• Walter POHL – Andre GINGRICH (Eds.)

medieval worlds • no. 13 • 2021

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medieval worlds provides a forum for comparative, interdisciplinary and transcultural studies of the Middle Ages. Its aim is to overcome disciplinary boundaries, regional limits and national research traditions in Medieval Studies, to open up new spaces for discussion, and to help developing global perspectives. We focus on the period from c. 400 to 1500 CE but do not stick to rigid periodization.
medieval worlds is open to submissions of broadly comparative studies and matters of global interest, whether in single articles, companion papers, smaller clusters, or special issues on a subject of global/comparative history. We particularly invite studies of wide-ranging connectivity or comparison between different world regions.
Apart from research articles, medieval worlds publishes ongoing debates and project and conference reports on comparative medieval research.


Editorial
Walter Pohl and Ingrid Hartl

Movement and Mobility in the Medieval Mediterranean:
Changing Perspectives from Late Antiquity to the Long-Twelfth Century, I

Guest Editors: Christopher Heath, Clemens Gantner and Edoardo Manarini

Introduction: Movement and Mobility in the Medieval Mediterranean:
Changing Perspectives from Late Antiquity to the Long-Twelfth Century
Christopher Heath, Clemens Gantner and Edoardo Manarini

Aspects of Movement and Mobility in Lombard Law: Fugitives, Runaway Slaves and StrangersAspects of Movement and Mobility in Lombard Law: Fugitives, Runaway Slaves and Strangers
Christopher Heath

Ad utriusque imperii unitatem? Anastasius Bibliothecarius as a Broker between Two Cultures and Three Courts in the Ninth Century
Clemens Gantner

Holiness on the Move: Relic Translations and the Affirmation of Authority on the Italian Edge of the Carolingian World
Francesco Veronese and Giulia Zornetta

The Translation of St Sylvester’s Relics from Rome to Nonantola: Itineraries of corpora sacra at the Crossroads between Devotion and Identity in Eighth-Tenth-Century Italy
Edoardo Manarini

Ideologies of Translation, III

Multilingual Sermons, II
Guest Editor: Jan Odstrčilík

Bilingualism in the Cambrai Homily
Gwendolyne Knight

Between Innovation and Tradition: Code-Switching in the Transmission of the Commentary to the Félire Óengusso
Nike Stam

Jacobus de Saraponte’s Aurissa: Evidence for Multilingual Preaching
Jan Odstrčilík

Language Mixing as a Persuasive Strategy in Oxford, MS Bodley 649
Helena Halmari

Individual Articles

The World Map of the Corpus Pelagianum (BNE, 1513, fol. 1v) and its Strategies of Identification
Patrick S. Marschner

The Pleasures of Virtue and the Virtues of Pleasure: The Classicizing Garden in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century China and Byzantium
Curie Virág and Foteini Spingou

Sectarian Rivalry in Ninth-Century Cambodia: A Posthumous Inscription Narrating the Religious Tergiversations of Jayavarman III (K. 1457)
Dominic Goodall and Chhunteng Hun

Project Report

The European Qur’ān: The Place of the Muslim Holy Book in European Cultural History
John Tolan

Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften
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Tel. +43-1-515 81/DW 3420, Fax +43-1-515 81/DW 3400
https://verlag.oeaw.ac.at, e-mail: verlag@oeaw.ac.at

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medieval worlds • no. 13 • 2021

ISSN 2412-3196
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ISBN 978-3-7001-8982-4
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Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften
Austrian Academy of Sciences Press
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The Pleasures of Virtue and the Virtues of Pleasure: The Classicizing Garden in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century China and Byzantium

    Curie Virág, Foteini Spingou

medieval worlds • no. 13 • 2021, pp. 229-265, 2021/06/30

doi: 10.1553/medievalworlds_no13_2021s229

doi: 10.1553/medievalworlds_no13_2021s229


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doi:10.1553/medievalworlds_no13_2021s229



doi:10.1553/medievalworlds_no13_2021s229

Abstract

During the eleventh and twelfth centuries in Byzantium and China, the garden as a site of pleasure was an important literary theme among literati. Although pleasure had long been associated with gardens prior to this period, its simultaneous resurgence in both cultures was specifically linked to new ways of engaging with the classical tradition. This paper explores the nature and significance of the discourse of pleasure in the imagination of gardens in these two culturally distinct, but historically resonant, imperial societies. Noting important parallels and divergences in the literature surrounding pleasurable gardens in the two traditions, it argues that the garden as a site of pleasure was more than a document of the carefree pleasures of communing with nature. Instead, it was a declaration among literati – constrained by their place in a vast imperial bureaucratic system – of their agency, their integrity and, above all, their virtue. Far from being just a psychological or affective state, the pleasures they documented were a testimony of their freedom and moral authority in the face of a vast political order upon which they depended, but that also required their participation and validation as the bearers of the authoritative classical tradition that sustained the very imperial project. As a site charged with references and allusions to the ancient past and its authoritative voices, the garden provided an optimal arena in which those literati retreating from the front lines of official duty could fashion the conditions of their own pleasure, and thereby display their virtue, assert their autonomy and bring to fulfillment their human potentiality.

Keywords: gardens; pleasure; Antiquity; classicizing learning; literati; Song Dynasty; Byzantium; virtue; self-cultivation