Philippa Byrne
Biographic Data
| ID | 3832370 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Philippa Byrne |
| GIVEN NAMES | Philippa |
| FAMILY NAME | Byrne |
| SIGNATURE | BYRNE P |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Oxford |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2424-0693 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 17 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 4 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 17 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1978 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Virgil in scholastic hands
Bath and Wells
A Local Translation in a Global World
This article revisits one of the texts associated with the fourteenthcentury spread of Franciscan mission across Eurasia, the account of the travels of Odoric of Pordenone (d.1331).Odoric's text is often mined for what it might reveal about Latin Christian perceptions of East Asia.This article argues that the local rather than the global aspects of the text should be given prominence in our assessment of his work, and greater attention paid to th…
Cassinese Horizons
This article reexamines the evidence for the intellectual life of Montecassino in the central Middle Ages, by interrogating a key text: Peter the Deacon’s De viris illustribus casinensis coenobii. This catalogue of the greatest scholars associated with the abbey lists their achievements in the liberal arts. Rather than being read sui generis, this text needs to be set within a longstanding Benedictine tradition. Peter’s catalogue reveals an attem…
Translating German Emperors
The Staufen conquest of the Kingdom of Sicily in 1194 can be understood as the violent destruction of a sophisticated and cosmopolitan Norman kingdom and its replacement by a new dynasty with starkly different cultural and political models. Indeed, many contemporary authors decried the brutality associated with Henry VI's conquest. This article considers the other side of the coin by examining the evidence for attempts to integrate Henry VI into …
Portable Scholasticism? The Intellectual Horizons of Gervase of Tilbury
The career of Gervase of Tilbury (c.1150-1220) opens a window into the complexity of the late twelfth-century intellectual world. Often dismissed as a mere compiler, Gervase was a scholastic thinker outside the schools who adapted complex theological arguments for an English prince, a Sicilian king, and a German emperor. His writing reveals the "portability" of scholastic thought. It also demonstrates how scholastic authors were molded by their e…
Chronologies of the animal turn
Camping with Tarantulas
This article examines how landscape and environmental factors shaped the eleventh-century Norman conquest of southern Italy and Sicily. The conquest was documented in several narrative histories, including those of Amatus of Montecassino, William of Apulia, and Geoffrey Malaterra. These texts have been extensively analyzed for their rhetorical qualities as literary texts, but such an approach has tended to cast the landscape in a passive role, as…
Cutting out the camel-like knees of St. James
This article examines the revival of the de viris illustribus genre in the twelfth century. These catalogues of the most important Christian authors were modelled on a template created in late antiquity by Jerome, but adopted new attitudes to what constitutes distinguished Christian literary activity. They regard the editing, collecting, and re-ordering of texts as equal to the composition of new works, and recognize legal codification as a notew…
Designing Norman Sicily
There are at least two perennial problems in writing the history of Norman Sicily. The first is one of a long shadow. We too often employ the term ‘Norman Sicily’ as shorthand for the reign of Roger II (r. 1130–54), founder of the kingdom. But the kingdom survived—even flourished—for another forty years after Roger’s death. Medievalists are not always as careful as they should be in disentangling Rogerian from Norman and vice versa. The second pr…
Pastoral Care in Medieval England
Pastoral Care in Medieval England: Interdisciplinary Approaches, ed. Peter Clarke and Sarah James Pastoral Care in Medieval England: Interdisciplinary Approaches, ed. Peter Clarke and Sarah James (London: Routledge, 2019; pp. 223. £120). P Byrne P Byrne Somerville College, Oxford, UK [email protected] https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2424-0693 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English Historical…
Structures and Origins of the Twelfth-Century ‘Renaissance’, by Peter Dinzelbacher
