Brepols Online Books Medieval Miscellanea Collection 2025 - bob2025mime

How can contemporary theorisations of consent help us to nuance our understanding of consent and coercion in the Middle Ages? And what can reconsidering medieval attitudes towards consent offer to our own ‘consent culture’? Contemporary feminist approaches have identified consent both as a potent political framework for liberation and as an inherently limited concept that opens out onto other important ethical questions. Proceeding from this moment, this book looks in two directions to understand the varied ways in which structural inequalities impact meaningful consent and facilitate coercion in the Middle Ages and today.

Building upon the momentum of ‘medieval consent studies’ as a newly defined field, this volume expands the focus beyond rape and raptus, assessing more varied representations of consent and coercion through an intersectional consideration of power, inequality, and sexual violence. The contributions bring together different methodologies, cultural contexts, and literary traditions to highlight literature’s capacity to reflect otherwise undocumented forms of sexual vulnerability. Offering a compelling case for integrating critical approaches like trans history, codicology, animal studies, ecocriticism, and disability studies into this field, Reconsidering Consent and Coercion demonstrates the vital necessity of a nuanced and inclusive understanding of the past for our present discourses of consent.

The body or relics of a saint could attract divine protection on the community and the place where they were kept. If, in some cases, the monasteries were structures of assistance to sanctuaries of certain notoriety, starting from the 7th century, they increasingly played the role of protagonists, autonomously managing the devotional activities derived from the acquisition or translation of relics. The need to preserve the isolation of the 'clausura' and to manage, at the same time, an increasing flow of pilgrims led these monasteries to build new spaces for prayer, communion and assistance.

This book includes the Proceedings of the International Conference held in Naples (Italy) on November 28-29, 2022. The Conference - organized, as part of a Marie-Curie research project, by the Fondazione San Bonaventura with the contribution of the Italian Ministry of Culture - brought together historians, archaeologists, and art historians to discuss the theme of spatial articulation of monasteries chosen as places of pilgrimage during the Early Middle Ages in Western Europe. From this interdisciplinary discussion, exciting insights have emerged on aspects of particular relevance, such as the organization of the funerary space and interaction between monks and laypeople, the elements of balance or clash between 'clausura' and hospitality and the comparison between male and female monasteries as devotional centers.

In recent years, archaeologists working at Norse sites across the North Atlantic have excavated a number of very small churches with cemeteries, often associated with individual farms. Such sites seem to be a characteristic feature of early ecclesiastical establishments in Norse settlements around the North Atlantic, and they stand in marked contrast to church sites elsewhere in Europe. But what was the reason behind this phenomenon?

From Greenland to Denmark, and from Ireland to the Hebrides, Iceland, and Norway, this volume presents a much-needed overview of small church studies from around the North Atlantic. The chapters gathered here discuss the different types of evidence for small churches and early ecclesiastical landscapes, review existing debates, and develop a synthesis that places the small churches in a broader context. Ultimately, despite the varied types of data at play, the contributions to this volume combine to offer a more coherent picture of the small church phenomenon, pointing to a church that was able to answer the needs of a newly converted population despite the lack of an established infrastructure, and throwing new light on how people lived and worshipped in an environment of dispersed settlements.

This book is the result of an international conference organized by the University of Tours in May 2021. It sets out to explore the notion of sequel in literature by examining the Homeric poems. While Gérard Genette evoked Homer in a considerable number of pages of his essay Palimpsestes, he however paid particular attention to forms of continuity from the front, from the back and from the sides, afterwards and sideways, which seem to make Homeric material the first victim of the cyclical additions that appear to constitute the ineluctable future of the great epics. In recent decades, however, these positions have been strongly nuanced and the time was ripe, therefore, for diachronic reflection on the validity of the notion of the ‘Homeric sequel’ by testing the meaning it has in various geographical and cultural contexts, from Antiquity to the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

The authors of this volume contribute to the discussion of the literary concept of ‘continuation’ and offer a wide panorama of the poet's fruitful reception over time; they do so without neglecting the phenomena of transformation made possible by the survival of a mythology of Homeric origin which exists despite the absence of a direct reading of the Greek texts.

The interconnected histories of Judaism and Christianity are explored in this compelling volume honouring the influential work of Jeremy Cohen. Cohen’s pioneering studies have reshaped our understanding of these religious traditions, emphasizing the crucial role of cross-religious engagements in forming their self-perceptions and identities.

Comprising fifteen chapters, the book is organized into four thematic sections. The first section, Literary Mirrors and Inter-Religious Representations, explores patterns of internalizations, (mis)representations, and appropriations between competing religious traditions. The second section, Physical and Figurative Encounters, addresses the roles played by visible and physical markers in setting interreligious boundaries and exchanges. The third section, Agents of Anti-Jewish Discourse, focuses on Christian thinkers of the late Middle Ages who propagated anti-Jewish measures or prejudices across different genres and causes. The final section, The Transformability of the Jews and the Hermeneutics of Inter-Religious Conversion, examines the cultural and intellectual impact of different efforts to convert Jews and Jewishness.

This collection of new studies by leading medievalists serves as a fitting tribute to Jeremy Cohen’s groundbreaking contributions and offers readers an insightful look into the complex world of medieval and early modern religious identity.

