Brepols Online Books Medieval Miscellanea Collection 2021 - bob2021mime

Medieval science has become an increasingly popular area of academic interest over the past couple of decades, but much of this work has up to now concentrated on France and the Mediterranean, while relatively little attention has been paid to the north of Europe. This has led to the assumption that Northern Europe stood aside from the mainstream of scientific knowledge in the Middle Ages, when in fact the region was a vital part of the medieval network of scientific scholarship. This important volume aims to redress the balance in scholarship by bringing together for the first time a collection of studies on medieval scientific knowledge that focuses on both Scandinavia and England.

The essays gathered here examine topics as wide-ranging as the intellectual network between Denmark and Paris; the role of Dominican friars in spreading scientific knowledge in Scandinavia; the practical application of technology by English armourers; fragments of scientific manuscripts found in early modern Swedish documents; the use of scientific volumes and descriptions of university life in medieval Icelandic literature; and fresh insights into the careers of the English scientists Roger of Hereford, Roger Bacon, and Robert Grosseteste. Together, these papers show the dynamism and depth of science in the medieval North, and offer new insights into how scientific wisdom travelled through, across, and between the peoples of this region.

Throughout the centuries Byzantium's ambitious authors were conscious of the significance of literary registers for the reception of their texts. They deliberately made use of stylistic elements or refrained from using certain features in order to reach their target audience. There are certain groups of texts dating from various periods where these stylistic elements can be tracked precisely by comparison of two or even more versions with their model text. Such examples of rewriting can be found particularly within genres with a broader audience appeal, namely hagiography and historiography. It is in both genres that we encounter metaphrastic processes, in terms of stylistic elaboration and in terms of stylistic simplification.

As well as stylistic reshaping, metaphrasis may also encompass the addition or removal of literary and/or thematic aspects. All these processes signify intent as well as authorial interpretation. Frequently, the ideological orientation of a text is refurbished through rewriting. Teasing out these strands for exploration helps to supply a potential wealth of information on the author (if known), cultural (social, religious, historical) context, and creative ability, as well as levels of education and literacy.

This collection of essays explores the multifaceted representation of power and authority in a variety of late antique and medieval hagiographical narratives (Lives, Martyr Acts, oneiric and miraculous accounts). The narratives under analysis, written in some of the major languages of the Islamicate world and the Christian East and Christian West - Arabic, Armenian, Georgian, Greek, Latin, Middle Persian, Ottoman Turkish, and Persian - prominently feature a diverse range of historical and fictional figures from a wide cross-section of society - from female lay saints in Italy and Zoroastrians in Sasanian and Islamic Iran to apostles and bishops and emperors and caliphs. Each chapter investigates how power and authority were narrated from above (courts/ saints) and below (saints/laity) and, by extension, navigated in various communities. As each chapter delves into the specific literary and social scene of a particular time, place, or hagiographer, the volume as a whole offers a broad view; it brings to the fore important shared literary and social historical aspects such as the possible itineraries of popular narratives and motifs across Eurasia and commonly held notions in the religio-political thought worlds of hagiographers and their communities. Through close readings and varied analyses, this collection contributes to the burgeoning interest in reading hagiography as literature while it offers new perspectives on the social and religious history of late antique and medieval communities.

In this volume, thirteen of the world’s leading scholars of medieval France explore some of the most important ideas, events, personalities, and artistic creations of the Capetian world (987-1328). From some of the earliest medieval attempts to make narrative treatments of French history, through the invention of the schools, the creation of Gothic architecture, the practices of chivalry, the practice of statecraft, and the promulgation of law codes, the volume offers a panoramic view of the kingdom and the era that has come to define the medieval world in both the scholarly and popular imaginations.

The scholars brought together in this volume share as well a common sense of gratitude and an intellectual debt to Elizabeth A. R. Brown, whose own rigour and brilliance has inspired their work and shaped their sense of the past. Political Ritual and Practice in Capetian France is both a tribute to a scholar of real accomplishment and a collection of original scholarship raised upon on the foundations that Elizabeth A. R. Brown herself set down.

This volume discusses cosmological issues in Greek Patristic and Byzantine question-and-answer literature. By adopting this focus, it yields novel insights into both the (theological / philosophical) content and the (literary) form of the texts under scrutiny. How did Greek Patristic and Byzantine authors understand the cosmos of which they were a part and the world in which they lived? And what literary forms did they use to express their questions and answers on these issues? This collection of studies shows that, in order to bring out the important intellectual contribution of the authors under discussion, both ‘cosmology’ and ‘question-and-answer literature’ should be defined more broadly than expected. Several papers deal with the crucial corpora by Pseudo-Justin and Maximus the Confessor. Other authors under discussion include Philoponus, Pseudo-Caesarius, Michael Psellus, Severian of Gabala, and Nilus Doxopatres. Attention also goes to the critical edition of question-and-answer literature, as well as to the Greek Patristic and Byzantine reception of cosmological questions and answers from Antiquity (i.c. Aristotle, Philo of Alexandria, Plutarch, and Iamblichus).