Many lofty and grandiose claims have been made for the twelfth century and its renaissance, but it is hard to imagine ones loftier or more grandiose than those advanced here. Peter Dinzelbacher views the period as distinct not for its proliferation of texts nor the restructuring of social orders, for these are merely the surface features of a far more profound phenomenon: a fundamental shift in the scheme of human emotional relations between c.10…
I Second That Emotion
The episcopacy in the High Middle Ages (c.1100–1300) can be understood through the idea of a shared emotional language, as seen in two treatises written to advise new bishops. In them, episcopal office was largely defined by the emotions it provoked: it was a cause for sorrow, a burden akin to back-breaking agricultural service. The ideas most associated with episcopal office were anxiety, labour and endurance. Ideas about Christian service as pa…
Peter Lombard and His Students, by Matthew Doyle
Can one ever get to know Peter Lombard, and, indeed, is it worth trying to do so? Matthew Doyle begins from the premise that while Peter—and it is always the familiar ‘Peter’, never ‘the Lombard’—may not offer up the same wealth of biographical material as the twelfth century’s arch self-publicists, Bernard of Clairvaux and Abelard, he is still in need of a biographer. In Doyle’s view, Peter’s life presents insights into the twelfth-century schoo…
Legal learning and saintly authority in thirteenth-century hagiography
Law is central to the construction of sanctity in Adam of Eynsham’s Magna vita of Hugh of Lincoln (1186–1200). Hugh had no formal training in canon law, and, beyond the Magna vita, there is no evidence to suggest that he was a particularly proficient judge. If that lack of legal training was not a problem in Hugh’s lifetime, it had become a more sensitive issue by c.1212, the date of the composition of the Magna vita. Rather than ignoring the law…
Nuclear Weapons and CND
Journal Article Nuclear Weapons and CND Get access PAUL BYRNE PAUL BYRNE Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Parliamentary Affairs, Volume 51, Issue 3, July 1998, Pages 424–434, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.pa.a028807 Published: 01 July 1998
Sex Equality and the Law in Britain
Nuclear Weapons and CND
Journal Article Nuclear Weapons and CND Get access PAUL BYRNE PAUL BYRNE Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Parliamentary Affairs, Volume 51, Issue 3, July 1998, Pages 424–434, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.pa.a028807 Published: 01 July 1998
Legal learning and saintly authority in thirteenth-century hagiography
Law is central to the construction of sanctity in Adam of Eynsham’s Magna vita of Hugh of Lincoln (1186–1200). Hugh had no formal training in canon law, and, beyond the Magna vita, there is no evidence to suggest that he was a particularly proficient judge. If that lack of legal training was not a problem in Hugh’s lifetime, it had become a more sensitive issue by c.1212, the date of the composition of the Magna vita. Rather than ignoring the law…
Sex Equality and the Law in Britain
Nuclear Weapons and CND
Journal Article Nuclear Weapons and CND Get access PAUL BYRNE PAUL BYRNE Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Parliamentary Affairs, Volume 51, Issue 3, July 1998, Pages 424–434, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.pa.a028807 Published: 01 July 1998
Legal learning and saintly authority in thirteenth-century hagiography
Law is central to the construction of sanctity in Adam of Eynsham’s Magna vita of Hugh of Lincoln (1186–1200). Hugh had no formal training in canon law, and, beyond the Magna vita, there is no evidence to suggest that he was a particularly proficient judge. If that lack of legal training was not a problem in Hugh’s lifetime, it had become a more sensitive issue by c.1212, the date of the composition of the Magna vita. Rather than ignoring the law…
Peter Lombard and His Students, by Matthew Doyle
Can one ever get to know Peter Lombard, and, indeed, is it worth trying to do so? Matthew Doyle begins from the premise that while Peter—and it is always the familiar ‘Peter’, never ‘the Lombard’—may not offer up the same wealth of biographical material as the twelfth century’s arch self-publicists, Bernard of Clairvaux and Abelard, he is still in need of a biographer. In Doyle’s view, Peter’s life presents insights into the twelfth-century schoo…
I Second That Emotion
The episcopacy in the High Middle Ages (c.1100–1300) can be understood through the idea of a shared emotional language, as seen in two treatises written to advise new bishops. In them, episcopal office was largely defined by the emotions it provoked: it was a cause for sorrow, a burden akin to back-breaking agricultural service. The ideas most associated with episcopal office were anxiety, labour and endurance. Ideas about Christian service as pa…
