Brepols

This volume stems from a research project on medieval and sixteenth-century fragments with music carried out at CESEM–Centre for the Study of the Sociology and Aesthetics of Music, Lisbon Nova University, between 2021 and 2024, as well as from an international colloquium on fragmentology held in Cascais, Portugal, in July 2023. It brings together twenty studies that address a varied range of disjecta membra, including loose folios from dismembered manuscripts, mutilated musical-liturgical codices, incomplete sets of part-books, truncated musical settings, and even the remains of a historic organ. The aim is to invest these materials with significance beyond their condition as fragmented cultural artefacts by exploring their texts, contexts, meanings, trajectories and, when appropriate, proposing methods for their reconstitution.

In recent decades, historians attempting to understand the transition from the world of late antiquity with its unitary imperial system to the medieval Europe of separate kingdoms have become increasingly concerned with the role of early medieval gentes, or peoples, in the end of the former and the constitution of the latter.

Eleven specialists examine here the role of ethnic identity in the formation of medieval polities on the periphery of the Frankish world in the eighth through eleventh centuries. In particular, they explore the intertwined issues of ethnic identity and state formation in Scandinavia and in the western and southern Slavic regions, areas in which the new approaches to the history of ethnicity have but little penetrated traditional scholarship. They ask to what extent common identities assisted in the consolidation and creation of early medieval kingdoms and to what extent the formation of these kingdoms created a discourse of common identity as a means to centralization and control. The authors contend that the developments in Scandinavia and in Slavic areas cannot be understood except in dynamic relationship with the process of state formation and group identity within the Frankish kingdoms. This powerful, expansionist society not only interacted and influenced the development of state structures on its northern and eastern borders, but it also provided models of discourse about the relationship between centralizing power and group solidarity. Not that these discourses were simply adopted by the Franks’ neighbours, but rather they became part of the range of possible options selectively adapted to local circumstances.

Friendship, patron-client relationships, and social networks played a fundamental role in Scandinavian society from the Viking Age through to the Industrial Era. Personal ties were essential to Viking chieftains for building their power base, and such ties were equally crucial for early modern merchants, who used their personal bonds to create trade networks. Furthermore, social networks connected medieval men and women to the saints and to God.

The articles in this book emphasize the strong correlation between political developments such as the emergence of the state and the evolution of friendships and social networks. They also highlight radical changes in the importance and contexts of friendship that occurred between the Viking Age and the late eighteenth century. During this period, friendships became far more than community-based social relationships, but rather tools for the elite in social positioning and wealth acquisition.

This volume highlights the major significance of friendships and patron-client relationships to political and cultural life in medieval, early modern, and modern society. It covers social networks in Iceland, Norway, Denmark, and Sweden, each of which are characterized by different societal features, ranging from the free-state republic of early medieval Iceland to the early modern kingdom of Denmark.

Les dix-sept contributions rassemblées dans ce volume se proposent d’aborder l’œuvre de Jean Froissart par le prisme de la rupture que marque la rédaction du Voyage en Béarn. Elles revisitent la cour de Gaston Febus dans ses aspects culturels, sondent le personnage de Gaston III, mesurent la distorsion entre la réalité historique et la représentation littéraire qu’en livre Froissart chroniqueur; elles s’interrogent, enfin, sur la teneur véritable des relations entre les deux hommes — l’écrivain et son mécène.

To fully understand the changes in European animal husbandry during the long twentieth century, it is necessary to examine all aspects of the food chain devoted to supplying proteins and fats to a growing population. Indeed, the twentieth century saw great changes in animal husbandry - towards a market-oriented, intensified and specialized production. This influenced and was influenced by policies, trade, aspects of animal and public health, food supply issues, aims in animal breeding, development of production systems, principles in feeding and impact of producer cooperatives.

Because it is not possible to apprehend all these global changes from a rural point of view, this book aims to bring together many different expert perspectives in fields such as: agronomy, veterinary medicine, microbiology, history of sciences, economic and cultural history, and sociology. Taking into account both national idiosyncrasies and changes from an international perspective, the book gathers scientists from Italy, Spain, France, England, The Netherlands and Sweden.

The first part of the book will be devoted to the evolution of animal husbandry and commercialization from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first century. The second part of the book is devoted to the increasing medicalization of this sector with a special focus on the role of veterinarians and the on the increasing uses of antibiotics.

This book deals with the theme of 'encounters with monsters' in early Irish texts. Three texts dealing with this theme are central to this study: the Old Irish Adventure of Fergus mac Leite, the Hiberno-Latin Life of St Columba by Adomnan, and the Old Irish Letter of Jesus. The author's investigation of the theme follows two lines. The first main line is the question of how aspects of the process of Christianization were reflected in early Irish literary texts. The second main line focusses on the development of ideas about evil in these textes. These two lines of investigations generated two approaches: firstly, a study into the origin of the descriptions of the monsters and, secondly, an analysis - by means of a hypothesis - of the ideas found in these three texts on this time. The broad scope of the process of Christianization is narrowed down to an investigation of the origin of the monsters and non-canonical scripture, encyclopedic Latin works such as Pliny's Naturalis Historia and Isidore's Etymologiae, related Latin and Old English material, Hiberno-Latin, and Old and Middle Irish texts. The author made this comparison in order to ascertain whether these descriptions were derived from sources and to classify the monsters according to three categories: "native", "imported", or "integrated". The author did this to determine if and how Christian idead influenced the symbolisation of evil in the form of monsters. In order to analyse the ideas about evil, the author distinguishes between two forms of evil: firstly, non-moral evil - evil that occurs without anyone inflicting it intentionally uppn the victims, and secondly, moral evil - evil done intentionally. According to the author's hypothesis, the monsters are said to belong originally to the realm of non-moral evil but, under the influence of Christianity, they also begin to personify moral evil.

