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Medieval commercial transactions did not occur spontaneously. They were crafted by merchants with the support of numerous personnel on the medieval marketplace: notaries, innkeepers, brokers, transporters, and subordinate personnel of the merchant's entourage. This study introduces the reader to the challenges of trade in the Mediterranean world and to specific market conditions in the Mediterranean French town of Montpellier. A case study of the business of the Cabanis merchants permits an in-depth examination of the facilitation of trade by intermediaries whose activities are traced in the discovery phase of arranging a deal and in its closing and execution. Medieval business practice involved multiple layers of personnel. The complexities of medieval trade are revealed in the new emphasis given to those who assisted merchants in their commercial endeavors.
From a wealth of vivid autobiographical writings, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie reconstructs the extraordinary life of Thomas Platter and the lives of his sons, bringing to life the customs, perceptions, and character of an age poised at the threshold of modernity. 26 halftones. 5 maps. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.
The major changes experienced by France's cities over the period from the end of the middle ages to the eve of the Revolution are explored by six French and North American historians.
In So Great a Light, So Great a Smoke, Louisa A. Burnham takes us inside the world of a little-known heretical group in the south of France in the early fourteenth century. The Beguins were a small sect of priests and lay people allied to (and sharing many of the convictions of) the Spiritual Franciscans. They stressed poverty in their pursuit of a Franciscan evangelical ideal and believed themselves to be living in the Last Days. By the late thirteenth century, the leaders of the order and the popes themselves had begun to discipline the Spirituals, and by 1317 they had been deemed a heresy. The Beguins refused to accept this situation and began to evade and confront the inquisitorial machi...
This groundbreaking book examines the complex relationships between individuals and communities during the profound transitions of the early modern period. Historians have traditionally identified the origins of a modern individualist spirit in the European Renaissance and Reformation. Yet since the 1960s, evolving scholarship has challenged this perspective by calling into question its basic assumptions about individualism, its exclusive focus on elite individuals, and its inherent Eurocentric bias. Arguing that individual identity drew from traditional forms of community, these essays by leading scholars convincingly show that individual and community created and recreated one another in t...
New interpretations of different aspects of troubadour texts and lyrics, from their main themes and motifs to their reception and influence. Nearly a millennium after their songs of love, politics, war, satire, and redemption began to fill the courts of Europe, the troubadours continue to fascinate modern audiences. However, many aspects of their work, such as the supposedly adulterous nature of fin'amor, the "Frenchness" of the troubadours, the biographical veracity of the vidas, and the inherent misogyny of the troubadour lyric, have long been taken for granted. This volume takes a fresh look at these ideas, questioning many of the formative assumptions of troubadour scholarship, and propo...
This sweeping and eminently readable book is the first synthetic history of Calvinism in almost fifty years. It tells the story of the Reformed tradition from its birth in the cities of Switzerland to the unraveling of orthodoxy amid the new intellectual currents of the seventeenth century. As befits a pan-European movement, Benedict’s canvas stretches from the British Isles to Eastern Europe. The course and causes of Calvinism’s remarkable expansion, the inner workings of the diverse national churches, and the theological debates that shaped Reformed doctrine all receive ample attention. The English Reformation is situated within the history of continental Protestantism in a way that re...
This book examines the social, institutional and cultural setting of medical practices in the medieval town of Montpellier which boasted one of the first universities of the middle ages and a famous school of medicine. Some of its most celebrated masters and their medical works have been thoroughly studied but few of them try to put these in context with a thriving urban community of merchants and craftsmen that were at the core of the city council. Their concurrent efforts will endow Montpellier of a rich health care system featuring not only the university masters but also the city’s barber-surgeons and apothecaries. Their collective fate is revealed here in an integrated picture of health and society in the middle ages.
The essays presented in this volume, first published in 2000, describe a phenomenon so widespread in human time and space that its importance is easily overlooked. City walls shaped the history of warfare; the mobilisation of manpower and resources needed to build them favoured some kinds of polities over others; and their massive strength, appropriately ornamented, created a visual language of authority. Previous collective volumes on the subject have dealt mainly with Europe, but the historians and art historians who collaborate here follow a comparative agenda. The millennial practice of wall building that branched out from the ancient Near East into India, Europe, and North Africa shows continuities and points of contact of which the makers of urban fortifications were scarcely aware; separate traditions in China, sub-Saharan Africa, and North America illustrate universal themes of defensive strategy and the symbolism of power, each time embedded in a distinctive local context.