Brepols Online Books Medieval Miscellanea Original Archive v2016 - bobar16mimeo

The transmission of knowledge in clerical and academic settings of the later Middle Ages has been relatively well studied by traditional scholarship. But successes achieved in other subject-areas by the application of a set of methodologies grouped under the rubric of ‘gender studies’ may offer insights into medieval education. This approach invites a re-examination in gender-political terms of the definition of knowledge by clerical elites and the concomitant rejection from the category of ‘knowledge’ of many varieties of knowledge which did not coincide with their template. The ten articles of this volume focus both on the perennial valorization of the content and methods of clerical/academic education, on the limitation of venues for its transmission to sites from which women were categorically excluded, and, in terms of media for the transmission of knowledge, on the attendant restriction of the techniques and media considered valid for the storage, retrieval, and communication of knowledge to those that were current in these privileged sites.

The volume addresses the following issues: what varieties of knowledge were available to communities of women? What kinds of knowledge originated in or became characteristic of women’s communities? What techniques did women develop to preserve and transmit their knowledge? In what ways and with what success was women’s knowledge valorized, both by authors from within these communities and by ‘authoritative’ figures from outside? Under what circumstances could women become authoritative originators of and transmitters of knowledge?

Appearances can be deceptive; and medieval ritual practices are in this respect no exception. They perform stability through the codification of repetitive modes of behaviour and simultaneously admit flexibility in their integration of newer forms of representation. They mask the historical contingencies of their own creation and construct alternative narratives of authority and continuity. They do not simply appear; their appearance reflects the mutual interplay of construction and modification.

This collection of eleven essays-which chronologically spans the period from the Carolingians to the Catholic Reform movement of the later sixteenth century-explores this double-edged potential in the appearance of medieval ritual practices; and, in this case, chiefly church rituals. It comprises a series of individual studies by scholars of literature, theology, music, and the visual arts. Each study examines a particular moment of change or transformation in ritual practices, illuminating, thereby, processes of ritualization. In this way, the book both provides an impulse to the recent renewal of methodological interest in ritual studies and presents individual contributions to specific scholarly discourses within this broad area.

The Jews of Europe in the Middle Ages presents the proceedings of an international symposium held at Speyer (Germany) in October, 2002. The collection aims at a comprehensive (and comprehensible) overview describing the variety of historical experience for European Jewries from c. 1000 to c. 1500. Leading European historians firmly based in regional, archival research have here been brought together with a number of Israeli and American scholars who concentrate on legal and constitutional aspects of the Jewish community. Historians working on medieval Mediterranean Jewries (Sicily, Spain, Provence, etc.) and those studying the northern communities (England, Northern France, and Ashkenaz) present their findings in a single, one-language collection. Regional overviews are supplemented by studies on cultural, economic, social, and linguistic aspects as well as by portraits of individual (northern) Jewish communities. The collection highlights the similarities and differences among the various European Jewish cultures, demonstrating that these cultures were no less European than they were Jewish. At the same time, the Jewish heritage has deeply influenced medieval and modern European majority cultures. This cultural symbiosis was epitomized in the European Jewish community (kahal, aljama).

Most famous for his harrowing ‘Sermon of the Wolf to the English’, Archbishop Wulfstan II of York (1002-23) has emerged in recent decades as one of the most important and influential figures in the late Anglo-Saxon church and state. This volume, which arises from a conference held in 2002 to mark the millennial anniversary of Wulfstan’s appointment as archbishop, is the first collection of essays to be devoted to this crucial figure. Its twenty contributors address the whole range of Wulfstan’s activities and writings, and supply not only an up-to-date survey of Wulfstan studies but also many new directions, discoveries, and insights. The studies within this volume variously explore Wulfstan’s preaching and law-making; his position in the late Anglo-Saxon church; the places and contexts in which he lived and worked; and, more generally, his learning, concerns, and ideas. The contributors, drawn from a variety of disciplines, bring together literary, historical, and art historical approaches to the study of Wulfstan, and a recurrent focus is on the extant manuscripts associated with him. Altogether, therefore, this volume provides a thorough and wide-ranging exploration of the life, works, and contexts of one of the most important of all Anglo-Saxons.

