Brepols

In the last decade, biblical exegesis has gradually taken into consideration the so-called “spatial turn.” However, the literary concept of space and its narrative analysis have found less interest than the study of space as a social and cultural phenomenon. This obvious gap in biblical research has become the impulse for the present work, dedicated to the book of Judith. Its aim is, on the one hand, to present the narrative analysis of space as a still-developing field in non-biblical literature and, on the other, to show how this promising approach can be developed in biblical studies.

In particular, this monograph provides the narrative analysis and interpretation of space in the book of Judith in response. The first part of the study offers a synthetic overview of perceptions, concepts and theories of space from antiquity to contemporary research, and of the theoretical approaches to space in the Old Testament. The main part is dedicated to the analysis of space on the micro and macro levels of the Judith story through the application of Katrin Dennerlein’s narratological theory of space. Thus, it can be demonstrated to what extent an in-depth analysis of the notion of space can contribute to better understand its thematic and symbolic dimension in the narrative, its function of characterising persons and actions, its role as a structuring element in the story and, last but not least, as a vehicle for an ideological and theological message.

In 1409, Archbishop Thomas Arundel banned the Wycliffite Bible, along with the heresy attributed to Oxford theologian John Wyclif for which it was named. Containing the first complete translation of the Bible into English, the Wycliffite Bible is nonetheless the most numerous extant work in Middle English by a wide margin.

Nearly half the existing copies of the Wycliffite Bible are illuminated. This book offers the first sustained, critical examination of the decoration of Wycliffite Bibles. This study has found that many copies were decorated by the most prominent border and initial artists of their eras. Many more were modeled on these styles. Such highly regarded artists had little to gain from producing volumes that might lead them to trial as heretics and ultimately to the stake.

This unprecedented study contributes to recent revisionist criticism and troubles long-standing assumptions about Wycliffism and the Wycliffite Bible. It contends that the manuscript record simply does not support a stark interpretation of the Wycliffite Bible as a marginalized text. Rather, this study reveals a prolific and vibrant textual exchange within the book culture of late medieval England.

The sixth-century theological controversy over the ‘Three Chapters’, which centred on the nature of Christ, provoked one of the most serious and long-lived religious schisms of the early Middle Ages. The fault lines ran not only between the Byzantine imperial court and the papacy, but between Rome and the churches in the former western empire’s successor states. In Italy, the schism endured into the seventh century, and the repercussions were felt long thereafter. Though rooted in the complexities of christological debate, the tensions reveal the growing political as well as cultural divide between Byzantium, Rome, and the West. Thus the controversy is critical for our understanding of the late-antique and early-medieval Mediterranean world, and of the inheritance of empire in western Europe and North Africa. This book presents ten chapters by an international group of scholars who examine different facets of the Three Chapters Controversy and its profound impact on these regions.

This book represents the first work of history dedicated to the crusade of King Conrad III of Germany (1146-48), emperor-elect of the Western Roman Empire and the most powerful man yet to assume the Cross. Even so, many of the people following the king on the Second Crusade were dead before they reached Constantinople and their ranks were devastated in Anatolia. Yet he went on to join with his fellow kings, Louis VII of France and Baldwin III of Jerusalem, in an attempt to capture the city of Damascus, the most powerful Muslim stronghold in southern Syria. Their unsuccessful attack lasted just five days. The recriminations for the many privations and problems the Germans suffered and encountered in Byzantium, Anatolia and Outremer were long and loud and have echoed down the ages: German indiscipline and poor leadership, Byzantine deceit and duplicity, and the self-serving interests of a Latin Jerusalemite nobility were and still are blamed for the various failings of the expedition. Scrutinising the original source evidence to an unparalleled degree and employing a range of innovative, multi-disciplinary approaches, this work challenges the traditional and more recent historiography at every turn leading to a significantly clearer and appreciably different understanding of the expedition’s complex and much maligned history.

As the cult of saints became increasingly important to the Christian religion during the latter centuries of the Roman Empire, so too the veneration of relics became a central element of Christian piety. The relics of holy men and women - the very tangibility of which ensured their lasting appeal - could be used to heal the sick, improve the weather, ensure victory in battle, and represent power and authority. Even today, in an era of declining church attendance, famous relics such as the head of St Catherine of Siena or the tongue of St Anthony of Padua continue to draw hundreds of thousands of pilgrims; the need to preserve and venerate objects associated with the important and the famous is a well-established human trait.

This book is the first to explore the historical roots of the cult of relics in early medieval Ireland, deepening our understanding of how the pagan Irish adapted to the new religion. Examining the cult of relics from the earliest Irish sources up to the ninth century, it provides insights into the role of relics and the culture and people to whom they were so significant. The volume investigates how the Christian phenomenon of relic veneration developed in early Ireland and it evaluates the continuity between Irish practice and that on the continent. By offering a new model of how the cult of relics evolved and by exploring the extent to which it helped forge early Irish Christianity, the arguments presented here have the potential to reshape views of the entire period.

Scandinavia has often been considered as a peripheral part of the Christian world, with its archbishopric in Nidaros an isolated outpost of the Catholic Church. This volume, however, offers a reassessment of such preconceptions by exploring the way in which the Nidaros see celebrated the cult of saints and followed traditions that were both part of, and distinct from, elsewhere in Christian Europe. The contributions gathered here come from specialists across different disciplines, among them historians, philologists, art historians, and epigraphists, to offer a multifaceted insight into how texts and objects, sculpture, runes, and relics all drove the cult of saints in this northern corner of Europe. In doing so, the volume offers a nuanced understanding of the development of cults, the saints themselves, and their miracles, not only in the Norse world, but also more widely.

What were the ideas that the ancient Greeks and Romans held about warfare? What do contemporary sources tell us about this? Is it possible to trace a development in the way of thinking about war in antiquity? These are the questions that are discussed (and answered) in this study. It combines a close reading of all the sources that we have - mostly written, like literary and historiographical, but also non-written, like art, monuments and coinage. The analysis of the discourse is accompanied by and contrasted with arguments raised by today’s specialists in the field of warfare and culture of ancient Greece and Rome.

