Sodelujoči

Institutional Memory and Social Networks in the Benedictine Cartulary of St Nicholas of Oltra (1072–1569)

The Cathastico de scritture de S. Niccolo d’Ultra Diocesi Justinopolitana (1072–1569), preserved in the Central Library of Koper, represents the only known surviving cartulary of the Benedictine monastery of St Nicholas of Oltra near Capodistria/Koper. Although compiled in the late sixteenth century, the manuscript preserves copies, summaries, and references to documents dating from 1072 onwards. The source contains records of donations, leases, purchases, exchanges, testaments, legal disputes, exemptions, papal privileges, and economic transactions connected to the monastery and its landed possessions across northern Istria. Despite its exceptional historical value, the manuscript has remained largely unexplored within both Slovenian and broader Adriatic historiography.

This paper approaches the Cathastico as both an instrument of institutional memory and a prosopographical source for reconstructing social and economic networks in medieval and early modern Istria. Particular attention is devoted to the recurring appearance of noble families, clerics, notaries, tenants, benefactors, and communal officials whose interactions reveal long-term continuities in landholding, patronage, and monastic administration. Through the analysis of personal names, legal formulas, property relations, and documentary patterns, the paper examines how the monastery functioned as a nodal institution connecting the urban elite of Capodistria with its agrarian hinterland and with wider ecclesiastical and political structures linked to the Patriarchate of Aquileia, the Holy Roman Empire, and later the Venetian Republic.

The contribution further explores the methodological value of cartularies as prosopographical corpora. Although the Cathastico was primarily intended to preserve legal memory and property rights, its structure simultaneously produced a layered record of collective identities and institutional relationships extending across several centuries. The repeated preservation of certain names, places, and legal relations demonstrates how monastic communities constructed continuity and authority through documentary practice. In this sense, the manuscript provides important insight into the mechanisms of institutional self-representation, the preservation of social authority, and the transformation of regional networks between the High Middle Ages and the early modern period.

Finally, the paper reflects on the broader interdisciplinary potential of the source, particularly for future prosopographical and digital-humanities approaches, including relational databases, spatial mapping, and network analysis of historical actors and places within the northern Adriatic region.

*

Peter Štoka is a graduate theologian, Master of Theology, and a doctoral student in Humanities at the University of Primorska, where he researches the Benedictine cartulary of the monastery of St Nicholas of Oltra (1072–1569). He is Head of the Department for Local History and Book Heritage at the Central Library of Koper and co-editor, together with Gregor Pobežin, of the scholarly series Bibliotheca Iustinopolitana. He co-organises the international symposium Divina: Days of Andreas Divus of Justinopolis and edits the series Rara Iustinopolitana, dedicated to editions of Koper humanists and Neo-Latin authors from the northern Adriatic region.

E-mail: stokapeter@gmail.com

Prosopography and Fiction: Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg, 1924)

Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain (1924), a renowned work of world literature, self-identifies as a “Zeitroman”, a portrait of an era. By narrating all aspects of everyday life at a sanatorium for pulmonary diseases frequented by middle-class patients in the Swiss Alps within a precise timeframe (from 1907 to 1914), the text identifies this bourgeois microcosm as a bygone and thus historical phenomenon obliterated by First World War. In doing so, The Magic Mountain reconstructs the “collective biography” of this social class (Broady, 13; Verboeven, Carlier, Dumolyn, 39) and thus opens itself to an approach through prosopography.

This paper proposes an experiment in interdisciplinary analysis and methodology situated between historical research and literary interpretation: it will examine The Magic Mountain in a prosopographic vein and reflect on the interdisciplinary benefits of this approach. I will analyze a set of significant textual elements that correspond to the parameters of a prosopography, such as the novel’s historically accurate geographical and chronological settings or its design of the main protagonist as an “individual type” in Max Weber’s and a “constructed individual” in Pierre Bourdieu’s senses, i.e., as an average figuration of late 19th-century middle-class characteristics. I will further discuss how the biographies and onomastics of several characters are woven together with historical information about the era’s material culture, medicine, and popular culture. The result of this investigation will reveal the novel as a sociography of the international capitalist bourgeoisie and its internal, social and ethnic divisions and power struggles in the economic context of their lifestyle.

This analysis regards itself as a case study on the usefulness of modern fictions with realistic ambitions such as The Magic Mountain for prosopography in particular and historical research more generally. When literary authors might consciously or unconsciously use methods close to or of prosopography to compose the subject matter of their fictions, their novels become documents fit for historical examination; but the literary qualities of their narratives offer additional advantages,  especially helping to avoid two pitfalls of prosopography: One, according to Weber, is the trap of “objectivity” – of mistaking scientific concepts for everyday-life ones; another, according to Bourdieu, is a lack of reflection on how power struggles within a social field continuously shape this field. Obviously and unmistakably “fictional”, literary texts leave no doubt that their mode of language use is located somewhere between empirical reality and imagination. But precisely this creative language also connects directly to emotional and psychological truths (rather than reporting about them), thus illuminating how human tensions and conflicts, not only empirical factors, shape socio-historical phenomena.

Ultimately, The Magic Mountain’s prosopographic analysis offers an instructive example for the mutual benefits of interdisciplinary cooperation between prosopography and literary research, benefits that reach beyond the unquestionably valuable cataloguing of fictional characters (cf. Soldevilla et al.) into forays into the immaterial depths of fictionalized social worlds with benefits for historical understanding.

