Category: History

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Epithets, Epistles, and Erasmus, Oh my [most serene king of Britain]!

In his treatise on the writing of letters, the De Conscribendis epistolis,[1] Dutch humanist and prolific letter-writer Desiderius Erasmus emphasizes the importance of the opening section of the letter. Going wrong here in the salutatio, the writer will, he says,“…like a poor helmsman…run aground right in the harbour.”[2]  His advice is to keep things simple, adopting the “new” Ciceronian style:

I approve the simplicity of the ancients; I only wish that we could emulate it everywhere amid the corrupt practices of our age, so that we might greet one another by the mere mention of names, as in: ‘Pliny gives his Calvus greeting!’ What could be truer or simpler? When you hear a man’s name pronounced you hear all his good qualities in a nutshell.[3]

Here and throughout his treatise, Erasmus makes a point of attacking the “corrupt practices of our age,” that is to say, medieval dictaminal practice. Erasmus’ friend and correspondent, the younger scholar Juan Luis Vives, who wrote a De Conscribendis Epistolis of his own, agrees that in medieval practice the use of epithets had spiraled out of control. Vives suggests that they should instead be employed as sparingly as possible, their use restricted to legitimate titles derived from the office of the addressee: “senator, consul, quaestor, bishop, priest, curate.”[4] He underscores the fact that a badly placed epithet might tarnish honor instead of enhancing it, suggesting that a name like Erasmus of Rotterdam carries its own distinction with no need for titles:

Other titles, originating from a debased custom, produce laughter or annoyance rather than confer distinction. Is it not more flattering to be so highly thought of that there is no need of epithets, as in the case of Guillaume Bude, Erasmus of Rotterdam, or Thomas More? In the lustre of such names expressions like “most learned in both tongues,” “consummate theologian,” “gentleman of greatest renown” are superfluous.[5]

Detail, Two Studies of the Left Hand of Erasmus of Rotterdam; Study of the Right Hand Writing. Silverpoint, black crayon and red chalk on grey-primed paper, 20.6 × 15.3 cm, Louvre, Paris. Christian Müller; Stephan Kemperdick; Maryan Ainsworth; et al, Hans Holbein the Younger: The Basel Years, 1515–1532, Munich: Prestel, 2006. Erasmus holds a pointed italic quill, suited to the purposes of his humanistic hand.

Erasmus ostensibly agrees, directly criticizing the customary pleonastic manner of addressing royals and nobles:

The king of the French alone is called “most Christian,” the king of Spain alone “Catholic,” the king of England “most serene,” the emperor alone “ever august,” dukes “most illustrious,” other members of the lesser nobility “illustrious,” and others “most noble.” Who introduced this superstition about titles into the world? … By the constant repetition of phrases like “most reverend lordships,” “Catholic majesties,” and “magnificent fatherhoods” we fill up a large part of a letter, and ruin the gracefulness of the Latin tongue. I pardon those who use them against their will; I do not pardon those who devise them, or who insist upon them as a serious matter.[6]

Despite this ideal, as with so many rules and regulations meant to govern the rules of prose, humanistic or otherwise, theory does not always accord with practice. Vives certainly uses flattering epithets in his own letters, despite his counsel to the contrary.[7] But although Erasmus begins by praising the “mere mention of names,” in practice his treatise goes on to linger on the salutatio for nearly a dozen sections, recommending the use of essential titles and the use of an apt—but not sycophantic—epithet (he suggests over 100 as suitable).[8]