On 25 September 1710, Pope Clement XI finally promulgated the 1704 decree Cum Deus optimus, which condemned the toleration of certain Confucian rituals among Chinese Catholic converts and the use of the Chinese terms tian and Shangdi to refer to the Christian God. This papal decision antagonised the Kangxi Emperor and devastated the Jesuit China mission. Although the Jesuits were prohibited from publicly refuting the decree, the Flemish Jesuit François Noël sought to defend the Jesuit position by publishing his voluminous scholarship on the Chinese classics. Among other works, in 1711 Noël published two seminal contributions to the history of Sinology: the Sinensis imperii libri classici sex or Libri sex, and the Philosophia Sinica, a sophisticated treatment of Chinese metaphysics, ritual, and ethics. While the Libri sex achieved some degree of influence in the Enlightenment through the French translation of the French Jesuit historian Du Halde and the writings of the philosopher Christian Wolff, the Philosophia Sinica was actively suppressed by the Superior-General of the Jesuit order. Yet it is in this latter work where the full breadth of Noël’s originality and intellectual contribution can be found. Noël reinterprets the Jesuits’ position through the lens of Neo-Confucianism, integrating concepts such as li, taiji, yin, and yang in his reading of Chinese philosophy. With contributions from Sinologists and intellectual historians, this book offers the first systematic study of this pioneering work.

Bavaria was a very important country during the early Middle Ages. Its territory included much of the modern German state but also reached across the Alps into what are now Austria and northern Italy. Bavaria thus occupied a strategic position between the rival kingdoms of the Franks and the Langobards. It was ruled by powerful dukes who had close political and personal relations with the Frankish rulers but who also vigorously resisted attempts to limit their own sovereignty. Bavaria’s independence was ended in 788 by Charlemagne who deposed his cousin, Duke Tassilo. Charlemagne’s son, the Emperor Louis the Pious, then established Bavaria as the first monarchy east of the river Rhine for his own son, Ludwig the German. This is the first full study of the entire evolution of Bavarian rule from the mid-sixth century into the early ninth century. It explores the changing strategies adopted by its dukes and then its first king to establish their authority and maintain their autonomy in face of evolving challenges to their rule. An Epilogue continues the story into the early tenth century.

Carl I. Hammer graduated from Amherst College (B.A.) and the University of Toronto (Ph.D.) and also studied at the universities of Munich, Chicago and Oxford. After a career in international business with Westinghouse and Daimler-Benz, he is now retired. He has published two other scholarly books on early-medieval Bavaria and numerous articles in academic journals in N. America and Europe. He lives in Pittsburgh.

Within the contemporary renewal of the exegetical and historical research on Jesus and early Christianity, this book stresses the importance of new epistemological and methodological perspectives in exegesis and History of Christianity (from the point of view of Cultural Anthropology and Comparative Religion). The articles of the first section present a consequent interpretation of Jesus within Jewish culture of the First century. Jesus activity is located within the Jewish movement of John the Baptizer. His words and political attitude is interpreted in the Jewish context of the Land of Israel under Roman administration. His movement is seen as a sub-group within Jewish society. The section dedicated to the first groups of Jesus’ disciples in the Land of Israel and in the ancient Mediterranean world mainly focuses on three constellations of questions: (a) the multiplicity and fractionation of Jesus’ groups, for example in Jerusalem in the period between 30 an 70 of the First century, (b) the fact that the post-Jesus Movement was sociologically characterized by a multiplicity of sub-groups of Jewish groups and movements; (c) the radical modifications provoked by the abandonment of Jewish contexts when the majority of followers was composed by Gentiles with limited relation with the daily practice of Jewish life and religion. Particular attention is dedicated to the connection of contemporary research with the interpretations of Jesus and early Christianity developed in the modern age.

Ever since the Christianization of the planetary week in Late Antiquity, the notion of Sunday as a day of rest, as well as the rhythm of a seven-day week, has been a constant. Yet the cultural history of Sunday in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages is complex. Detailed research reveals a greater diversity than appears at first glance. For example, Sunday did not simply replace the Sabbath, nor was the Jewish Sabbath commandment directly adopted. Furthermore, the Sunday laws of Emperor Constantine officially gave the inhabitants of the Roman Empire a day of rest free of work, but the effect and reception of the laws is hard to grasp, even among Christian authors. Moreover, Sunday was by no means a central theme in the history of late antique Christianity, so that the scattered references must be interpreted.

This edited collection, based on a conference in Vienna in 2019, investigates the relevance of Sunday and the weekly rhythm in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages in the everyday life of people, in monasticism, in synods, in further imperial and ecclesiastical laws, and in disciplinary and liturgical developments. It also covers controversies with the Jewish Sabbath as well as reflections on the aspect of rest, freedom, and of charity. While exploring different views and regional differences, the contributions show the growing importance of the Lord’s Day, especially since the sixth century, as part of the Christianization of society and the sacralization of the calendar.

From Topography to Text: The Image of Jerusalem in the Writings of Eucherius, Adomnán and Bede uses topographical detail to examine the source material, religious imagination and the image of Jerusalem in three related Latin texts from the fifth, seventh and eighth centuries. The work introduces an original methodology for analyzing the Jerusalem pilgrim texts, defined by their core interest in the commemorative topography of the Christian holy places. By newly identifying the topographical material in Adomnán’s description of Jerusalem, the study exposes key distortions in the text, its exclusive intramural focus on the Holy Sepulchre and the eschatological image of New Jerusalem that emerges from its description of contemporary Jerusalem. The study verifies the post-Byzantine provenance of Adomnán’s topographical material, namely, the oral report of Arculf, thus redressing scholarly ambivalence regarding Adomnán’s contemporary source.

The new insights into Adomnán’s De locis sanctis, including its mental map of Jerusalem, provide a template with which to analyze the text’s relationship with the writings of Eucherius and Bede. While Bede’s De locis sanctis has commonly been regarded as an epitome of Adomnán’s work, when the sequence, structure and images of the texts are compared, Eucherius not Adomnán is, for Bede, the authoritative text.

From Topography to Text offers a significant discussion on the Jerusalem pilgrim texts and the Christian topography of the Holy City, while analyzing the image of Jerusalem in the writings of three remote authors who never set foot in the city.