This volume explores the Viking Age colonization and exploration of the North Atlantic, from Arctic Norway to Vinland in eastern North America. Its contributors, predominately archaeologists by training, bring new evidence and an interdisciplinary perspective to a subject often dominated by sources of variable historicity. They explore the creation and transformation of ethnicity in new lands - some occupied, others empty. They also address the historiography of Norse Landnám, unravelling the processes by which scholarly interpretations of the Viking Age have been created. The result illuminates the consequences of migration in the early Middle Ages and the interplay of local and large-scale socio-economic processes. In concluding, the volume assesses the relationship between Norse expansion and later European ‘rediscovery’ of the New World.

This versatile collection of essays sets out to underline the new visual agenda in today’s research into history and the history of art. The impact of alternative imagery, of image databases and of computer-generated material has effectively revealed a separate resource-category, offering further definitions of meaning and information and requiring new methodologies of interpretation. The volume’s subtitle, ‘Towards a New Iconology’, makes the point that our conventional approaches towards the image may no longer be adequate. Its nineteen contributions all represent a moving-away from the tradition passed down ever since Gregory the Great famously pronounced images to be the Bible of the illiterate. On the contrary, the authors of this volume demonstrate that images constitute another world altogether, with its own ideology and store of information, and with its own emotional charge and seductive qualities. History and Images contains articles by eminent scholars from Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK and USA.

How did people know what they knew, and learn what they learnt? As Derek Pearsall’s introduction makes clear this is the primary focus of the collection of essays published in celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of the foundation of the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of York.

The learning materials included range from grammar books to mystery plays, and from court records to monastic chronicles, as well as liturgical and devotional texts. But the essays are not only concerned with texts alone, but with the broader and often fluid social environments in which learning took place. Many of the papers therefore question the validity of some distinctions habitually used in the discussion of medieval culture, such as the opposition between orality and literacy, between Latin and the vernacular or between secular and religious.

This volume addresses the current fashion for research on the family and domesticity in the past. It draws together work from various disciplines - historical, art-historical, and literary - with their very different source materials and from a broad geographical area, including some countries - such as Croatia and Poland - which are not usually considered in standard textbooks on the medieval family. This volume considers the various affective relationships within and around the family and the manner in which those relationships were regulated and ritualized in more public arenas. Despite their disparate approaches and geographical spread, these essays share many thematic concerns; the ideologies which structured gender roles, inheritance rights, incest law and the ethics of domestic violence, for example, are all considered here. This collection originates from the Leeds IMC in 2001 when the special strand was entitled ‘Domus and Familia’ and attracted huge participation. This book aims to reflect that richness and variety whilst contributing to an expanding area of historical enquiry.

Assembly is a central feature of the European political process between the demise of the Roman Empire and the rise of the bureaucratic state in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Historians have often neglected the crucial rule of political assemblies in their own right, concentrating instead on exceptional or extraordinary attention-catching events which occurred at assemblies. Earlier generations of scholars tried to discern in such assemblies the forerunners of later medieval parliaments and other forms of representative government. By contrast, the contributors to this volume present medieval assemblies in their own terms.

Were political assemblies in the earlier Middle Ages convened to confirm decisions already taken elsewhere or were they genuinely deliberative? How, if at all, did political assemblies create consensus? At what level(s) of the political and administrative hierarchy were assemblies held, who attended such gatherings, how were they conducted, and where were they held? The main focus is on assemblies of emperors, kings, and princes, and on those of townsfolk, though some more local assemblies are also discussed. The over-arching thematic structure relates to the purposes of assemblies and how they worked, their practical and ritual or symbolic aspects, and the degree to which they were stage-managed, and by whom. The contributors bring archaeological, as well as historical, evidence to bear and present a range of geographical, political and historiographical approaches and traditions.