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.

This volume examines Florentine society at crucial moments of change that are often treated separately in historical narratives: the later years of Medici government under the aegis of Lorenzo the Magnificent, the four tumultuous years of Savonarola’s religious regime from 1494 to 1498, and the unsettled early decades of the sixteenth century. Drawing upon original research conducted during the past decade, it provides important insights into the politics and conflicting ideologies in the city as experienced by different levels of society, not only by the politicians, preachers, and intellectuals whose voices are more familiar to us, but also by women and lower-class citizens. Since no single paradigm is adequate to describe these years of flux, this volume attempts to reassess the period by uncovering the debate underlying nearly all the topics it discusses. In this way, it offers a new and multifocused approach to the study of this important and influential period in Florentine history.

The essays in this collection pertain to art history, medieval Latin culture both ecclesiastic and legal, the history of vernacular literatures, and the devotional practices of the laity. They reflect the patronage of authors and manuscript painters, from the royal through the monastic to the urban middle class, and they trace the sometimes astonishing afterlife of manuscripts. The subject matter of these studies ranges chronologically from late antiquity to the later Middle Ages, adding the emergent medievalism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Its geographic breadth extends through the major Western cultures and literatures, from England to Italy, Germany, and France. Its wide range in time and space reflects the lifetime of manuscript research, teaching, and collecting by its honorees, Richard and Mary Rouse.

A particular emphasis distinguishes this volume from other such collections: its stress on the use, and usefulness, of medieval manuscripts in the teaching of most historical disciplines in Western culture, from the broad undergraduate survey (of art, literature, history) to the specialized graduate seminar. In the last half century, public colleges and universities have increasingly appreciated the pedagogical opportunities inherent in building, through gift and purchase, collections of medieval manuscripts, formerly thought to be the province only of wealthy private schools. No similar collection of manuscript studies exhibits so clearly the role of medieval manuscripts in teaching.

The specialist authors represented in this volume have displayed, over the whole of their careers, an ability to combine the highest caliber of research with an eagerness to make their subject accessible to others through teaching and writing and public lectures. The essays offer the results of new and sometimes technical research, set forth in a manner intelligible not only to the expert but to the interested amateur.

Ces Mots médiévaux offerts à Ruedi Imbach rendent un hommage dans les formes du lexique historique et historiographique. Plutôt que de brosser le portrait d' un professeur et d' un chercheur, ils présentent une image de son monde intellectuel et des intérêts des spécialistes qui travaillent le même champ disciplinaire que lui, la philosophie et l' histoire de la philosophie médiévale en particulier. Le lecteur circule librement à travers soixante-dix études courtes consacrées à des notions négligées, marginales ou encore mal définies de la culture médiévale; il accomplit aussi quelques excursions de l' Antiquité à la Modernité, à travers les aléas de l 'histoire de la transmission des doctrines philosophiques.

Le volume comprend des contributions de: Jan A. Aertsen, Etienne Anheim, Henryk Anzulewicz, Iñigo Atucha, Alessandra Beccarisi, Luca Bianchi, Joël Biard, Magdalena Bieniak, Serge-Thomas Bonino, Bruno-Marie Borde, Jean-Baptiste Brenet, Olivier Boulnois, Alain Boureau, Charles Burnett, Philippe Büttgen, Dragos Calma, Monica Calma, Stefano Caroti, Delphine Carron, Julie Casteigt, Laurent Cesalli, Stephen Chung, Emanuele Coccia, Valérie Cordonier, Iacopo Costa, Fernando Domínquez Reboiras, Gianfranco Fioravanti, Kurt Flasch, Frédéric Gabriel, Christophe Grellard, Barbara Hallensleben, Maarten J.F.M. Hoenen, Tobias Hoffmann, mary E. Ingham, Isabel Iribarren, Zénon Kaluza, Theo Kobusch, Catherine König-Pralong, Alfonso Maierù, John Marenbon, Jean-Luc Marion, Burkhart Mojsisch, Adriano Oliva, Dominic O' Meara, Gianfranco Pellegrino, Dominik Perler, Sylvain Piron, Dominique Poirel, Olaf Pluta, Pasquale Porro, François-Xavier Putallaz, Francis Python, Fiorella Retucci, Thomas Ricklin, Aurélien Robert, Andrea Robiglio, Anne-Sophie Robin, Irène Rosier-Catach, Jacob Schmutz, Peter Schulthess, Philibert Secrétan, Andreas Speer, Loris Sturlese, Tiziana Suarez-Nani, Christian Trottmann, Luisa Valente, Anca Vasiliu, Guido Vergauwen, Ubaldo Villani-Lubelli, Peter von Moos, Olga Weijers, Irene Zavattero.