From Topography to Text offers a significant discussion on the Jerusalem pilgrim texts and the Christian topography of the Holy City, while analyzing the image of Jerusalem in the writings of three remote authors who never set foot in the city.

Preaching is a method of exhorting the practice of virtues and the performance of one’s duties. If people are not moved to act, preachers become obsolete. Because of this, preachers in the Middle Ages understood the importance of ensuring that their words were heeded and disseminated.

The focus of this volume is the relationship, whether direct or indirect, between what was preached and what was achieved. The articles in this collection present a range of studies, from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century and, while focused on Italy, also give a broad European perspective.

The volume investigates both the tools employed by preachers and the pragmatic aims and outcomes of their sermons. It does this by exploring the various oratorical and gesticular techniques employed by preachers, as well as their methods of preparing themselves to deliver their message and preparing their audiences to receive it. Furthermore, the volume considers both hypothetical and concrete relationships between preachers’ words and civic policies and the behaviours of groups or individual citizens, as well as the question of how and when words were translated into actions.

The phrase ‘Jus Uncommon’ summarizes England’s claim to independence from Europe, a claim supported by its unique legal system and Elizabethan theatre, and their strong interconnexion. Elizabethan tragedy begins at the Inns of Court. It was no mere coincidence, but a result of the long history of intersecting processes of law, politics, and theatre. This book sets out to contextualize and explore such legal and literary intersections, charting the emergence of Elizabethan legal culture from its various English and European sources over the course of the four hundred years running from Magna Carta to Shakespeare. It encompasses the major strands of legal history and culture that formed the background to Elizabethan political drama, republican tradition, theories of monarchical sovereignty,　European and English theories of　imperium,　pedagogical and rhetorical practices of the Inns of Court,legal-antiquarian research, parliamentary privilege, and Tudor political pamphleteering.

Legal texts, discourses, and social practices constructed a pervasive intellectual culture from which Elizabethan drama – like Shakespeare’s – emerged. Shakespeare is not the central object of this study, but he is central to its argument. What he knew about law was what collective memory had stored from centuries past at home and abroad. The issues, characters, themes, theories, and metaphors dramatized by the Elizabethan playwrights followed the way opened at the Inns. Emblematic figures of lawyers-writers and their Senecan patterns paved the way to Gorboduc and to Shakespeare’s histories.

The first uses of the term frontiere in thirteenth-fourteenth-century French were military, referring to the first line of troops in a battle. In architecture it meant the front of a building, and at the end of the fourteenth century it was first used as a geographical term, in Spain specifically about the divide between the Christians and the Muslims. More than obstacles, medieval frontiers - whether geographical, political, military, intellectual or artistic - seem to have been bridges and points of contact.

Frontiers was the theme of the Third European Congress of Medieval Studies organised by the FIDEM in Jyväskylä, Finland, in 2003. True to the nature of the FIDEM, it was highly interdisciplinary, bringing together scholars from all over the world, addressing problems ranging from Byzantine administration to Icelandic vernacular scribal culture, during a week of extraordinary intellectual excitement.

This volume brings together forty-four contributions by specialists of history, history of ideas, medieval philosophy, philology, linguistics, literature as well as manuscript and archival studies.

Comment définir les liens adelphiques? À quelles réalités biologiques, sociales, politiques, renvoient-ils dans l’Occident antique et médiéval?

Les textes rassemblés dans ce volume tentent d’éclairer les liens entre frères et soeurs en se fondant sur des approches linguistiques, historiques, juridiques et littéraires.

Ils abordent des aspects aussi divers et complexes que le rôle du frère aîné, le choix du nom, le lignage, les pratiques successorales, les liens du sang, la défense de l’honneur familial et la solidarité, les affinités, mais aussi les antagonismes, le fratricide et la vengeance.

L’exploration de cette problématique est inévitablement pluridisciplinaire car toute réflexion sur les liens adelphiques doit interroger aussi bien l’histoire, le droit, que les textes littéraires.

Published anonymously in 1733, Memoirs of the Twentieth Century is one of the earliest futuristic novels known in Anglophone and Euro-American literature. It foregrounds an acceleration of history brought about by an increasing degree of global interconnectedness, and the exclusion of prophetism and astrology as credible ways to know the future. The work of Samuel Madden, an Irish writer and philanthropist of Whig sympathies, it consists of a collection of diplomatic letters composed in the 1990s, which the narrator claims were brought to him from the time to come by a supernatural entity. Through these correspondences, twentieth-century world scenarios are spread out before the reader, in which British naval power rules the waves and international commerce, while the transnational scheming of the Jesuits threatens the independence of weaker European courts.

This book — which includes a study followed by an annotated edition of the text — assesses the cultural significance of this literary work, as an apt observatory on how historical time as a cultural construction was shaped, during the eighteenth century, by new forms of transnational circulation of information, and by the dubious space carved out in European culture by seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century debates on the nature of historical knowledge.

Through and by means of the Memoirs case study, this volume aims to contribute to a wider cultural history of the future and speculative fiction. The novel’s ironic distancing of beliefs considered to be superstitious and absurd — such as divination techniques and occult and magical disciplines — offers an exceptional testimony to the negotiation of the boundaries of verisimilitude and credibility within a religious enlightenment.

Vingt-quatre contributions portant sur toutes les périodes historiques et sur des thématiques chères au jeune émérite: l’histoire de la théologie et du christianisme, l’histoire de la Wallonie, l’histoire de l’Université catholique de Louvain, la bande dessinée et la littérature de jeunesse en tant que sources historiques.

Gaspar van Weerbeke was one of the most successful Franco-Flemish musicians of the second half of the fifteenth century, holding prestigious positions in the Sforza court in Milan, the Burgundian court chapel, and the papal chapel in Rome. His compositions were widely transmitted in manuscript and print sources throughout Europe, and he was one of the best represented composers in the early Italian music prints of Ottaviano Petrucci. Despite the high esteem of his contemporaries, Gaspar has up to now played only a peripheral role in Renaissance music historiography. This book is the first collection of research articles dedicated exclusively to the life and works of Gaspar. While the basic facts of Gaspar's life have long been known, the book fleshes out the details, presenting a more differentiated and complex picture of his biography. Analysis of a wide range of Gaspar's compositional output leads to new interpretations of his approach to different genres: masses, motets, and motet cycles. His relatively small quantity of songs is revisited in light of the confusion—both then and now—over the meaning and validity of their attributions. This book seeks to promote further research on this composer and place him in his appropriate place in music history.

