The Limburg Sermons: Preaching in the Medieval Low Countries at the Turn of the Fourteenth Century by Wybren Scheepsma (review)

REVIEWS 307 traders known as Radhaniyya were important conveyors of slaves. The Balkan region, especially the Slavic and Bulgar regions, provided the main sources of slaves for Byzantium. The Greek synonym word for slave is sklavos, and this attests to the Slavic origin of these slaves. Rotman meticulously researched the evolution of the slave trade routes throughout the geo-political changes occurring in the Byzantium world between the eighth and eleventh centuries. Rotman provides a map featuring trade routes and a table explaining the ever-changing geopolitical space of these turbulent times. The definitions of slave in the Byzantine world closely track the development of the idea of slavery and freedom in the medieval world. Rotman undertakes a fascinating linguistic analysis of all the terms denoting some type of slave status. He analyses the frequency of slave-related references and their possible use in shedding light on the role of slaves in the Byzantine world by looking at public documents, private documents, hagiographical literature, historiographical literature, and sources such as the papyri of Egypt (6th–7th c.), the archives of Athos/Patmos (9th–11th c.), documents of Cappadocia (10th– 11th c.), and documents of southern Italy (11th c.). The closing chapters analyze the evolution of the concept of “unfreedom,” the Byzantine church and its relation to slavery, and the beginning of the perception of slave as human being . Rotman states that the definition of the person of free status was linked to his religious identity, to his community, and to his state. The slave started being perceived as human for a religious reason and a political reason: in the first case, the slave owed his allegiance to God and not to his fellow man; in the second, the slave owed his allegiance to the imperial state, not his master. In Byzantine Slavery and the Mediterranean World, Rotman analyzes Byzantine slavery from civil, social, and economic viewpoints, focusing on this social dependency of a private nature in an enlightening, provocative, intelligent, and relevant way. As he points out, slavery as a civic institution no longer exists in the modern world, yet unfreedom is found everywhere. MIHAELA L. FLORESCU, French and Linguistics, Cerritos College Wybren Scheepsma, The Limburg Sermons: Preaching in the Medieval Low Countries at the Turn of the Fourteenth Century, trans. David F. Johnson (Leiden: Brill 2008) xiii + 486 pp. This excellent, thorough monograph provides the Anglophone world with a richly-detailed account of one of the earliest collections of Middle Dutch prose, The Limburg Sermons, a thirteenth-century corpus of spiritual and contemplative texts found in MS The Hague, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, 70 E5 (given the siglum H; the manuscript also contains the earliest extant Dutch dramatic poetry , the Maastricht (Ripuarian) Passion Play, on the final folios—fols. 233v– 247v—but this text was likely added to the MS somewhat after the Sermons were copied, despite a continuity of pricking through fol. 236). This collection of sermons is remarkable not only for its primacy in Dutch prose and the Netherlandish spiritual tradition, but also for its virtuosic incorporation of sources both local and distant: letters from Hadewijch and a treatise by Beatrice of Nazareth are used, and the bulk of the sermons are translations and adaptations of certain of the Middle High German sermon collection known as the St. Georgen Sermons. REVIEWS 308 This volume contains an exhaustive discussion of the sources of the sermons , the choices the compiler made in assembling his materials (and, when applicable, in translating from MHG), the general spiritual milieu in which they were likely produced, and several images of relevant MSS and block books. The book ends with several appendices that give us a codicological description of MS H, the rubrics by which the 48 sermons are identified, a concordance presenting an overview of the transmission history, a glimpse at the translations which changed the addressees of the sermons from female to male, and finally a Modern English translation of the two most important sermons from the collection (Ls. 31, This is the Book of the Palm Tree, and Ls. 39, This is the Book of the Orchard—21 pages of translated material, altogether). To say the least, this is an exhaustive treatment of...