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Change and Resilience offers a view of the main Mediterranean islands from West to East in Late Antiquity because Mediterranean islands can contribute in fundamental ways to our understanding not only of earlier colonizations but also later periods. The volume explores specifically the time frame from the fall of the Roman empire to the Medieval period. A first group of papers covers islands and island groups in the Central and Western Mediterranean, including the Balearic Islands, Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily, and the Adriatic islands. Together, these five papers highlight several common themes across the region: local or indigenous sites were often reoccupied in Late Antiquity, the rural coun...
A general historical introduction to the Muslims of Medieval Italy which presents specific information regarding social, religious, administrative, political, cultural, artistic and intellectual questions.
A new account of the Mediterranean economy in the 10th to 12th centuries, forcing readers to entirely rethink the underlying logic to medieval economic systems. Chris Wickham re-examines documentary and archaeological sources to give a detailed account of both individual economies, and their relationships with each other. Chris Wickham offers a new account of the Mediterranean economy in the tenth to twelfth centuries, based on a completely new look at the sources, documentary and archaeological. Our knowledge of the Mediterranean economy is based on syntheses which are between 50 and 150 years old; they are based on outdated assumptions and restricted data sets, and were written before ther...
The Roman empire tends to be seen as a whole whereas the early middle ages tends to be seen as a collection of regional histories, roughly corresponding to the land-areas of modern nation states. As a result, early medieval history is much more fragmented, and there have been few convincing syntheses of socio-economic change in the post-Roman world since the 1930s. In recent decades, the rise of early medieval archaeology has also transformed our source-base, but this has not been adequately integrated into analyses of documentary history in almost any country. In Framing the Early Middle Ages Chris Wickham combines documentary and archaeological evidence to create a comparative history of t...
The Anonymous Old English Homily: Sources, Composition, and Variation offers important essays on the origins, textual transmission, and (re)use of early English preaching texts between the ninth and the late twelfth centuries. Associated with the Electronic Corpus of Anonymous Homilies in Old English project, these studies provide fresh insights into one of the most complex textual genres of early medieval literature. Contributions deal with the definition of the anonymous homiletic corpus in Old English, the history of scholarship on its Latin sources, and the important unedited Pembroke and Angers Latin homiliaries. They also include new source and manuscript identifications, and in-depth studies of a number of popular Old English homilies, their themes, revisions, and textual relations. Contributors are: Aidan Conti, Robert Getz, Thomas N. Hall, Susan Irvine, Esther Lemmerz, Stephen Pelle, Thijs Porck, Winfried Rudolf, Donald G. Scragg, Robert K. Upchurch, Jonathan Wilcox, Charles D. Wright, Samantha Zacher. See inside the book.
Islamic archaeology is young discipline, emerging only over the course of the 1980s and 1990s. The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Archaeology is the first work of its kind to cover the archaeology of the Islamic world on a global scale, from North Africa to China and Europe to sub-Saharan Africa.
Die Studien zur Geschichte und Kultur des Vorderen Orients erscheinen als Supplement der Zeitschrift Der Islam, gegründet 1910 von Carl Heinrich Becker, einem der Väter der modernen Islamwissenschaft. Ganz im Sinne Beckers ist das Ziel der Studien die Erforschung der vergangenen Gesellschaften des Vorderen Orients, ihrer Glaubenssysteme und der zugrundeliegenden sozialen und ökonomischen Verhältnisse, von der Iberischen Halbinsel bis nach Zentralasien, von den ukrainischen Steppen zum Hochland des Jemen. Über die grundlegende philologische Arbeit an der literarischen Überlieferung hinaus nutzen die Studien die archivalischen, sowie materiellen und archäologischen Überlieferungen als Quelle für die gesamte Bandbreite der historisch arbeitenden Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften.
Roman identity is one of the most interesting cases of social identity because in the course of time, it could mean so many different things: for instance, Greek-speaking subjects of the Byzantine empire, inhabitants of the city of Rome, autonomous civic or regional groups, Latin speakers under ‘barbarian’ rule in the West or, increasingly, representatives of the Church of Rome. Eventually, the Christian dimension of Roman identity gained ground. The shifting concepts of Romanness represent a methodological challenge for studies of ethnicity because, depending on its uses, Roman identity may be regarded as ‘ethnic’ in a broad sense, but under most criteria, it is not. Romanness is indeed a test case how an established and prestigious social identity can acquire many different shades of meaning, which we would class as civic, political, imperial, ethnic, cultural, legal, religious, regional or as status groups. This book offers comprehensive overviews of the meaning of Romanness in most (former) Roman provinces, complemented by a number of comparative and thematic studies. A similarly wide-ranging overview has not been available so far.
In the last twenty years scholarship on late antique and early medieval Ravenna has resulted in a certain number of publications mainly focused on the fields of architecture, mosaics and archaeology. On the contrary, much less attention has been paid on labour – both manual and intellectual – as well as the structure of production and objects derived from manufacturing activities, despite the fact that Ravenna is the place which preserves the highest number of historical evidence among all centres of the late Roman Mediterranean. Its cultural heritage is vast and composite, ranging from papyri to inscriptions, from ivories to marbles, as well as luxury objects, pottery, and coins. Starting from concrete typologies of hand-manufactured goods existing in the Ravennate milieu, the book aims at exploring the multifaceted traditions of late antique and early Byzantine handicraft from the fourth to the eighth century AD. Its perspective is to pay attention more on patronage, social taste, acculturation, workers and the economic industry of production which supported the demand, circulation and distribution of artefacts, than on the artistic evaluation of the objects themselves.
Medieval Rome analyses the history of the city of Rome between 900 and 1150, a period of major change in the city. This volume doesn't merely seek to tell the story of the city from the traditional Church standpoint; instead, it engages in studies of the city's processions, material culture,legal transformations, and sense of the past, seeking to unravel the complexities of Roman cultural identity, including its urban economy, social history as seen across the different strata of society, and the articulation between the city's regions.This new approach serves to underpin a major reinterpretation of Rome's political history in the era of the "reform papacy", one of the greatest crises in Rome's history, which had a resonance across the entire continent. Medieval Rome is the most systematic analysis ever made of two and a halfcenturies of Rome's history, one which saw centuries of stability undermined by external crisis and the long period of reconstruction which followed.