En 1629 Pierre Gassendi se lance dans un projet qui devait l’occuper jusqu’à sa mort en 1655 et avoir une profonde influence sur sa propre philosophie. Ce projet était la préparation d’un traité détaillé de la totalité de la philosophie d’Épicure sous le titre de Philosophia Epicuri. Cependant, il modifia deux fois son projet initial, au niveau de la disposition et de la présentation des textes. Au terme de la première révision, le travail se vit attribuer le titre de De Vita et Doctrina Epicuri. Les résultats de la seconde révision, élaborée entre 1633 et 1645, sont parvenus jusqu’à nous sous différentes formes, soit publiées, soit manuscrites.

Les livres I - VII furent publiés en 1647 sous le titre de De Vita et Moribus Epicuri ; le livre VIII, « De philosophia Epicuri universe » est conservé à la British Library, Ms. Harley 1677, ff. 1v - 55r ; les livres XII - XXV consacrés à la Physique sont conservés à Tours, Mss. 707-710. Nous présentons ici pour la première fois le texte des livres IX - XI, qui portent sur la Canonique, composé par Gassendi à Aix-en-Provence en 1636, conservé à Carpentras, Bibliothèque Inguimbertine, Ms. 1832,ff. 205r - 256r.

Gassendi considérait que la logique était une branche importante de la philosophie, ce qu’il a affirmé à divers moments de sa carrière. Le manuscrit de Carpentras est important parce que, rédigé à miparcours entre la polémique de jeunesse de Gassendi contre la dialectique d’Aristote et l’Institutio Logica de sa maturité, il permet de comprendre comment, à un moment crucial de sa vie, l’attachement croissant de Gassendi pour la doctrine d’Épicure l’a aidé à formuler sa propre vision philosophique sur des questions aussi importantes que l’existence de la vérité, la valeur de l’observation et de l’investigation scientifiques, et la possibilité du progrès.

Le texte, bien évidemment traduit en français, est ici précédé par une introduction destinée à éclairer les principales caractéristiques des livres IX - XI ; il s’agit de replacer l’exposé de la Canonique par Gassendi à l’intérieur du contexte philosophique plus large.

Gautier de Coinci (c. 1177-1236) was a Benedictine prior, a poet and composer, and the author of several very popular religious works, including a large collection of Miracles of the Virgin in French, which enjoyed a wide circulation during the Middle Ages. Gautier drew on multiple Latin sources for his work, embellishing and personalizing them as he adapted them to his poetic design. Conceiving of his collection of miracles as a complete work, Gautier carefully organized the tales into two books, framing each with authorial exordia and lyrics praising the Virgin. In addition to its obvious literary interest, the subsequent manuscript tradition offers a remarkable panorama of medieval manuscript production, in particular due to the fascinating combination of text, music and illustration. Bringing together a select group of scholars from multiple disciplines (including art history, musicology, and literary studies), this collection of essays explores complementary aspects of Gautier, his works, and his manuscripts. The volume offers both breadth and depth in its examination of Gautier de Coinci and his Miracles de Nostre Dame. It promises to redefine Gautier studies through its interdisciplinary consideration of the varied facets of his work as it makes available to scholars and students the first interdisciplinary examination of this key figure in medieval vernacular religious culture.

Gandhāran art developed around the first century BCE till the fourth century CE in parts of present-day Afghanistan and Pakistan and has been the focus of intense scholarly debates in both Classical and South Asian Studies for many decades. In this book, Ashwini Lakshminarayan offers for the first time a specialized study on gender using Gandharan material culture and convincingly proposes new readings of visual culture beyond Eurocentric and postcolonial interpretations.

This book sets the stage with a detailed overview of the contexts in which Gandhāran art was located in Buddhist sites by analysing the gendered use of space, and the gender and activities of donors and administrators. At its core, the book gives prominence to the stone reliefs of Gandhāra and examines how male and female bodies are represented, how they interact, and how gender symbolised ideals and values.

With an important comparative overview of the Gandhāran artistic production and new illustrations, this work is indispensable for all those interested in the study of gender in ancient art, the interaction between Graeco-Roman and Indic cultures, and the development of the early Buddhist artistic tradition in South and Central Asia that also shaped Buddhist visual culture eastwards in China.

In this analysis of Bernard of Clairvaux’s famous Sermons on the Song of Songs, gendered imagery is treated, for the first time, as an interpretative key. Through close readings of Bernard’s text and through the rich array of recent medieval studies on sex and gender, this book challenges familiar interpretations of body, gender, and asceticism, disrupting the commonplace view of medieval monasticism as desexualized and un-gendered.

Bernard not only interprets, but also embodies or actualizes the figure of the bride, generating images of celibacy as erotic pleasure and monks as fecund and female. Through his performance, Bernard provides a hermeneutical model on which he patterns himself and his audience, the Cistercian choir monk. By analyzing the rhetorical functions of Bernard’s female self-representation, the author explores how complex and varied female images in the text are absorbed into the bridal role - lactating mother, ecstatic virgin, weeping widow, needy girl.

By appropriating femaleness, Bernard transformed the Cistercian cloister into an inverted world that anticipated eschatological restoration and salvation. In this parallel monastic reality, the book argues, males performed all parts while gender hierarchy was upheld to establish notions of superior and inferior, worldly and heavenly, humility and sublimity. The male-female duality in this language is not one of equality, but was rather forged into a hermeneutical hierarchy in which, ultimately, a fully Christomimetic man both appropriates and negates femaleness.

The idea of the Nordic nations as champions of gender equality is firmly rooted in today’s perceptions of society. But how does such a modern comprehension influence our views of history? Does our understanding of gender impact on how we see the past? And do the ways in which we gender the past have an effect on our present identities?