The study treats recurrent cultural themes like courage, fatherland, or victory within a chronological framework, for discourse features cannot be isolated from the context of their time. For each specific period - Greek, Hellenistic and the six parts of the long and diverse Roman time - conclusions are drawn. The remarkable developments in time that can be observed, especially in Rome, are brought together in the final chapter.

This volume presents a complete reconstruction of the ritual response to terminal illness and death at the monastic community of Cluny at the height of its development in the later eleventh and early twelfth centuries. Based on the best manuscript of the customary of Bernard, the only account of the abbey's customs written at and for Cluny itself, the reconstruction contains not just Bernard's Latin description of the ritual process, but also the full texts of the prayers and chants that accompanied it, gathered, in the absence of surviving ritual books from Cluny itself, from contemporary sources with clear ties to the Cluniac customs. Facing-page English and French translations make the results available to readers with little or no facility in Latin. The author places the Cluniac death ritual in the context of religious responses to death, dying and the care of the dead in medieval Latin Christianity as a whole. He also explicates the origins, development and meaning of the Cluniac death ritual's myriad elements as they were spoken, sung and performed within the sacred spaces of the monastic complex-cloister, chapter house, infirmary, church and cemetery.

Frederick S. Paxton is Brigida Pacchiani Ardenghi Professor of History at Connecticut College, in New London, CT, USA. He is the author of Christianizing Death: The Making of a Ritual Process in Early Medieval Europe (1990), Anchoress and Abbess in Ninth-Century Saxony: the Lives of Liutbirga of Wendhausen and Hathumoda of Gandersheim (2009) and numerous articles and essays on sickness, death, dying and the dead in medieval Europe.

This volume focuses on the complex and often overlooked topic of crusading activities and the crusade movement on the fringes of Latin Christendom in the time frame from approximately 1300 to the beginning of the sixteenth century. It covers a period widely considered as a time of significant political, cultural and religious changes in Europe. A period in which Western Christianity was on the one hand still expanding (vide Lithuania and the western Rus and later the Spanish, Portuguese, French and English expansion in the Americas, Africa and South-East Asia) and on the other hand facing two mighty opponents: the Ottoman Empire and Muscovy. On its eastern and southeastern frontiers, Latin Christian expansion came to a gradual halt — here, the West was now largely under siege! Alone the political, logistical and ultimately also military feasibility of a large-scale crusade to liberate Jerusalem had now receded into a purely theoretical and practically almost unenforceable far distance. Ranging in scope from the Baltic Sea region to the Balkans and Iberia, this book’s nineteen papers explore how these developments influenced the continuation and adaptation of crusading ideas and activities during this later period of crusades.

This book analyses the diffusion of anti-Judaic stereotypes and topoi in thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century model sermon collections. It concentrates on the sermons on Luke 19.41-48 where Jesus foretells the Destruction of Jerusalem. The preachers took the view that the Destruction of Jerusalem was divine vengeance for the Jews because they killed Jesus. Thus, these sermons were a good venue for those preachers who wanted to preach against the Jews.

Model sermon collections were the closest thing to modern mass media. Consequently, their role in the diffusion of anti-Judaic attitudes was significant. The anti-Judaic writings of the early Church Fathers were only read by few literate church men, whereas model sermons reached the illiterate masses all over Christianity. Therefore, they played a major role in diffusing anti-Judaic attitudes amongst the population at large and thus contributed to the marginalization of the Jews, to various libels, expulsions, violence, and eventually to large-scale pogroms.

The Didascalia apostolorum is one of the ancient church orders, setting out the duties and responsibilities of laypeople, bishops and widows, regulating the keeping of Pascha and engaging in polemic with Judaism. It is a work of extraordinary interest for the history of the church in Syria, as a document of social and liturgical history and as a document bearing witness to relations between Christians and Jews.

Alistair Stewart-Sykes presents the text in a readable English version which takes full account of the various textual witnesses. Of particular importance is the introduction. The Didascalia is conventionally ascribed to a single hand in third-century Syria, but here an entirely new compositional hypothesis is proposed in which the work is shown to be composite and to include sources of much greater antiquity than the period of final redaction. In the light of the compositional hypothesis there are radically new discussions of ministry (including the ministry of widows), relationships with Judaism, and liturgy (including the penitential process). Beyond this the introduction engages with the social context in which these developments emerged.

The work is suitable for a wide audience. The translation will be useful to undergraduate and graduate students whereas the introduction and commentary will be of interest to scholars in ecclesiastical history, historical liturgy, forming Judaism and Jewish-Christian relations as well as Syriac studies.

The author, Alistair Stewart-Sykes, is well-known in the field having produced the first critical text for over a century of the Apostolic church order and the first full-length commentary on the Apostolic tradition.

This book offers an anthology from the proceedings of the Second International Conference on Patristic Studies, “The Discoveries of Manuscripts from Late Antiquity: Their Impact on Patristic Studies and the Contemporary World”, which took place in San Juan, Argentina, in March 2017. The aim of this event was to analyze and assess 20th- and 21st-century discoveries of manuscripts from Late Antiquity. Indeed, complete libraries of manuscripts, as well as individual documents of great importance for our understanding of historical authors and situations, have come to light after having been buried for millennia. Just some examples are the incredible discoveries of the Nag Hammadi Gnostic library, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Origen of Alexandria’s homilies, and Augustine’s sermons, among others. Rather than being passive documents, these manuscripts pose numerous questions to specialists from a diverse array of fields, demanding new evaluations of a past that was already thought to be understood and judged.

The references to Charles the Bold´s work, which are largely drawn from the accounts of the chambres des comptes at Lille and Brussels, amply illustrate the aesthetic preferences of the Burgundian nobility. All the relevant documents, most of which have not been published before, appear in appendix I. The second part of the book reviews the votive portraits of Charles the Bold. The circumstances surrounding the commission of the Liège statuette - Loyet´s sole surviving work - are discussed in detail, and all documents relating to the statuette are included in appendix II. In the second chapter of part II, the focus is on the statuette´s iconography, which is unique for a votive gift. Charles´s motives are further investigated in the final chapter of part II, which discusses the votive portraits that he donated to other shrines. In the third and final part, the attention shifts to votive gifts, and more specifically to the genre of votive portraits.

