Brepols

Landscape archaeology has, in recent years, expanded as a discipline to include various aspects of human-environment interactions in the past. In line with this trend, this volume offers a comprehensive perspective on three topics: theoretical and textual approaches to landscape, which provides an important framework for interdisciplinary research; the use of land and resources, which, while a popular topic in Southwest Asian archaeology, remains relatively understudied in connection to ancient technologies; and human impact on the highlands. The contributions gathered in this volume cover topics as diverse as agricultural practices, metallurgy, trade, and environmental research, and draw together evidence from both textual and material evidence to shed light on different places and periods from the Bronze Age through to the Roman era. Together, these varied case studies offer new insights into how different methods can be utilized to assess unique patterns in human-environment interactions in Southwest Asia.

Moral philosophy, and particularly ethics, was among the most contested disciplines in the Renaissance, as philosophers, theologians, and literary scholars all laid claim to it, while an expanding canon of sources made the ground shift under their feet. In this volume, eleven specialists drawn from literature, intellectual history, philosophy, and religious studies examine the configuration of ethics and how it changed in the period from Petrarch to Descartes. They show that the contexts in which ethics was explored, the approaches taken to it, and the conclusions it reached make Renaissance ethics something worthy of exploration in its own right, in distinction to both medieval and early modern ethics. Particular attention is given to the development of new audiences, settings, genres (essays, dialogues, commonplace books, biographies, short fiction), and mediums (especially the vernacular) in ethical discussions, as well as the continuities with the formal exploration of ethics through commentaries. Renaissance ethics emerges as a highly eclectic product, which combined Christian insights with the Aristotelian and Platonic traditions while increasingly incorporating elements from Stoicism and Epicureanism. This volume will be of particular interest to students and researchers who wish to gain an overall view of how ethics developed throughout Europe in response to the cultural, historical, and religious changes between 1350 and 1650.

Revealing Women offers a detailed and textually oriented investigation of the roles and functions of female characters in Gnostic Christian mythologies. It answers questions such as: to what end did Gnostic Christian theologians employ feminine imagery in their theology? What did they want to convey through it?

This book shows that feminine imagery was a genuine concern for Gnostic theologians, and it enquires about how it was employed to describe the divine through a contextual reading of Gnostic Christian texts presenting Ophite, Sethian, Barbeloite and Valentinian mythologoumena and theologoumena. Overall, it argues that feminine imagery ought to be acknowledged as an important theological framework to investigate and contextualize Gnostic works by showing that these theologians used feminine imagery to exemplify those aspects of the Godhead which they considered paradoxical and, yet, essential. The claims made in the first chapters are later substantiated by an in-depth investigation of understudied Gnostic texts, such as the so-called Simonian Gnostic works, the Book of Baruch of the Gnostic teacher Justin and the Nag Hammadi treatise known as Exegesis of the Soul.

Rewriting the Middle Ages in the Twentieth Century offers analytical introductions to the biographical and academic trajectories as well as the scholarly contributions of the most important medievalists of the 20th century, privileging the contexts in which their influential texts in modern medieval studies were articulated and their effect on subsequent approaches to the field. The volume pays tribute to the medievalists-historians, philologists, literary critics, philosophers, historians of art and science, and theologians-whose work effectively forged contemporary academics and acknowledges a debt of gratitude for the trail they blazed in the twentieth century. An introductory essay provides a comprehensive examination of the development of historiographical perspectives on medieval studies as shaped by the subjects of the volume, contextualizing the individual chapters and offering a critical reconsideration of the manifold ways in which medievalism has been inscribed. The chapters in the book develop from interdisciplinary and transversal strategies which reflect the kind of originative work enacted by both the subjects of the volume and the scholars who write about them. A concluding essay summarizes the place of the medievalists in relation to their professional identity, to the time in which they worked, and to the national spaces that marked their scholarly production.

This is the third volume of the series “Rewriting the Middle Ages in the Twentieth Century”, focused this time on the medieval political thought.