Moreover, for the 1515 dedication to his Senecae Lucubrationes, Erasmus composes a salutation that hardly appears to follow his own advice: “To the most distinguished Father D. Thomas Ruthall,” he writes, “Bishop of Durham, Secretary of State of the Most Serene King of Britain, Erasmus of Roterdam sends greeting.[9] Though he does give himself merely his two names Erasmus Roterodamus, he is not content to give his friend Ruthall the single epithet amplissimo—he goes on to add his titles as well as those of Ruthall’s master, the “Most Serene King of Britain.” Leaving aside the elevated diction Secretarius Magnus and the choice of Britanniae instead of Angliae, Erasmus appears to fall right into the very “superstition about titles” he criticized above: calling the king of England “most serene.” As Erasmus cannot be imagined to here use epithets “against [his] will, in our charity we must conclude that he simply does not “insist upon them as a serious matter.” Indeed, we might imagine this apparent “do as I say, not as I do” as part of a game among friends. A glance at the letters of another friend of Erasmus, fellow correspondent Sir Thomas More, reveals that More uses titles only rarely in his salutations—rare exceptions include the high-flung salutation of Henry (that same most serene king of Britain) as Britanniae Galliaeque Regi and a 1506 letter addressed to Regio apud Anglos Secretario, our very own Thomas Ruthall. In the year 1506, Erasmus was staying in More’s house at Bucklersbury, and the two were engaged in the translation of Lucian’s dialogues. More’s almost overly learned letter to Ruthall offers some “first fruits” of these Greek studies. More and Erasmus engage here in a game of language and words, breaking their own rules, offering their efforts to a mutual humanist friend they knew would delight in their linguistic play.

Despite living the most fruitful parts of his adult career after the conclusion of what is generally considered the medieval period, Desiderius Erasmus never really attempted to avoid or evade the Middle Ages. Both in his return to the Classics and his agitations for a new humanistic approach to writing and scholarship, Erasmus continues to engage with medieval thinkers and medieval ways of thinking. In responding to and helping drive the dramatic shift away from the centuries-old medieval dictaminal tradition designed for the mass production of documents essential to the court of every Christian kingdom to a humanistic model grown out of the fourteenth-century Renaissance and Francesco Petrarcha’s rediscovery of the personal letters of Cicero to his friend Atticus, Erasmus engages in a humanistic game that plays off of tension with the near medieval past.

Rebecca West, PhD
Literature Core Faculty
University of Dallas

[1] Erasmus was already writing an early version of this text for his student Robert Fisher by about 1498 (Epistularum scribendarum ratio).⁠ A pirated version of his treatise was published at Oxford in 1521 by Siberch,⁠ more or less forcing Erasmus to come out with an expanded, corrected official version in 1522. The standard edition of the treatise is Charles Fantazzi, ed., “On the Writing of Letters / De Conscribendis Epistolis,” in The Collected Works of Erasmus: Literary and Educational Writings, 3 and 4, by J. K. Sowards, ed., 25 (University of Toronto Press, 1985). Hereafter abbreviated as CWE 25/3.

[2] CWE 25/3:50. The ars dictaminis aimed at organizing the letter—a form largely meant for public declamation of official communications—according to standardized models following a set of rules derived from ancient Ciceronian oratory. Erasmus devotes significant portions of his treatise to the proper way to frame the opening of a letter, the portion corresponding to the salutatio and captatio benevolentiae of a letter written according to the terminology of the medieval dictaminalmodel.

[3] CWE 25/3:51

[4] Charles Fantazzi, ed., J.L. Vives: De Conscribendis Epistolis: Critical Edition with Introduction, Translation and Annotation, trans. Charles Fantazzi (Leiden: Brill, 1989), 47.

[5] Vives: De Conscribendis Epistolis, 47.

[6] CWE 25/3:61.

[7] See the introduction to Fantazzi’s edition for the use of flattering epithets in Vives’ own corpus of letters.

[8] CWE 25/3:50-62.

[9] Amplissimo patri D. Thomae Ruthallo Episcopo Dunelmensi Serenissimi Britanniae Regis Secretario Magno Erasmus Roterodamus S. D. Text from Elizabeth Frances Rogers, ed., The Correspondence of Sir Thomas More, (Princeton: University Press, 1947), letter 5.Translation from Clarence H. Miller, Leicester Bradner, Charles A. Lynch, and Revilo P. Oliver, eds., The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, Volume 3, Part II (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 1:2–8.

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“A Cord Laid Tight Loosens Discord”: The Shifting Role of Precision in the Byzantine LandSurvey Tradition

Through my dissertation research on the middle Byzantine Maeander Valley in Western Asia Minor (modern Türkiye), I had become fascinated by an eleventh-century estate ledger, known as the Praktikon of Adam, and how Byzantine surveyors described landscapes in technical language.[1]  The boundary description or periorismos was composed of formulaic phrases describing the route taken needed for a surveyor to encircle a property.  Sometimes, but not always, these descriptions are accompanied by measurements, which can be rationalized from the Byzantine units into meters.  I am interested in mapping these boundary descriptions to compare them with the results of archaeological field surveys. 