The Drama of Reform establishes the impact of late medieval and early modern religious reform on dramaturgy. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, it examines the interactions between theatricality and theology across a range of different plays including the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, Jacke Jugeler, John Bale’s Three Laws, and Lewis Wager’s Life and Repentaunce of Mary Magdalene. Tracing the development of arguments concerning the interpretation of the sacraments, the relationship between priests and players, and the use and abuse of imagery and drama in religious worship, The Drama of Reform draws on a rich variety of contextual materials including liturgical texts, heresy trial accounts, dramatic treatises, polemical tracts, and religious laws.

Focussed on the period between Archbishop Arundel’s Constitutions in the fifteenth century and Archbishop Cranmer’s second Book of Common Prayer in the sixteenth, The Drama of Reform explores the phenomenological similarities between drama and certain religious rites, notably the eucharist, and proposes that religious reform prompted attempts to reform dramaturgy. In presenting this analysis, the author argues that while drama continued to function as dramatic propaganda, efforts to initiate new modes of playing were only partially successful.

2010 saw the publication of the Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on the Science of Computus in Ireland and Europe, which took place in Galway, 14–16 July, 2006. That first collection, which had the sub-title Computus and its Cultural Context in the Latin West, AD 300–1200, brought together papers by ten of the leading scholars in the field, on subjects ranging from the origins of the Annus Domini to the study of computus in Ireland c. 1100. All those who participated in the Conference were unanimous that a second, follow-up event should be organized, and that duly took place (also in Galway), 18–20 July, 2008. The proceedings of that Conference are published in this current volume. The topics covered in the 2nd Galway Conference ranged from the general – but vitally important – vocabulary of computus (i.e., the technical terminology developed by computists to describe what they were doing) to the origins of the different systems used to calculate the date of Easter in Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. In addition, there was discussion also of the great debates about Easter, epitomized by the famous Synod of Whitby in AD 664, and the role of well-known individuals in the evolution of computistical knowledge (e.g., Anatolius of Laodicea, the African Augustalis, Sulpicius Severus, Victorius of Aquitaine, Cassiodorus, Dionysius Exiguus, Willibrord, the ninth-century Irish scholar-exile, Dicuil, as well as the late-tenth century Abbo of Fleury). Immo Warntjes is lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Greifswald (Germany). Besides computistics, his main areas of research include the use of languages in Early Medieval Europe, succession to high offices, high and late medieval burial practices, and German, English, and Irish political history and culture. Dáibhí Ó Cróinín lectures in history at NUI, Galway, where he is the Director of The Foundations of Irish Culture project. His research interests are Ireland, Britain and Europe during the Early Middle Ages, computistics, Medieval Latin Palaeography and Irish traditional music and song.

This publication is a collection of essays on the function and significance of emblematic decoration of buildings in Europe from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, dealing with general issues involved in architectural emblematics, while a number of the essays are case studies of specific types of building.

The emblematic decoration of buildings, both secular and ecclesiastical, was widespread in Europe from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. The function and significance of such decoration is, however, frequently overlooked. The two introductory essays seek to come to grips with the general issues involved in architectural emblematics. The remaining essays are case studies of specific types of building while the final two consider the relation of architecture to the book. The essays are revised versions of selected papers presented at an international conference on the subject held at the Canadian centre for Architecture in November 1994.

This volume offers a comparative approach to the crusade movement on the frontiers of Latin Christendom in the high Middle Ages, bringing a regional focus to research on these peripheral phenomena. It features several key questions: Which military campaigns were propagated as crusades on the peripheries of the Christian West? What efforts were made to gain recognition for them as crusades and what effects did these have? What value did the crusade movement have for societies at the fines christianitatis? What role did the cruciatae have in strengthening pan-Western sense of togetherness and solidarity, and what role did they have for creation of a crusader and frontier identity? The eighteen papers, ranging in scope from the southern and eastern Baltic regions to Iberia, Egypt and the Balkans, provide new insights into the ways in which crusade rhetoric was reflected in the culture and literature of countries involved in crusading beyond the Holy Land.

The foundations of European civilization as we know it today were laid in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. The Faces of the Other: Religious Rivalry and Ethnic Encounters in the Later Roman World traces the roots of the attitudes and argumentation about religious or ethnic otherness in modern western culture. It aims at deepening the historical understanding of attitudes towards otherness as well as cultural and religious conflicts in world history. The Faces of the Other discusses the conceptions, depictions, and attitudes towards the other in Graeco-Roman antiquity. The book focuses on the perception of otherness, whether other peoples or religions, in the Later Roman Empire as understood broadly, from the first until the fifth century CE. These others are ethnic others such as the Persians, Huns, and the Germanic peoples were to Romans, or religious others such as Jews were to Christians or Christians to Jews, Christians to pagans or pagans to Christians, or different cults to the ‘mainstream’ Romans, or different Christian sects to each other.

This book unravels how the agricultural sector and the rural world in Europe became more and more organised within capitalism in the years 1870-1940, and this with the aim of tackling the important challenges of the time. The focus is not so much on the myriad of individual farmers’ actions, but on the collective efforts undertaken through the interplay between the state and the agricultural civil society.

A wide variety of actors, from landowners associations, farmers’ unions, cooperatives, scientific institutions and researchers to farmers themselves (or civil society) played a critical role in the process of drafting a policy agenda, developing agricultural policies and were instrumental in implementing them in close relationship with the state. The result was a metamorphosis from mobilisation and representation of agrarian interests to a form of self-government or co-government of the agricultural sector at the national level, which would only reach its highest point after the Second World War.

These issues are explored by established rural historians, covering a period of seven decades (1870-1940). The papers provide a wide geographical perspective, from the north of Europe to the Mediterranean.