From the Stone Age to the Early Modern period, and from warriors and queens to households and burials, this groundbreaking volume draws together research conducted as part of the project Gendering the Nordic Past, an inter-Nordic collaboration aimed at (re)evaluating and revitalizing the field of gender studies in the region. The chapters gathered in this volume, contributed by archaeologists and historians, theologians, art historians, and specialists in gender studies, aim to offer novel perspectives on the ways in which we gender the past. While many of the chapters focus explicitly on the Nordic countries, comparisons are also drawn with other regions in order to provide both internal and external views on the role of the collective past in present Nordic identities. The result, presented here, is an essential dialogue into the importance of gender in creating and maintaining past identities, as well as a new understanding of how the identities that we construct for the past can relate to heritage narratives.

Si les études de genre utilisent abondamment les notions de discrimination ou d’inégalités, il est plus rare qu’elles abordent à proprement parler celle de compétition. Le présent volume aborde ce thème avec pour but de mettre en lumière la manière dont les périodes de forte compétition sociale influent sur la place et la redéfinition des attributs sexués, en même temps que l’importance relative donnée à ceux-ci dans les situations de rivalité ou de compétition. La dizaine de travaux rassemblés présentent une vaste enquête sur la notion de genre dans l'historiographie moderne et dans les sources de la fin de l'Antiquité et du haut Moyen Âge avant d'analyser des exemples venus aussi bien de l'archéologie que des chroniques ou de l'hagiographie, essentiellement en Gaule et en Italie. Les auteurs montrent comment genres et régimes de genre sont des outils et des produits des crises et des compétitions, aussi bien pour les hommes que pour les femmes de l'Occident altimédiéval.

Depuis le XIXe siècle, les historiens français et allemands racontent une histoire fondamentalement différente de la transition entre le monde carolingien et les Xe-XIIe siècles : pour les premiers, l’apparition de principautés « territoriales » dans le monde post-carolingien est avant toute chose le signe de la désagrégation des institutions carolingiennes et représente une mutation fondamentale dans l’organisation des pouvoirs. Pour les seconds, il n’y a pas de véritable solution de continuité dans un système où le pouvoir a toujours reposé non sur la domination d’un territoire mais sur l’importance des liens interpersonnels entre le roi et l’aristocratie, et cela dès l’époque carolingienne. Le but de cet ouvrage est de montrer comment l’importance dévolue au caractère territorial du pouvoir – largement remis en question par la recherche actuelle – a influé sur la manière dont on raconte l’histoire de l’empire carolingien et des royaumes post-carolingiens à l’Est et à l’Ouest du Rhin, grâce à plusieurs mises au point historiographiques et à de nombreuses études de cas.

In George Eliot's last two novels, Middlemarch (1871-72) and Daniel Deronda (1876), she abandons the realism she had explored and articulated so carefully, most famously in Adam Bede, 'a faithful account of men and things', for an unprecedented return to 'cloud-borne angels, [...] prophets, sibyls, and heroic warriors'. This study addresses Eliot's exploitation of Victorian medievalism by considering the way in which she utilizes the discourses of medievalism, both for their potential for subversiveness and their potential for mediation, to affirm that change is possible socially, culturally, and politically, in her modern contemporary world. The various medieval discourses are revealed as interstices within what initially appears to be a continuation of the realism of her earlier novels. They permit political and cultural readings of a different, and often unexpected, kind to the realist bourgeois values of novels like Adam Bede, and to a lesser extent, Felix Holt. These political and cultural readings reveal a more determined, more obvious feminist and socialist polemic in her two last and possibly greatest novels.

Chancelier de l’Université de Paris, Jean Gerson (1363-1429) est surtout connu comme théoricien de la théologie mystique et par son action réformatrice au sein de l’Église pendant les années difficiles du Grand Schisme, où il joua un rôle de premier plan. Or si la carrière universitaire et l’action politique de Gerson font de lui un intellectuel parisien, l’évidence de la transmission manuscrite et imprimée désigne sans équivoque le Rhin supérieur comme la région où la diffusion des œuvres du chancelier a été la plus foisonnante. Intervenant à une échelle comparable à la diffusion manuscrite des œuvres de Thomas d’Aquin, le rayonnement de l’œuvre de Gerson a ceci de spectaculaire qu’il dépasse largement le milieu universitaire et qu’il se déploie en moins d’un siècle. Le paradoxe reste pourtant intact de pourquoi l’Allemagne, et non la France, s’impose comme le lieu de rayonnement de l’œuvre de Gerson dans des proportions aussi importantes quantitativement ? Pour répondre à cette question, l’étude de la réception de l’œuvre du chancelier ne peut pas faire l’économie d’une réévaluation de la tradition manuscrite et imprimée des 15e et 16e siècles à partir des témoins préservés dans les bibliothèques du Rhin supérieur. En privilégiant le cas de Gerson comme point d’observation, ce volume se propose de renouveler les perspectives de l’histoire intellectuelle et culturelle dans le long 15e siècle en focalisant sur l’histoire des textes, les conditions et les circonstances de leur transmission, afin de dresser une cartographie des réseaux de communication dans la région rhénane dans les décennies qui entourent l’invention de l’imprimerie.

Jean sans Peur qui succède à son père Philippe le Hardi à la tête du duché de Bourgogne en 1404, dut attendre la mort de sa mère Marguerite pour hériter du comté en 1405. L’historiographie l’a longtemps montré comme détaché de son petit territoire comtois en raison de sa forte implication dans la politique du royaume de France voisin et de son plus grand attachement au duché. Si la gestion de l’ordinaire requérait peu son attention, elle permettait des rentrées d’argent que le duc-comte ne dédaignait pas. Ses interventions démontrent parfois une volonté d’améliorer la gestion, la majorité prouvant surtout son désir d’accroitre ce qu’il en retirait. Jean sans Peur n’a pas négligé son comté malgré sa faible importance au cœur de l’ensemble bourguignon. Graphiques et tableaux systématiquement employés pour appuyer la démonstration livrent des approches chiffrées du rapport de ce domaine bourguignon, mettant en lumière la gestion et l’administration d’un domaine princier en cette fin de Moyen Âge.

