Brepols Online Books Medieval Miscellanea Collection 2011 - bob2011mime

This collection of essays, written in honour of the eminent architectural historian Paul Crossley, brings together some of the most distinguished scholars of medieval art and architecture from the United States and many parts of Europe. Covering a broad spectrum of topics and approaches including recent discoveries, new interpretations and critical debates, this book and its counterpart Image, Memory and Devotion (also published in the Studies in Gothic Art series) offer a fitting tribute to the exceptional range of Professor Crossley’s intellectual interests, while providing invaluable insights into the present study of the Middle Ages.

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.

This volume presents the proceedings of the International Congress Chromatius of Aquileia and His Age which took place at Aquileia (Italy) from 22 to 24 May 2008 under the direction of Pier Franco Beatrice (University of Padova) and Alessio Peršič (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan) and was fostered by the National Commitee for the Sixteenth Centenary of the Death of Saint Chromatius Bishop of Aquileia headed by Dr. Mons. Duilio Corgnali, in common accord with the Dioceses of the Autonomous Region of Friuli Venezia Giulia and the adjacent Slovenian and Austrian Dioceses of Ljubljiana, Koper / Capodistria, and Gurk-Klagenfurt.

The Congress was part of a vast range of celebratory activites inspired by the desire to create a renewed Christian historical awareness of both the significance of Aquileia and its Fathers and of the strong vitality of evangelical spirituality directed at creating a synthesis between East and West, between Greco-Roman civilization, the revealed Hebrew epos, and the disruptive diversity of the new invading peoples. The Christian communities are heirs to the long tradition of the Patriarcate of Aquileia which lasted for over a thousand years and it was the passionate interest in their Christian origins which prompted the Congress. The Aquileian metropolis—patriarcal see until the eighteenth century and a crossroads where Romans and Illyrians, Germanic peoples and Slavs all met—was a cradle of monasticism and home to some of its greatest masters (Martin, Chromatius, Rufinus, and Jerome). These scholars have proven to be the beneficiaries of earlier exegetic skills (Victorinus, Fortunatianus) as well as intrepid and creative mediators of the highest and most controversial expressions of Greek spiritual and theological culture in the Roman world and of the rediscovered veritas hebraica of Old Testament sources. Lastly, Paulus Diaconus and the Patriarch Paulinus II distinguished themselves as inspiration for a modern European identity after its slow Christian and barbarian palingenesis.

The Congress brought together scholars from Europe and America who are experts on the work of Chromatius—only recently saved from the near obscurity into which it had fallen in manuscript tradition—for the purpose of providing original contributions on an international level to Aquileian literary historiography, Chromatius in particular, not always taken into account and given due merit.

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

Responding to renewed interest in the powerful early medieval kingdom of Northumbria, this volume uses evidence drawn from archaeology, documentary history, place-names, and artistic works to produce an unashamedly cross-disciplinary body of scholarship that addresses all aspects of Northumbria’s past. Northumbria at its peak stretched from the River Humber to the Scottish highlands and westwards to the Irish Sea, producing saints, kings, and scholars with contacts across Europe, from Scandinavia, Ireland, and Francia to Rome itself. This volume unites papers on all aspects of this major European power of its day, from its origins in the fifth and sixth centuries from British and Anglo-Saxon chiefdoms, through its ‘Golden Age’ as eighth-century Europe’s intellectual powerhouse, to its role as a key element of an international Viking kingdom. Where traditional scholarship has centred on the ecclesiastical high culture of the age of Bede, this work examines the kingdom’s social and economic life and its origins and decline as well. There is a stress on approaching established bodies of material from new perspectives and engaging with wider debates in the field, including monumentality, the development of kingships, and the evolution of the early Church. Areas investigated include the kingdom’s political history, its economy and society, and its wider place within Europe. Its unique artistic legacy, in the form of illuminated manuscripts and a rich sculptural tradition, is also explored.

This up-to-date discussion takes as its starting point the challenge to the traditional notion of feudalism in the twenty-five years since the publication of Jean-Pierre Poly and Eric Bournazel’s work on the ‘mutation féodale’ and Susan Reynolds’s attack on the very idea of a feudal society in the Middle Ages. While these challenges have presented a new picture of Western Europe in the so-called feudal age, one more focused than the traditional model of feudalism was, no new scholarly consensus has yet emerged.

The volume has two objectives. Firstly, it discusses the present state of research, bringing together leading representatives of the various interpretations of feudalism. It examines the character of medieval society, including questions of landholding, government, and the relationship between king and aristocracy. Secondly, it provides a new geographic perspective on the subject by considering countries little discussed from a feudal perspective. In addition to discussing countries that have been prominent in previous studies of feudalism such as England and France, the book also includes contributions on Germany, Spain, Scandinavia, Hungary, and Romania, thus supplying a truly European perspective and a comparative view of social structure in different regions of Europe.

La publication des actes d’un colloque organisé à Erice en 1994 sur le thème Les manuscrits des lexiques et glossaires de l’Antiquité tardive à la fin du moyen âge, a donné une impulsion nouvelle aux études consacrées à ces recueils inédits. Une documentation très intéressante avait été rassemblée et a déjà donné lieu à des éditions critiques de textes qui n’étaient pas encore publiés à cette époque. Mais tous les secteurs n’avaient pas été abordés pendant cette rencontre, étant donné l’ampleur du sujet. A la demande de plusieurs chercheurs, il a donc semblé intéressant de faire le point, quinze ans après, pour évaluer l’état d’avancement des recherches, mais aussi pour couvrir des domaines qui n’avaient pas encore été envisagés.

