Brepols Online Books Medieval Miscellanea Collection 2020 - bob2020mime

The three-volume project Cohesion in Multi-Ethnic Societies in Europe from c. 1000 to the Present explores and seeks to find solutions to a crucial problem facing contemporary Europe: in what circumstances can different ethnic groups co-operate for the common good? They apparently did so in the past, combining to form political societies, medieval and early modern duchies, kingdoms, and empires. But did they maintain their ethnic traditions in this process? Did they pass on elements of their cultural memory when they were not in a dominant position in a given polity?

This first volume of the project focuses on the cohesive function of memory, tradition, and identity politics in multi-ethnic societies. Featuring chapters written by authors from Southern, Central, and Eastern Europe, it presents sixteen case studies of the co-habitation or co-operation of different ethnic groups from the so-called ‘peripheries’ of medieval and early modern Europe that resulted in peaceful acculturation or the birth of a new identity on the basis of multi-ethnic political society. The volume suggests that ethnic identities were consciously accepted as one among various forms of identity that were possessed by social groups: they were rarely absolutized, and members of these groups preferred pragmatic approaches in their relations with other ethnicities.

The history of the Far North is tinged by dark fantasies. A remote location, harsh climate, a boundless and often mountainous wasteland, complex ethnic composition, and strange ways of life: all contributed to how the edge of Europe was misunderstood by outsiders. Since ancient times, the North has been considered as a place that exuded evil: it was the end of the world, the abode of monsters and supernatural beings, of magicians and sorcerers. It was Europe’s last bastion of recalcitrant paganism. Many weird tales of the North even came from within the region itself, and when newly literate Scandinavians began to re-work their oral traditions into written form after 1100 AD, these myths of their past underlay newer legends and stories serving to support the development to Christian national monarchies.

The essays in this volume engage closely with these stories, questioning how and why such traditions developed, and exploring their meaning. Through this approach, the volume also examines how historiographical traditions were shaped by authors pursuing agendas of nation-building and Christianization, at the same time that myths surrounding and originating among the multi-ethnic populations of the Far North continued to dominate the perception of the region and its people, and to define their place in Norwegian medieval history.

The proceedings of the SIEPM Colloquium at Nijmegen published in this volume bring together new evidence for how the corpus of late-medieval commentaries on the Sentences, especially from the second half of the fourteenth century, contributed to the development of philosophical psychology within the discipline of theology. The relation among the faculties of the soul, the limits of knowledge, hylomorphism and the union of soul and body, intuitive and abstractive cognition, the immortality of the soul, the experience of the beatific vision, divine foreknowledge and the knowability of species are some of the topics involving psychological issues that are examined in this volume. The wealth of new information presented in this volume results from the interpretation of previously unexplored sources. The essays in this volume demonstrate that the various parts and Books of Peter Lombard’s Sentences,the standard textbook of theology in the Middle Ages, provided lecturers and commentators with a variety of loci for the discussion of philosophical topics, from the principia (Denys of Montina), the Prologue (Alfonsus Vargas of Toledo, Hugolino of Orvieto, John Regis, Francis Toti of Perugia), Book I (Gregory of Rimini, John of Mirecourt, Pierre Ceffons, Hugolino of Orvieto, Pierre d’Ailly, Peter of Candia, the Vienna Group, John Capreolus, Henry of Gorkum, Denys the Carthusian), Book II (Pierre Ceffons, Peter of Candia, Guillaume de Vaurouillon, Gabriel Biel, Denys the Carthusian), and Book III (Heymericus de Campo). This diversity, within large works on theology conceived broadly, constitutes a tradition parallel to that found in commentaries on Aristotle’s De anima in the late Middle Ages.