This volume collects essays from an international group of scholars who treat various aspects of the Fourth Lateran Council's placement within the development of the ius commune. Topics include the canon law about armsbearing clergy, episcopal elections, heresy, degrees of affinity within marriage, the oversight of relic veneration; two essays highlight the council's reaction to the Fourth Crusade's sack of Constantinople in trying to incorporate the eastern church into the ecclesiastical structure and liturgical norms of the Roman Church; several essays concentrate on the usage of Roman or civil law in some of Lateran IV's constitutions and emphasize issues of private and procedural law. Collectively, and headed by an essay by Anne J. Duggan on the relationship of Pope Alexander III's pontificate to the Lateran IV constitutions, the essays create a fuller picture of Innocent III and his curia's reliance on developments within the jurisprudence of the preceding half century, but they also reveal the ways in which they forged new paths and made significant contributions to guide canon law in the years following the council.

This volume, containing a selection of essays from ACMRS's 1996 Conference, reflects a broad range of interests in medieval and Renaissance studies. Although most of the eleven essays address western European topics, one essay deals with Byzantine political and theological histroy, and one touches on Arabic poetry in medieval Sicily. The chronological range is also broad, extending from the seventh to the twentieth century and including topics from an early Byzantine polemicist to the recent growing interest in medievalism, and from critical readings of early texts to implications of computer technology for future manuscript study. In some significant ways the volume continues earlier discussions of the state of the profession, such as those in William D. Paden (ed.), The Future of the Middle Ages, and John Van Engen (ed.), The Past and Future of Medieval Studies. More generally, this second volume in the Arizona series extends the theme of the first, Reinventing the Past, and makes fresh contributions to the scholarship on a number of problems. If the current volume provides a reliable gauge for the future of medieval and Renaissance studies, we are on the verge of new beginnings, increasingly outward-looking, reexamining and redefining old boundaries to reach a new and sharpened understanding of the past.

This major study looks at the heritage and literary transformation of Giovanni Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris in late-fifteenth and early-sixteenth-century Italy.The monograph is the first full-length study of the new elaborations of women’s role and potential that were being developed in the north Italian courts in this period. The Ghost of Boccaccio presents a sustained textual analysis of a selection of male-authored texts. It treats these texts as highly specific events in the development of the querelle des femmes, or ‘the woman question’, providing an important and often neglected Italian context for this question. By analysing these texts together in one volume, this study places them firmly on the scholarly map. They represent an extraordinary variety of voices seeking to be heard about the status of women in Renaissance Italy, ranging from the most conservative to the truly radical. They provide vital perspectives on constructions of women in the Renaissance. A number of these texts also represent a crucial moment in the development of intellectual strategies to challenge the dominant gender ideologies of Renaissance and early modern Europe. The book will be of interest to scholars and students of Renaissance history and culture, Italian studies, neo-Latin studies, and gender studies.

Any state intervention in society requires a high degree of knowledge. This is usually given by a state-sponsored enquiry. Some of these surveys can be traced back to Antiquity, but by the nineteenth century enquiries proved to be different because the nature of the state and the distribution of political influence had changed, and the scientific and financial means to investigate had progressed. This new context prompted states to launch large enquiries to assess transformations in the rural world: new techniques, opening to long distance trade. The heart of the nineteenth century was the golden age of state enquiries. Inspired by the nascent sociology, they fulfilled the desire for scientific knowledge accessible to everyone and the search for innovative solutions for the improvement of agriculture and rural life.

The present volume does not focus on the content of the enquiries; it examines their origins and functioning as new and important objects of historical research, with fourteen studies gathered from twelve countries. The main focus is on Western Europe, with broadening perspectives to the East (Ottoman Empire) and West (Canada and Mexico). The international comparative perspectives highlight the importance of transnational cultural transfers in the nineteenth century. French and British methods were considered models of progress and of a civilised state. Statistical methods and the needs of the administration were discussed and adapted in each state according to their conception of state power, in a context of the construction of the nation state.

The Missale Gothicum provides unique evidence relating to the liturgy of early medieval Gaul around 700 ad and offers insight into the development of the Latin language in this key period of Latinity. Its significance may therefore not be underestimated. The codex in which the text is transmitted, now preserved in the Vatican Library (Vat. reg. lat. 317), comprises the prayers for Mass for the entire liturgical year as recited by the celebrant, most probably the bishop of Autun. The Gothic Missal is the only surviving source of many rites and commemorations that characterise the specific liturgical tradition of late antique and early medieval (Merovingian) Gaul. At the same time, the codex is the earliest known source of a number of liturgical texts still in use in the liturgy of the Western Church, such as the Easter hymn Exultet and prayers featuring in Baptismal rites. This first integral English translation of the text is intended to make its sometimes rather obscure Latin more accessible to scholars of medieval liturgy (musicologists, religious and social historians) and of medieval Latin, as well as to new generations of students interested in the history and religious culture of the Middle Ages. Moreover, it is the hope of the author of the present volume to address a broad audience of interested readers, academic and otherwise, by opening up to them the unique and colourful world of late antique and early medieval liturgical life and its significance until the present day.

The source text of this volume appeared in the series Corpus Christianorum Series Latina as Missale Gothicum (CCSL 159D). References to the corresponding pages of the edition are provided in the margins of the present translation.

This book combines the Greek and Gothic Revival phenomena in the period between 1750 and 1850, showing the common cultural background of these artistic trends referring to the past. It presents examples from almost all over Europe. In addition to the introductory text problematizing the idea, there are studies of more detailed issues - topographic shots presenting the aforementioned phenomena within artistic regions, presentations of projects undertaken by outstanding personalities of the era, as well as analyses of individual assumptions or works.

Around the mid-sixteenth century, one of the largest Italian heterodox communities developed in Modena: the community of ‘Brothers’. At the beginning of the century, a flourishing humanistic tradition had inspired protests against the authority of the Church and had led many of the city’s prominent figures to sympathize with Luther and the Reformation. Over the following decades, such positions became more extreme: most of the ‘Brothers’ held radical convictions, ranging from belief in predestination to contestation of the Antichrist pope. In some cases, the ‘Brothers’ even went so far as to deny the value of baptism.