Beaucoup de progrès ont été faits depuis, surtout dans le domaine des lexiques bilingues et trilingues ainsi que pour certains recueils systématiques consacrés à diverses branches du savoir, comme la médecine, les sciences, la grammaire ou la philosophie, par exemple. Plusieurs équipes nationales et internationales travaillent d’ailleurs désormais dans ces secteurs.

Le but de ce volume, qui rassemble les actes du colloque organisé en 2010, est donc de faire un nouvel état de la question et de dresser une liste de priorités pour les glossaires et lexiques encore inédits. Le volume présente des études sur des recueils qui datent du IXe au XVe siècle. Certains d’entre eux illustrent d’ailleurs la progression des langues vernaculaires dans ce domaine. Le volume constitue donc non seulement un complément à l’ouvrage publié en 1996, mais donne aussi un aperçu des recueils qui mériteraient d’être édités rapidement.

Les articles sont l’oeuvre de F. Cinato (Paris), A. Cizek (Münster), O. Collet (Genève), E. Guadagnini et G. Vaccaro (Firenze), A. García González (Valladolid), A. Gómes Rabal (Barcelona), L. Holtz (Paris), A. I. Martín Ferreira (Valladolid), B. Merrilees (Toronto), E. Montero Cartelle (Valladolid), J. Olszowy-Schlanger (Paris), A. Rollo (Napoli), S. Toniato (Chambéry), G. Ucciardello (Messina).

This volume presents the first comprehensive overview of the major early historical narratives created in Northern, East-Central, and Eastern Europe between c. 1070 and c. 1200, with each chapter providing a short introduction to the narrative in question. Most chapters are written by established experts in their fields, who have published critical editions of the discussed narratives, their English translations, or analytical works dealing with early history writing in corresponding regions. However, the volume is more than just a summary of various narratives. Despite being written in such different languages as Latin, Old Norse, and Old Church Slavonic, these narratives played similar roles for their reading audiences, in that they were crucial in the construction of Christian identity in the lands recently converted to Christianity. The thirteen authors contemplate the extent to which this identity formation affected the nature of narrativity in these early historical works. The authors ask how the pagan past and Christian present were incorporated in the texture of the narratives, and address the relative importance of classical and biblical models for their composition and structure. By addressing such questions, the volume offers medievalists a coherent comparative study of early history writing in the peripheral regions of medieval Europe in the first centuries after conversion.

Il patrimonio della cultura classica, nei suoi molteplici aspetti (dalla filosofia agli auctores letterari, dal diritto alla mitologia, ecc.), ha alimentato, tra «continuità» e «rinascite», in forme varie e differenziate a seconda dei luoghi e dei tempi, delle discipline e degli autori, l’universo intellettuale del Medioevo, al punto che ricostruire le fortune dell’«Antichità classica nel pensiero medievale» significa di fatto tracciare le vicende del sapere medievale. Questo è stato l’argomento del XIX convegno della Società Italiana per lo Studio del Pensiero Medievale (SISPM) i cui atti vengono pubblicati in questo volume.

La raccolta di saggi offre uno spaccato della sopravvivenza della cultura classica nel Medioevo, esaminando una grande varietà di questioni, di autori, di fonti e di generi letterari, toccando ambiti storico-culturali differenti, adottando numerose prospettive metodologiche e proposte teoriche. Seppur prevalenti, filosofia e teologia non sono le uniche discipline rappresentate nel volume, che ha anzi tra i suoi caratteri distintivi l’apertura multidisciplinare: accanto a contributi di contenuto filosofico e teologico, infatti, ve ne sono altri nei quali viene indagata la ricezione di componenti del patrimonio culturale classico quali la mitologia, la poesia e il diritto romano, nei quali i protagonisti del confronto con l’Antichità classica non sono i filosofi o i teologi, bensì i letterati e i giuristi medievali.

Contributi di N. Bray, G. Briguglia, G. Fioravanti, F. Forte, G. Gambale, G. C. Garfagnini, M. Meliadò, S. Negri, A. Palazzo, C. Panti, L. Parisoli, G. Piaia, D. Quaglioni, T. Ricklin, A. Rodolfi, F. Siri, C. Steel, M. Trizio. L. Tromboni, L. Valente.

La société seigneuriale du bas moyen âge repose sur un ensemble de droits et d’obligations associant étroitement maîtres des lieux, sols et paysans. Les travaux et les jours y sont rythmés par l’exercice de pouvoirs et le poids de contraintes, mais aussi par des repères communs. La demeure seigneuriale, le château est de ceux-là.

«Résidence fortifiée d’un puissant» (Michel Bur): un type architectural est ici étroitement lié à une position de commandement politique et militaire, mais aussi économique et social. Il procure une domination sur une vaste région peut-être, mais aussi et d’abord sur un domaine et ceux qui le peuplent. Ces «manants», «villains», ou tout simplement «hommes», ainsi que les dénomment les sources, s’acquittent en rapport avec le château de prestations de garde, de guet, de charroi, de travaux d’aménagement. Pareilles tâches s’intègrent dans l’ensemble plus vaste de tout ce qui fait le «régime seigneurial».

Le seigneur est en outre, par la force des choses, gestionnaire. Des documents d’exploitation, tels comptes ou livres fonciers, peuvent aider l’historien à mieux cerner sa demeure et ses biens.