This book offers an overview of the national and transnational traditions of the historiography and studies the main questions and the background of this discipline in the last century.

Essays for this new volume focus on the subject’s life, intellectual and academic training; discuss major works and historiographical heritage; and locate the medievalists who have contributed to the better understanding of medieval political thought, through their work in medieval studies. This interdisciplinary resource aims to include medievalists from different fields: history, art, literature, theology, among others.

A modest man of great accomplishments, Walahfrid Strabo was a fine poet, teacher, abbot, gardener, liturgist, and diplomat. His personal notebook reveals that he loved arithmetic and astronomy. For a decade, he tutored Carolus iunior, youngest son of Judith and Ludwig der Fromme, who became emperor Charles the Bald. On two occasions, Walahfrid found and transcribed formulae and explanations of time series, often correcting them.

By identifying Walahfrid's sources and scripts, Professor Stevens is able to trace his life and scholarship, as they relate to Carolingian politics and schools in the first half of ninth-century Europe.

The early seventeenth-century English sermon was the bestselling print genre of its time, and church preaching was more widely attended than any play. Jennifer Clement argues here that a major aim of these sermons was to teach people how to feel the right emotions — or, as preachers would have said at the time, the passions or affections — to lead a good Christian life. In the process, preachers took a primarily rhetorical approach to the emotions; that is, they used their sermons to define emotions and to encourage their listeners and readers actively to cultivate and shape their emotions in line with Scripture.

This study offers an overview of five key emotions — love, fear, anger, grief, and joy – in the sermons of key preachers such as John Donne, Richard Sibbes, Joseph Hall, Launcelot Andrewes, and others. It shows how these preachers engaged with contemporary treatises on the emotions as well as treatises on preaching to highlight the importance of the rhetorical, as opposed to the humoral, approach to understanding the emotions in a religious context. In addition, Clement reads sermons next to early seventeenth-century religious poetry by writers such as Donne, George Herbert, Amelia Lanyer, and Henry Vaughan to show how the emotional concerns of the sermons also appear in the poetry, reverberating beyond the pulpit.

Bringing together rhetorical theory, sermon studies, and the history of the emotions, Clement shows how the early seventeenth-century English sermon needs to inform our thinking about literature and its engagement with emotion in this period.

During the Renaissance and at the beginning of the early modern times, with the origin of philology and the advent of a new knowledge linked to the development of print and the discovery of the New World, the art of dialectic, in the traditional Aristotelian sense, changes and finds new applications.

The creation of a public arena for discussions is linked to the development of the rhetorical resources as an appropriation of a history and a language inside a specific community of some authors with their own cultural and social characteristics. Meanwhile they don’t stop to insert their own works in the continuity or in the remains of the Antiquity.Because of the great events shaping the whole European history from the end of the Middle Ages until the 17th century, rhetoric is not separated from religion: every rhetorical practice is based upon the representation of the truth, the evaluation of the principles and the profession of faith.

Dominique de Courcelles is a research director at the French Center for scientific research (CNRS), UMR 5037 CERPHI

Although Macrobius’ work has been understood as a source likely to engage erudite interest, above all in the area of ancient Roman religion, the absence of studies emphasizing the Saturnalia’s (written c. 430 AD) literary and rhetorical aspects is unfortunate. Macrobius elaborates an innovative project for the writing of this carefully fashioned banquet. At the origin of this silence, Quellenforschung clearly ignored that the author had taken up the challenge of collecting the vast multiplicity of knowledge into an organic whole through coherent construction. Thanks to the system of readings allotted to the twelve specialized speakers who are present, Macrobius creates a living encyclopedia of ancient times. The terms of reference in which each person undertakes a speech, composes it and eventually passes it along to his neighbor, who in turn offers his own contribution to the knowledge that takes shape, inform us about the idea of discourse which the work authorizes, and which obviously constitutes a singular advancement in the definition of sermo doctus.

