Brepols

This volume contains a selection of the collected papers of the late Professor Glanville R. J. Jones. Following a brief assessment of the man and his work, by J. Beverley Smith, an extensive introductory essay by the editors sets Jones’s work in a wide historiographical context. This material provides an overview of his ‘multiple estate’ model and concludes with an assessment of its continuing relevance in the twenty-first century. The selection of his published papers then begins with Welsh roots and the work from which his ideas grew, while the remaining items show how the questions he asked led him towards explorations of ‘early’ medieval estate structures in England, their links with rural settlement evolution, and the pragmatic, tenurial, and fiscal arrangements which bound individual rural settlements into broader spatial structures. Jones’s ideas are often cited — usually, but not invariably, with praise — and this corpus is intended to allow today’s scholars to reach a mature assessment of what he achieved. Right or wrong, he presented important challenges to the various disciplines working on the archaeology, history, and historical geography of the periods before and after the Norman Conquest of 1066.

As founder of the Carthusian order, Saint Bruno of Cologne († 1101) is known as a leading figure in the twelfth-century religious renewal. As recent research has emphasized, he was also one of the first proponents of a new intellectual culture of the French schools as a teacher at Reims before his conversion and retreat to the Italian hermitage of La Torre.

Various contrary aspects of his life are commemorated in his mortuary roll, a unique document that was sent around churches and monasteries of Europe upon his death by his fledgling hermit community. Over 150 entries by individuals and monastic or clerical communities in Italy, France, and England, mostly in verse, survive in an early sixteenth-century text witness.

In celebrating Bruno’s life and saintly death, the many-voiced entries comment upon intellectual and religious ideals, illustrating literary practices and intellectual and spiritual values as well as the pragmatic workings of memoria. The present edition includes all materials accompanying the sole surviving sixteenth-century print of the roll. It offers complete translations into English and into German, and includes five studies by experts debating the most important aspects and contexts of this singular and multi-faceted medieval text.

The four-volume sub-series ‘Petrifying Wealth’ explores the sudden ubiquity of masonry construction between 1050 and 1300 in Southern Europe and its profound effect on the European landscape. New questions about wealth, society, and medieval building are explored, which highlight the link between construction in durable materials and the shaping of individual, collective, and territorial identities: the birth of a new, long-lasting panorama, epitomising the way we see the space and territory of Europe nowadays.

Volume 2 of the ‘Petrifying Wealth’ series focuses on economic growth in Southern Europe between 1050 and 1300, discussing investments on buildings connected with production and trade. It examines buildings that served a primarily economic purpose, in various aspects: agricultural activity and the conservation and processing of its products, crafts, and exchanges and their material infrastructures. The growth in this period resulted in a multiplication of material structures closely linked with economic activity, such as mills, barns, canals, workshops, and arsenals. Focusing on the dynamics connected with these buildings thus offers a vantage point to better understand the contexts and characteristics of the ‘economic take-off’ in Southern Europe in this period.

This volume gathers together 277 letters of Pope Honorius III (1216-1227) concerning Frankish Greece and Constantinople. These letters constitute an indispensable source for the early history of the territories conquered during and just after the Fourth Crusade of 1204, for which almost no local archival material survives. The Latin texts of many of the letters are published here for the first time, and almost all the letters have been reedited from the manuscripts, primarily the papal registers in the Vatican Archives. In addition, the volume makes the letters available to non-specialists through exhaustive English summaries of all the letters and complete translations of the most significant ones. A lengthy historical introduction uses these letters to portray the dynamic world of the Latin Empire of Constantinople, the Kingdom of Thessaloniki, and the other states that replaced Byzantium, as the precarious condition of the Latin states compelled the ecclesiastical authorities in Rome to temper their ambitions of transcultural religious unity with pragmatic measures. It explores how this mixture of cultural idealism, practical necessity, and divergent class structures manifested themselves in Honorius' policy towards the lower Greek clergy and Greek and Latin religious orders. Maps, tables, indices, and a guide to papal letters make the volume a useful tool for future studies of this fascinating and controversial phase in the history of Greece and the papacy.