This blog entry will be a short musing upon the shifting role of precision in the tradition of Byzantine land survey.  In our modern world, cartographic precision has become an unquestioned backdrop to how we view landscapes.  We rarely feel the need to justify spatial precision when representing a landscape on a map (i.e., Fig. 1).  Such a casual aesthetic commitment to cartographic precision has no counterpart among ancient and medieval representations of landscapes.  Therefore, any study of boundary descriptions must rest upon why such precision was necessary.  The presence (and absence) of that precision reveals the underlying motivations of the surveyors.  Such motivations must be considered when using these documents to understand Byzantine landscapes. 

The Casual Use of Cartography on a Mural for the City of Owego, New York.  Photo by author.

Surveying for Taxation

The original goal of Byzantine land survey was calculating the tax burden of a property.  Twelve Byzantine survey manuals survive, which were written to instruct new bureaucrats on how to survey the land and then use those measurements to calculate area.  The study of these textbooks provides a starting point for understanding how and why Byzantine surveyed the land.[2]  Surviving documents found in Byzantine archives, such as the Praktikon of Adam, show how the recommendations of these textbooks were or were not enacted.

The purpose of taxation prioritized the taking of measurements.  Land is measured with ropes (schoinioi or sokaria).  An illustration from a Byzantine Octateuch (Fig. 2) shows the survey of land in action.  I took the title of the blog entry from the Byzantine Greek written on this image: “A cord laid tight loosens discord” – akin to the English proverb “Good fences make good neighbors.”  The whole set of illustrations show a Byzantine twist on the delineation of land in the last ten chapters of the Book of Josuah in the Old Testament.  These ropes were not just a tool but also the most important unit of measurement.  Ropes are divided into fathoms (orgyia), based on two different criteria: the quality of the soil or the region of the empire.  The 10-fathom rope was the standard for high quality soils, while lesser soils were measured with a 12-fathom rope.  In Thrakesion (western Asia Minor), the 10-fathom rope was the standard for all soils. 

Two Byzantine Surveyors Measure Land with a Rope, Vat. Gr. 746, f. 461r. By permission of Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, with all rights reserved.

The desired product of the fiscal survey was calculating the area of many properties efficiently.  Therefore, the methods were less than geometrically sound.  Or as Jacques Lefort and his team wrote: “The geometric technique of the tax office is nevertheless very simple, since it consists, in a world implicitly conceived as almost everywhere orthogonal, in multiplying the length by the width.  It therefore owes nothing to geometric science and is in fact resolved by arithmetic, and even then, only by the art of multiplying well.”[3]  In other words, no field cannot be reduced to a rectangle (Fig. 3).  While scholars in the past attributed these imprecise methods to the decline of geometry in the Middle Ages, the Byzantines were capable of complicated geometry when it suited the task at hand.  Precision in individual measurements was not important for the tax office.

Fields were Simplified into Rectangles to Calculate Approximate Area.  Drawn by Author.

Finally, the tax surveyors were interested in a space, but not in a place.  The taxation surveys of fields are often unmoored from their landscapes.  The precise location of the field made little difference when calculating the tax burden.  Therefore, without other correlating data, the precision of the tax survey, while useful for maintaining an empire, provides little help to the archaeologist.

The Motivation of the Boundary Description

On the other hand, a boundary description represents a diverging motivation for land survey within the same tradition.  Not all have measurements, but when they did, the individual measurements appear to be more important than the whole.  The description is grounded in the specifics of the landscape.  The precision of individual measurements included often outstrips the needs of calculating area (Fig. 3).  Instead, precision correlates with the presence of properties owned by neighbors of the estate (Fig. 4).  Instead of taxation, the purpose of the precision of the boundary description appears to be related to the control of land.  Theft of land by unscrumptious neighbors was a growing problem from the late eleventh century through to the end of Byzantium.  The Praktikon of Adam reveals two such cases where theft was discovered.  Still, the former was recorded in a boundary description, while the latter still relied upon the taxation-based survey technique, which shows that both techniques could theoretically reveal theft even if the boundary description appears better equipped.

The Correlation between Neighbors and Precision in a Boundary Description.

