Brepols Online Books Medieval Miscellanea Collection 2011 - bob2011mime

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).