This heterodox community in Modena created a hidden network for the free expression of its reformed faith. Within twenty years, however, the election of Pope Pius V (1566-1572) and the consolidation of the Holy Office led to a harsh campaign to disperse dissenters in the city. Despite the protection of illustrious members of the Roman Catholic hierarchy, the bishops of Modena, and the dukes of Ferrara, the Holy Office succeeded in repressing the community. The history of the ‘Brothers’ of Modena therefore provides a case study for understanding how the Inquisition influenced the balance of religious Italy, changing the face of the Peninsula forever.

The book contains published papers of the conference 'Textiles & Identity in the Medieval and Early Modern Mediterranean: Paradigms of Contexts and Cross-Cultural Exchanges' of the British School at Athens held at the (Benaki) Museum of Islamic Art in 2016, as well as some new contributions.

The focus in this wide-ranging collection of studies by key scholars in the field is on textiles and their functions in various Mediterranean contexts (and beyond) during medieval and post-medieval times (ca. 10th-19th c.). The scope of the contributions encompasses archaeological, anthropological and art historical perspectives on a great variety of subjects, such as textiles from the Byzantine Empire and the Medieval Islamic World (e.g. Spain, Mamluk Egypt, Seljuk Anatolia), as well as the production and use of textiles in Italy, the Ottoman Empire, Armenia and Ethiopia. The volume offers a state-of-the-art of an often still hardly known area of study of textiles as historical and cultural sources of information, which makes it essential reading for scholars and a larger audience alike.

The book includes contributions by Laura Rodríguez Peinado, Ana Cabrera-Lafuente, Avinoam Shalem, Scott Redford, Maria Sardi, Vera-Simone Schulz, Nikolaos Vryzidis, Marielle Martiniani-Reber, Elena Papastavrou, Jacopo Gnisci and Dickran Kouymjian.

In the study of the ancient world, Babylon can be considered as the most impressive representation, historically, archaeologically, and in literature, of urbanism in the Near East. This first example of an urban centre and its cultural heritage - both tangible and intangible - provides a focal point for discussions of historical and cultural memory in the region. The eleven contributions gathered here draw together multidisciplinary research into Babylonian culture, exploring the epistemic foundations, contacts, resilience, and cultural transmission of the city and its milieu from ancient times up until the modern day. Through this approach, this volume is able to support conversations concerning the historical and cultural memory of Babylon and promote a dialogue that cuts across, and unites, both cultures and academic disciplines.

The Physiologus is the ancestor of the bestiary, a collection of chapters describing animal qualities and behaviours, usually with an allegorical meaning, which proliferated especially in England in the late Middle Ages. While much scholarly attention has been directed to the bestiary, the history of the transmission of the Physiologus has hardly been investigated. Evidence of the circulation of this treatise in the early medieval period is certainly scanty, since only two brief versions dating from this period have been preserved, one in Old English and another one in Latin. However, this monograph shows further proof of the knowledge of the Physiologus in Anglo-Saxon England. It also reveals the relationship of the only two surviving texts and their connection to the main Continental recension of the time. This study therefore demonstrates that the popularity of bestiaries in the later Middle Ages was largely due to the prominence that its predecessor, the Physiologus, enjoyed in the preceding period.

Central to many medieval ritual traditions both sacred and secular, the Gothic cathedral holds a privileged place within the European cultural imagination and experience. Due to the burgeoning historical interest in the medieval past, in connection with the medieval revival in literature, visual arts, and architecture that began in the late seventeenth century and culminated in the nineteenth, the Gothic cathedral took centre stage in numerous ideological discourses. These discourses imposed contemporary political and aesthetic connotations upon the cathedral that were often far removed from its original meaning and ritual use.

This volume presents interdisciplinary perspectives on the resignification of the Gothic cathedral in the post-medieval period. Its contributors, literary scholars and historians of art and architecture, investigate the dynamics of national and cultural movements that turned Gothic cathedrals into symbols of the modern nation-state, highlight the political uses of the edifice in literature and the arts, and underscore the importance of subjectivity in literary and visual representations of Gothic architecture. Contributing to scholarship in historiography, cultural history, intermedial and interdisciplinary studies, as well as traditional disciplines, the volume resonates with wider perspectives, especially relating to the reuse of artefacts to serve particular ideological ends.

Painted cityscapes have always captivated the viewers of medieval works of art. To this day scholars are mesmerised by their capacity to mirror the urban context from which they sprang, combined with their ability to symbolize a more abstract world view, religious idea or social ideal. Especially oil painting, which thrived in the fifteenth-century Low Countries among a heterogeneous elite and the well-off urban middling groups, succeeded as no other medium in capturing the urban landscape in its finest details. In order to gain an insight into how late medieval citizens, clerics and noblemen conceived of urban society and space, this book combines a serial analysis of a large corpus of painted city views with a critical discussion of some well-documented and revealing works of art. Throughout the book a variety of questions are addressed, ranging from the religious conception of the city, the theatrical dimension of urban space, the extent to which Early Netherlandish painting depicted the city as an economic space, how images of city and countryside functioned as identity markers of the donor, and how technical advances in the field of cartography impacted the portrayal of towns in the sixteenth century. In doing so, this study explores the duality of some of the major interpretive schemes that have determined the last few decades of historiography on late medieval Netherlandish culture, oscillating between bourgeois and courtly, realistic and symbolic, profane and religious, and innovative versus traditional.

