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Teresa Pac provides a much-needed contribution to the discussion on shared culture as foundational to societal survival. Through the examination of common culture as a process in medieval Kraków, Poznań, and Lublin, Pac challenges the ideology of difference—institutional, religious, ethnic, and nationalistic. Similarly, Pac maintains, twenty-first century Polish leaders utilize anachronistic approaches in the invention of Polish Catholic identity to counteract the country’s increasing ethnic and religious diversity. As in the medieval period, contemporary Polish political and social elites subscribe to the European Union’s ideology of difference, legitimized by a European Christian heritage, and its intended basis for discrimination against non-Christians and non-white individuals under the auspices of democratic values and minority rights, among which Muslims are a significant target.
This volume presents a new picture of marriage in medieval Poland. Based on the analysis of historical documents from the ecclesiastical courts of one of the oldest dioceses in Poland, this book sheds light on the presence and prevalence of a wide range of marital problems in the Diocese of Poznań in the first quarter of the fifteenth century. Through the material presented, the voices of one of the most underrepresented groups in the history of society – namely women from the lower social strata – are amplified.
This volume launches the book series of “Inquire – International Centre for Research on Inquisitions” of the University of Bologna, a research network that engages with the history of religious justice from the 13th to the 20th century. This first publication offers twenty chapters that take stock of the current historiography on medieval and early modern Inquisitions (the Spanish, Portuguese and Roman Inquisitions) and their modern continuations. Through the analysis of specific questions related to religious repression in Europe and the Iberian colonial territories extending from the Middle Ages to today, the contributions here examine the history of the perception of tribunals and the most recent historiographical trends. New research perspectives thus emerge on a subject that continues to intrigue those interested in the practices of justice and censorship, the history of religious dissent and the genesis of intolerance in the Western world and beyond.
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.
This volume reconsiders literacy and communication in pre-modern societies, focusing especially on how material form affects the way textual artefacts are understood and interpreted. By bringing together scholars from diverse disciplines such as archaeology, medieval studies, and Islamic studies, this volume provides the specialist and non-specialist with insights on how humans express themselves through writing and material culture.
Superstitions are commonplace in the modern world. Mostly, however, they evoke innocuous images of people reading their horoscopes or avoiding black cats. Certain religious practices might also come to mind—praying to St. Christopher or lighting candles for the dead. Benign as they might seem today, such practices were not always perceived that way. In medieval Europe superstitions were considered serious offenses, violations of essential precepts of Christian doctrine or immutable natural laws. But how and why did this come to be? In Fearful Spirits, Reasoned Follies, Michael D. Bailey explores the thorny concept of superstition as it was understood and debated in the Middle Ages. Bailey ...
The book offers a renewed study of the life and works of one of the most famous popular preachers and sermon authors of Renaissance Italy, providing a reference work on the figure of Roberto Caracciolo and a reading of his times.
Essays considering how information could be used and abused in the service of heresy and inquisition. The collection, curation, and manipulation of knowledge were fundamental to the operation of inquisition. Its coercive power rested on its ability to control information and to produce authoritative discourses from it - a fact not lost on contemporaries, or on later commentators. Understanding that relationship between inquisition and knowledge has been one of the principal drivers of its long historiography. Inquisitors and their historians have always been preoccupied with the process by which information was gathered and recirculated as knowledge. The tenor of that question has changed ov...
Imagined Communities: Constructing Collective Identities in Medieval Europe offers a series of studies focusing on the problems of conceptualisation of social group identities, including national, royal, aristocratic, regional, urban, religious, and gendered communities. The geographical focus of the case studies presented in this volume range from Wales and Scotland, to Hungary and Ruthenia, while both narrative and other types of evidence, such as legal texts, are drawn upon. What emerges is how the characteristics and aspirations of communities are exemplified and legitimised through the presentation of the past and an imagined picture of present. By means of its multiple perspectives, this volume offers significant insight into the medieval dynamics of collective mentality and group consciousness. Contributors are Dániel Bagi, Mariusz Bartnicki, Zbigniew Dalewski, Georg Jostkleigrewe, Bartosz Klusek, Paweł Kras, Wojciech Michalski, Martin Nodl, Andrzej Pleszczyński, Euryn Rhys Roberts, Stanisław Rosik, Joanna Sobiesiak, Karol Szejgiec, Michał Tomaszek, Tomasz Tarczyński, Przemysław Tyszka, Tatiana Vilkul, and Przemysław Wiszewski.
The aim of this book is to introduce the reader to the organization of medieval Prague up to the early 15th century with a focus on the first two essential phases of agglomeration development: early urban and post-charted. Prague was a so-called “multi-part town”, consisting of several municipalities and separate urban complexes. This publication examines these Prague towns, their inhabitants, and the institutions that served them, as well as many events and places not connected directly to this book’s “urban” subject but which nevertheless constitute an inseparable background and significantly influenced the whole community of Prague.