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Historians have traditionally studied late medieval education backward – through the eyes of religious and political reformers critical of that which preceded them. This has led to significant distortions. Histories written from this perspective, tend to overemphasize the novelty of early modern educational reforms at the expense of evident continuities, and focus on conflict between ecclesiastical and lay authorities rather than cooperation. This book focuses instead, on the medieval experience of education through a detailed reconstruction of the educational landscape of late medieval Regensburg. The resulting picture provides new insights into the relationship between civic authorities and ecclesiastical institutions, the role of education in social and economic mobility, and the connections between local communities and broader European educational structures.
Exhaustively surveying all known cases of academic condemnation at Oxford, including several never studied before, this book seeks to establish the institutional mechanisms and factors that led the university to condemn scholars and their theories.
The Donation of Constantine is the most outrageous and powerful forgery in world history. The question of its precise time of origin alone kept generations of researchers occupied. But, what exactly is the Donation of Constantine? To find the answer, it is necessary to approach the question on two different semantic levels: First, as the Constitutum Constantini, a fictitious privilege, in which, among other things, rights and presents were bestowed on the catholic church by a grateful Emperor Konstantin. Secondly, as a reflection of the Middle Age mindset, becoming part of the culture landscape midway through 11th century A.D. The author not only reinterprets the origin of this forgery (i.e. puts it down to the Franks’ opposition of Emperor Louis the Pious), but retells, as well, the history of its misinterpretation since the High Middle Ages. In an appendix, all relevant texts are printed in the original language, an English translation is provided.
The history of belief, piety, and theology ("Frommigkeitsgeschichte") has long stood in the center of Erlangen church historian Berndt Hamm's research interest. Inspired by his work, scholars from Europe and the U.S. have produced this interdisciplinary volume covering topics from the early Middle Ages to the present and dedicate it to him on his sixtieth birthday. Theologie- und frommigkeitsgeschichtlichen Phanomenen gilt das besondere Forschungsinteresse des Erlanger Kirchenhistorikers Berndt Hamm. Die Impulse aus seinen Forschungen aufnehmend, widmen ihm Forscher/-innen aus Europa und den USA zum 60. Geburtstag diesen interdisziplinar angelegten Sammelband mit Beitragen vom Fruhmittelalter bis zur Gegenwart.
Franciscan friars were everywhere in the early modern Catholic world, a world that stretched from the Americas, through Western and Central Europe, to the Middle East and Asia. This global brotherhood was as deeply entangled in the great religious wars that convulsed Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as it was in the Spanish and Portuguese empires. While the political and imperial theories of Dominicans like Francisco de Vitoria and Bartolome de Las Casas, who took the theology of Thomas Aquinas as their starting point, are well-known, this has not been the case for Franciscan thinking until now. The Franciscans and their allies built a body of political writings around t...
Focusing on the theme of property and community, this study offers a new account of the origins of fifteenth-century Observant reform in the monasteries and canonries of the southern Empire. Through close readings of unpublished texts, it traces how ideas about reformed community emerged, both beyond and within the religious orders, in the era of the Council of Constance. Focusing on reform among monks and canons in Bavaria and Austria to 1450, it then shows how those ideas were applied in practice, through reforming visitation and through a devotional culture steeped in the a oenew pietya of the day. These considerations allow the Observant Movement to offer fresh perspectives on the history religious community, reform, and the church in the fifteenth century.
What was an “advocate” (Latin: advocatus; German: Vogt) in the Middle Ages? What responsibilities came with the position and how did they change over time? With this groundbreaking study, Jonathan R. Lyon challenges the standard narrative of a “medieval” Europe of feudalism and lordship being replaced by a “modern” Europe of government, bureaucracy and the state. By focusing on the position of advocate, he argues for continuity in corrupt practices of justice and protection between 750 and 1800. This book traces the development of the role of church advocate from the Carolingian period onward and explains why this position became associated with the violent abuse of power on churches' estates. When other types of advocates became common in and around Germany after 1250, including territorial and urban advocates, they were not officeholders in developing bureaucracies. Instead, they used similar practices to church advocates to profit illicitly from their positions, which calls into question scholarly arguments about the decline of violent lordship and the rise of governmental accountability in European history.
Scholars and analysts seeking to illuminate the extraordinary creativity and innovation evident in European medieval cultures and their afterlives have thus far neglected the important role of religious heresy. The papers collected here - reflecting the disciplines of history, literature, theology, philosophy, economics and law - examine the intellectual and social investments characteristic of both deliberate religious dissent such as the Cathars of Languedoc, the Balkan Bogomils, the Hussites of Bohemia and those who knowingly or unknowingly bent or broke the rules, creating their own 'unofficial orthodoxies'. Attempts to understand, police and eradicate all these, through methods such as the Inquisition, required no less ingenuity. The ambivalent dynamic evident in the tensions between coercion and dissent is still recognisable and productive in the world today.
William of Ockham's (ca. 1288-1347) Opus nonaginta dierum has long been of interest to historians for his theory of rights. Yet the results of this interest has been uneven because most studies do not take sufficient account of the defences of Franciscan poverty already articulated by his fellow Franciscans, Bonagratia of Bergamo, Michael of Cesena, and Francis of Marchia. This book therefore presents and analyzes Ockham's account of property rights alongside those of his confreres. This contextualization of Ockham’s theory corrects many misconceptions about his theory of property, natural law, and natural rights, and therefore also provides a new foundation for studies of his political oeuvre, intellectual development, and significance as a political theorist.
The Nemesis of Power is the first book to look at the history of international relations theories. Many theorists have investigated the nature of power, studying it in its social, political, economic, intellectual and physical contexts in order to define it. Rather than present yet another definition, Harald Kleinschmidt shows how the theorists themselves have perceived and handled the concept of power and how conduct in international relations has been evaluated. Taking a broad look at international relations theories from the Roman Empire to the modern transformation of the European world picture, Kleinschmidt bridges the gap between theory and history by subjecting theory to the logic and method of historical inquiry. Drawing on original sources, he reads international relations theories against their social and cultural contexts, placing an emphasis on the ways in which changes in theory are reflections of a wider pattern of changes in culture.