While there is more research to be done, I am still convinced that the embeddedness of the boundary description within their respective settings and the incorporation of measurements into the descriptions can make these technical descriptions valuable comparanda to archaeological survey data in reconstructing the landscapes of the Byzantine world.

Tyler Wolford, PhD
Byzantine Studies Postdoctoral Fellowship
Medieval Institute
University of Notre Dame

[1] M. Nystazopoulou-Pelekidou, ed., Βυζαντινὰ ἔγγραφα τῆς Μονῆς Πάτμου. Volume 2. Δημοσίων λειτουργῶν. Athens: National Institute of Research, 1980, Document 50.

[2] J. Lefort, B. Bondoux, J.-Cl. Cheynet, J.-P. Grélois, V. Kravari.  Géométries du fisc byzantin.  Réalités Byzantines 4.  Paris: Éditions P. Lethielleux, 1991.

[3] Lefort et al., Géométries du fisc byzantine, 244.

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From Chariots to Chaucer: Mastiffs in Medieval England

As a medievalist and a mastiff owner, it seems fitting that I first found my beloved dogs in the pages of medieval literature, specifically in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

In Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, Palamon and Arcite are pitted against one another in a tournament to determine which knight will win Emelye’s hand in marriage. The contestants are given a year to prepare, during which time they each assemble an entourage of men to accompany them into the melee. When the Knight introduces Lycurgus, “the grete king of Trace” [the great king of Thrace] (Chaucer 2129) who sides with Palamon, he describes the dogs circling his chariot as part of the tournament’s pageantry:

Aboute his chaar ther wenten white alauntz,
Twenty and mo, as grete as any steer,
To hunten at the leoun or the deer,
And folwed hym with mosel faste ybounde,
Colered of gold, and tourettes fyled rounde. (Chaucer 2148-2152)[1]

[About his chariot there went white alaunts,
More than twenty, each as great as any steer,
To hunt the lion or the deer,
And followed him with muzzles securely bound,
Wearing collars of gold and rings for leashes filed round.] (My translation)

The term alaunt, now archaic and historical, refers to a type of dog, though exactly what kind of dog remains at least somewhat ambiguous. Although Harvard’s interlinear text translates “alauntz” as “wolfhounds,” it is far more likely that these alaunts are mastiffs.

Mastiffs are one of the oldest recorded dog breeds. Revered for their size and strength, the breed was used for hunting, fighting, and guarding for thousands of years. The massive dogs are physically characterized by their imposing size, broad heads, and powerful necks, qualities that have defined them from their earliest appearances in art and literature.

Image of a warrior holding a mastiff-type dog on a leash from an expansive Assyrian relief depicting a lion hunt, dated 645-640 BCE and housed at the British Museum.

It is unclear where the mastiff originated, but the English Mastiff has ties to ancient Greece and Rome, where the narrator of Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale sets his story. According to The Kennel Club, “[w]hen the Romans invaded Britain in 55 BC they found the inhabitants already had a mastiff-type dog, huge and courageous and which defeated the Romans’ own dogs in organised fights. The Romans took some of these mastiff types home with them and used them for fighting wild animals in the Colosseum.”[2]

The English Mastiff, as we know it today, descends from the Molossus, a formidable war dog from ancient Greece. The British Museum reports that the Molossus is depicted battling lions and gladiators in murals dating as far back as 2500 BC. The dogs also served in the Roman army, as guard dogs stationed within encampments or as soldiers, with the largest and most ferocious dogs strapped with armor and sent into battle. Both Aristotle and Ovid mention the Molussus in their work.[3]

The Dog of Alcibiades, marble statue depicting a Molussus, probably produced in Rome between 100 and 200 AD, British Museum.  

The term mastiff does not appear in English until the 14th century,[4] but this does not mean that mastiffs were not present in England during the Middle Ages. When the Normans introduced bull baiting to Britain in the 12th century, they used mastiffs to torment bulls for sport long before the appearance of the bulldog.[5] The bulldog was actually developed from the mastiff and looked quite different from the bulldog as we recognize it today.

Sketch of a bulldog by Thomas Brown, from Biographical Sketches and Authentic Anecdotes of Dogs, published in 1829.