Gildas is the earliest insular writer who has left us a substantial legacy of theological writing. He is usually, however, not seen as a theological writer but as an historical source for ‘dark age’ Britain at the time of the Germanic invasions in the mid-sixth century. Yet the deacon Gildas saw himself as a prophet charged by God to call the rulers and clergy of his society back to being a chosen people of the covenant. The form this call took was that of an indictment of those groups based on the testimonia of the Christian scriptures.

This book is a study both of Gildas’s use of the scriptures (his text, his canon, his exegetical strategies) and of how, from the way he interprets sacred history, he created a distinctive theology of the church and of salvation.

Thomas O'Loughlin is Professor of Historical Theology at the University of Nottingham. His areas of interest are Patristic and Medieval Theology, History of Scriptural Interpretation, Early Church and Method in Historical Theology.

Giulia Gonzaga (1513-66) was renowned throughout sixteenth-century Italy as a model of pious widowhood and of female beauty. Yet over three decades she sustained a risky friendship and personal correspondence with Pietro Carnesecchi (1508-67), the one-time papal favourite who became infamous for his heretical religious beliefs and associations. Indeed, Carnesecchi was condemned to death by the Tribunal of the Roman Inquisition, implicated in part by evidence of his correspondence with donna Giulia.

This major new study traces the evolution of donna Giulia’s unorthodox religious ideas and networks. Considered alongside inquisitorial trial records and contemporary religious treatises, donna Giulia’s written dialogue with Carnesecchi and others, vividly reflects the religious tensions of mid-sixteenth-century Italy.

Giulia Gonzaga and the Religious Controversies of Sixteenth-Century Italy details donna Giulia’s important contribution to the exchange and currency of reformist ideas amongst an intellectual elite of women and men, clergy and laity that extended through the Italian peninsula and beyond.

It is impossible to understand societies without looking at their technological underpinnings. Technology constitutes the very fabric of societies' political, economic, cultural, and everyday realities. Building on recent historiography, this book offers the first overview of the global history of contemporary technology.

Gathering more than fifty specialists of the history of technology, the collection of essays presents an overview of technological evolutions on a global scale. The book challenges both teleological approaches on progress and eurocentric perspectives. It explores the complex socio-economic implications of ‘techniques’ (and not simply technology) as well as the systems of representation and power structures that led to the emergence of today’s world.

The purpose of the collected essays is to offer a new history of technology. In this perspective, a central question concerns the very category of the history of technology, i.e. the term ‘technology’ itself. Refusing both the limitations of ‘technology’ and of ‘useful knowledge’, the book stresses the necessity to study technology as embodying human activity as a whole. In that sense, history of technology, envisioned as techniques rather than purely technologies, is intrinsically linked to anthropology and ethnology.

This book is divided into three sections. The first section opens with a world tour of techniques, restoring the complexity of regional historiographies and of the meanings given to technological activities in different societies. The second part focuses on sectors of activity, processes, and products with a strong emphasis on means of production and communication, the exploitation of natural resources, major technological systems, infrastructures and networks. The final section provides access to major cross-related issues. It pays particular attention to the role played by technology/techniques in the process of globalization, particularly through colonization, imperialism, and the development of large technological systems.

From the twelfth century onwards, notable advances in the theoretical development occur in independent treatises on syntax, which on their side are intimately linked with medieval commentaries on the last two books, the so-called Priscian Minor, of the Institutiones Grammaticae I-XVIII, where Priscian deals with syntax. A number of the independent treatises on syntax are now available. But of the many commentaries on Priscian Minor known, only a few have been edited, so let me start by editing an interesting 12th c. gloss on Priscian Minor, called the Glosa Victorina. Priscian Minor itself begins with introducing the notion of what is a perfect sentence, what is a well-formed utterance and which parts of speech are indispensable or the most important, stating their order of importance : noun, verb, participle, pronoun, and the indeclinable word classes. As the argumentation unfolds, comparisons between letters, syllables and words are introduced providing a continuity and refinement on what was taught earlier in the so-called Priscian Maior, and how this concerns grammar on the level of syntax. Very quickly, this leads to an interdisciplinary discussion of what constitutes a perfect sentence (according to the grammarians and the dialecticians), involving the commentators in redefinitions of the principal parts of speech and explaining their distinguishing features. In this process, notions of substance, of person, of deixis, of reference - signification, and many other important grammatical issues are discussed. So in principle, the beginning of any commentary on Priscian Minor provides its author with scope for developing his particular doctrines and ideas of prime importance in linguistics.

Here the Glosa Victorina deserves a closer look, because it provides us with insights into discussions normally only hinted at by Abelard, or a use of terminology which then becomes refined and partially rejected by William of Conches and Petrus Helias.

À l'occasion du départ à la retraite de Jean-Daniel Dubois de la direction d'études « Gnose et Manichéisme » à l'École pratique des hautes études en 2015, plusieurs de ses collègues et amis ont tenu à lui rendre hommage. La diversité des thèmes, des écrits et des communautés culturelles et linguistiques étudiés dans les quarante-quatre contributions ici publiées, témoigne de la richesse du parcours intellectuel de Jean-Daniel Dubois, lequel s'étend des oasis d'Égypte jusqu'à la Route de la Soie.

Ce volume s'adresse aux spécialistes de la Méditerranée, du Proche-Orient et de l'Extrême-Orient anciens. Il intéressera les historiens des religions, particulièrement ceux des mouvements chrétiens - dont les courants gnostiques -, du manichéisme, des cultes polythéistes et de l'islam, les philologues ainsi que les historiens de la philosophie de l'Antiquité tardive.

The systematic formulation of the status of the People of Israel as the Chosen People of God stands at the heart of Judah Halevi’s famous theological and polemical treatise - the Kuzari.

