Brepols Online Books Medieval Miscellanea Collection 2019 - bob2019mime

How were early medieval people connected to each other and to the wider world? In this collection, archaeologists and historians working in very different areas of early medieval Europe explore diverse evidence - from landscape and burial archaeology to charters and chronicles - to discuss the relationships that constituted neighbourhoods and the roles these played in the processes of state formation that can be observed in the peripheries of the Frankish world. What these case-studies teach us, the contributors argue, is that polities are formed not through the exclusive operation of either top-down or bottom-up agencies, but from the interplay between them. By exploring the ways in which local knowledge, social ties, and understandings of landscape interacted with higher-level authorities and institutions, we can gain real insights into the nature of early medieval power and people’s experiences of it.

Marking the culmination of a collective effort that has spanned over a decade and three funded projects, this volume brings together case-studies from Spain, Italy, England, northern Frankia, Norway, and Iceland to offer a comparative view of polities and neighbourhoods in early medieval Europe. Drawing on new research, and offering new perspectives driven by an interdisciplinary approach, this volume is of relevance to a range of disciplines including archaeology, history, onomastics, geography, and anthropology.

In the first two decades of the fifteenth century, the Hussite religious reform movement emerged in Bohemia; it used one of the realm's vernacular languages, Czech, both to disseminate its reform ideas, and to establish strong foundations for the reform. The vernacular became a significant strategy for identification, capable of binding together disconnected religious, ethnic, political and regional identities and generating a very potent aggregate of identifications. This volume considers material from the second half of the fourteenth century to the first half of the sixteenth, beginning with the so-called Hussite ‘forerunners’ and ending with the early German reformation. Individual essays discuss the various functions of the vernaculars in different text types, social situations and religious and political contexts. Together, they correct former assumptions about the topic and provide a basis for further study of Hussite vernacular theology and contribute to the transformation of scholarly narratives about the Hussite movement by including works of vernacular religious education among the most important source material. It offers a basis for the comparative research on the role of the vernaculars in late medieval European religious reform movements.