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Bouchard provides a fresh perspective on social and ecclesiastical life in the High Middle Ages, drawing on a vast range of primary sources to reveal the surprisingly close relationship between monasteries and the nobility.
This interdisciplinary handbook provides extensive information about research in medieval studies and its most important results over the last decades. The handbook is a reference work which enables the readers to quickly and purposely gain insight into the important research discussions and to inform themselves about the current status of research in the field. The handbook consists of four parts. The first, large section offers articles on all of the main disciplines and discussions of the field. The second section presents articles on the key concepts of modern medieval studies and the debates therein. The third section is a lexicon of the most important text genres of the Middle Ages. The fourth section provides an international bio-bibliographical lexicon of the most prominent medievalists in all disciplines. A comprehensive bibliography rounds off the compendium. The result is a reference work which exhaustively documents the current status of research in medieval studies and brings the disciplines and experts of the field together.
Examines the struggle between Innocent II and Anacletus II, a member of the Roman Pierleoni family which had converted from Judaism to Christianity. In contrast to the prevailing theory that the split was ideological and that Innocent and his supporters in the monastic movement (e.g., Bernard of Clairvaux, Peter the Venerable, Matthew of Albano) represented a progressive church reform party, argues that it was basically political. Anacletus' Jewish origin and his family's banking activities were exploited in a successful campaign of vilification against him. Ch. 15 (pp. 156-168), "The Anatomy of the Schism: The Jewish Element", shows how increased antisemitism after the First Crusade and the image of the Jew as a usurer contributed to this campaign.
In Bounded Wilderness, Kathryn Jasper focuses on the innovations undertaken at the hermitage of Fonte Avellana in central Italy during the eleventh century by its prior, Peter Damian (d. 1072). The congregation of Fonte Avellana experimented with reforming practices that led to new ways of managing property and relations among clergy, nobles, and the laity. Jasper charts how Damian's notion of monastic reform took advantage of the surrounding topography and geography to amplify the sensory aspects of ascetic experiences. By focusing on monastic landscapes and land ownership, Jasper demonstrates that reform extended beyond abstract ideas. Rather, reform circulated locally through monastic networks and addressed practical concerns such as property boundaries and rights over water, orchards, pastures, and mills. Putting new sources, both documentary and archaeological, into conversation with monastic charters and Damian's letters, Bounded Wilderness reveals the interrelationship of economic practices, religious traditions, and the natural environment in the idea and implementation of reform.
It has for decades been part of the canon of maxims of basic research that most images of rulers in early medieval book illustrations have been transmitted in liturgical manuscripts, i.e. manuscripts originally intended for divine worship. There have however to date been few investigations which draw serious consequences from this and which also view miniatures of rulers in the light of their functional aspects, for example as ‘memorial depictions’ (O.G. Oexle), or on the basis of the social reality of the pious motives behind their presentation. This study gives a more precise explanation of the function and purpose of ruler-images by examining a few selected early medieval miniatures. It analyzes the historical and social contexts of their genesis and the liturgical and commemorative aims of their use against the setting of the social form of remembrance of confraternity.
Central to current understandings of medieval history is the concept of political ritual, encompassing events from coronations to funerals, entries into cities, civic games, banquets, hunting, acts of submission or commendation, and more. ''Ritual?'' asks Philippe Buc. In The Dangers of Ritual he boldly argues that the concept shouldn't be so central after all. Modern-day scholars, gently seduced by twentieth-century theories of ritual, often misinterpret medieval documents that ostensibly describe such events, in part because they fail to appreciate the intentions behind them. The book begins with four case studies whose arrangement--backward from texts on tenth-century kingship to fourth-c...
In The Sleep of Behemoth, Jehangir Yezdi Malegam explores the emergence of conflicting concepts of peace in western Europe during the High Middle Ages. Ever since the early Church, Christian thinkers had conceived of their peace separate from the peace of the world, guarded by the sacraments and shared only grudgingly with powers and principalities. To kingdoms and communities they had allowed attenuated versions of this peace, modes of accommodation and domination that had tranquility as the goal. After 1000, reformers in the papal curia and monks and canons in the intellectual circles of northern France began to reimagine the Church as an engine of true peace, whose task it was eventually ...
During the dissolution of the former Carolingian Empire, warfare and plunder went unchecked. An innovative response to this violence was the Church-led initiative known as the Peace of God, perhaps history's earliest mass peace movement. In the thirteen essays collected here, leading scholars consider key aspects of the movement and episodes in its history.
This book is not a conventional political narrative of Carolingian history shaped by narrative sources, capitularies, and charter material. It is structured, instead, by numismatic, diplomatic, liturgical, and iconographic sources and deals with political signs, images, and fixed formulas in them as interconnected elements in a symbolic language that was used in the indirect negotiation and maintenance of Carolingian authority. Building on the comprehensive analysis of royal liturgy, intitulature, iconography, and graphic signs and responding to recent interpretations of early medieval politics, this book offers a fresh view of Carolingian political culture and of corresponding roles that royal/imperial courts, larger monasteries, and human agents played there.
A complete reappraisal of the papacy of Honorius II, highlighting the strategies to which this pontificate turned in order to govern ecclesiastical institutions and to deal with secular matters.The papacy of Honorius II (1124-1130) has often been overlooked by historians, usually considered uneventful, transitional and colourless. This book offers a complete reappraisal, drawing on a detailed examination of the surviving letters produced by the papal chancery to show that conversely, it was a vital and innovative pontificate. It argues that during what was a stabilising period for the papacy in an era of peace, Honorius and the chancery were able to enact the instruments and ecclesiological ...