Structures and Origins of the Twelfth-Century ‘Renaissance’, by Peter Dinzelbacher
Many lofty and grandiose claims have been made for the twelfth century and its renaissance, but it is hard to imagine ones loftier or more grandiose than those advanced here. Peter Dinzelbacher views the period as distinct not for its proliferation of texts nor the restructuring of social orders, for these are merely the surface features of a far more profound phenomenon: a fundamental shift in the scheme of human emotional relations between c.10…
Camping with Tarantulas
This article examines how landscape and environmental factors shaped the eleventh-century Norman conquest of southern Italy and Sicily. The conquest was documented in several narrative histories, including those of Amatus of Montecassino, William of Apulia, and Geoffrey Malaterra. These texts have been extensively analyzed for their rhetorical qualities as literary texts, but such an approach has tended to cast the landscape in a passive role, as…
Cutting out the camel-like knees of St. James
This article examines the revival of the de viris illustribus genre in the twelfth century. These catalogues of the most important Christian authors were modelled on a template created in late antiquity by Jerome, but adopted new attitudes to what constitutes distinguished Christian literary activity. They regard the editing, collecting, and re-ordering of texts as equal to the composition of new works, and recognize legal codification as a notew…
Designing Norman Sicily
There are at least two perennial problems in writing the history of Norman Sicily. The first is one of a long shadow. We too often employ the term ‘Norman Sicily’ as shorthand for the reign of Roger II (r. 1130–54), founder of the kingdom. But the kingdom survived—even flourished—for another forty years after Roger’s death. Medievalists are not always as careful as they should be in disentangling Rogerian from Norman and vice versa. The second pr…
Pastoral Care in Medieval England
Pastoral Care in Medieval England: Interdisciplinary Approaches, ed. Peter Clarke and Sarah James Pastoral Care in Medieval England: Interdisciplinary Approaches, ed. Peter Clarke and Sarah James (London: Routledge, 2019; pp. 223. £120). P Byrne P Byrne Somerville College, Oxford, UK [email protected] https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2424-0693 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English Historical…
Chronologies of the animal turn
Cassinese Horizons
This article reexamines the evidence for the intellectual life of Montecassino in the central Middle Ages, by interrogating a key text: Peter the Deacon’s De viris illustribus casinensis coenobii. This catalogue of the greatest scholars associated with the abbey lists their achievements in the liberal arts. Rather than being read sui generis, this text needs to be set within a longstanding Benedictine tradition. Peter’s catalogue reveals an attem…
Translating German Emperors
The Staufen conquest of the Kingdom of Sicily in 1194 can be understood as the violent destruction of a sophisticated and cosmopolitan Norman kingdom and its replacement by a new dynasty with starkly different cultural and political models. Indeed, many contemporary authors decried the brutality associated with Henry VI's conquest. This article considers the other side of the coin by examining the evidence for attempts to integrate Henry VI into …
Portable Scholasticism? The Intellectual Horizons of Gervase of Tilbury
The career of Gervase of Tilbury (c.1150-1220) opens a window into the complexity of the late twelfth-century intellectual world. Often dismissed as a mere compiler, Gervase was a scholastic thinker outside the schools who adapted complex theological arguments for an English prince, a Sicilian king, and a German emperor. His writing reveals the "portability" of scholastic thought. It also demonstrates how scholastic authors were molded by their e…
A Local Translation in a Global World
This article revisits one of the texts associated with the fourteenthcentury spread of Franciscan mission across Eurasia, the account of the travels of Odoric of Pordenone (d.1331).Odoric's text is often mined for what it might reveal about Latin Christian perceptions of East Asia.This article argues that the local rather than the global aspects of the text should be given prominence in our assessment of his work, and greater attention paid to th…
Virgil in scholastic hands
Bath and Wells
History (11 works) · Medieval Literature and History (9 works) · Classics (8 works) · History (7 works) · Law (7 works) · Philosophy (7 works) · Political science (7 works) · Ancient history (6 works) · Art (5 works) · Classics (5 works)