The idea of the Chosen People is an ancient one and is deeply rooted in Judaism. Through a wide-ranging textual and phenomenological investigation, this book highlights the novel and systematic presentation of the Chosen People in the Kuzari and shows how Judah Halevi draws, in a creative manner, on terms, concepts, and themes borrowed from the Shī‘ī doctrine of the Imām as presented in Shī‘ī literature.

This book presents a historical perspective for understanding the basis of Judah Halevi’s attraction to Shī‘ī theology, with its unique category of God’s Chosen. The polemical argument over the issue of the legitimate successor to leadership in early Islam, as well as the debate around the legitimate successor-group in medieval interreligious disputes, emerges as the historical background for the seemingly surprising link between the Shī‘ī Imām doctrine and the idea of the Chosen People in Judah Halevi’s thought. This link on the one hand portrays Halevi as a bold, original thinker and, on the other, portrays the Shī‘ī Imām doctrine as exceedingly fruitful and reaching beyond the bounds of Islam.

The archaeological excavations conducted from one end of the Mediterranean zone to the other have illuminated the place of gods in the ritual practices in the dwellings of the Graeco-Roman era. The discovery of multiple artefacts, dedicated spaces, and figurative paintings support new avenues of historical, anthropological, and social reflection with the aim of better understanding domestic religious practices in the polytheistic contexts of antiquity. This collective volume organizes those reflections around three axes.The first axis centres on identifying the deities that were favoured in domestic sanctuaries. Which gods are represented and which are not? The second axisconcerns the interrelationships evident within domestic ritual spaces and sanctuaries.The third axis is dedicated to the anthropology of rituals. Lines of inquiry informed by anthropological, social, and phenomenological approaches are assuming ever-greater importance in scholarship on Antiquity. It is from this perspective that the authors explore the role that domestic ritual spaces play in shaping the lived environment.

In the year 2007, the Raimundus-Lullus-Institut at the University of Freiburg celebrated its 50th anniversary. To mark this occasion, an international congress was held on 25–28 November 2007, titled Vision of God and Contemplation of the World. Interpretations of Ramon Lull’s »Liber contemplationis«. The congress papers assembled in the present volume offer an informative survey of the Liber contemplationis in Deum (Catalan: Llibre de contemplació en Déu), the most comprehensive and probably most significant work of Lull’s. The Liber contemplationis comprises 366 chapters: one chapter for each day of the year, including one for the additional day of the leap year. The contents of the work have often been described as ‘encyclopaedic’. Its aim, however, is not to offer a comprehensive account of all that is known about reality, but rather to recognise and describe reality in the context of contemplating God, knowing the articles of faith as well as attaining a virtuous life agreeable to God.

The volume contains introductory studies of the Latin tradition of the text as well as detailed commentaries on individual chapters.

Im Jahr 2007 konnte das Raimundus-Lullus-Institut der Universität Freiburg sein 50-jähriges Bestehen feiern. Aus diesem Anlass fand vom 25.–28. November 2007 ein internationaler wissenschaftlicher Kongress unter dem Titel Gottes Schau und Weltbetrachtung. Interpretationen zum »Liber contemplationis« des Raimundus Lullus statt. Die 20 Referentinnen und Referenten wurden bewusst nicht nur aus dem Kreis namhafter Lull-Spezialisten gewählt, sondern repräsentieren ein breites Spektrum internationaler mediävistischer Forschung. Mit ihren Tagungsbeiträgen, die in diesem Band gesammelt vorliegen, bieten sie eine informative Tour d’Horizon durch Ramon Lulls umfangreichstes und wohl bedeutendstes Werk, den Liber contemplationis in Deum (katalanisch: Llibre de contemplació en Déu).

Der Liber contemplationis umfasst 366 Kapitel: ein Kapitel für jeden Tag des Jahres und eines für den zusätzlichen Tag im Schaltjahr. Der Inhalt des Werkes ist oft als ‚enzyklopädisch‘ bezeichnet worden. Sein Ziel besteht jedoch nicht in einer umfassenden Darstellung des Wissens über die gesamte Wirklichkeit, sondern in der Bestimmung und Beschreibung der Wirklichkeit in Bezug auf die Betrachtung Gottes, die Erkenntnis der Glaubensartikel sowie die Erlangung eines tugendhaften, gottgefälligen Lebens.

Der vorliegende Band umfasst neben einführenden Untersuchungen zur lateinischen Textüberlieferung und zur Struktur des Werkes sowohl detaillierte Kommentare zu ausgewählten Kapiteln als auch Diskussionen von Einzelfragen vor dem Hintergrund von Lulls Gesamtwerk in seinem historischen Kontext.

La Légende dorée de Jacques de Voragine constitue à n’en pas douter une œuvre centrale et incontournable de la littérature européenne. Le nombre considérable de ses témoins manuscrits dans toutes les langues de l’Occident médiéval permet largement de le mesurer, tout autant que la foule des œuvres qui s’en sont inspiré.

On ne peut manquer pourtant de s’étonner : la Légende dorée a certes circulé à travers les milieux sociaux, les aires linguistiques et les territoires les plus divers, mais au prix de substantielles transformations, dans sa matérialité, dans sa composition, dans ses significations et ses usages. Pourtant, sans devenir absolument méconnaissable, la compilation hagiographique confectionnée à la fin du xiii e siècle a rapidement constitué une matrice textuelle accueillante et ouverte aux interventions que ses lecteurs ultérieurs ont apportées pour mieux l’actualiser au gré de leurs besoins et selon les nécessités des contextes. Tel est bien le paradoxe d’une œuvre si plastique et polyvalente qu’avec une singulière longévité littéraire elle parvient à perdurer non pas malgré, mais grâce aux modulations considérables qu’elle connait.

C’est ainsi que la Légende dorée a pu s’imposer comme un instrument à la fois souple et robuste de la pastorale, tout à la fois tourné vers l’édification de l’individu et assurant l’interface entre la collectivité de tous les hommes et la grande Cour des saints.

