizami’s Khamsa were produced by workshops throughout greater Iran for the ruling classes in the centuries leading up to the Safavid period, including scenes illustrating each set of lovers meeting privately.

Abstract

This chapter interrogates the tests used by the Church to determine disability. These were required at several stages of the clerical profession: canon law stipulates that all candidates applying for admission to the secular and regular orders, and all clerics wishing to receive a promotion, must be examined before their appointment. Supposedly a ‘quality-control’ measure to guarantee the uniformity of the clerical condition at all levels, this evaluation was required from a cleric's first tonsure to their entrance into the priesthood, up until his election as bishop or abbot, when the Pope himself, in theory at least, conducted the examination.

Keywords: Examination; Promotion; Election; Education; Black Death

The Papal Chancery routinely blocked the entry of disabled clerics into minor and major orders, alongside preventing their receipt of a benefice attached to the care of souls (cura animarum). Restrictions of grace of this kind were more prevalent in the thirteenth century, when the number of such promotions granted to disabled churchmen remained low. Analysis of the relevant petitions addressed to the Papal Chancery by the disabled clerics and papal letters sent in response suggests, however, an openness to the inclusion of disabled clerics within major orders in the following century. While the thirteenth century saw a large proportion of resignations by disabled secular clerics (51% of letters, compared to 15% in the fourteenth century, see Chapter 5) the pontifical institution received significantly more requests for secular promotions during the fourteenth century, with the topic figuring in 33% of letters (94) and 26% of petitions (22) in the latter period, compared to just 17% of thirteenth-century letters (32) (see Figure 3.1).

These numbers show that the pontifical institution granted graces to receive a benefice with the care of souls and/or a promotion to the major orders to disabled clerics more willingly during the fourteenth century. Indeed, the Papal Chancery authorized the request of 64% of petitioners seeking to accede to a pastoral role, that is, benefices cum cura (vs. 31% in the thirteenth century), and 77% of those wishing to join major orders (vs. 27% in the previous century). The results for petitions to join the minor orders are in line with letters of the thirteenth century, with most petitioners prohibited from joining major orders (four out of six cases), alongside fewer spontaneous requests to enter minor orders (two cases out of six).

As these words of Bishop Isidore of Seville (d. 636) suggested, charity was considered to be essential to episcopal office. Many of his writings were concerned with ecclesiastical duties, both moral and spiritual, and addressed the responsibilities involved in pastoral care. He vehemently exhorted bishops to engage in charity, one of the highest virtues, which since Early Christianity had been closely connected to episcopacy. Emphasis on charity, therefore, was not new in the seventh century. Its importance can be traced back to Jesus’s teachings found in the Synoptic tradition and the Pauline texts, and revived later in the writings of the Church Fathers during the Early Christian centuries.

As bishops were becoming central figures within the Christian Church and within the communities where they lived and preached, an episcopal model focused on virtues – and particularly on charity – was also being shaped. As a result of extended and heated controversies that sought to define the scope of episcopal authority, bishops strengthened their positions in local communities by concentrating wealth, acquiring privileges, and assuming old practices and social responsibilities. Among the duties that fell under the jurisdiction of the bishops were Christian education and the moral guidance of the flock, the administration of liturgical rites, the protection of marginal and essential groups, the administration of ecclesiastical resources, and the foundation of churches and monasteries.