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This volume provides relevant insights into medieval political legitimation, and its impact on political competition and notions of power. With a main focus on medieval Castile, the political discourses purporting to legitimate practices of power are discussed, both as pieces of textual material and in their wider historical context.
This collection presents an innovative series of essays about the medieval culture of Feud and Violence. Featuring both prominent senior and younger scholars from the United States and Europe, the contributions offer various methods and points of view in their analyses. All, however, are indebted in some way to the work of Stephen D. White on legal culture, politics, and violence. White's work has frequently emphasized the importance of careful, closely focused readings of medieval sources as well as the need to take account of practice in relation to indigenous normative statements. His work has thus made historians of medieval political culture keenly aware of the ways in which various rhe...
Although it has a rich historiography, and from the late ninth century is rich in textual evidence, northern Iberia has barely featured in the great debates of early medieval European history of recent generations. Lying beyond the Frankish world, in a peninsula more than half controlled by Muslims, Spanish and Portuguese experience has seemed irrelevant to the Carolingian Empire and the political fragmentation (or realignment) that followed it. But Spain and Portugal shared the late Roman heritage which influenced much of western Europe in the early middle ages and by the tenth century records and practice in the Christian north still shared features with parts farther east. What is interes...
Despite the significant attention medieval scholarship has devoted to the study of peasant societies, these groups have traditionally been depicted as passive and homogeneous, merely able of resisting pressures from the state or powerful individuals. However, in recent years, the availability of new records, the widespread adoption of microhistorical analyses, and the renewal of conceptual frameworks have enabled scholars to undertake more detailed and nuanced investigations. This collective volume aims to explore the political, economic, and social practices of Iberian medieval peasant societies. A key finding of this multivocal analysis is the revelation of the relative subalternity of medieval ruling groups and the constraints on peasant actions across various geographical and chronological contexts.
The Triumph of an Accursed Lineage analyses kingship in Castile between 1252 and 1350, with a particular focus on the pivotal reign of Alfonso XI (r. 1312–1350). This century witnessed significant changes in the ways in which the Castilian monarchy constructed and represented its power in this period. The ideas and motifs used to extoll royal authority, the territorial conceptualisation of the kingdom, the role queens and the royal family played, and the interpersonal relationship between the kings and the nobility were all integral to this process. Ultimately, this book addresses how Alfonso XI, a member of an accursed lineage who rose to the throne when he was an infant, was able to end the internal turmoil which plagued Castile since the 1270s and become a paradigm of successful kingship. This book will appeal to scholars and students of medieval Spain, as well as those interested in the history of kingship.
For much of the Middle Ages, the Lara family was among the most powerful aristocratic lineages in Spain. Proteges of the monarchy at the time of El Cid, their influence reached extraordinary heights during the struggle against the Moors. Hand-in-glove with successive kings, they gathered an impressive array of military and political positions across the Iberian Peninsula. But cooperation gave way to confrontation, as the family was pitted against the crown in a series of civil wars. This book, the first modern study of the Laras, explores the causes of change in the dynamics of power, and narrates the dramatic story of the events that overtook the family. The Laras' militant quest for territorial strength and the conflict with the monarchy led toward a fatal end, but anticipated a form of aristocratic power that long outlived the family. The noble elite would come to dominate Spanish society in the coming centuries, and the Lara family provides important lessons for students of the history of nobility, monarchy, and power in the medieval and early modern world.
Traces the remarkable international history of the Brienne/Beaumont family, spanning from the Crusader states to Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean. The Brienne/Beaumonts, a noble family originally from Champagne, spread across Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean in the Middle Ages. Their story begins with John de Brienne (c. 1175/78-1237), who was the emperor of Constantinople, became king of Jerusalem by marriage, and claimed the throne of a kingdom in modern-day Turkey called Armenian Cilicia. His life, his children and his grandchildren’s lives were remarkably international. His daughters were born in Italy and what is now Lebanon; one of his sons, who grew up in Constantinople, Fra...
The relationship between rulers and their subjects is always channelled by emotion. This volume explores the specific tones this relationship took on in the Middle Ages, as well as their accordance with a concept of power based ultimately on agreement, an inclination to visualise emotions, a social pedagogy based on fear, and a religious ideology which placed humanity between divine order and divine wrath. It also examines the emotive models used to rule society and deal with conflicts. Together, the contributions in this book demonstrate how our understanding of late medieval society can be enhanced by recognising the emotional strategies present in the game of power and how they were used to build authority. Contributors are: Alexandru Stefan Anca, Attila Bárány, Ulrike Becker, Luciano Gallinari, Sari Katajala-Peltomaa, Vinni Lucherini, Esther Martí Sentañés, Francesc Massip, Rob Meens, Tamás Olbei, Bernard Ribémont, Flocel Sabaté, and Hans-Joachim Schmidt.
How did medieval Europeans use and change their environments, think about the natural world, and try to handle the natural forces affecting their lives? This groundbreaking environmental history examines medieval relationships with the natural world from the perspective of social ecology, viewing human society as a hybrid of the cultural and the natural. Richard Hoffmann's interdisciplinary approach sheds important light on such central topics in medieval history as the decline of Rome, religious doctrine, urbanization and technology, as well as key environmental themes, among them energy use, sustainability, disease and climate change. Revealing the role of natural forces in events previously seen as purely human, the book explores issues including the treatment of animals, the 'tragedy of the commons', agricultural clearances and agrarian economies. By introducing medieval history in the context of social ecology, it brings the natural world into historiography as an agent and object of history itself.
Die International Bibliographiy of Historical Sciences verzeichnet jährlich die bedeutendsten Neuerscheinungen geschichtswissenschaftlicher Monographien und Zeitschriftenartikel weltweit, die inhaltlich von der Vor- und Frühgeschichte bis zur jüngsten Vergangenheit reichen. Sie ist damit die derzeit einzige laufende Bibliographie dieser Art, die thematisch, zeitlich und geographisch ein derart breites Spektrum abdeckt. Innerhalb der systematischen Gliederung nach Zeitalter, Region oder historischer Disziplin sind die Werke nach Autorennamen oder charakteristischem Titelhauptwort aufgelistet.