Winner of The European Society for the Study of English - Book Award 2014 (Cultural Studies in English - Junior scholars)

This volume offers a wide-ranging and interdisciplinary treatment of European representations of the Indies between the twelfth and the fifteenth centuries. Drawing on encyclopaedias, cosmographies and cartography, romance, hagiography, and legend, it traces the influence of classical, late antique, and early medieval ideas on the later medieval geographical imagination, including the imagined and experienced Indies of European travellers. Addressing the evidence of Latin and vernacular manuscripts, the book explores readers’ encounters with the most widely read travellers’ accounts, in particular, those of Marco Polo, Odorico da Pordenone, and Niccolò Conti. Chapters on The Book of Sir John Mandeville, medieval Europe’s most idiosyncratic yet popular work of geography, alongside world maps produced across Europe, point to the ways in which representations of the Indies were inflected by temporal concerns, specifically, their relationship to Latin Christendom’s past, present, and future. The Indies relates the texts, documents, maps, and manuscripts it discusses closely to the changing ideological concerns of their times, notably those of mission and conversion, crusade, conquest, and economics. Nonetheless, the relationships that the work delineates between spatial representations and notions of dominance, whether religious, political, economic, or epistemic, have implications for the post-medieval world.

Conversion to Christianity is arguably the most revolutionary social and cultural change that Europe experienced throughout Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. Christianisation affected all strata of society and transformed not only religious beliefs and practices, but also the nature of government, the priorities of the economy, the character of kinship, and gender relations. It is against this backdrop that an international array of leading medievalists gathered under the auspices of the Converting the Isles Research Network (funded by the Leverhulme Trust) to investigate social, economic, and cultural aspects of conversion in the early medieval Insular world, covering different parts of Britain, Ireland, Scandinavia, and Iceland.

This is is the first of two volumes showcasing research generated through the ‘Converting the Isles’ Network. This volume focuses on specific aspects of the introduction of Christianity into the early medieval Insular world, including the nature and degree of missionary activity involved, socio-economic stimulants for conversion, as well as the depiction and presentation of a Christian saint. Its companion volume has the transformation of landscape as its main theme. By adopting a broad comparative and crossdisciplinary approach that transcends national boundaries, the material presented here and in volume II offers novel perspectives on conversion that challenge existing historiographical narratives and draw on up-to-date archaeological and written evidence in order to shed light on central issues pertaining to the conversion of the Isles.

The volume offers a re-examination of the rise of the Jagiellon dynasty in medieval and early modern Central Europe. Originating in Lithuania and extending its dominion to Poland, Hungary, and Bohemia, the Jagiellon dynasty has left an enduring legacy in European history. This collection of studies presents the Jagiellons as rulers with dynamic and negotiated authority. It begins with the dynasty’s origins and its dynastic union with Poland, milestones that have shaped the political and cultural trajectory of the dynasty’s reign. The volume places significant emphasis on the role of royal consorts, thereby broadening traditional gender-focused perspectives. Far from being mere accessories, queens had a considerable influence on governance, economic matters, and diplomacy. The cultural impact of Jagiellon rule is analysed through interactions with humanists and the intellectual milieu of the court. The performative aspects of Jagiellon power, including the use of words, gestures, and even intentional silences, are examined as powerful tools of articulation. Emotional factors that influence governance and intricate dynastic relationships are explored, revealing how political decisions, especially constitutional reforms, are made more rapidly when faced with perceived dynastic vulnerabilities. In Poland, the rise of parliamentary institutions under the earlier Jagiellon monarchs epitomises the concept of negotiated authority, underscoring the growing political role of the nobility. This volume thus provides a multi-faceted and nuanced understanding of the Jagiellon dynasty’s legacy in political, cultural, and gender-related spheres, enhancing understanding of European history.

The Jews of Europe in the Middle Ages presents the proceedings of an international symposium held at Speyer (Germany) in October, 2002. The collection aims at a comprehensive (and comprehensible) overview describing the variety of historical experience for European Jewries from c. 1000 to c. 1500. Leading European historians firmly based in regional, archival research have here been brought together with a number of Israeli and American scholars who concentrate on legal and constitutional aspects of the Jewish community. Historians working on medieval Mediterranean Jewries (Sicily, Spain, Provence, etc.) and those studying the northern communities (England, Northern France, and Ashkenaz) present their findings in a single, one-language collection. Regional overviews are supplemented by studies on cultural, economic, social, and linguistic aspects as well as by portraits of individual (northern) Jewish communities. The collection highlights the similarities and differences among the various European Jewish cultures, demonstrating that these cultures were no less European than they were Jewish. At the same time, the Jewish heritage has deeply influenced medieval and modern European majority cultures. This cultural symbiosis was epitomized in the European Jewish community (kahal, aljama).

This book is dedicated to studying the Karaite Mourners of Zion - the leading faction within the Karaite movement during its formative period (9th - 11th century). Like all Karaites, the Mourners claimed that the Rabbinic Oral Law was not given by God but is rather the ‘commandment of man’ (Isaiah 29.13). Therefore they called for a return to the Hebrew Bible.

According to the Karaite Mourners, neglecting the Bible caused also the neglect of the Land of Israel. For them the Oral Law was a tool of the Jewish people to strike roots in the exile. Therefore they developed a Messianic doctrine which encouraged the Jewish people not only to return to the Bible, but also to immigrate to the Land of Israel in order to accelerate the redemption.

The Karaite Mourners’ leadership practiced what they preached. From their cradle in the exile of Babylonia and Persia they came to Jerusalem, where they created a community that was called Shoshanim (lilies). This community became the most important community that ever flourished in the history of Karaism. They left behind prolific work, most of it written in Judaeo-Arabic.

Coming to Palestine, and maybe before that, the Karaite Mourners were exposed to some of the Qumran scrolls that were discovered at their time. They did not hesitate to adopt some of the Qumran doctrine and halakha, despite the fact that main Qumran beliefs were not acceptable to the Karaites.

Studying the Qumranic influence on the Karaite Mourners sheds light simultaneously on early Karaism and the Jewish sects of the Second Temple period.

This book is a history of Milan in the early medieval period. It investigates the political, social, and economic aspects of the transformation of the Roman world in one of its major centres. Its main theme is the role of monastic communities in this transformation. In the case of Milan a single monastery can be studied in great detail: the Benedictine community founded by Charlemagne, c. 789, next to the basilica in which St Ambrose himself was buried. Surprisingly, the impact which this important Carolingian foundation had upon the existing society of Milan has been underestimated by historians, partly because the history of the monastery has been studied apart from the history of the city.