The two books of Scriptor, Cantor & Notator present an innovative multi-author project dealing with the complex interconnections between learning, writing and performing chant in the Middle Ages. A number of different methodological approaches have been employed, with the aim of beginning to understand the phenomenon of chant transmission over a large geographical area, linking and contrasting modern definitions of East and West. Thus, in spite of this wide geographical spread, and the consequent variety of rites, languages and musical styles involved, the common thread of parallels and similarities between various chant repertoires arising from the need to fix oral repertories in a written form, and the challenges involved in so doing, are what bring this wide variety of repertoires and approaches together. This multi-centric multi-disciplinary approach will encourage scholars working in these areas to consider their work as part of a much larger geographical and historical picture, and thus reveal to reader and listener more, and far richer, patterns of connections and developments than might otherwise have been suspected. The Materiality of Sound in Chant Manuscripts in the East brings together articles on ancient Greek, Byzantine, Coptic and Armenian music scripts in the East. Together with the collection of essays published in The Materiality of Sound in Chant Manuscripts in the West, these books discuss local scribal peculiarities and idiosyncrasies beyond the cultural and geographical contexts of production and uses of their manuscript sources.

This collection of essays is the first to focus exclusively on the Wittelsbach court of Duke Wilhelm IV of Bavaria (1493–1550). The contributors argue for a deeper understanding of this duke’s reign and acknowledge his crucial role in shaping the religious and cultural identity of the Duchy of Bavaria. By providing insights into the duke’s cultural aspirations, the organisation of the court, musical sources, religious musical practice, and everyday working life, this book aims to: (1) situate the court of Wilhelm IV in the context of the religious and political upheavals of the early sixteenth century; (2) trace the development of the musical repertoire and personnel of the Bavarian court chapel between 1500 and 1550; and (3) critically assess the degree to which the Munich court could be considered ‘modern’ by re-evaluating the broader cultural, religious, and musical life of the court around 1520. The volume thus sheds light on the cultural ambitions of a duke who defined music and art as expressions of strategic elements that interwove tradition, devotion, and representation in a programme of governance based on humanist education—a duke whose foresight enabled the Munich court to quickly become one of the most prestigious and famous seats of power in the Holy Roman Empire.

Roman wooden writing tablets, known in Latin as tabulae ceratae, have been found by archaeologists in various locations around the former capital of the civitas/municipium Tungrorum or Roman Tongeren (now the Belgian city of Tongeren-Borgloon). These rare and delicate finds are remarkable not only due to the excellent state of their preservation, but also because they are inscribed with the remnants of texts, once etched into an overlying wax layer, that can, to the discerning eye, still be deciphered. The tablets not only provide concrete information about religious, judicial and administrative practices, but they also enhance our understanding of the complex processes of Romanisation and Latinisation in the northwestern civitates and municipia of the Roman Empire.

Unearthed in the first half of the twentieth century, with a second group discovered in 2013, the Roman tablets housed in the Gallo-Roman Museum of Tongeren-Borgloon and in the city’s municipal heritage depository, became the object of an in-depth study by an international team of specialists piloted by the Gallo-Roman Museum. It is the results of this project that are presented here in this volume for the first time. The painstaking process of deciphering and interpreting the script marks and text fragments is explored via analysis of palaeography, philology and onomastics, along with key scientific techniques such as wax analysis, wood species identification, and script visualisation by Multi-Light Reflectance Imaging. Rich detail is also provided about other associated wooden finds that shed light on how and where the tablets were produced.

The result is a beautifully illustrated and insightful volume that introduces the lost world of Roman Tongeren and its writing tablets to professionals and the general public alike.

What different mechanisms did women religious use to interpret the communal and individual aspects of enclosure throughout history? To what extent was enclosure a pivotal feature of Christian spiritual, social and cultural life? How did social and political contexts shape the strategies of nuns and beatas in accepting or rejecting strict enclosure?

Within Walls explores the diverse experiences of enclosure within female Christian spiritualities, presenting it as a crucial concept for a deep understanding of the history of women religious. The volume primarily aims to show the different ways in which women religious lived, negotiated and redefined enclosure in its material and symbolic dimensions. Covering the period from the New Testament era to the late sixteenth century, and spanning regions from the Holy Land and Egypt to Western Europe and colonial Mexico, it  explores the evolving meanings and uses of the confined life as experienced and shaped by women religious in Christianity.

The case studies presented in this volume—from the strategies of seclusion of early Christian anchoresses to the plethora of voices of Mediaeval and Early Modern female communities and the authority wielded by individual nuns, pilgrims, prioresses, reformers and mystics—argue that there was by no means a single form of enclosure in female Christian religious life. Instead, inspired by Philip Sheldrake’s interpretation of sacred spaces as polyphonic, this volume stresses the multivocality and multilocality of the term. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach that integrates microhistory, human geography, the cultural analysis of materiality, literary studies, feminist and gender studies, indigenous methodologies, art studies, postcolonial anthropology and the philosophy of religion and spirituality, Within Walls provides fresh perspectives on the most intricate dimension of religious life in history.