Celebrating the work of Brian J. Levy in the realm of comedy and humour in the Middle Ages, this collection of twenty essays explores unusual, unexpected or unacknowledged elements of humour in medieval literature and art. Scholars from Britain, France, Italy, the USA, Denmark, and the Netherlands consider comic elements taking an unusual form; a comic presence in unexpected places; comic elements intentionally or unintentionally hidden; comic elements surprisingly vaunted; a comic presence in standard contexts which stands out for a particular reason; comic elements which are for some reason controversial; comic elements as yet unidentified or unacknowledged; a commonly acknowledged comic presence which is in fact no such thing. Essays in English and French deal with a broad range of subjects. If the Roman de Renart is particularly well represented amongst these essays, other subjects make up the majority of the book. These include: Cicero’s De Oratorei; the Mannekin pis; late-medieval wall paintings; German and French Drama; fabliaux; vernacular pious tales and dits; the romance epic Richard Coeur de Lyon; Les Quinze joyes de mariage; bestiaries; and misericords. Sometimes shocking, often surprising, and always intriguing, the medieval comic presence rarely corresponds to our expectations and assumptions. This book shows that in numerous cases the medieval joke is actually on the modern scholar.

What do we really know about Greek alchemy throughout the ages? Certain periods, such as the Byzantine and post-Byzantine, have been somewhat overlooked. This volume engages in the the effort to shed light on certain aspects of Greek Alchemy from the 1st century CE to the 18th century, discussing and presenting relative sources, as well as the reception, transformation and use of this ‘art.’ The book also examines newly discovered manuscripts and offers a commented translation of Stephanos of Alexandria’s prayers. Furthermore, to better understand the material aspect of alchemy, it addresses the expectations and problems of laboratory replication and chemical explanation of early alchemical processes, and presents educational activities that use historical texts for the reconstruction of apparatuses in the school laboratory in secondary education.

Agricultural production has been the basic and single most important factor for the well-being of mankind since the Neolithic revolution. Insufficient agricultural output has led to deficient means of subsistence and sometimes even starvation, while rich harvests brought about plenty and prosperity. Continuous increases in agricultural output have transformed whole societies and continents, bringing about radical changes in people’s lives and economic prospects.

This book is focused on measuring and explaining agricultural growth in Europe. For most countries statistics on agricultural production are either non-existing or shaky for the period up to the end of the nineteenth century. Consequently, researchers dealing with historical farming have been forced to put a lot of effort into reconstructing reliable data on inputs and outputs. The last decades have seen major progress, and new approaches to quantify and explain agricultural development have been adopted. The book is the result of these efforts and it encompasses estimations and explanations of European historical agriculture over time, from the ninth to the twentieth century, and over space, from the Iberian Peninsula to Scandinavia and from the British Isles to Russia.

Mats Olsson and Patrick Svensson are associate professors in Economic History at Lund University. Their major research area is the agricultural transformation of Sweden and its social and demographic consequences, covering the manorial system, peasant production and labour productivity, social mobility, and preindustrial land and capital markets.

Depuis l’invasion arabo-berbère de la Péninsule ibérique en 711, les sociétés hispaniques chrétiennes sont très affectées par la guerre. Aux alentours de l’an mil, cette guerre prend une nouvelle dimension. Après une période de conflits internes et de défaites, culminant lors des fameux raids d’al-Mansûr, les principautés chrétiennes prennent l’offensive.

A cet égard, l’an mil constitue bien un tournant dans l’histoire de l’Espagne chrétienne. Vers le milieu du onzième siècle, la Reconquista est en marche, tandis que quatre forces politiques s’imposent: les royaumes de León, de Pampelune et d’Aragon, et les comtés catalans. La multiplication des conflits influe très fortement sur l’organisation des pouvoirs civils, et implique des enjeux fondamentaux dans la genèse des Espagnes chrétiennes médiévales, qui connaissent alors de profondes mutations culturelles, juridiques et idéologiques.

Les 26, 27 et 28 septembre 2002, plusieurs historiens et historiens de l’art venus de France, d’Espagne et d’Allemagne se sont retrouvés au Centre d’Etudes Supérieures de Civilisation Médiévale de Poitiers et à Angoulême pour travailler sur ces thèmes. Ils ont suivi trois axes de recherche, qui structurent les actes de ce colloque: la rencontre des mondes chrétien et musulman, la guerre comme enjeu de pouvoir et la dimension religieuse des idéologies.

Many of our oldest and best-loved stories are about killing guests and betraying hosts. Hospitality is celebrated, in medieval texts and in medieval studies, as a way of binding individuals together and strengthening social cohesion, but both the practice and narration of hospitality was shot through with ambiguity and ambivalence.

This volume shifts the scholarly gaze from the high table — where kings, queens, and honoured guests are graciously served by skilled servants — to the shadowy corners of the hall, the places where gossip and complaint are exchanged, where outlaws hide under the guise of hospitality, where hostages and troublesome strangers are benched, where the light from the hall-fire reflects on drawn blades: prompting difficult reflections on the processes of extraction and predation that provided the material foundations for the feast.

The chapters in Guests, Strangers, Aliens, Enemies range from Silk Road caravanserais in Armenia and crusader relations in the Latin East, through ambassadorial and papal receptions in the Mediterranean, treatment of merchants and the poor in Scandinavia, elite feasts in Latin Europe, to hosting of outlaws and hostages in Eurasia. The authors explore ambiguities of hospitality in the Middle Ages through a wide range of sources and methodological approaches.

The Catalan philosopher and theologian Guido Terreni (ca. 1270-1342) is one of the most outstanding fi gures in the history of the Carmelite order. The articles gathered in the first part of this volume explore the extremely rich, though still understudied, oeuvre of the Bishop of Majorca and Elne which comprises philosophicotheological, polemical, biblical and juridical texts. Since many of these works remain unedited, the second part of the volume contains selected text editions from Guido’s commentaries on Aristotle’s Physics and the Decretum Gratiani, as well as from his influential Quodlibetal Questions. Altogether, the sixteen contributions in this volume offer a comprehensive and up-to-date appraisal of Guido’s major contribution to the intellectual and political debates of his age and beyond.