Making the Medieval Archive: Celebrating Elizabeth A. R. Brown at Penn

Thinking about Marguerite Porete with Peggy Brown

Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski (French and Italian, University of Pittsburgh)

In my brief remarks I will attempt to reconstruct many years of discussion with Peggy Brown about Margaret Porete centering on the questions of her very existence, her origins, the trial and its documents, her execution, accounts of various chroniclers, the nature and afterlife of the Mirror of Simple Souls, and Margaret's identity with the Marie of Valenciennes mentioned by Jean Gerson. Throughout the years in Parisian and New York cafés as well as in long phone conversations we played out different scenarios that would make sense, given the often scant evidence. I hope to illuminate through this one example all the qualities that made Peggy an extraordinary scholar and human being.

TBA [virtual]

Julien Théry (History, Université Lyon)

Peggy, Saint-Denis, Charlemagne and the Pseudo-Turpin [virtual]

M. Alison Stones (Art history and Architecture, University of Pittsburgh)

My first encounter with Peggy took place in relation to (of course) the abbey of Saint-Denis.  We were interested in finding a historian to write about the reception in France of the legends of Charlemagne's campaign in Spain, and Peggy was the obvious choice.  That connection led to a warm friendship with Peggy and Ralph and to an enriching range of exchanges about medieval France, the Capetians, political and regal figures, and much more.

Peggy Brown: The Freedom of a Historian

Pierre-Anne Forcadet (Histoire du droit et des institutions, Université d'Orléans)

"Freedom" appears to be one of the many ways to characterize Peggy Brown's career. This is the kind of freedom that is, of course, preceded by remarkable talent, a strong work ethic, and profound erudition. It is the freedom to be an eminent medievalist, specialist of monarchy and power, while also having the flexibility to explore later periods and diverse topics as needed. It is the freedom to access and utilize a wide range of documents and archives, and to publish numerous texts that facilitate easy reading and understanding for others. It is also the freedom (and kindness) evident in most of her social and professional interactions. Ultimately, it is the freedom for future research made possible by her generous donations. The Middle Ages was a period of greater freedom than people usually think, and that’s what I am currently working on.

The forgotten invasion: the English expedition of Louis of France (1215–1217) in its European context [Virtual]

Frédérique Lachaud (History, Sorbonne Université)

One of the many areas of research explored by Peggy Brown is the question of political culture at the court of Philip Augustus (“La notion de la légitimité et la prophétie à la cour de Philippe Auguste”, 1982). Peggy’s sensitive approach has profoundly inspired the international project on “The forgotten invasion: the English expedition of Louis of France (1215-1217) in its European context”. The aim of this project is to take a fresh look at the attempt by Louis, the son of Philip Augustus, to obtain the English throne offered to him by some of the barons who had rebelled against King John. The presentation will outline the project and its main achievements.

What's wrong with Pierre Flote?

Xavier Hélary (History, Sorbonne Université, École pratique des Hautes études)

Generally recognized as Philip the Fair's principal advisor in the 1290s, Pierre Flote remains little known. Petrus de Flota, vir astutus et potens in consilio regis, as described by the author of the Annales Gandenses, while pope Boniface VIII saw him as : “this is Achitopel, this is the Devil or that man inspired by the Devil whom God has already punished in part, one-eyed in body, blind in soul, this Pierre Flote, this man full of bitterness and gall, who deserves to be reputed a heretic and to be condemned as such”. If contemporaries knew who Pierre Flote was, we're left in the dark. Was he from Dauphiné or Auvergne? How did he enter the service of the King of France? What was his network? What role did he play in shaping Philippe le Bel's policies? In February 2024, a workshop on Pierre Flote was held in Paris; Peggy attended online. This contribution is a tribute to her work.

The King and His Bed: Elizabeth A. R. Brown's Influence on the Study of Judicial and Legislative Authority

William Chester Jordan (History, Princeton University) 

The aim of this paper is to describe the approach Elizabeth Brown took in the study she co-authored with Richard Famiglietti on the institution known in the Early Modern Period as the Lit de justice, Bed of Justice. I describe the problem as she posed it, her leading assumptions, and her critiques of the existing historiography. I also bring to light the responses of various scholars to her achievement.

The Curious Case of Liberty and Slavery in Late Capetian Languedoc and Beyond

Daniel Smail (History, Harvard University)

In the second half of the thirteenth century, a "wind of liberty," as Mireille Mousnier has put it, swept through the Toulousain region of Languedoc, leaving signs of its passing in the charters from the region. As the historiography of the phenomenon has amply demonstrated, the movement favoring liberty targeted the arbitrary and unjust servitudes imposed by seigneurs on serfs, peasants, and townsfolk. Liberty served two purposes. First, servitudes formed part of a political economy that enriched lords and castellans. The act of releasing individuals and corporations from servile payments helped undermine seigneurial power. Second, the freedom offered was not free. Individuals and corporations had to pay to be released from their servitudes. For late Capetian and early Valois kings, as Peggy Brown has noted, selling freedom from servitude was a tried-and-true technique for raising money.

