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Dominique Barthélemy presents a sharply revisionist account of the history of France around the year 1000, challenging the traditional view that France underwent a kind of revolution at the millennium which ushered in feudalism.
Theodore Evergates has assembled, translated, and annotated some two hundred documents from the country of Champagne into a sourcebook that focuses on the political, economic, and legal workings of a feudal society, uncovering the details of private life and social history that are embedded in the official records.
The authors of Cultures of Power proffer diverse perspectives on the prehistory of government in Northern France, Spain, Germany, the Low Countries, and England. Political, social, ecclesiastical, and cultural history are brought to bear on topics such as aristocracies, women, rituals, commemoration, and manifestations of power through literary, legal, and scriptural means.
The bishop was a figure of unparalleled importance in the tenth and eleventh centuries, as he married the advantages of his noble birth to the sacramental and pastoral role of bishop, drawing upon the resultant range of powers to intervene in all areas of life. Scholarship on the episcopate in this period, however, has tended to cluster around two themes: the role of bishops in the fragmentation of the Carolingian Empire and the critiques of these bishops levied by certain church reformers. This book moves beyond these subjects and examines the full scope of bishops activities in southwest France, as they ruled their cathedrals, interacted with lay powers, patronized religious communities, and wrestled with the complex nature of their office.
This is the second collection of studies by Stephen D. White to be published by Variorum (the first being Feuding and Peace-Making in Eleventh-Century France). The essays in this volume look principally at France and England from Merovingian and Anglo-Saxon times up to the 12th century. They analyze Latin and Old French discourses that medieval nobles used to construct their relationships with kin, lords, men, and friends, and investigate the political dimensions of such relationships with particular reference to patronage/clientage, the use of land as an item of exchange, and feuding. In so doing, the essays call into question the conventional practice of studying kinship and feudalism as independent systems of legal institutions and propose new strategies for studying them.
Looking at a neglected period in the social history of modernization, David Levine investigates the centuries that followed the year 1000, when a new kind of society emerged in Europe. New commercial routines, new forms of agriculture, new methods of information technology, and increased population densities all played a role in the prolonged transition away from antiquity and toward modernity. At the Dawn of Modernity highlights both "top-down" and "bottom-up" changes that characterized the social experience of early modernization. In the former category are the Gregorian Reformation, the imposition of feudalism, and the development of centralizing state formations. Of equal importance to Levine's portrait of the emerging social order are the bottom-up demographic relations that structured everyday life, because the making of the modern world, in his view, also began in the decisions made by countless men and women regarding their families and circumstances. Levine ends his story with the cataclysm unleashed by the Black Death in 1348, which brought three centuries of growth to a grim end.
The World in the Year 1000 is organized in four thematic sections covering five world regions: Europe, the Islamic world, India, China, and Mesoamerica. All contributions in this volume are original works by many of today's leading scholars.
This selection of articles by Robert-Henri Bautier deals with the political and institutional history of France between the 6th and 12th centuries, and is above all concerned with the changing extent of the rulers' power from the rise of the Carolingians onwards. A subsequent volume will focus on the Capetians, while a further pair of volumes deal with economic history. The first studies here examine two general topics: the emergence of Paris as the undisputed capital of France, and the ceremony of Royal coronation and consecration. The following articles, on Carolingian France, reconsider the significance of the battle of Roncevaux and the importance of the region of Neustria, then study th...
Eleanor of Aquitaine’s extraordinary life seems more likely to be found in the pages of fiction. Proud daughter of a distinguished French dynasty, she married the king of France, Louis VII, then the king of England, Henry II, and gave birth to two sons who rose to take the English throne—Richard the Lionheart and John. Renowned for her beauty, hungry for power, headstrong, and unconventional, Eleanor traveled on crusades, acted as regent for Henry II and later for Richard, incited rebellion, endured a fifteen-year imprisonment, and as an elderly widow still wielded political power with energy and enthusiasm. This gripping biography is the definitive account of the most important queen of...
Includes English translation of the Vita Geraldi brevior.