Recent research into old age and dying in the premodern world has examined not only the demographic aspects of ageing populations but also the social role of aged people. Nonetheless, there has usually been a neglect of the end of life and attitudes towards death and memory. These topics have seldom been discussed in the same volume. The end of life evokes questions. What does it mean to grow old? What happens when one dies? How does one cope with old age and death? These questions were as relevant for individuals and societies in earlier periods as they are in the present. The aim of this collection of articles is to cross the boundaries that have traditionally isolated different time periods and scholarly disciplines from each other. The volume focuses on aging, old age, and death from Classical Antiquity to the Middle Ages. The purpose of this book is to approach these themes from an interdisciplinary point of view in the longue durée. Instead of concentrating solely on demographic issues it takes a much broader view, considering attitudes towards ageing, dying, death, and memory. The volume, with its diverse topics, cuts across traditional scholarly barriers and will provide valuable analytical tools for further studies on the subject.

Continuity and change enclose a problem field that is fundamental to the interpretation of historical material. On the one hand the notions that are necessary to perceive the historical account as a narrative: continuity, tradition, constancy, consistency, identity; on the other those that provide an impetus or drive to that account: change, innovation, rupture, or discontinuity.

Resonances: Historical Essays on Continuity and Change explores the historiographical question of the modes of interrelation between these motifs in historical narratives. The essays in the collection attempt to realize theoretical consciousness through historical narrative ‘in practice’, by discussing selected historical topics from Western cultural history, within the disciplines of history, literature, visual arts, musicology, archaeology, philosophy, and theology.

The title Resonances indicates the overall perspective of the book: how connotations of past meanings may resonate through time, in new contexts, assuming new meanings without surrendering the old.

This volume aims to define the changing nature of lordship in Viking and early medieval Scandinavia. Advances in settlement archaeology and cultural geography have revealed new aspects of social power in Viking Age and early medieval Scandinavia. The organization of settlement is increasingly well understood and gives evidence of strong social differentiation in rural settlement. Historical research, however, increasingly portrays these societies as characterized by elementary social networks at a personal level rather than at the level of formal institutions. Can these representations be reconciled? When did the possession of land, in the form of manors or large demesne farms, become an important source of power and authority? This question has generated intense debate internationally in recent years, but there is no comprehensive overview for Scandinavia. New sources and approaches allow us to question the traditional view that Scandinavian aristocrats developed from Viking raiders into Christian landlords. Seventeen thematic chapters by leading scholars survey and assess the state of research and provide a new baseline for interdisciplinary discussions. How were social ties structured? How did lordship and dependency materialize in modes of agriculture, settlement, landscape, and monuments? The book traces the power of tributary relations, forged through personal ties, gifts, duties, and feasting in great halls, and their gradual transformation into the feudal bonds of levies and land-rent.

Of all the new monastic and religious groups to settle in the British Isles in the course of the twelfth century the regular canons were the most prolific. At the heart of their existence was the vita apostolica, but even more than other such groups the regular canons became involved in active spiritual care of their communities. Perhaps as a result of this feature they also enjoyed sustained support from founders, patrons, and benefactors, and new foundations continued to be made long after the main force of the expansion of the monastic orders had declined. This interdisciplinary volume brings together scholars from Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and England who work on aspects of the history, culture, art history, and archaeology of the regular canons in the medieval British Isles. Between them, the chapters of this book consider the regular canons in their wider historical and historiographical context, assessing their role in the religious, social, cultural, economic, and political world of the medieval British Isles, and introducing new and recent research on this important religious group.

