Brepols

Ancient works On Kingship have received a lot of attention in recent scholarship, where the main focus is usually on classic works such as Seneca’s On Clemency, Isocrates’ Cyprian Orations or Dio of Prusa’s Kingship Orations. In this volume, we deliberately turn to the periphery, to the grey zone where matters usually prove more complicated. This volume focuses on authors who deal with analogous problems and raise similar questions in other contexts, authors who also address powerful rulers or develop ideals of right rulership but who choose very different literary genres to do so, or works on kingship that have almost been forgotten. Departing from well-trodden paths, we hope to contribute to the scholarly debate by bringing in new relevant material and confront it with well-known and oft-discussed classics. This confrontation even throws a new light upon the very notion of ‘mirrors for princes’. Moreover, the selection of peripheral texts from Antiquity to the Renaissance reveals several patterns in the evolution of the tradition over a longer period of time.

Throughout the period 800–1250, English culture was marked by linguistic contestation and pluralism: the consequence of migrations and conquests and of the establishment and flourishing of the Christian religion centred on Rome. In 855 the Danes ‘over-wintered’ for the first time, re-initiating centuries of linguistic pluralism; by 1250 English had, overwhelmingly, become the first language of England. Norse and French, the Celtic languages of the borderlands, and Latin competed with dialects of English for cultural precedence. Moreover, the diverse relations of each of these languages to the written word complicated textual practices of government, poetics, the recording of history, and liturgy. Geographical or societal micro-languages interacted daily with the ‘official’ languages of the Church, the State, and the Court. English and English speakers also played key roles in the linguistic history of medieval Europe. At the start of the period of inquiry, Alcuin led the reform of Latin in the Carolingian Empire, while in the period after the Conquest, the long-established use of English as a written language encouraged the flourishing of French as a written language. This interdisciplinary volume brings the complex and dynamic multilingualism of medieval England into focus and opens up new areas for collaborative research.

The literature against the Jews (contra Iudeos) was crucially influential in the shaping of Christianity during the centuries following the crucifixion, particularly during the period when Christianity remained outside official Roman toleration. And yet, this phenomenon did not decline in the Middle Ages when Christianity emerged as the supreme power in the western world and Judaism could no longer threaten it in any way. The Jewish response to this literary practice did not arise for some time, yet from the twelfth century onwards the effort to counter Christian ideological attacks became a central intellectual activity and a pressing concern on the part of Jewish scholars in the West. Although both Latin and Hebrew polemics were often intended, first and foremost, for local audiences in order to satisfy local needs and intellectual demands, they also engaged each other, and raised urgent theological and cultural questions in doing so. This cultural discourse did not just find expression in polemical literature (Nizahon and Adversus Iudaeos) but also in a variety of other representations and daily practices. This collection of studies is devoted to an examination of the significance of this phenomenon as a longue durée process, and pursues its concerns from a variety of innovative perspectives that join together authoritative scholars from the field of Jewish-Christian relations.

By the late Middle Ages, mendicant spiritual confraternities had developed a poor reputation. Their spiritual status was ill-identified: somewhere between requests for intercession, necrological commemoration, and pious associations. In the hands of the mendicants, they seemed to resemble what indulgences had supposedly become in the hands of the papacy: bait that was handed out to extort funds from the faithful while offering an apparently immediate access to Paradise. Thus, like indulgences, they seem to have been gradually emptied of their substance and denounced (even before Luther) as glaring evidence of the corruption of the Roman Church. Much recent scholarship has followed this negative portrait of spiritual confraternities — unless it has conflated them with other non-spiritual confraternities, or indeed ignored them altogether.

This volume draws on the abundant number of letters of confraternity available from Hungarian sources in order to provide a more nuanced picture of mendicant spiritual confraternities. It sheds new light on the links between the mendicants and their supports among the laity, and emphasises the broader significance of the confraternity movement in late medieval piety in Central Europe and beyond.

Over the past several decades, scholars of medieval and early modern Iberia have transformed the study of the region into one of the most vibrant areas of research today. This volume brings together twelve essays from a diverse group of international historians who explore the formation of the multiple and overlapping identities, both individual and collective, that made up the Iberian peninsula during the eleventh through seventeenth centuries. Individually, the contributions in this volume engage with the notion of identity in varied ways, including the formation of collective identities at the level of the late medieval city, the use of writing and political discourse to construct or promote common political or socio-cultural identities, the role of encounters with states and cultures beyond the peninsula in identity formation, and the ongoing debates surrounding the peninsula’s characteristic ethno-religious pluralism.Collectively, these essays challenge the traditional dividing line between the medieval and early modern periods, providing a broader framework for approaching Iberia’s fragmented yet interconnected internal dynamics while simultaneously reflecting on the implications of Iberia’s positioning within the broader Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds.