The boundaries between sacred and secular in the late Middle Ages, traditionally perceived as separate domains, are nowadays perceived as porous or non-existent. This collection on religious connectivity explores a new approach to religious culture in the late Middle Ages. In assessing the porosity of the domains of sacred and secular, and of religious and lay, the contributors to this collection investigate processes of transfer of religious knowledge, literature, and artefacts, and the people involved.

Religious connectivity describes people in networks. This concept emphasises dynamics and processes rather than stability, and focuses on all persons involved in transfer and appropriation, not just the producers. It is therefore a fruitful concept by which to explore medieval society and the continuum of sacred and secular. By using the lens of religious connectivity, the authors of this collection shed new light on religious activities and religious culture in late medieval urban communities.

The articles gathered in this special issue of Convivium offer a variety of perspectives - history of medieval art, architecture, literary studies - that explore the relations between spoliation and translation, with a particular focus on the interconnections and similarities between material/artistic and textual/literary cultures. Building on current research in spolia and translation studies, these contributions respond to the increasing interest in and popularity of these two topics in recent scholarship. A conceptual point of departure is that reuse and translation represent two crucial processes facilitating cultural dialogues and exchanges across time and space. Material and textual spolia fascinate us, because they provide various means and levels of engagement with the past with a tangible form, sometimes of an ambivalent nature. Objects, artefacts, buildings, and texts have been subject to constant reworkings, through which they have been interpreted and translated: old stories gain new significance in new contexts, just as old objects gain new meanings in new settings. The aim of this collection is to foster a better understanding of such processes and, at the same time, of the history of the medieval worlds of the Eastern Mediterranean, which is marked by constant cross-cultural encounters and interactions.

The crusades have been remembered and commemorated in many ways, from the late eleventh century until today. Soon after the conquest of Jerusalem in 1099, the fate of the First Crusade inspired literary, historiographical and artistic traditions. Participants in the subsequent crusades would look to the first Crusade for inspiration and spiritual guidance, while playing out their own ideas of crusading. Since then the crusades have been put to use in very divers ways and for different purposes. This volume explores how the crusades have been remembered, revered and ridiculed by those who participated in them and by those who in later periods made use of the crusades as an historical phenomenon. The volume thus traces the memory and legacy of the crusades by putting together essays that focus on the specific ways in which the crusades have been memorized, evoked and exploited from the eleventh century until today.

In both popular memory and in their own histories, the Normans remain almost synonymous with conquest. In their relatively brief history, some of these Normans left a small duchy in northern France to fight with Empires, conquer kingdoms, and form new ruling dynasties. This book examines the explosive Norman encounters with the medieval Mediterranean, c. 1000-1250. It evaluates new evidence for conquest and communities, and offers new perspectives on the Normans’ many meetings and adventures in history and memory.

The contributions gathered here ask questions of politics, culture, society, and historical writing. How should we characterize the Normans’ many personal, local, and interregional interactions in the Mediterranean? How were they remembered in writing in the years and centuries that followed their incursions? The book questions the idea of conquest as replacement, examining instead how human interactions created new nodes and networks that transformed the medieval Mediterranean. Through studies of the Normans and the communities who encountered them - across Iberia, the eastern Roman Empire, Lombard Italy, Islamic Sicily, and the Great Sea - the book explores macro- and micro-histories of conquest, its strategies and technologies, and how medieval people revised, rewrote, and remembered conquest.

Medieval communication followed rules that were defined, negotiated, and altered in processes of exchange. Conflicts resulting from different communication practices, as well as forms of innovation, revolve around rules that are not self-evident. Political actors such as princes and cities, chanceries, secretaries, ambassadors, and councillors formed rules of political participation, which became visible in written documentation. These rules were both formed and negotiated via processes of communication. Medieval chanceries can thus be understood as a vast field of experimentation where different solutions were tested, passed on, or discarded.

This book explores communication practices in German, French, Italian, Tyrolian, and Gorizian chanceries, as well as at diets from the tenth to the sixteenth century. Its chapters examine royal, monastic, princely, and communal chanceries. For the early and high Middle Ages, a close analysis of documents will reconstruct negotiation and communication from within the documents themselves. For the later Middle Ages, focus will turn to the chancery, with the appearance of chancery orders and chancery annotations that provide explicit insight in communication between the chancellors, secretaries, and political authorities. The growing amount and variety of documents issued in the late Middle Ages allows us to retrace conflicts resulting from differing chancery practices as well as attempts to reorganise the chancery into a political instrument for the prince. The processes of political communication will be followed in three parts. Part I focuses on the rules within documents. Part II looks at administrative processes within specific chanceries, while Part III explores forms of exchange between the chancery and other political actors.