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An analysis of medieval ritual, history, and memory in Germany and the United States.
This collection of essays examines the similarities and differences between medieval England and Germany at a period of great change in almost all areas of life. It asks a number of fundamental questions which highlight the foundations of a rich common European heritage. What was it that madelife in the twelfth century more varied, less peaceful, and less secure than before? How can the parellel developments, changes, and transformations that took place in Latin Europe in the High Middle Ages be related to each other? What answers were found to the challenges of the age in England andGermany? This volume gives the reader an opportunity to see how English-speaking and German scholars approach similar themes. Edited by two leading German medievalists, it includes 17 contributions by eminent scholrs from Britain, North America, and Germany. It is divided into 4 sections on modes ofcommunication, war and peace, Christians and non-Christians, and urban and rural developments, and is essential reading for students and scholars of English or German medieval history.
In this book, Beñat Elortza Larrea analyses the processes of polity consolidation and military transformation in Scandinavia between the early eleventh and early fourteenth centuries. Based on a plethora of administrative, legal, and narrative sources, this study examines the development of governance and warfare in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, and evaluates to which degree European ideas and institutions shaped the budding medieval Scandinavian realms. In other words – did the formation of these kingdoms stem mostly from European influence, were they a by-product of a purely Scandinavian ethos, or did they largely develop due to historical and geographical circumstances unique to each realm
This volume examines mutual ethnic and national perceptions and stereotypes in the Middle Ages by analysing a range of historical sources, with a particular focus on the mutual history of Germany and Poland.
This is an engaging study of how kingship and royal government operated in the late Anglo-Saxon period.
The volume presents a new understanding of medieval historiography by examining the representation of society, politics and human behaviour in six historical writings from imperial Germany, one of the leading political and intellectual centres during the period c. 950-1150.
This corpus-based study examines the lexical field of theft in the Anglo-Saxon law-codes and documents containing reports of lawsuits (charters, writs, and some chapters of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle). The individual Old English lexemes are analysed not only in terms of their meaning, collocation patterns, and Latin translations, but also, more unusually in a field-approach, with reference to their distribution over the various textual genres and the discourse strategies dominant in these. Although primarily linguistic in focus, a detailed description of the theft-offences and the wider context in which they occur should also be of interest to the historian.
When Christianity spread from its Mediterranean base into the Germanic and Celtic north, it initiated profound changes, particularly in kinship relations and sexual mores. Joseph H. Lynch traces the introduction and assimilation of the concept of spiritual kinship into Anglo-Saxon England. Covering the years 597 to 1066, he shows how this notion unsettled and in time altered the structures of the society.In early Germanic societies, kinship was a major organizing principle. Spiritual kinship of various kinds began to take hold among the Anglo-Saxons with the arrival of Christian missionaries from Rome in the seventh century. Lynch discusses in detail sponsorship at baptism, confirmation, and...
This is the first English translation of the main contemporary accounts of the Crusade and death of the German Frederick I Barbarossa (ruled 1152-90). The most important of these, the 'History of the Expedition of the Emperor Frederick' was written soon after the events described, and is a crucial, and under-used source for the Third Crusade (at least in the Anglophone world). The account begins with two letters describing the disaster of Hattin and Saladin's subsequent conquest of most of the Holy Land (the second of these is addressed to the duke of Austria). It goes on to describe how the emperor took the Cross, the preparations and recruitment for the Crusade, the diplomatic contacts of ...
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.