Brepols

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In recent years Byzantine hagiography has attracted renewed interest of the international community of Byzantine scholars and not only thanks to studies dedicated to this subject and critical editions of individual texts, but also because hagiography has been the main focus of numerous major research projects: databases, new repertories, a new version of the Bibliotheca Hagiographica Graeca and some very useful handbooks dedicated to this literary genre during the Byzantine Empire. These researches have analysed Byzantine hagiography in relation to the hagiographic writings composed in neighbouring areas, the West, the Syriac and Arabic Middle East, the Southern Slavs, etc. but also the relations between the hagiographical texts and other literary genres.

This volume introduces the current developments of hagiographical studies and on-going projects on the subject, and investigates a variety of texts and authors from the Patristic period to the end of Byzantium.

Since Byzantium never saw a consistent and definitive attempt at determining the status of philosophy and theology the way Western scholasticism did, the relationship between them in the Greek-speaking medieval world has always been regarded as a problematic issue. The essays contained in this volume work from the assumption that philosophy in Byzantium was not a monolithic doctrinal tradition, but related to a manifold set of intellectual phenomena, institutional frameworks, doctrines, and text traditions that influenced the theological literature in different ways according to the different manifestations and facets of philosophy itself.

Antonio Rigo is Professor of Byzantine Philology and Christianity at the University of Venice Ca' Foscari. His research focuses on religious life in Byzantium, with special emphasis on ascetical and mystical literature, heresiology, and theology during the Paleologan period.

The role of Byzantium in the Middle Ages is comparable to that of a modern political superpower such as the United States. The latter has a pervasive cultural impact on Europe and Asia, and similar cross-cultural relationships between East and West were also evident in medieval Europe, when Byzantine literature, music, art, and ritual were not only known but also studied and appropriated throughout the West. Scholarship on Byzantium and its relationship with Western Europe has yet to explore the full dynamics of this relationship or the extent to which the West was influenced by Byzantine culture. The papers presented in this volume offer a wide interdisciplinary perspective on the crucial importance of Byzantium for Western Europe, featuring articles on art and architectural history, social and religious history, musicology, literature, historiography, gender studies. The essays originate from an interdisciplinary conference, held in the Wissenschaftskolleg Greifswald in December 2007, which brought together an international group of scholars. The proceedings of this gathering give a new and compelling testimony to the exceptionally high status of Byzantine culture in Western Europe and invite further studies on the exceptional and unique role of the Byzantine Empire, positioned at the crux between Europe and Asia.

Michael Altripp received his PhD in Early Christian Archaeology and Byzantine Art from the University of Mainz, and currently holds an Associate Professorship at the University of Greifswald. His main fi elds of interests are at the crossroads of art and architecture with theology, and address in particular issues of exegesis, iconography and liturgy, as well as the dynamics of cross-cultural exchange between East and West.