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"Brings together the disciplines of art, music, and history to explore the importance of the past to conceptions of the present in the central Middle Ages"--Provided by publisher.
This volume contributes to the study of early English poetics. In these essays, several related approaches and fields of study radiate outward from poetics, including stylistics, literary history, word studies, gender studies, metrics, and textual criticism. By combining and redirecting these traditional scholarly methods, as well as exploring newer ones such as object-oriented ontology and sound studies, these essays demonstrate how poetry responds to its intellectual, literary, and material contexts. The contributors propose to connect the small (syllables, words, and phrases) to the large (histories, emotions, faiths, secrets). In doing so, they attempt to work magic on the texts they consider: turning an ordinary word into something strange and new, or demonstrating texture, difference, and horizontality where previous eyes had perceived only smoothness, sameness, and verticality.
Arthur Westwell reveals the surprising vibrancy and creativity of early medieval book culture through the Ordines Romani manuscripts.
Focusing on the way bishops in the eleventh century used the ecclesiastical tithe - church taxes - to develop or re-order ties of loyalty and dependence within their dioceses, this book offers a new perspective on episcopacy in medieval Germany and Italy. Using three broad case studies from the dioceses of Mainz, Salzburg and Lucca in Tuscany, John Eldevik places the social dynamics of collecting the church tithe within current debates about religious reform, social change and the so-called 'feudal revolution' in the eleventh century, and analyses a key economic institution, the medieval tithe, as a social and political phenomenon. By examining episcopal churches and their possessions not in institutional terms, but as social networks which bishops were obliged to negotiate and construct over time using legal, historiographical and interpersonal means, this comparative study casts fresh light on the history of early medieval society.
A collection of eight lectures published over the past 20 years, in which Bullough (medieval history, U. of St. Andrews) looks at the ninth-century Carolingian court, focusing on the pan-European cultural elements. He combines his own close analysis of texts with the work of other scholars. Distributed in the U.S. by St. Martin's Press. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
This illustrated book is a coherently conceived collection of interdisciplinary essays by distinguished authors on the city of Rome and its contacts with western Christendom in the early Middle Ages (c. 500-1000 AD). The first part integrates historical, archaeological, numismatic and art historical approaches to studying the transition of the city of Rome from Antiquity to the Middle Ages and offers groundbreaking new analyses of selected sites and problems. Attention is given to the economic, social, religious and cultural history of the city. In the second part of the volume historical, archaeological, liturgical and palaeographical approaches address Rome's contacts and influence in Latin Christendom in this period, with particular regard to Rome's place within Italian politics and its cultural influence in Carolingian Francia and Anglo-Saxon England.
Christianization and Commonwealth in Early Medieval Europe re-examines the alterations in Western European life that followed widespread conversion to Christianity-the phenomena traditionally termed "Christianization". It refocuses scholarly paradigms for Christianization around the development of mandatory rituals. One prominent ritual, Rogationtide supplies an ideal case study demonstrating a new paradigm of "Christianization without religion." Christianization in the Middle Ages was not a slow process through which a Christian system of religious beliefs and practices replaced an earlier pagan system. In the Middle Ages, religion did not exist in the sense of a fixed system of belief boun...
A Companion to Isidore of Seville presents nineteen chapters from leading international scholars on Isidore of Seville (d. 636), the most prominent bishop of the Visigothic kingdom in Hispania in the seventh century and one of the most prolific authors of early medieval western Europe. Introductory studies establish the political, religious and familial contexts in which Isidore operated, his key works are then analysed in detail, as are some of the main themes that run throughout his corpus. Isidore's influence extended across the entire Middle Ages and into the early modern period in fields such as church governance and pastoral care, theology, grammar, science, history-writing, and linguistics – all topics that are explored in the volume. Contributors: Graham Barrett, Winston Black, José Carracedo Fraga, Santiago Castellanos, Pedro Castillo Maldonado, Jacques Elfassi, Andrew Fear, Amy Fuller, Raúl González Salinero, Jeremy Lawrance, Céline Martin, Thomas O'Loughlin, Martin J. Ryan, Sinéad O'Sullivan, Mark Lewis Tizzoni, Purificación Ubric Rabaneda, Faith Wallis, Immo Warntjes, and Jamie Wood. See inside the book.
Despite the wealth of scholarship in recent decades on medieval women, we still know much less about the experiences of women in the early Middle Ages than we do about those in later centuries. In Women and Aristocratic Culture in the Carolingian World, Valerie L. Garver offers a fresh appraisal of the cultural and social history of eighth- and ninth-century women. Examining changes in women's lives and in the ways others perceived women during the early Middle Ages, she shows that lay and religious women, despite their legal and social constrictions, played integral roles in Carolingian society. Garver's innovative book employs an especially wide range of sources, both textual and material,...
This book examines the sustained interest in legends of the pagan and peripheral North, tracing and analyzing the use of an ‘out-of-Scandinavia’ legend (Scandinavia as an ancestral homeland) in a wide range of medieval texts from all over Europe, with a focus on the Anglo-Saxon tradition. The pagan North was an imaginative region, which attracted a number of conflicting interpretations. To Christian Europe, the pagan North was an abject Other, but it also symbolized a place from which ancestral strength and energy derived. Rix maps how these discourses informed ‘national’ legends of ancestral origins, showing how an ‘out-of-Scandinavia’ legend can be found in works by several fam...