A former student of the Ecole Normale Supérieure de la rue d’Ulm, Paris, and an Agrégé de lettres classiques, Benjamin Goldlust is Associate Professor at the University of Lyon 3 - Jean Moulin. His research work focuses mainly on Late Latin Literature.

Ce poème moyen-anglais relate les exploits du roi Richard Coeur de Lion lors de la troisième croisade. Il occupe une place à part dans le corpus des romans moyen-anglais du fait que son héros est un roi anglais et que les événements racontés sont historiques. Cependant, au fil des réécritures, la vérité historique est progressivement déformée et le roi Richard devient un héros de roman. Sous sa forme définitive ce texte se singularise par la présence d’éléments macabres et en particulier de scènes de cannibalisme. Très célèbre de son temps, encore édité au xvi e siècle, le poème est redécouvert au xix e siècle et notamment exploité par Walter Scott.

Ce volume présente, à côté du texte moyen-anglais dans l’édition de Larkin (2015), la première traduction française du poème. Les notes et l’introduction attachent une importance toute particulière à l’étude des sources et à l’élaboration du texte version après version.

Employing a blend of historical, philological, literary, and linguistic methods, Richard Rowlands Verstegan: A Versatile Man in an Age of Turmoil paints a full-bodied portrait of Richard Rowlands Verstegan (or Verstegen, 1550?-1640) - a man whose multiple and variously spelled name reflects a multifaceted public personality. English by birth and upbringing, Dutch by fatherly descent, Verstegan spent most of his life on the Continent, employed intermittently as a Catholic spy, poet, religious translator, polemicist, and philologist. While this many-sidedness is typical of the Renaissance period, some of Verstegan’s interests and positions were innovative or extravagant - witness his familiarization of the epigram in the Netherlands (1617), or his description of Teutonic England in the Restitution of Decayed Intelligence (1605). In this collection of essays, Verstegan’s life and works are both explored in themselves and as mirrors of his times. As each contributor investigates one or more aspects of Verstegan’s careers, a wider perspective is created of English and Dutch religious politics, of the prevailing literary modes and fashions of the period, and of the picture that Europe was beginning to paint for itself. Conversely, this all-encompassing view demonstrates the centrality of a figure who has long been relegated to the margins of English, Dutch, and European history.

This book offers new and innovative perspectives on long-distance trade between Europe, the Mediterranean area, the Middle East, Africa, India and China during the Early Medieval period. The archaeological data and historical insights presented in this volume are without exception of great interest, often exciting, and more than once astonishing. The goods which travelled between the continents in the timespan under discussion (ca. 6th to 12th centuries) include pottery in all shapes and forms, textiles, coins, metal, lava millstones, glass, marble columns, rock-crystal beads, and also plants used for incense. The scope of the contributions includes the wide-ranging economic contacts of a Viking community, the changing patterns of long-distance trade in the Byzantine Empire, the spread of Chinese pottery to Africa, the Near East and Europe, the information on maritime routes provided by shipwrecks in the Java Sea, the reconstruction of an incense trade network, and the production and distribution of textiles as well as stone objects in the Middle East and beyond. The varied approaches in this volume underline that the movement of objects in Early Medieval times over vast distances not only reflect mechanisms of exchange, but also imply social networks and the transfer of ideas. Thus, Riches Beyond the Horizon sheds compelling light on a world which was much more complex and much more interconnected than has often been assumed.

