Brepols

This volume is the first to delve into Norway’s history of Christianization since 1973 when Fridtjov Birkeli published his book on the topic. For the first time in over thirty years, Dr Nordeide illuminates the change from non-Christian to Christian rituals by analysing archaeological resources from c. AD 560 to c. 1150/1200. This book both asserts and challenges previous hypotheses of the chronology of Christianization, as well as offering fascinating new versions of the Norway’s eventual conversion. As well as asserting that local history leads Norway along chronological lines typical of its peripheral location, the author argues that in some ways, Norway’s history of Christianity is best located within the history of central European regions even more than has ever been suggested before.

The impingement of monastery on marketplace provides the unifying theme for this collection of nine research papers. Separation from the world, for most members of religious orders in the Middle Ages, did not imply isolation from the rest of society but, rather, a new spirituality orientated relationship which took different forms in different times and circumstances. Three of the contributors are concerned with particular aspects of the intellectual activities of the religious orders in both university and cloister. Two others examine the traumatic effects of the enforced return to secular life of thousands of men and women religious in England when monastic life was brought to an abrupt end in 1540. An individual monk's pastoral role among the laity is explored and evaluated in one paper, while another reveals the extent to which a rural English nunnery was both rooted in the local community and dependent on foreign supervision. Problems encountered by the friars are discussed by two other contributors who, on the basis of their recent research, conclude that the hostility between Franciscans and Benedictines has been overstated and that some German Dominicans risked their reputations in their involvement with contemporary heterodox movements among the laity.

Throughout the medieval period, the popular classes were always reckoned as a potential force in society even though it was usually dangerous for them to articulate divergent social, political and religious opinions. Sources on medieval political and social life seem to show us a world of order, acquiescence and consent. Otherwise, they reveal a picture of bloodshed and violent strife. During times of intense conflict, however, the human tongue was always the most frequently used weapon, much more so than the sword or the dagger. The vox populi, though often difficultly retrievable in the sources, was a ubiquitous one within the realm of later medieval politics. The essays collected in this volume deal with such speech acts of political rebels, with political languages of the ‘popular classes’ in medieval society but also with the subversive twists to speech situations such as preaching, mockery and insults.

Jan Dumolyn is a senior lecturer in medieval history at Ghent University. He publishes on the socio-economic, political and cultural history of the urban world of the medieval Low Countries.

Jelle Haemers lectures medieval history at the University of Leuven. He has published widely on the social history of medieval politics and the urban history of the Low Countries.

Hipólito Rafael Oliva Herrer is professor of Medieval History in the University of Sevilla. He has published both on medieval peasantry and popular political culture, including the making of popular ideologies and forms of popular protest.

Vincent Challet is a senior lecturer at the University of Montpellier-III, and works on the political conscience of communities. He is also the scientific coordinator of the ANR “Thalamus” project which aims to produce a scientific edition of the chronicle and urban statutes of Montpellier in the Middle Ages.

On 11 May 1625 Charles I married Henrietta Maria, the youngest sister of Louis XIII of France. The match signalled Britain’s firm alignment with France against Habsburg Spain and promised well for future relations between the two countries. However, the union between a Protestant king and a Catholic princess was controversial from the start and the marriage celebrations were fraught with tensions. They were further disrupted by the sudden death of James I and an outbreak of the plague, which prevented large-scale public celebrations in London. The British weather also played its part. In fact, unlike other state occasions, the celebrations exposed weaknesses in the display of royal grandeur and national superiority. To a large extent they also failed to hide the tensions in the Stuart-Bourbon alliance. Instead they revealed the conflicting expectations of the two countries, each convinced of its own superiority and intent on furthering its own national interests. Less than two years later Britain was effectively in a state of war against France.

In this volume, leading scholars from a variety of disciplines explore for the first time the marriage celebrations of 1625, with a view to uncovering the differences and misunderstandings beneath the outward celebration of union and concord. By taking into account the ceremonial, political, religious and international dimensions of the event, the collection paints a rounded portrait of a union that would become personally successful, but complicated by the various tensions played out in the marriage celebrations and discussed here.

Contributors: R. Malcolm Smuts, Lucinda H. S. Dean, J. R. (Ronnie) Mulryne, Karen Britland, Marie-Claude Canova-Green, Erin Griffey, Margaret Shewring, Sara J. Wolfson, Sara Trevisan, Kevin Laam, Sydney Anglo, Margaret M. McGowan, John Peacock, Gordon Higgott, Ella Hawkins .

When a monk living at the beginning of the last millennium described Europe ‘cladding itself everywhere in a white mantle of churches’, he precipitated several questions for historians to answer. Was there a surge in church-building at the time? If so, what were the causes of this, and what were the purposes? Does it help to explain our understanding of Romanesque architecture and art? Was there a connection between the ‘white mantle of churches’ and the millennium? Did people believe the world was coming to an end?

The supposition of apocalyptic expectations at the time was until recently dismissed as romantic myth, but the arrival of our new millennium has brought a revival in interest in the dawn of the second millennium, and new evidence of millennial fears. Yet millennial studies and architectural history largely continue to follow separate, parallel paths. This book therefore aims to add the architectural evidence to the millennial debate, and to examine this formative period in relation to the evolution of Romanesque architecture and art. As our own millennium gets under way with continuing hesitancy between European aspiration and national identity, it is also of interest to compare our time with the Europe of a thousand years ago.

