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Dominique Barthélemy presents a sharply revisionist account of the history of France around the year 1000, challenging the traditional view that France underwent a kind of revolution at the millennium which ushered in feudalism.
Here, Reddy illuminates the birth of a cultural movement that managed to regulate selfish desire and render it innocent - or innocent enough. Reddy strikes out from this historical moment on an exploration of love, contrasting the medieval development of romantic love in Europe with contemporaneous eastern traditions in Bengal.
Whereas modern societies tend to banish the dead from the world of the living, medieval men and women acccorded them a vital role in the community. The saints counted most prominently as potential intercessors before God, but the ordinary dead as well were called upon to aid the living, and even to participate in the negotiation of political disputes. In this book, the distinguished medievalist Patrick J. Geary shows how exploring the complex relations between the living and dead can broaden our understanding of the political, economic, and cultural history of medieval Europe. Geary has brought together for this volume twelve of his most influential essays. They address such topics as the de...
The Making of New World Slavery argues that independent commerce, geared to burgeoning consumer markets, was the driving force behind the rise of plantation slavery. The baroque state sought-successfully-to feed upon this commerce and-with markedly less success-to regulate slavery and racial relations. To illustrate this thesis, Blackburn examines the deployment of slaves in the colonial possessions of the Portuguese, the Spanish, the Dutch, the English and the French. Plantation slavery is shown to have emerged from the impulses of civil society, not from the strategies of individual states. Robin Blackburn argues that the organization of slave plantations placed the West on a destructive path to modernity and that greatly preferable alternatives were both proposed and rejected. Finally, he shows that the surge of Atlantic trade, predicated on the murderous toil of the plantations, made a decisive contribution to both the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the West.
During the dissolution of the former Carolingian Empire, warfare and plunder went unchecked. An innovative response to this violence was the Church-led initiative known as the Peace of God, perhaps history's earliest mass peace movement. In the thirteen essays collected here, leading scholars consider key aspects of the movement and episodes in its history.
In a major contribution to the debate among medievalists about the nature of social and political change in Europe around the turn of the millennium, Jeffrey A. Bowman explores how people contended over property during the tenth and eleventh centuries in the province of Narbonne. He examines the system of courts and judges that weighed property disputes and shows how disputants and judges gradually adapted, modified, and reshaped legal traditions. The region (which comprised Catalonia and parts of Mediterranean France) possessed a distinctive legal culture, characterized by the prominent role of professional judges, a high level of procedural sophistication, and an intense attachment to writ...
This edited collection presents an economic history of Catalonia and its economic crises, from Roman times to the political difficulties of the present day. It considers how the strong identity of the Catalan people has been reinforced in critical episodes such as the commercial revolution of the Late Medieval Age, the 1640 rebellion, the Succession War of 1705-1714, the industrial revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the strong repression during early Francoism. The book also explores how historical parallels from Catalonia’s past might shed light on the long-term consequences of the Great Recession of 2007-9 and recovery in the EU, showing how the typical Mediterran...
The most up-to-date research in the period from the Anglo-Saxons to Angevins. This volume of the Haskins Society Journal continues its tradition of publishing the best historical and interdisciplinary research on the early and central middle ages in the Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-Norman, and Angevin worlds. The topics of the essays range from legal influences on Alfred's Mosaic Prologue, judicial processes in tenth-century Iberia, and the ecclesiology of the Norman Anonymous to the nature and implications of comital authority in the eleventh- and twelfth-century Anglo-Norman realm and conceptions of servitude in legal thinking in thirteenth-century Catalonia. The volume also embraces art history, wi...
Medieval civilization came of age in thunderous events like the Norman Conquest and the First Crusade. Power fell into the hands of men who imposed coercive new lordships in quest of nobility. Rethinking a familiar history, Thomas Bisson explores the circumstances that impelled knights, emperors, nobles, and churchmen to infuse lordship with social purpose. Bisson traces the origins of European government to a crisis of lordship and its resolution. King John of England was only the latest and most conspicuous in a gallery of bad lords who dominated the populace instead of ruling it. Yet, it was not so much the oppressed people as their tormentors who were in crisis. The Crisis of the Twelfth Century suggests what these violent people—and the outcries they provoked—contributed to the making of governments in kingdoms, principalities, and towns.
The focus of this collection of articles by Donald J. Kagay is the effect of the expansion of royal government on the societies of the medieval Crown of Aragon. He shows how the extensive episodes of warfare during the 13th and 14th centuries served as a catalyst for the extension of the king's law and government across the varied topography and political landscape of eastern Spain. In the long conflicts against Spanish Islam and neighbouring Christian states, the relationships of royal to customary law, of monarchical to aristocratic power, and of Christian to Jewish and Muslim populations, all became issues that marked the transition of the medieval Crown of Aragon to the early modern states of Catalonia, Aragon and Valencia, and finally to the modern Spanish nation.