Rievaulx abbey was one of the most prominent houses of white monks (Cistercians) in England, and became in the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries an important feature of the ecclesiastical and social landscape of Yorkshire. The present work is the first in-depth study devoted to Rievaulx's social history. The abbey's once extensive archives were largely destroyed after the Dissolution, but the surviving late-twelfth-century cartulary provides a fascinating insight into the process of creating institutional memory, preserving and shaping information about various neighbours of the abbey, and creating a 'map' of social networks that developed around Rievaulx. The complex picture of building and sustaining connections between the abbey and its lay patrons, benefactors and neighbours forms a core to this book. This study also examines how Rievaulx  co-existed with other religious institutions in the area, and particularly the practical dimension of friendships between abbots, declarations of mutual support between monastic communities, and how these were reconciled with a fierce competition for land and donations. Contacts between Rievaulx abbey and the nearby archbishops of York and bishops of Durham were intense and these contacts demonstrate how important these prelates were as potential supporters, and how broader ecclesiastical issues influenced their relationships with Rievaulx. Whilst exploring the case of one particular monastery this book is an important contribution to the current debate on the shaping of Cistercian practice, and particularly the mechanisms for the interaction between laity and monastic communities, during the High Middle Ages.

What anxieties did medieval missionaries and crusaders face and what role did the sense of risk play in their community-building? To what extent did crusaders and Christian colonists empathize with the local populations they set out to conquer? Who were the hosts and who were the guests during the confrontations with the pagan societies on the Baltic Rim? And how were the uncertainties of the conversion process addressed in concrete encounters and in the accounts of Christian authors?

This book explores emotional bonding as well as practices and discourses of hospitality as uncertain means of evangelization, interaction, and socialization across cultural divides on the Baltic Rim, c. 1000-1300. It focuses on interactions between local populations and missionary communities, as well as crusader frontier societies. By applying tools of historical anthropology to the study of host-guest relations, spaces of hospitality, emotional communities, and empathy on the fronts of Christianization, this book offers fresh insights and approaches to the manner in which missionaries and crusaders reflexively engaged with the groups targeted by Christianization in terms of practice, ethics, and identity.

This volume presents a thorough study of the more than a thousand preserved Danish medieval rural parish churches. It traces the transformations of church interiors from c. 1450 to 1600 (thus covering both the emergence and impact of the Danish Reformation) by interpreting material changes within a broad historical perspective that highlights changes in religious practices and liturgy. The book explores the spatial and artistic implications of liturgy as well as the role of the congregation, the donor, and the clergy both in shaping and disrupting these interiors. It sets out to answer four basic questions: What did these rural churches look like by the middle of the fifteenth century? How did they change from the middle of the fifteenth century to the end of the sixteenth? How were they used and integrated into public as well as private ceremonies? And how may these churches have been perceived and experienced by the congregation and clergy?

This study seeks to establish a methodological framework that incorporates the disciplines of archaeology, art history, history, and theology, in order to facilitate an overall understanding of the architectural setting, embracing spatial, material, and artistic elements within the church through liturgy.

Thanks largely to the introduction of new methods of recovery and analysis, archaeology is increasingly treated as a science. Yet, it should continue to ask questions that are founded in the humanities. This is especially true of social archaeology, which forms the core of this volume. Being based on the notion that ‘the social’ permeates all areas of life, the chapters gathered here give priority to archaeological data and contexts, which in turn form the prerequisite for analyzing how, at particular times and places, people negotiated or reaffirmed the society around them. Case studies from the Levant and the Eastern Mediterranean sit alongside selected comparative cases from other parts of the world and assess issues such as the development of cultural characteristics of societies, societal continuity and collapse, religious beliefs and rituals, and the role of social memory, as well as interactions within and between societies. The volume is dedicated to the memory of our colleague and friend, Dr. Sharon Zuckerman, who embraced the quest for ‘the social’ throughout her career.

La violence occupe une place paradoxale dans le bouddhisme tantrique tibétain. Alors que l’impératif éthique de ne pas nuire aux êtres est absolument central, l’activité rituelle comporte une face beaucoup plus sombre, une face de pouvoir et de violence : celle du repoussement et de la destruction du mal. Toute une machinerie rituelle est déployée pour écarter ou tuer des démons hostiles, voire des « ennemis » aux contours vagues - la magie noire n’est pas absente. De terribles divinités protectrices sont incitées à tuer, à battre, à réduire en morceaux… Comment comprendre l’importance de cette modalité violente dans le contexte bouddhique ?