Medieval Church Studies is a series of monographs and, sometimes, collections devoted to the history of the Western Church from, approximately, the Carolingian reform to the Council of Trent. It builds on Brepols’ longstanding interest in editions of texts and primary sources, and presents studies that are founded on a traditional close analysis of primary sources but which confront current research issues and adopt contemporary methodological approaches.

Studies of the vernacular in the period 1300-1550 have tended to focus exclusively upon language, to the exception of the wider vernacular culture within which this was located. In a period when the status of English and ideas of Englishness were transforming in response to a variety of social, political, cultural and economic factors, the changing nature and perception of the vernacular deserves to be explored comprehensively and in detail. Vernacularity in England and Wales examines the vernacular in and across literature, art, and architecture to reach a more inclusive understanding of the nature of late medieval vernacularity.

The essays in this collection draw upon a wide range of source material, including buildings, devotional and educational literature, and parliamentary and civic records, in order to expand and elaborate our idea of the vernacular. Each contributor addresses central ideas about the nature and identity of the vernacular and how we appraise it, involving questions about nationhood, popularity, the commonalty, and the conflict and conjunction of the vernacular with the non-vernacular. These notions of vernacularity are situated within studies of reading practices, heresy, translation, gentry identity, seditious speech, and language politics. By considering the nature of vernacularity, these essays explore whether it is possible to perceive a common theory of vernacular use and practice at this time.

Research on the practices and impacts of literacy has revolutionized the study of medieval history and culture. After initially having focused on investigating the modernising aspects of the development of literacy during the Middle Ages, the discussion now involves a large variety of topics, such as the performance of writing and reading, the use of the written word in political ritual and, on a general level, the ‘otherness’ of medieval communication. The volume presents essays dealing with a wide range of social and political uses of the written word during the Middle Ages, from the Carolingian era to late medieval Italy, Switzerland, Germany and Burgundy. It presents a panorama of the current state of the research and also offers new insights into the current conceptual debates about the history of communication in premodern Europe.

It goes without saying that agriculture is a form of colonisation of nature by society. In the course of history the articulation of natural and societal features gave rise to a wide variety of agrosystems within the boundaries of Europe which were embedded in supra-regional political and economic contexts at least from the High Middle Ages onwards. By following an integrative approach, this volume defines agrosystems as production systems based on the ecological and socioeconomic relations involved in the reproduction of rural societies at multiple levels. The authors explore the articulation of natural and societal factors through the prism of labour relations. The structural and practical organization of labour is seen as the crucial link between rural production and reproduction. Accordingly, the contributions focus on the rural household as the basic unit of production and reproduction in different temporal and spatial contexts. Therefore, the question arises if the changes in ecosystems and social systems have so fundamentally altered European agriculture up to now that peasant family farming will disappear (if it is no longer sustained by state intervention).

Ce volume recueille les actes d’un colloque tenu à Bruxelles dans le cadre du programme international «Les élites au haut Moyen Âge» et se propose d’étudier la richesse comme critère d’appartenance à l’élite sociale, politique ou religieuse et les usages faits de leurs biens matériels par les membres de ces groupes.

La possession de biens matériels, qu’il s’agisse de terres, de demeures, de bijoux, d’armes, de biens de production ou de biens de prestige, fait partie des éléments permettant à des groupes sociaux ou à des individus d’exercer leur domination sur les autres. À côté du prestige qu’assure la culture ou de la situation à la tête de réseaux complexes dans une société où les hiérarchies sont essentielles, la richesse classe et contribue à l’établissement du rang d’un individu ou d’un groupe dans l’ordre social.

Être riche entraîne un certain nombre de comportements et contraint à la satisfaction d’obligation de tous ordres: il existe un usage chrétien de la richesse et donc tout un discours sur sa signification et sa destination. La composition des fortunes, leur évolution, leur gestion et leur transmission sont de véritables problèmes auxquels le colloque «Les élites et la richesse durant le haut Moyen Âge» s’est efforcé de répondre, en axant ses interrogations sur les rationalités à l’œuvre dans les comportements des grands agents économiques de la période, qu’il s’agisse d’abbés, d’évêques ou de membres de l’aristocratie laïque.

