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This is the first major study of the interplay between Latin and Germanic vernaculars in early medieval records, examining the role of language choice in the documentary cultures of the Anglo-Saxon and eastern Frankish worlds.
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.
The history of monastic institutions in the Middle Ages may at first appear remarkably uniform and predictable. Medieval commentators and modern scholars have observed how monasteries of the tenth to early twelfth centuries experienced long periods of stasis alternating with bursts of rapid development known as reforms. Charismatic leaders by sheer force of will, and by assiduously recruiting the support of the ecclesiastical and lay elites, pushed monasticism forward toward reform, remediating the inevitable decline of discipline and government in these institutions. A lack of concrete information on what happened at individual monasteries is not regarded as a significant problem, as long a...
Negotiating the Landscape explores the question of how medieval religious identities were shaped and modified by interaction with the natural environment. Focusing on the Benedictine monastic community of Stavelot-Malmedy in the Ardennes, Ellen F. Arnold draws upon a rich archive of charters, property and tax records, correspondence, miracle collections, and saints' lives from the seventh to the mid-twelfth century to explore the contexts in which the monks' intense engagement with the natural world was generated and refined. Arnold argues for a broad cultural approach to medieval environmental history and a consideration of a medieval environmental imagination through which people perceived...
In dit 'Jaarboek' worden diverse interessante thema's uit de middeleeuwse geschiedenis van de Nederlanden behandeld. Nicolas Mazeure onderzoekt de omgang van monnik Folcuin met de archivalia van de Vlaamse abdij van Sint-Bertijns. J.A. (Hans) Mol biedt een nieuwe kijk op de eind elfde eeuw op gang gekomen veenontginningen in het huidige Noordwest-Overijssel en Zuid-Friesland. Aan de hand van de door de dertiendeeeuwse Vlaams-Henegouwse gravin Johanna van Constantinopel uitgevaardigde oorkonden belicht Els De Paermentier het bestuur en de machtsuitoefening door vrouwen. Jaap van Moolenbroek ontrafelt het ontstaan van de mythe rond de inname van Damietta door Haarlemse kruisvaarders. Ellen Wurtzel laat zien hoe de stedelijke verdedigingswerken in het vijftiende- en zestiende-eeuwse Lille in toenemende mate werden beschouwd als collectief bezit. Truus van Bueren, Kim Ragetli en Arnoud-Jan Bijsterveld belichten de mogelijkheden en uitdagingen van het brede onderzoeksterrein van middeleeuwse 'memoria', in het bijzonder van het Utrechtse MeMo-project.
Der Abt und seine Bauern. Territorialisierung als Prozess in Salem vom Spten Mittelalter bis zum Dreiigjhrigen Krieg Die Studie ber die reichsunmittelbare Zisterzienserabtei Salem erffnet neue Einsichten ber grundlegende politische Entwicklungen in der Frhen Neuzeit. Sie beleuchtet die Mglichkeiten und die Grenzen kirchlicher Herrschaft und weist auf breiter Quellengrundlage den dauerhaften politischen Einfluss der Bauernschaft nach. In der untersuchten Periode von 1473 bis 1637 festigte die Abtei ihre politische Herrschaft ber Land und Leute. Im Zuge der Territorialisierung verdichtete sie verschiedene Herrschaftsrechte in ihrer Hand und schloss das Herrschaftsgebiet ab. Dies wurde auf zwei...
This book examines the concept of moral economy originally established by E.P. Thompson, focusing on the impact of religious norms on economic practice. With each chapter discussing a different empirical case study, the interrelations of the economy and religion are explored from antiquity through to the 20th century. The long-term trajectory and comparative perspective allows for moral economy to be seen in relation to ancient Greek commerce, medieval pawn-broking, Christian and Jewish economic ethics, urban social politics during the Plague, the Jesuit mission in Paraguay, the Ottoman Empire, religion in modern American capitalism, and Catholic attitudes toward taxation. This book aims to provide insight into how moral thinking about the economy and economic practice has evolved from a long historic perspective. It will be relevant to students and researchers interested in economic history and cultural economics.
Thinkers in medieval France constantly reconceptualized what had come before, interpreting past events to give validity to the present and help control the future. The long-dead saints who presided over churches and the ancestors of established dynasties were an especially crucial part of creative memory, Constance Brittain Bouchard contends. In Rewriting Saints and Ancestors she examines how such ex post facto accounts are less an impediment to the writing of accurate history than a crucial tool for understanding the Middle Ages. Working backward through time, Bouchard discusses twelfth-century scribes contemplating the ninth-century documents they copied into cartularies or reworked into n...
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.
Day of Reckoning: Power and Accountability in Medieval France applies recent approaches to literacy, legal studies, memory, ritual, and the manorial economy to reexamine the transformation of medieval power. Highlighting the relationship of archives and power, it draws on the rich documentary sources of five of the largest Benedictine monasteries in northern France and Flanders, with comparisons to others, over a period of nearly four centuries. The book opens up new perspectives on important problems of power, in particular the idea and practice of accountability. In a violent society, medieval lords tried to delegate power rather than share it—to get their men to prosecute justice or rai...