La question est d’autant plus intrigante qu’il existe un type de spécialiste religieux tibétain fortement associé à ce versant problématique du domaine rituel : le ngakpa, ou tantriste. Contrairement au moine, ce religieux spécialisé dans les rituels tantriques ne prononce pas de voeux monastiques. Qui sont les tantristes, et comment comprendre qu’un spécialiste bouddhique soit associé à l’exercice de rituels violents ? Pour répondre à cette interrogation, l’auteur nous fait découvrir une communauté villageoise de tantristes située dans la bordure himalayenne du monde tibétain, dans une haute vallée du nord du Népal. Le regard anthropologique porté sur ces religieux et leur société, sur leurs rituels et leurs questionnements éthiques permet de faire émerger des éléments de cohérence qui sous-tendent l’association des tantristes à des rituels de violence. Cette contribution importante à l’anthropologie du bouddhisme tibétain apporte un éclairage nouveau pour penser la violence de l’exorcisme et, à travers la dualité du moine et du tantriste, les champs religieux marqués par la présence de différentes formes de spécialisation religieuse.

Fontevraud: 1101-2001. Fontevraud: à la fois monastère et congrégation, communauté mixte où, par la singulière volonté du fondateur, les hommes en ce temps féodal étaient soumis au pouvoir des femmes. Célébrer le neuvième centenaire de la fondation de Robert d’Arbrissel s’imposait; ce qui fut fait du 13 au 16 décembre 2001, dans l’enceinte même de la somptueuse abbaye ligérienne.

Le présent volume témoigne de ces denses journées d’étude; il intègre aussi des contributions supplémentaires, pour gagner encore en richesse et en cohérence. Volontairement déroutant, il nous entraîne d’abord bien loin du Val de Loire, dans les solitudes boisées des Apennins, où le ressourcement monastique surgi du haut Moyen Âge inaugure ce Moyen Âge que nous disons central. Les organisateurs scientifiques de la rencontre n’ont en effet pas souhaité la focaliser d’emblée sur l’originalité de Fontevraud et les étranges comportements de son fondateur. Ils ont au contraire voulu donner à lire l’accident de 1101 dans le vaste élan qui ouvre une ère nouvelle pour la Chrétienté et pour notre monde en ce qu’il en procède: cette réforme de l’Église qu’on dit «grégorienne», qui repense en fait toute l’architecture ecclésiale et sociale, des plus hauts aux plus infimes pouvoirs, des institutions aux individus et du sacré au profane.

Roger II (c. 1095-1154), Sicily’s first king, was an anomaly for his time. An ambitious new ruler who lacked the distinguished lineage so prized by the nobility, and a leader of an extraordinarily diverse population on the fringes of Europe, he occupied a Roger II (c. 1095-1154), Sicily’s first king, was an anomaly for his time. An ambitious new ruler who lacked the distinguished lineage so prized by the nobility, and a leader of an extraordinarily diverse population on the fringes of Europe, he occupied a unique space in the continent’s charged political landscape. This interdisciplinary study examines the strategies that Roger used to legitimize his authority, including his relationships with contemporary rulers, the familial connections that he established through no less than three marriages, and his devotion to the Church and Saint Nicholas of Myra/Bari. Yet while Roger and his family made the most of their geographic and cultural contexts, it is convincingly argued here that they nonetheless retained a strong western focus, and that behind the diverse mélange of Norman Sicily were very occidental interests.

Drawing together sources of political, social, and religious history from locations as disparate as Spain and the Byzantine Empire, as well as evidence from the magnificent churches and elaborate mosaics constructed during his reign, this volume offers a fascinating portrait of a figure whose rule was characterized both by great potential and devastating tragedy. Indeed, had Roger been able to accomplish his ambitious agenda, the history of the medieval Mediterranean world would have unfolded very