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How do people, in both the past and the present, think about moments of social and political crisis, and how do they respond to them? What are the interpretive codes by which troubling events are read and given meaning, and what part do these codes play in suggesting specific strategies for coping with the world? In Past Convictions Courtney Booker attempts to answer these questions by examining the controversial divestiture and public penance of Charlemagne's son, the Emperor Louis the Pious, in 833. Historians have customarily viewed the event as marking the beginning of the end of the Carolingian dynasty. Exploring how both contemporaries and subsequent generations thought about Louis's f...
The life of an aristocratic Carolingian man involved an array of behaviors and duties associated with his gender and rank: an education in arms and letters; training in horsemanship, soldiery, and hunting; betrothal, marriage, and the virile production of heirs; and the masterful command of a prominent household. In Be a Perfect Man, Andrew J. Romig argues that Carolingian masculinity was constituted just as centrally by the performance of caritas, defined by the early medieval scholar Alcuin of York as a complete and all-inclusive love for God and for fellow human beings, flowing from the whole heart, mind, and soul. The authority of the Carolingian man depended not only on his skills in wa...
This is the first book to focus on Latin epic verse saints' lives in their medieval historical contexts. Anna Taylor examines how these works promoted bonds of friendship and expressed rivalries among writers, monasteries, saints, earthly patrons, teachers, and students in Western Europe in the central middle ages. Using philological, codicological, and microhistorical approaches, Professor Taylor reveals new insights that will reshape our understanding of monasticism, patronage, and education. These texts give historians an unprecedented glimpse inside the early medieval classroom, provide a nuanced view of the complicated synthesis of the Christian and Classical heritages, and show the cultural importance and varied functions of poetic composition in the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries.
The increased interest in religion as a phenomenon and its various cultural contexts is encouraging a focus on the relationship between religion and politics. However, the political relevance of the religious and the interdependence between political and religious spheres has always been a major area of medieval research. The articles in this volume consider not only the principle inseparability of both spheres as previously established by research, but also the beginnings of a differentiation and relative autonomy of religion and politics within the framework of a comparison between Germany and the United Kingdom. This allows the identification of restrictions within the research traditions that are due to national histories and points to ways of overcoming these restrictions.
The tenth and eleventh centuries in medieval Europe are commonly seen as a time of uncertainty and loss: an age of lawless aristocrats, of weak political authority, of cultural decline and dissolute monks, and of rampant superstition. It is a period often judged from its margins, compared (mostly negatively) to what came before and what would follow. We impose upon it both a sense of nostalgia and a teleology, as they somehow knowingly foreshadow what is to come. Seeking to complicate this mischaracterisation, which is primarily the invention of nineteenth and early twentieth century historiography, this book maps the movement between two intellectual stances: a shift from prophetic to apoca...
In The Song of Songs in the Early Middle Ages, Hannah W. Matis examines how the Song of Songs, the collection of Hebrew love poetry, was understood in the Latin West as an allegory of Christ and the church. This reading of the biblical text was passed down via the patristic tradition, established by the Venerable Bede, and promoted by the chief architects of the Carolingian reform. Throughout the ninth century, the Song of Songs became a text that Carolingian churchmen used to think about the nature of Christ and to conceptualize their own roles and duties within the church. This study examines the many different ways that the Song of Songs was read within its early medieval historical context.
In Dark Age Bodies Lynda L. Coon reconstructs the gender ideology of monastic masculinity through an investigation of early medieval readings of the body. Focusing on the Carolingian era, Coon evaluates the ritual and liturgical performances of monastic bodies within the imaginative landscapes of same-sex ascetic communities in northern Europe. She demonstrates how the priestly body plays a significant role in shaping major aspects of Carolingian history, such as the revival of classicism, movements for clerical reform, and church-state relations. In the political realm, Carolingian churchmen consistently exploited monastic constructions of gender to assert the power of the monastery. Stress...
Charlemagne never traveled farther east than Italy, but by the mid-tenth century a story had begun to circulate about the friendly alliances that the emperor had forged while visiting Jerusalem and Constantinople. This story gained wide currency throughout the Middle Ages, appearing frequently in chronicles, histories, imperial decrees, and hagiographies-even in stained-glass windows and vernacular verse and prose. In Emperor of the World, Anne A. Latowsky traces the curious history of this myth, revealing how the memory of the Frankish Emperor was manipulated to shape the institutions of kingship and empire in the High Middle Ages. The legend incorporates apocalyptic themes such as the succ...
Rome and Religion in the Medieval World provides a panoramic and interdisciplinary exploration of Rome and religious culture. The studies build upon or engage Thomas F.X. Noble’s interest in Rome, especially his landmark contributions to the origins of the Papal States and early medieval image controversies. Scholars from a variety of disciplines offer new viewpoints on key issues and questions relating to medieval religious, cultural and intellectual history. Each study explores different dimensions of Rome and religion, including medieval art, theology, material culture, politics, education, law, and religious practice. Drawing upon a wide range of sources, including manuscripts, relics,...
Language and ideology in the scholarship of the late Middle Ages