Of Locustae and Dangerous Men: Peter Damian, the Vallombrosans, and Eleventh-century Reform1
In a letter to the people of Florence in the early part of 1067, the ardent reformer, Peter Damian, denounced a group of monks as locustae. These unnamed monks—whom it has long been accepted were the Vallombrosans—had been waging a campaign against their bishop, Peter Mezzabarba of Florence, whom they accused of obtaining his office by simony. Although Damian, who had been cardinalbishop of Ostia as well as prior of the eremitical community at Fonte Avellana, readily acknowledged that Mezzabarba might have a case to answer at Pope Alexander II's forthcoming council in Rome, he condemned their intrusion into matters of ecclesiastical politics that were none of their business. Yet it was clearly more than a matter of inappropriate activities. For he went on to dismiss in the bitterest of terms the dangerous pretensions of these monks to a superior holiness. Referring to their sanctity as odiosa, Damian concluded by saying that if monks like the Vallombrosans wanted to be holy they should not flaunt a spiritual arrogance in the face of weaker brethren. For Damian, the duty of monks was strictly defined by function: their calling was to weep for sins, not to announce them.
The Papacy, The Patarenes and the Church of Milan
Between 1046, when the Emperor Henry III reformed the papacy, and 1099, when Pope Urban II died, a very drastic change came over the loyalties of the church and city of Milan. In 1046, these loyalties were chiefly local; their centre was St Ambrose, the fourth-century bishop of Milan who was its patron saint. Apart from certain rather artificial purposes of propaganda in its long struggle for precedence over Ravenna and Aquileia, Milan did not actively look to the see of St Peter; nor was it, in practice, subject to Roman interference. Politically, it did, indeed, acknowledge an ultimate loyalty to the emperor; but this was because, so long as he ruled his kingdom of Italy from a distance, he was a safeguard for Milan's virtual autonomy in spiritual and temporal affairs. Milan had the appearance of a proud and self-sufficient metropolis, subject only to the ecclesiastical and civil rule of its own archbishop. But, after 1056, its order and independence were rudely challenged when the Patarene movement gave rise to nineteen years of civil strife. The Patarenes sought help from Rome, where they found some ready and effective allies amongst the reformers. Milan, accordingly, reacted by showing itself actively hostile to the papacy; for a while, its citizens called upon the Emperor Henry IV to be active in vindicating his rights. Then, in 1075, tne Patarenes suffered a sudden collapse and ceased to be an effective movement.
French film theory and criticism : a history/anthology, 1907-1939
These two volumes examine a significant but previously neglected moment in French cultural history: the emergence of French film theory and criticism before the essays of Andr Bazin. Richard Abel has devised an organizational scheme of six nearly symmetrical periods that serve to "bite into" the discursive flow of early French writing on the cinema. Each of the periods is discussed in a separate and extensive historical introduction, with convincing explications of the various concepts current at the time. In each instance, Abel goes on to provide a complementary anthology of selected texts in translation. Amounting to a portable archive, these anthologies make available a rich selection of nearly one hundred and fifty important texts, most of them never before published in English.