Perhaps no author of the Latin Middle Ages has been the subject of so much controversy and even vitriol than Marsilius of Padua (c. 1275-1342/43). As author of the notorious heretical tract, the Defensor Pacis, Marsilius became an infamous figure throughout the intellectual and political centres of Europe during his own lifetime. His magnum opus, a sharply pointed dissection of the damage done to earthly political life by the incursions of the papacy and a plea for conciliar ecclesiology, was repeatedly condemned during the fourteenth century and in later years. Yet the treatise continued to be disseminated and received translation into several vernacular languages. During the Reformation, Marsilius and his Defensor Pacis enjoyed another round of acclamation and denunciation, depending upon one’s confession. In July 2003, a group comprising many of the world’s most renowned scholars of medieval political thought gathered for a ‘Marsilius of Padua World Congress’. The contents of the present volume represent a compendium of innovative scholarly contributions to the understanding of Marsilius, his life and times, and his lasting impact on Western thought. Included are chapters that reflect a range of recent, ground-breaking research by both senior scholars and the future leaders in the field. After a general survey of the current state of scholarship on Marsilius, the volume divides into three thematically organized sections, covering a variety of historical, textual, methodological, theological, and theoretical questions. In all of the essays, readers will discover the wealth and complexity of Marsilius’s thought as well as the startling range of approaches and methods of interpretation taken in the study of his work. The volume’s selection of authors is international in scope and represents the first interdisciplinary scholarly collaboration in the field of Marsilian studies to occur in the twenty-first century.

Roman wooden writing tablets, known in Latin as tabulae ceratae, have been found by archaeologists in various locations around the former capital of the civitas/municipium Tungrorum or Roman Tongeren (now the Belgian city of Tongeren-Borgloon). These rare and delicate finds are remarkable not only due to the excellent state of their preservation, but also because they are inscribed with the remnants of texts, once etched into an overlying wax layer, that can, to the discerning eye, still be deciphered. The tablets not only provide concrete information about religious, judicial and administrative practices, but they also enhance our understanding of the complex processes of Romanisation and Latinisation in the northwestern civitates and municipia of the Roman Empire.

Unearthed in the first half of the twentieth century, with a second group discovered in 2013, the Roman tablets housed in the Gallo-Roman Museum of Tongeren-Borgloon and in the city’s municipal heritage depository, became the object of an in-depth study by an international team of specialists piloted by the Gallo-Roman Museum. It is the results of this project that are presented here in this volume for the first time. The painstaking process of deciphering and interpreting the script marks and text fragments is explored via analysis of palaeography, philology and onomastics, along with key scientific techniques such as wax analysis, wood species identification, and script visualisation by Multi-Light Reflectance Imaging. Rich detail is also provided about other associated wooden finds that shed light on how and where the tablets were produced.

The result is a beautifully illustrated and insightful volume that introduces the lost world of Roman Tongeren and its writing tablets to professionals and the general public alike.

This book provides a detailed narrative history of the dynasty and confederation of the Yuezhi, whose migration from western China to the northern border of present-day Afghanistan resulted ultimately in the creation of the Kushan Empire. Although the Yuezhi have long been recognised as the probable ancestors of the Kushans, they have generally only been considered as a prelude to the principal subject of Kushan history, rather than as a significant and influential people in their own right. The evidence seemed limited and ambiguous, but is actually surprisingly extensive and detailed and certainly sufficient to compile a comprehensive chronological political history of the Yuezhi during the first millennium BCE. The book analyses textual, numismatic and archaeological evidence in an attempt to explain the probable origin of the Yuezhi, their relationship with several Chinese dynasties, their eventual military defeat and expulsion from the Gansu by the Xiongnu, their migration through the Ili Valley, Ferghana and Sogdia to northern Bactria, and their role in the conquest of the former Greco-Bactria state. All of these events were bound up with broader cultural and political developments in ancient Central Asia and show the extraordinary interconnectedness of the Eurasian historical processes. The domino-effect of the migration of the Yuezhi led to significant changes in the broader Eurasian polity.

In the twelfth to sixteenth centuries, the exploitation of landownership underwent drastic changes in various parts of Northwestern Europe. In these changes, the emergence of the lease plays a pivotal role. At the end of the Middle Ages, in a number of areas within the North Sea area, the greater part of available land was held at lease for relatively short terms. The competitive and contractual nature of such leasing has caused many to associate it with the emergence of capitalism in the countryside, seeing its rise as a key element in the transformation of the rural economy and society in the last millennium. In view of this, it is surprising that the emergence of leasing has received little systematic attention, particularly where its roots, its early development, its exact arrangements and the social and economic context of its emergence are concerned, let alone the regional and chronological differences in these elements. This volume aims to make a first step in exploring these issues.

Until the 19th century very large areas of Western Europe were subject to some degree to common rights, where individual users collectively managed resources such as pasture and wood which were central to the agrarian economy. Much scholarship has focused on the dissolution of these rights and the effects of the enclosure of common land on society and agricultural productivity. In contrast, this volume seeks to assess in a comparative framework the long-term management of the common lands and the relative success of strategies in providing the resources sought by the rural population. Chapters covering northern and southern England, France, the Netherlands, Flanders, Sweden and northern and southern Germany examine the institutional and legal framework of commoning, the resources available and their value, the sustainability of practices, and policies of inclusion and exclusion among the group of commoners. Building on the theoretical insights of recent works on commonly managed resources, this volume, the result of an international collaboration in the CORN network, provides a series of detailed historical studies and is the first major work to address this central aspect of the agrarian economy in a comparative European context.