Alaunt referred to any ‘large fierce dog or mastiff of a breed valued for its use in hunting and fighting,’ and indeed, the term’s first appearance in English is attributed to Chaucer.[6] The “alaunts” he describes as “great as any steer” would certainly suggest the stature of a mastiff with their massive bodies, heads, and necks and the power conveyed by the ratio of mass and muscle much similar to that of a bull. Their presence in a stadium setting within the Classical world recalls the Mollosus of the Colosseum, while their accompaniment of a Thracian warrior and their ability to hunt lions invokes the image of the Assyrian reliefs pictured above.

Admittedly, modern mastiffs are no match for deer with respect to their speed, and greyhounds would have been the preferred breed for deer hunting in medieval England, such as those described in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. But it’s possible that earlier mastiffs may have been capable of the chase, as their speed and endurance would have also been needed in battle. It’s also possible that mastiffs provided a hunting party with protection from animals that could pose serious threats such as boars and wolves – and in fact, mastiffs were used to hunt both.

Mastiffs today are no less powerful than their predecessors, even if their modern status as pets has mostly replaced their previous responsibilities in medieval England. The English Mastiff is still considered the largest dog breed and certainly the heaviest, if not always the tallest, with males easily reaching 240 pounds and standing upward of 30 inches at the shoulder. The world’s heaviest and longest dog ever recorded was a male English Mastiff from London named Aicama Zorba of La-Susa, who weighed 343 pounds, stood 37 inches at the shoulder, and measured 8 feet 3 inches from nose to tail in September 1987.[7]  

An English Mastiff named Aicama Zorba of La-Susa remains the largest dog ever recorded.

The second mastiff associated with England is the Bullmastiff, developed as a guard dog during the 19th century to assist gamekeepers in their efforts to stop poachers. The Bullmastiff descends from the breeding of English Mastiffs and Bulldogs, at a ratio of 60 to 40 percent respectively, to produce a dog that exhibited size, courage, and athleticism. They were trained to pin and hold poachers, rather than maul them. As the American Kennel Club puts it, the Bullmastiff was “smart enough to work on command, tractable enough to hold but not maul a poacher, and big enough to scare the bejesus out of any intruder.”[8]

During the Victorian era, gamekeepers preferred Bullmastiffs with brindle coats, which worked to camouflage the dogs in the dark, but dogs with fawn colored coats and black masks are contemporarily more common.[9] Smaller than English Mastiffs, large Bullmastiff males can reach 140 pounds and stand 27 inches at the shoulder.

My first Bullmastiff, Beorn, lost unexpectedly and much too early to illness in November 2023.

Mastiffs, of course, are not limited to the British varieties. There is a plethora of types that extend to the Americas, across Europe, and into Asia. They also come in a variety of colors and coat lengths, hence the probability of white mastiffs loping alongside a chariot in the Classical world that Chaucer’s Knight creates.

My boys have been the very best dogs for me, but mastiffs of any kind are not for inexperienced or inattentive dog owners, nor are they good matches for the faint of heart. My Bullmastiffs are affectionate and intelligent, sweet and silly. They are big and slobbery and prefer to be with their people. They are extremely friendly because they have been properly trained and socialized since they were tiny babies. They are still incredibly strong and fiercely protective of me and anyone else they perceive as members of their pack.  

My second Bullmastiff, Sebastian, adopted in 2024.

As a medievalist, I love seeing my dogs’ legacy in the literature I study, but I chose my dogs because they are the perfect breed for my personality and my lifestyle, not because they appear in Chaucer’s poetry. It’s a happy coincidence that I initially crossed paths with my canine companions in a text that paved the way for my academic career — and since it’s Thanksgiving week, it’s fitting to say I’m grateful that I get to be their person.

Emily McLemore, Ph.D.
Alumni Contributor
Medieval Institute
University of Notre Dame

[1] Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Knight’s Tale. Harvard’s Geoffrey Chaucer Website.

[2] “Mastiff,” The Kennel Club.

[3] “Beware of the dog!,” British Museum.

[4] “Mastiff,” Oxford English Dictionary.

[5] “Bulldog,” The Kennel Club.

[6] “Alaunt,” Oxford English Dictionary.

[7] “Longest dog ever,” Guiness World Records.

[8] “Bullmastiff,” American Kennel Club.

[9] “Bullmastiff,” The Kennel Club.