The book shows how successive generations of monks helped to change the social organisation of the city and much of its hinterland, largely through their substantial dealings in property as recorded in one of the most important surviving collections of early medieval charters. This thesis challenges the views of earlier generations of scholars who downplayed the role of the monastery in the mechanisms of social change, in favour of a ‘new’ mercantile class.

In the Middle Ages, the sermon was a powerful and versatile means of bringing the Word of God to the people. In fact, in the oral culture of that period, it was the primary medium for Christian clergy to convey religious education to lay audiences. Moreover, the sermon played an important role in the liturgy and life of the religious orders. With the growth of lay literacy the sermon collection also developed into a vernacular literary genre of its own.

Two aspects of Christian piety, hopeful expectation on the one hand, and fearful anticipation on the other, were decisive factors for the shaping of religious life and practical pastoral care. Both these aspects were often brought to the fore in sermons on the Last Judgement as part of a recurrent argument against a life too much oriented towards the world. The preachers dwell on both the Particular Judgement occurring immediately after death and the General Judgement over the whole of creation at the end of times.

This volume brings together scholars from several European countries with the purpose to present their research on the theme of the Last Judgement in medieval sermons. The scope of scholars is broadened to incorporate not only specialists in sermon studies, but also historians, theologians, and literary historians to encourage research along new, multi-perspectival lines.

The Lucydarye is a late Middle English manual of popular instruction, largely religious in its orientation, though including lengthy discussions of witchcraft, demonology, and meteorological phenomena. There is a strong interest in pastoral instruction. Set in the form of a dialogue between a magister and his discipulus, it is an over-literal translation of a fourteenth-century French text known as the Second Lucidaire, itself a free adaptation of the Latin Elucidarium, traditionally attributed to Honorius Augustodunensis (Honorius of Autun). The translation is the work of one Andrew Chertsey. The Middle English text, edited here for the first time (from a Wynkyn de Worde print), bears striking similarities to other, popular works of an encyclopaedic nature, notably Sydrak and Bokkus and the Pricke of Conscience. Equally, there are many points in common with the sermon literature of the time. The Lucydarye is printed alongside the French source so as to allow the reader both to appreciate points of obscurity in the text and to observe Chertsey's translation technique. A discussion of the relationship between the Lucydarye and the various versions of the Second Lucidaire throws some light on the complicated textual tradition of the French prints.

In September 2008, the seventh edition of the International Colloquium of Greek Palaeography (Madrid-Salamanca, 15-20 September 2008) celebrated the 300th anniversary of the Palaeographia Graeca, the pioneer work of the Benedictine Bernard de Montfaucon that established the fundamentals of the discipline. Papers by renowned specialists in the field contributed to the methodology of study and to our knowledge of Greek manuscripts, and opened new perspectives for the study of the Greek manuscripts preserved mostly in European libraries, taking into account new methodological approaches, the possibilities of online resources and the results of ongoing research projects.

The Proceedings published here include contributions by specialists from over ten different countries, dealing with palaeographical issues such as ancient capital and lower-case lettering, writing and books in the Macedonian, Comnenian and Palaeologan periods, and Greek scribes and ateliers in the Renaissance (especially in manuscripts from the Iberian Peninsula). Many contributors also take a codicological approach and consider the material aspects of the codex, as well as other new research techniques. Finally, some papers deal with the book as object and how this relates to its content, as well as with the history of texts.

The International Colloquia of Greek Palaeography are organized by the International Committee of Greek Palaeography, presided by Prof. Dieter Harlfinger. The seventh edition payed tribute to the memory of the late Jean Irigoin, who died in 2006.

The letters of Anselm of Canterbury († 1109) provide the clearest insight into his mind and action, and they also constitute one of our finest vantage points to observe the formation of those profound forces moulding Europe in the late eleventh- and early twelfth centuries. The focus of the present study is the transmission of Anselm’s correspondence. It argues that many of the conclusions of earlier scholarship have been constructed on flawed foundations. Using evidence from all known manuscripts and printed editions, the study seeks to demonstrate precisely how Anselm’s letters have survived and how the surviving witnesses relate to one another. The study also aims to define the historical contexts within which our key manuscripts were copied and edited. Only when equipped with this store of information can we begin to understand the editorial processes that shaped the textual tradition of Anselm’s letter collections before and after his death.

Dr Samu Niskanen is Newton Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford.

Anglo-Saxon England experienced a process of multicultural assimilation similar to that of contemporary England. At the end of the ninth century, speakers of Old Norse from present-day Denmark, Norway, and Sweden started to settle down in the so-called Danelaw amongst the Anglo-Saxon inhabitants, and brought with them cultural traditions and linguistic elements that are still a very significant part of the English speaking world in the twenty-first century.

This book analyses the first Norse terms to be recorded in English. After revising the list of terms recorded in Old English texts which can be considered to have derived from Norse, the author explores their dialectal and chronological distribution, as well as the semantic and stylistic relationships which the Norse-derived terms established with their native equivalents (when they existed). This approach helps to clarify questions such as these: Why were the terms borrowed? At what point did the terms stop being identified as ‘foreign’? Why is a particular term used in a particular context? What can the terms tell us about the Anglo-Scandinavian sociolinguistic relations?

The main purpose of this book is to revalue Potamius of Lisbon as a historical figure of a certain importance, as a theologian of some originality and especially as a writer of great power. The first part of the research is a historical study on the life of Potamius and on his role in the development of the Arian crisis in the Western part of the empire. Particular attention is given to the problem of the different phases of his doctrinal career, which began in the orthodox party, then had a short Arian phase and finally ended with a return to Nicenism. The second part is a general study on Potamius as a writer. The topics discussed are the establishment of the author's literary corpus, the content of his works, his language and style, and his importance as a cultural figure in the age of the Arian crisis. Part three is composed by five complete commentaries on each work of Potamius: Epistula ad Athanasium, De Lazaro, De martyrio Isaiae prophetae, Epistula de substantia Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti, Epistula Potamii (fragment quoted in Phoebadius' Contra Arianos). Part four is an appendix constituted by the Latin text of each work with English translation. This complete translation is the first ever made for this author.