Pour cette raison, les vingt contributions de l’ouvrage sont distribuées en trois parties, «Discourir sur la richesse», «Être riche» et «Obtenir et utiliser les richesses» qui marquent toutes trois un point de vue sur les interactions entre la richesse et la domination sociale telle qu’elle apparaît à travers les sources à notre disposition.

Cet ouvrage présente les résultats des travaux effectués dans le cadre d’un Groupement de recherche (GDR) initié par le CNRS en 2003 pour une durée de quatre ans et portant sur les matériaux du livre médiéval.

Ce groupement de recherche avait pour but de fédérer, dans un travail collectif interdisciplinaire et pluridisciplinaire, des équipes de recherche en sciences humaines, des laboratoires de sciences dites «dures», autrement dit des historiens, des paléographes, des archivistes-paléographes, des chimistes, des physiciens, des conservateurs de bibliothèques, d’archives, de musées, mais également des enseignants, des artisans-papetiers et formaires (les formaires étant des fabricants de formes à faire le papier à la main); participaient aussi au projet parcheminiers, enlumineurs, calligraphes, relieurs, etc., ainsi qu’un cinéaste documentariste. L’objectif était de faire progresser la connaissance des matériaux du livre médiéval sur le plan livresque, historique, expérimental ou analytique, en mettant en synergie et en fédérant les approches et les compétences spécifiques des personnels et des laboratoires participant au GDR. Connaissance indispensable pour son apport à l’histoire du livre et capitale pour gérer au mieux les problèmes de la conservation et de la sauvegarde de tout patrimoine.

L’originalité de ce GDR fut d’associer des recherches à la fois très différentes et très complémentaires qui pourraient, pour citer T. Delcourt, être regroupées en trois grandes catégories: «les recherches techniques sur les supports matériels de l’écrit que sont le papier, le parchemin, les encres; les recherches sur les différentes étapes intervenant dans la fabrication du livre autour de la reliure, mais aussi des ateliers de parcheminiers ou des moulins à papier; enfin des recherches sur le vocabulaire du livre et de l’écrit au Moyen Age si l’on veut comprendre avec un peu de certitude les textes, les inventaires ou les recettes qui traitent de la fabrication du livre au Moyen Age.»

Ces travaux ont été exposés au cours d’un colloque qui s’est tenu à Paris en novembre 2007.

Although barbarians in history is a topic of perennial interest, most studies have addressed a small number of groups for which continuous narratives can be constructed, such as the Franks, Goths, and Anglo-Saxons. This volume examines groups less accessible in the literary and archaeological evidence. Scholars from thirteen countries examine the history and archaeology of groups for whom literary evidence is too scant to contribute to current theoretical debates about ethnicity. Ranging from the Baltic and northern Caucasus to Spain and North Africa and over a time period from 300 to 900, the essays address three main themes. Why is a given barbarian group neglected? How much can we know about a group and in what ways can we bring up this information? What sorts of future research are necessary to extend or fill out our understanding? Some papers treat these questions organically. Others use case studies to establish what we know and how we can advance. Drawing on those separate lines of research, the conclusion proposes an alternative reading of Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, viewed not from the ‘centre’ of the privileged but from the ‘periphery’ of the neglected groups. Neglected Barbarians covers a longer time span than similar studies of this kind, while its frequent use of the newest archaeological evidence has no parallel in any book so far published in any language.

Love play or playing dead, wordplay or playing games - the notion of play inhabits all spheres of human activity. This collection of essays brings together international scholars from a range of disciplines to explore aspects of playfulness in the later European Middle Ages. From manuscript to performance and from the domestic to the doctrinal, the exuberance and ambiguity of verbal and visual play is interrogated in order to decode layers of meaning in texts and artefacts. These twelve papers celebrate the work of Elaine C. Block, whose dedicated study of misericords has, through countless articles and books, made the riches of this dizzying iconographic resource easily available to scholars for the first time. Her monumental Corpus on Medieval Misericords volumes will no doubt inform medieval scholars for generations to come, and those included in the present collection are both proud and grateful to be of the first generation to benefit from her work on this body of carvings which challengingly - and playfully - straddles thesometimes invisible line between the sacred and profane.