This history is well known. Less well known is what happened afterward. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Toulouse became known as a refuge for people fleeing their enslavement in the Crown of Aragon. In a curious twist, the "liberty" once granted to peasants and serfs was converted into a "liberty" granted to all enslaved persons arriving in Toulouse, as the city sought to justify its stance in the face of insistent demands for the return of the slaves made by the Aragonese. The fiction of Toulouse as a land of liberty then deepened in the early modern era, forming an essential plank in the "free soil principle" that emerged in France by 1600 and subsequently cast a long shadow over French historiography on slavery.

Revisiting the cult of Saint Louis at the Abbey of St.-Denis

Cecilia (“Pippin”) Gaposchkin (History, Dartmouth College)

Elizabeth A. R. Brown pioneered the study of the cult of Louis IX at the monastery of St.-Denis in two seminal articles: "Philippe Le Bel and the Remains of Saint Louis” from 1980 and “The Chapels and Cult of Saint Louis at Saint-Denis” from 1984, and she continued to work on related issues, publishing an update to her 1980 piece on the head relic of Louis in 2020. I relied on these articles (and Peggy herself) in my dissertation on the cult of Louis, which, in one chapter, examined the liturgy that was used at St.-Denis to celebrate the feast day of Louis IX after his canonization in 1297. I recently discovered new evidence of the liturgical cult as celebrated at St.-Denis. This paper will introduce this evidence, explain its relationship to both the known history of the liturgy, and the canonization proceedings that were held at St.-Denis in 1282-1283, and integrate this new evidence into our broader understanding of the history of Louis’ cult at St.-Denis that Peggy pioneered.

A Book of Prayers Made for and by Cistercian Nuns

Susan Boynton (Music, Columbia University)

In studies such as “’Laver de ses pechies une pecheresse royale’: Psalm Collects in an Early Fourteenth-Century Devotional Book” (2007), Elizabeth AR Brown demonstrated how the close study of a prayer book can deepen our understanding of an individual’s religious observance in historical context, and also shed new light on the manuscript and the texts it transmits. I will present some of the ritual and devotional texts gathered in an early sixteenth-century prayer book from a community of Cistercian nuns in the diocese of Angers. Written on paper by several different hands, the diminutive volume includes a wide range of devotions, including the Carolingian psalmody prayers found in psalters of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Cistercian monastic death ritual, and many of the prayers and votive offices typically transmitted in books of hours, as well as intriguing later additions. While these diverse elements originated at various times over the centuries, their purposeful juxtaposition is eloquent testimony to the needs and experiences of its users.

Moncel – at the beginning: Centering the Cult of Saint Louis at the Margins of Paris

Anne E. Lester (History, Johns Hopkins University)

A year after the canonization of his grandfather, Louis IX, Philip the Fair began the process of founding a new Franciscan nunnery, Saint-Jean Baptiste de Moncel. Moncel would form a pair with the Dominican nunnery of Poissy, that Philip initiated in 1296. Peggy wrote about both institutions, but especially the foundation of Poissy and the legacies for Louis that Jeanne de Navarre established through her testaments. In my brief remarks, I look closely at the beginnings of Moncel, its location just east of Pont-Sainte-Maxence on the banks of the Oise and two kilometers outside of the hamlet of Pontpoint in close proximity to the royal residence of Fécamp and near the forest of Halette, one of Philip IV’s favorite hunting spots. As Peggy certainly knew, the grounds of Moncel had once been the residence of Philippe de Beaumanoir, sénéchal and bailli, and author of the Coutumes de Beauvaisis, written for or under the patronage of Count Robert of Clermont, Louis IX’s youngest son. This paper offers an opportunity to pick up threads of a conversation with Peggy anew and to return to a set of questions she had long engaged. I will explore briefly and in a layered fashion the connections drawing these men, the women in their lives, and the foundation of Moncel together. One shared focus was the model of the sainted king. And yet even that memory when set into context here and as Peggy has noted, was itself a thing of contestation and open to reinterpretation. I will close by offering a reading the earliest sources connected to Moncel, in particular, William of Saint-Pathus’s Vie de Saint Louis, which I suggest functioned as an exemplar of saintly behavior and a ritual (rituale) book for the performance of certain liturgies in imitation of the blessed king.

Attende Rectorem Caeli Stantem in Cruce: The Crucifix in a Sermon for the Crusade Against Peter of Aragon

Sara Lipton (History, Stony Brook University)

This paper offers a close reading of an unpublished sermon preached in Paris in ca. 1283-84. The sermon is a rather unusual hybrid, combining a series of moralizations on the Transfiguration with a highly visual meditation on the crucifix. Along the way, the preacher inserts, almost as an afterthought, condemnations of Peter III of Aragon and calls for volunteers to join Philip III le Hardi’s crusade against the Aragonese. As I have done so many times in my career, in my attempt to disentangle the political, military, ecclesiastical, material, and spiritual threads woven into this odd text, I turned to Peggy Brown for guidance. Even though she was undergoing difficult medical treatments at the time, she responded with characteristic generosity, connecting me with a leading French expert on the Aragonese expedition, and offering a host of useful (and occasionally confusing, because consisting of first names only) bibliographical references. In this paper, I share my thoughts about the sermon, considering its liturgical setting and examining the rhetorical and conceptual links it constructs between the Transfiguration, the crucifix, and crusading. I shall suggest that the sermon sheds light on the ambivalent attitude among layfolk and clergy alike to the vexed projects known as the political crusades.