This volume revolves around three men who knew each other well, oversaw the political and spiritual life of much of northern France and Flanders during the first third of the twelfth century, and died within five years of one another: Charles the Good, count of Flanders from 1119 to 1127; John of Warneton, archdeacon of Arras from 1096 to 1099 and bishop of Thérouanne from 1099 to 1130; and their common biographer, Walter, archdeacon of Thérouanne from 1116 to 1132. The volume includes a detailed historical introduction and offers the first English translations of Walter's biographies of Charles and John and of several other texts: Lambert of Saint-Omer’s Genealogy of the Counts of Flanders and its continuation, poems on the death of Charles the Good, the inquest into his murder, and selections from Galbert of Marchiennes’ The Transferal of Saint Jonatus to the Village of Sailly-en-Ostrevant, Simon of Saint Bertin’s continuation of the Deeds of the Abbots of Saint ertin’s, Andreas of Marchiennes’ The Miracles of Saint Rictrude, and the third Genealogy of the Flemish Counts (Flandria generosa). The works translated in this volume are the principal sources for the reign and assassination of Charles the Good and the bishopric of John of Warneton that have not yet been translated into English. This volume will be of particular interest to scholars of medieval Flanders and to medieval legal, ecclesiastical, political and social historians in general.

Most of the source texts of this volume were edited in 2006 by Jeff Rider (Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Mediaevalis, vol. 217). References to the corresponding pages of the Corpus Christianorum edition are provided in the margins of this translation.

The articles in this book encompass a broad historical panorama and consider the presence of litanic prayers and songs in different religions, beginning with written records in the Egyptian, Sumerian and Hebrew languages and finishing with Christian works from diverse denominations. The research presents the litany as an exceptionally long-lasting genre which for several thousand years existed in the Middle-Eastern and European traditions, easily conforming to changes in religious or historical circumstances. An interdisciplinary approach by scholars representing different fields of study, including the history of liturgy, Egyptology, Assyriology, literary studies, musicology and ethnosemiotics, allows the eclectic character of litanies to be revealed, litanies which not only were a form of church prayer but also had an impact on the organization of social rituals as well as being appropriated by all the major fields of art, oetry, the fine arts and music. The musicological articles in the book address the performance of Sumerian prayers, the liturgical songs of the Middle Ages, litanies in Tudor England and polyphonic works of the great composers, such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

In first-century Palestine, a revival was taking place. Many Jews were looking for a more personal encounter with their God. They believed that the glory of YHWH was not confined to the Jerusalem sanctuary, and that in the ‘temples’ of their homes and synagogues they could be like the priests. They would offer sacrifices not of animals, but of prayer. It was in this setting that Jesus taught his followers to say, “Our Father in heaven ...”

Over the course of two centuries, this Jewish prayer became a central feature of Christian ritual. The process of transformation is discerned in various texts: the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, the Didache, and Tertullian’s De oratione. To a significant degree, each of these interpreters built upon the foundation which Jesus had established. Yet they also created innovatory significance, forms and functions for this simple prayer.

This work presents the early interpretive history of the Lord’s Prayer. It not only surveys what it meant to Jesus and the early Christians, but also seeks to address the question of why the understanding of the Lord’s Prayer changes. Biblical texts invite - even urge - new interpretations. The meaning of the Lord’s Prayer is to be found not just in its ‘original sense,’ but in the history of its meaning. This work traces the beginning chapters of a two-thousand-year-story which we ourselves continue to shape.

There has been a major trend among social scientists and historians to assume that the history of modernity can be studied without taking into consideration religion as an important factor. This in contrast to premodern societies in which religion would have played such a predominant and all-embracing role that a total symbiosis between religion and society would have existed. Both of these views are challenged by the authors of this volume. They claim that neither of them does justice to the complexity of the relationship between society and religion. They propose a theoretical framework that fully addresses this complexity by focussing on the variegated active ways in which religious agents (groups and individuals) process(ed) their societal and religious contexts in the modern era as well as in the premodern period. Viewed from this perspective, the history of Christianity appears as the heterogeneous result of an ongoing and unceasing selective processing by all Christians - and non-Christians - of their environment. The application of this new theoretical and methodological framework sheds light - often in a surprising and unexpected way - on various processes in the history of Christianity: the conflict-ridden parting of the ways between Jews and Christians; the emergence and development of early Christian rituals; the formation of a Cathar Counter- Church; the emergence of new forms of Christianity in North America; the complicated and ambiguous evolution of Roman Catholicism in modernity.

What is technique in the arts? Now widely used to refer to the practical aspects of art making, ‘technique’ was a neologism in the vernacular, and started to appear in treatises on arts and sciences from around 1750. Rooted in the Greek technè, which was translated routinely as ‘art’ until the mid-eighteenth century, technique referred to processes of making or doing and their products. Described previously as ‘art’, ‘methods’, ‘manners’ or ‘mechanics’, techniques were recorded in text with the intention of documenting or transmitting practical skills and knowledge. This book bridges the gap between the changing concept of technique and the practices currently described by it. It explores the linguistic, philosophical, and pedagogic history of technique in the arts, answering the question why the term ‘technique’ first emerged around 1750, and exploring how its meaning to artists, art theorists, and natural philosophers changed until the twentieth century

In recent years, much critical attention has been devoted to medieval texts written for recluses, such as the Life of Christina of Markyate, Aelred’s Institutio reclusarum, and the Ancrene Wisse. The Manere of Good Lyvyng, in contrast, brings the focus back to the conventual life and to the needs of a nun rather than an anchoress.

The Manere of Good Lyvyng is a late Middle English translation of an earlier Latin text, the Liber de modo bene vivendi ad sororem, long attributed to St Bernard of Clairvaux. Whether in its Latin form or its Middle English rendering, this work is a fascinating text and one with considerable artistic merit. It is neither a flamboyant text nor one strewn with images such as one encounters in the Ancrene Wisse. It is a quiet text, with the beauty and simplicity of a manuscript perfectly written in an elegant script, where no illustration distracts the reader from its reading.