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The Favor of Friends offers the first book-length exploration of intercession—aid and advocacy by one individual or group in behalf of another—within early medieval aristocratic societies. Drawing upon a variety of disciplines and historiographical traditions, Sean Gilsdorf demonstrates how this process operated, and how it was ideologically elaborated, in Carolingian and Ottonian Europe, allowing individuals and groups to leverage their own, limited interpersonal networks to the fullest, produce new relationships, gain access to previously closed spaces, and generate interest in their agendas from those able to effect change. The Favor of Friends enriches our understanding of early medieval politics and rulership, offering a model of political interaction in which hierarchy and comity do not stand in ideological and pragmatic tension, but instead work in integrated and mutually-reinforcing ways.
These volumes propose a renewed way of framing the debate around the history of medieval art and architecture to highlight the multiple roles played by women. Today’s standard division of artist from patron is not seen in medieval inscriptions—on paintings, metalwork, embroideries, or buildings—where the most common verb is 'made' (fecit). At times this denotes the individual whose hands produced the work, but it can equally refer to the person whose donation made the undertaking possible. Here twenty-four scholars examine secular and religious art from across medieval Europe to demonstrate that a range of studies is of interest not just for a particular time and place but because, fro...
This unique collection makes available, for the first time, translations of medieval Italian jurisprudence, including commentaries, tracts, and legal opinions by leading jurists.
In this volume, the authors bring fresh approaches to the subject of royal and noble households in medieval and early modern Europe. The essays focus on the people of the highest social rank: the nuclear and extended royal family, their household attendants, noblemen and noblewomen as courtiers, and physicians. Themes include financial and administrative management, itinerant households, the household of an imprisoned noblewoman, blended households, and cultural influence. The essays are grounded in sources such as records of court ceremonial, economic records, letters, legal records, wills, and inventories. The authors employ a variety of methods, including prosopography, economic history, visual analysis, network analysis, and gift exchange, and the collection is engaged with current political, sociological, anthropological, gender, and feminist theories.
Renowned art historian Herbert L. Kessler authors a love song to medieval art inviting students, teachers, and professional medievalists to experience the wondrous, complex art of the Middle Ages.
Queenship and Sanctity brings together for the first time in English the anonymous Lives of Mathilda and Odilo of Cluny's Epitaph of Adelheid. Richly annotated, with an extensive introduction placing the texts and their subjects in historical and hagiographical context, it provides teachers and students with a crucial set of sources for the history of Europe (particularly Germany) in the tenth and eleventh centuries, for the development of sacred biography and medieval notions of sanctity, and for the life of aristocratic and royal women in the early Middle Ages.
This book examines Max Weber's understanding of bureaucracy by applying his ideas to the development of officialdom from the ninth century to the present in six territories: England, Sweden, France, Germany, Spain, and Hungary. Edward Page takes a broad view of bureaucracy that includes not only officials in important central or national institutions but also those providing goods and services locally. The 'scorecard' is based on expected developments in four key areas of Weber's analysis: the functional differentiation of tasks within government, professionalism, formalism, and monocracy. After discussing the character of officialdom in the ninth, twelfth, fifteenth, eighteenth, and twenty-first centuries, the book reveals that Weber's scorecard has a mixed record, especially weak in its account of the development of monocracy and formalism. A final chapter discusses alternative conceptions of bureaucratic development and sets out an account based on understanding processes of routinization, institutional integration, and the instrumentalization of law.
Friendship and Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: The Linguistic Performance of Intimacy from Cicero to Aelred covers approximately 1,200 years of literature. This is a book on "medieval literature" that foregrounds language as the agent for cultivating medieval friendship (from the first century BC to c. 1160 AD) in oratorical, ecclesiastical, monastic, and erotic contexts. Taking a different approach than many works in this area, which search for the lived experience of friends behind language, this book stands apart in looking at friendship's enactment through rhetorical language among classical and medieval authors.
In the period following the collapse of the Carolingian Empire up to the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), the episcopate everywhere in Europe experienced substantial and important change, brought about by a variety of factors: the pressures of ecclesiastical reform; the devolution and recovery of royal authority; the growth of papal involvement in regional matters and in diocesan administration; the emergence of the "crowd" onto the European stage around 1000 and the proliferation of autonomous municipal governments; the explosion of new devotional and religious energies; the expansion of Christendom's borders; and the proliferation of new monastic orders and new forms of religious life, among...