This book explores representations of saints in a variety of Latin and Greek late antique hagiographical narratives, such as saints’ Lives, martyr acts, miracle collections, and edifying tales. The book examines techniques through which the saints featured in such texts are depicted as heroes and heroines, i.e., as extraordinary characters exhibiting both exemplary behaviour and a set of specific qualities that distinguish them from others. The book inscribes itself in a growing body of relatively recent scholarship that approaches hagiographical accounts not just as historical sources but also as narrative constructions. As such, it contributes to the development of a scholarly rationale which increasingly values imaginative and fictional aspects of hagiography in their own right, with the aim of answering broader questions about narrative creativity and ideology. For instance, individual chapters examine how hagiographical accounts mobilize and capitalize on earlier literary and rhetorical traditions or narrative models. These questions are specifically addressed to explore the narrative construction of characters. The chapters thereby encourage us to acknowledge that many hagiographers were more skilful than is often accepted.

In considering the construction of medieval sermons, the term ‘construction’ has many meanings. Those studied here range from questions about sermon composition with the help of artes praedicandi or model collections to a more abstract investigation of the mental construction of the concepts of sermon and preacher. Sermons from a range of European countries, written both in Latin and vernaculars, are subjected to a broad variety of analyses. The approach demonstrates the vitality of this sub-discipline. Most of the essays are more occupied with literary and philological problems than with the religious content of the sermons. While many focus on vernacular sermons, the Latin cultural and literary background is always considered and shows how vernacular preaching was in part based on a more learned Latin culture. The collection testifies both to the increasing esteem of the study of vernacular sermons, and to a revival in the study of all those things contained in a preacher’s ‘workshop’, ranging from rhetorical invention, medieval library holdings and study-aids, through to factors that are crucial for the successful delivery of the sermon, such as the choice of language, mnemonic devices and addressing the audience. The interdisciplinary approach remains ever-present, not only in the diversity of the academic disciplines represented, but also within individual essays. The volume is based on a conference held in Stockholm, 7-9 October 2004.

Entre la fin du IXe et le milieu du Xe siècle, de nouvelles formes de pouvoir émergent en Occident, au sein d’un monde encore carolingien : un bouleversement majeur qui marque la genèse de la société seigneuriale. C’est cette période charnière que permet d’appréhender la figure d’Odon, deuxième abbé de Cluny, grand aristocrate, réformateur acharné et intellectuel de haut niveau.

L’itinéraire d’Odon (né vers 879, mort en 942), acteur de premier plan et témoin privilégié de son temps, reflète en effet la profonde transformation des structures aristocratiques alors à l’œuvre, tandis que l’ecclésiologie originale élaborée par l’abbé réformateur, avec un bagage qui demeure celui du lettré carolingien, définit les conditions et les contours d’une société d’un type nouveau. L’objet de cet ouvrage est bien de cerner au plus près la recomposition des rapports de force et les ressorts idéologiques d’un monde où le champ des possibles est largement ouvert. À quelles stratégies, à la fois sociales et discursives, un puissant aristocrate entré au service de Dieu a-t-il recours pour fonder et asseoir son pouvoir ? À un moment où évoluent les cadres de la société et où se bâtissent de nouvelles légitimités, de quelle manière un réformateur justifie-t-il la domination des moines sur l’ensemble du corps social ? Il s’agit en d’autres termes d’analyser comment un abbé du Xe siècle construit, tant sur le plan des pratiques sociales que des représentations, une certaine société seigneuriale.

Isabelle Rosé, agrégée et docteur en histoire, a réalisé ce travail dans le cadre du Centre d’études Préhistoire, Antiquité, Moyen Âge, unité mixte de recherche de l’université de Nice-Sophia Antipolis et du CNRS. Elle est à présent maître de conférences à l’université de Haute-Bretagne - Rennes 2.

Food determines who we are. We are what we eat, but also how we eat, with whom we eat, where we eat and, in some cases, even why we eat. Food production and consumption in the ancient world can express multiple dimensions of identity and negotiate belonging to, or exclusion from, cultural groups. It can bind through religious praxis, express wealth, manifest cultural identity, reveal differentiation in age or gender, and define status. As a prism through which to investigate the past, its utility is manifold. The chapters gathered together in this ground-breaking book explore the intersections between food, consumption, and ritual within Etruscan society through a purposeful cross-disciplinary approach. It offers a unique and innovative selection of up-to-date analysis from a variety of Etruscan food-related topics. From banqueting, feasting, fish rites, and symbolic consumption to bio-archaeological data, this volume explores a new and exciting field in ancient Italian archaeology.