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Translated from the 1983 French edition, traces the rise, fall, and revival of the Carolingian dynasty, and shows how it molded the shape of a post-Roman Europe that is still with us today. An introduction to the subject for undergraduate or general readers. The largely French and German bibliography has been replaced with a short list of recommended English works. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Detailed account of the common people's daily life in the time of Charlemagne and how politics and military struggle affected them.
Designed for students, this detailed analysis of the principal areas of French grammar combines the insights of modern linguistic theory with those of more traditional grammarians. Theory is placed firmly in the service of description and analysis, and students are guided to an understanding of the French language which will complement the information offered by traditional reference grammars. The book includes discussion of verbs and verb phrases, voice, tense and mood, the noun phrase and pronouns, prepositions and variations in sentence-structure. The author pays special attention to those areas of French grammar which pose difficulties for an English-speaking reader. Each chapter is followed by a set of problems and exercises, and by a useful guide to further reading. Foundations of French Syntax assumes no prior knowledge of linguistics, and will appeal to students and teachers of linguistics, French and other Romance languages.
Using a wide variety of sources, John Boswell examines the evidence that parents of all classes gave up unwanted children, "exposing" them in public places, donating them to the church, or delivering them in later centuries to foundling hospitals. He shows what happened to these children, and he illuminates the moral codes that condoned abandonment.
In this study of the manner in which medieval nuns lived, Penelope Johnson challenges facile stereotypes of nuns living passively under monastic rule, finding instead that collectively they were empowered by their communal privileges and status to think and act without many of the subordinate attitudes of secular women. In the words of one abbess comparing nuns with monks, they were "different as to their sex but equal in their monastic profession." Johnson researched more than two dozen nunneries in northern France from the eleventh century through the thirteenth century, balancing a qualitative reading of medieval monastic documents with a quantitative analysis of a lengthy thirteenth-century visitation record which allows an important comparison of nuns and monks. A fascinating look at the world of medieval spirituality, this work enriches our understanding of women's role in premodern Europe and in church history.
Argues that higher education needs to abandon the “culture wars” if it hopes to address the major crises of the century.
The rise of Christianity to the dominant position it held in the Middle Ages remains a paradoxical achievement. Early Christian communities in Gaul had been so restrictive that they sometimes persecuted misfits with accusations of heresy. Yet by the fifth century Gallic aristocrats were becoming bishops to enhance their prestige; and by the sixth century Christian relic cults provided the most comprehensive idiom for articulating values and conventions. To strengthen its appeal, Christianity had absorbed the ideologies of secular authority already familiar in Gallic society.
Continuing on to the electronic revolution, Martin's account takes in the changes wrought on writing by computers and electronic systems of storage and communication, and offers surprising insights into the influence these new technologies have had on children born into the computer age. The power of writing to influence and dominate is, indeed, a central theme in this history, as Martin explores the processes by which the written word has gradually imposed its logic on society over four thousand years. The summation of decades of study by one of the world's great scholars on the subject, this fascinating account of writing explains much about the world we inhabit, where we uneasily confer, accept, and resist the power of the written word.
This is the final volume in the set of four collections of Michel Huglo's articles to be published in the Variorum series, and focuses on medieval music theory. The point of departure for Huglo's research was his doctoral dissertation on tonaries, published in 1971: as a consequence, he studied the manuscripts of music theory concerning plainchant, and, later, those with writings on music by authors of Late Antiquity as well as the Liber glossarum, with its many definitions of musical terms. In this volume, certain articles consider the interpretation or dissemination of texts, instruction in the art of plainchant, and musical instruction at the university. Others concern the manuscripts of ...
For those who ruled medieval society, the family was the crucial social unit, made up of those from whom property and authority were inherited and those to whom it passed. One's kin could be one's closest political and military allies or one's fiercest enemies. While the general term used to describe family members was consanguinei mei, "those of my blood," not all of those relations-parents, siblings, children, distant cousins, maternal relatives, paternal ancestors, and so on-counted as true family in any given time, place, or circumstance. In the early and high Middle Ages, the "family" was a very different group than it is in modern society, and the ways in which medieval men and women c...