*

Dr. Alina Dana Weber is an Associate Professor of German at Florida State University (FSU) and serves as the Chair of the International Society for Cultural History. She is the author of the ethnographic and cultural-historical study Blood Brothers and Peace Pipes (2019) and the editor of two essay volumes. Weber has published in Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift, German Studies Review, Seminar, and elsewhere. She has won several fellowships and awards and is currently working on new cultural-historical contextualizations of two German texts of world literature, E. T. A. Hoffmann’s novella Nutcracker and Mouse King (1816) and Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain (1924).

E-mail: aweber@fsu.edu

The Hagiography and Hagiographers as the Precursor of the Cultural-Historical Value of the Sanctity’s Virtue

The present paper aims to re-evaluate the prosopographical research in the field of medieval hagiography, with particular reference to the nomenclature and identities of the hagiographers themselves. These writers, translators, and transmitters of saints’ lives functioned as a transregional community of textual agents whose shared philological, theological, and manuscript practices had a significant impact on medieval (biographical) cultural-historical consciousness. Rather than treating hagiography as merely devotional, the study argues that it constituted the central intellectual and cultural matrix from which medieval life writing emerged across the Latin West and the Orthodox East.

Approaching hagiography as a mode of culturally embedded textual production, the paper examines the vita as a narrative facility where language, theology, and cultural memory converge. The characteristic lexicon of sanctity was grounded in biblical intertextuality and patristic conceptualisations, while the creative differentiation (partly formalised) of virtues (intra-lingually and paraphrasically) shaped the content of the hagiographical genre. In the absence of copyright legislation and the concept of exclusive ownership of written compositions, unacknowledged citations, borrowings and copying of patristic authorities constituted a significant element of hagiographic rhetoric and style. In this context it is important to not discard the metaphrasis (not only in Metaphrastic hagiography of 9th century) as the (Byzantine) concept of rewriting and its meaning for the new chapter of the textual (and in-tangibly material) transformation. Self-authorship remains largely submerged yet is discretely enhanced through the individual response to the challenges of the (one’s, divine) destiny and the ultimate (ascetic height) goal of (spiritual) production.

Methodologically, the paper adopts a prosopographical lens to reconstruct hagiographers as historically situated actors embedded in networks of monastic culture, translation, and intellectual exchange. The transmission of vitae – from Greek into Latin, from Byzantine Greek into Old Church Slavonic, and within multilingual monastic environments – formed a sub-European textual network in which hagiographers functioned as theologians, philologists, and cultural mediators; St Maximus the Greek (1469–1555/6) exemplifies this composite role, demonstrating how individual agents navigated and unified multiple cultural and intellectual traditions while preserving and rearticulating hagiographical content in the evocating metamorphic treats, rearticulated across languages.

By analysing shared narrative strategies (such as expressed humility, the vocabulary of humbleness, the encyclopedia of miracles, and intertextual layering of creating the ascetic path) juxtaposed by cultural-historical examination of the reviewed terms, the functioning of the (im-personal) names (cf. Keats-Rohan 2007: 151, 155) in the relation to the differentiated sense of impersonal identity, but with the attention on the written records and their precise reference (as the primary anthroponymic function of the names), the study shows how hagiographical techniques became uncatalogued foundational for medieval biography and continued to shape early modern conceptions of holiness and personal identity/personhood.

*

Neža Zajc’s research specialisation is centred on the phenomenon of St Maximus the Greek (1469–1555/6), to the legacy of whom she has been devoting her research for the past twenty years. Furthermore, the scope of her specific research extends to the subsequent historical moments of the periods that are traditionally considered as well-known.

E-mail: neza.zajc@zrc-sazu.si

The Homeric Changes to the Traditional Image of Odysseus

Comparative studies allow us to reconstruct Odysseus’ image and the role in the oral pre-Homeric tradition. He is not a protagonist of the epic there but, representing the trickster type, rather the antagonist of the hero-protagonist. Both polarized characters represent two types of behavior assessed by the audience in terms of their usefulness for the survival of the community. In his readiness for sacrifice, the hero displays an altruistic attitude, positively valorized as moral behavior. The trickster’s egoistic behavior moves away from moral principles, but it can also ultimately bring benefit to the whole community. Similarly to the behavior of the trickster-antagonist, that of the hero-protagonist is also ambivalent, as it can likewise bring harm to the community, which – though temporary – often takes on the dimension of a disaster. Odysseus’ similarities to the god Hephaestus have been recognized previously by some scholars, and they do not seem to be coincidental: both characters reveal traits of crafty and dangerous dwarves, who are also excellent craftsmen and have magic at their disposal. The author(s) of the Odyssey and, to some extent, also of the Iliad reconfigure and transform this traditional character in a manner typical of oral tradition, which has always been open to reinterpretation.

*

Karol Zieliński is a classical philologist and professor at the Institute of Classical, Mediterranean and Oriental Studies at the University of Wrocław, Poland. He is the head of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on the Relationship between Oral and Written Culture and editor-in-chief of Quaestiones Oralitatis, a journal that deals with the issues of orality and its relationships with literature. He specialises in Greek literature of the archaic period, especially with a view to its links with oral tradition. His publications include monographs: Słońce w rozpaczy. Liryka miłosna Safony w aspekcie oralności (The Sun in Despair: Sappho’ s Love Lyric Poetry in the Aspect of Orality, 2006), Worldview in Narrative and Non-narrative Expression: The Cognitive, Anthropological, and Literary Perspective (2021, co-editor) and The Iliad and the Oral Epic Tradition (2023).

E-mail: karol.zielinski@uwr.edu.pl