The environment - together with ecology and other aspects of the way people see their world - has become a major focus of pre-modern studies. The thirteen contributions in this volume discuss topics across the millennium in Europe from the late 600s to the early 1600s. They introduce applications to older texts, art works, and ideas made possible by relatively new fields of discourse such as animal studies, ecotheology, and Material Engagement Theory. From studies of medieval land charters and epics to the canticles sung in churches, the encyclopedic natural histories compiled for the learned, the hunting parks described and illustrated for the aristocracy, chronicles from the New World, classical paintings from the Old World, and the plays of Shakespeare, the authors engage with the human responses to nature in times when it touched their lives more intimately than it does for people today, even though this contact raised concerns that are still very much alive today.

The chronicles of medieval Wales are a rich body of source material offering an array of perspectives on historical developments in Wales and beyond. Preserving unique records of events from the fifth to the fifteenth centuries, these chronicles form the essential narrative backbone of all modern accounts of medieval Welsh history. Most celebrated of all are the chronicles belonging to the Annales Cambriae and Brut y Tywysogyon families, which document the tumultuous struggles between the Welsh princes and their Norman and English neighbours for control over Wales.

Building on foundational studies of these chronicles by J. E. Lloyd, Thomas Jones, Kathleen Hughes, and others, this book seeks to enhance understanding of the texts by refining and complicating the ways in which they should be read as deliberate literary and historical productions. The studies in this volume make significant advances in this direction through fresh analyses of well-known texts, as well as through full studies, editions, and translations of five chronicles that had hitherto escaped notice.

The thematic frame of this issue is the anthropological notion of liminality, applied both to physical as well as imaginary places of transition in medieval art. The volume is thus dedicated to the phenomenon of the limen, the threshold in medieval culture, understood mainly as a spatial, ritual and temporal category. The structure of the book follows the virtual path of any medieval visitor entering the sacred space. While doing so, the visitor encountered and eventually crossed several "liminal zones" that have been constructed around a series of physical and mental thresholds. In order to truly access the sacred - once again both physically and metaphorically - many transitional (micro)rituals were required and were therefore given particular attention within this volume. The volume was published as proceedings of the Liminality and Medieval Art II conference, which was held in October 2018 at the Masaryk University in Brno. Authors were supposed to conceive their contributions in pairs in order to reflect on the selected topics with an interdisciplinary approach. In the end, the very same pattern was also maintained for the final publication.

La Società italiana di Filologia romanza, la Société de langues et littératures médiévales d’oc et d’oïl et la Société de Linguistique romane ont décidé d’organiser conjointement un colloque consacré au thème des « transferts culturels franco-italiens au Moyen Âge ». Le thème des transferts culturels, choisi par les trois sociétés, est apparu comme le meilleur moyen d’étudier ce qui à la fois rapproche et sépare ces deux espaces centraux de la Romania.

Le colloque a permis de contribuer au renouvellement des études comparatistes dans le domaine des lettres médiévales, favorisant une meilleure communication entre les spécialistes de la civilisation littéraire du Moyen Âge. La structuration des trois journées en cinq séances principales et deux tables rondes a également permis de réfléchir à ce sujet selon cinq approches complémentaires qui entendent tenir compte de l’ensemble des mouvements qui mettent en relation et en tension les lettres gallo-romanes et le volgare tout au long du Moyen Âge vernaculaire.

This book focuses on the city and urban politics, because historically towns have been an interesting laboratory for the creation and development of political ideas and practices, as they are also today. The contributions in this volume shed light on why, how and when citizens participated in the urban political process in late medieval Europe (c. 1300-1500). In other words, this book reconsiders the involvement of urban commoners in political matters by studying their claims and wishes, their methods of expression and their discursive and ideological strategies. It shows that, in order to garner support for and establish the parameters of the most important urban policies, medieval urban governments engaged regularly in dialogue with their citizens. While the degree of citizens’ active involvement differed from region to region and even from one town to the next, political participation never remained restricted to voting for representatives at set times. This book therefore demonstrates that the making of politics was not the sole prerogative of the government; it was always, to some extent, a bottom-up process as well.