You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
A Companion to Seals in the Middle Ages is a cross-disciplinary collection of fourteen essays on medieval sigillography. It is organized thematically, and it emphasizes important, often cutting-edge, methodologies for the study of medieval seals and sealing cultures. As the chronological, temporal and geographic scope of the essays in the volume suggests, the study of the medieval seal—its manufacture, materiality, usage, iconography, inscription, and preservation—is a rich endeavour that demands collaboration across disciplines as well as between scholars working on material from different regions and periods. It is hoped that this collection will make the study of medieval seals more accessible and will stimulate students and scholars to employ and further develop these material and methodological approaches to seals. Contributors are Adrian Ailes, Elka Cwiertnia, Paul Dryburgh, Emir O. Filipovi, Oliver Harris, Philippa Hoskin, Ashley Jones, Andreas Lehnertz, John McEwan, Elizabeth A. New, Jonathan Shea, Caroline Simonet, Angelina A. Volkoff, and Marek L. Wójcik.
Graphic Signs Of Authority in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages offers a cultural history of the graphic monogrammatic tools from antiquity to the Middle Ages. It examines the sign of the cross, christograms, monograms, and other similar devices, and how they were used during a time of great socio-political and religious change.
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.
This book presents the results of the first systematic archaeological study of Roman peasants. It examines the spaces, architecture, diet, agriculture, market interactions, and movement habitus of non-elite rural dwellers in a region of southern Tuscany, Italy, during the Roman period. Volume 1 presents the excavation data from eight non-elite rural sites including a farm, a peasant house, animal stall/work huts, a ceramics factory, field drains, and a site of uncertain function, here framed as individual chapters complete with finds analysis. Volume 2 examines this data synthetically in thematic chapters addressing land use, agriculture, diet, markets, and movement. The results suggest a di...
Includes entries for maps and atlases.
The eighth century has not been analysed as a period of economic history since the 1930s, and is ripe for a comprehensive reassessment. The twelve papers in this book range over the whole of Europe and the Mediterranean from Denmark to Palestine, covering Francia, Italy and Byzantium on the way. They examine regional economies and associated political structures, that is to say the whole network of production, exchange, and social relations in each area. They offer both authoritative overviews of current work and new and original work. As a whole, they show how the eighth century was the first century when the post-Roman world can clearly be seen to have emerged, in the regional economies of each part of Europe.
The volume gathers together seventeen articles dedicated to the monetary history of medieval Italy, most of them newly translated into English. The articles in the first section of the volume trace the development of monetisation in Italy from the Lombard period until the rise of the communes, taking Rome, Lazio, Tuscany, and several cities and regions in north-central Italy as case studies. The articles in the second section analyse different aspects of monetary production and circulation in Byzantine Italy, while the third gathers together studies on various aspects of Carolingian coinage: the transition from the Lombard system and the problem of furnishing an adequate supply of silver; mints and royal administration; and the activity and inactivity of mints operating at the edges of the Regnum Italiae. All of the articles share the author’s characteristic concern with setting the evidence from written sources against the wealth of new data emerging from recent archaeological research.
The Master Game is a rollercoaster intellectual journey through the back streets and rat runs of history to uncover the traces in architecture and monuments of a secret religion that has shaped the world. Pivotal historical events and processes, not least the Renaissance, the birth of scientific rationalism, and the French and American revolutions, are radically reevaluated in the light of new investigative evidence presented in The Master Game. Even the belief that the United States has a "global mission," so obvious today, may ultimately prove to be less the result of a shortterm reaction to terrorism than the inevitable working out of a covert plan originally set in motion almost two thou...
Winner of the Professional/Scholarly Publishing Award in Economics from the Association of American Publishers Within a few months of assuming the position of curator of medieval coins at the American Numismatic Society in 1980, Alan M. Stahl was presented with a plastic bag containing a hoard of 5,000 recently discovered coins, most of which turned out to be from medieval Venice. The course of study of that hoard (and a later one containing more than 14,000 coins) led him to the Venetian archives, where he examined thousands of unpublished manuscripts. To provide an even more accurate account of how the Zecca mint operated in Venice in the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries, Stahl commi...
Reading Medieval Sources is an exciting new series which leads scholars and students into some of the most challenging and rewarding sources from the European Middle Ages, and introduces the most important approaches to understanding them. Written by an international team of twelve leading scholars, this volume Money and Coinage in the Middle Ages presents a set of fresh and insightful perspectives that demonstrate the rich potential of this source material to all scholars of medieval history and culture. It includes coverage of major developments in monetary history, set into their economic and political context, as well as innovative and interdisciplinary perspectives that address money and coinage in relation to archaeology, anthropology and medieval literature. Contributors are Nanouschka Myrberg Burström, Elizabeth Edwards, Gaspar Feliu, Anna Gannon, Richard Kelleher, Bill Maurer, Nick Mayhew, Rory Naismith, Philipp Robinson Rössner, Alessia Rovelli, Lucia Travaini, and Andrew Woods.