Brepols Online Books Other Monographs Archive v2016 - bobar16moot

The organization of society formed a crucial element in the remarkable development of the countryside in the North Sea area in the last 1500 years. Vital questions are: who owned the land? Who gained the profits from its exploitation? How was the use of rural resources controlled and changed? These questions have no simple answers, because the land has been subjected to competing claims, varying from region to region. In early times peasants mostly possessed and worked their holdings, but lords took much of the produce, and had the ultimate control over the land. In more recent times the occupiers and cultivators gained stronger rights over their farms. Neither lords nor peasants were free agents because communities governed the use of common lands. In the highly urbanized North Sea region towns and townspeople had considerable and increasing influence over the countryside. Change came from within society, for example from the tension and negotiation between lords and peasants, and the growing importance of the state and its policies. This volume also looks at the interaction between society and external changes, such as the rise and fall of the market, trends in population, and European integration.

Bas J.P. van Bavel is professor of Economic and Social History of the Middle Ages at Utrecht University, the Netherlands

Richard W. Hoyle is professor of Rural History at the University of Reading, United Kingdom

Amongst the rites for procurating prodigies, those ominous signs of divine anger, the supplication holds a special place.

A lavish ceremony in which not only the priests but the whole Roman people took part, it gathered men, women, and children who were due to visit all the sanctuaries of the City in order to address their prayer to the gods, according to a religious rhetoric where verbal request and body language were associated. Through the supplicatio, ‘self-abasement’ rather than a properly ‘kneeling’ rite which a much debated etymology suggests, Roman people intended to placate deities of whom they acknowledged in the same way as the undeniable superiority.

The purpose of the present work is to define this rite, regarding the people, the places and the various elements it involved. At the same time, the point is also to clarify the controversial origins of a ceremonial traditionally related to the ritus Graecus. Quite similar to the supplication ‘between human people’ with which it shares most of its ritual elements, the religious supplication seems to have been influenced by the ritus Graecus and the practices which come under it, without asserting, though, a Greek origin. Complexity and contradictions characterise, as well, the supplication which, without breaking thoroughly with the austerity of ancestral rites, still belongs to the typically Roman procuration. Officially attested since the fifth century B. C., this rite disappeared in the last century of the Roman Republic, just as the notion of prodigy changed, under the influence of a new way of thinking.

Caroline Février is maître de conférences in Latin language at the University of Caen. Her research work focuses mainly on Roman religion. Her doctoral thesis and several of her articles are devoted to the expiation of prodigies.

This study of sixteenth-century Antwerp and its surroundings is an attempt to combine commercial explanation models concerning the impact of great towns on their surrounding countryside with an approach in which institutional factors, and especially property relations, play the major role. It focuses on four types of influence of Antwerp on its surroundings:

- the demographic impact

- the increasing urban demand for agrarian products

-the impact of the urban economy on non-agrarian types of labour in the countryside and

- the purchases of land and other investments made by Antwerp citizens and their impact on the property relations in the surrounding countryside

Within the framework of these four fields of interaction between town and countryside, three essential questions have to be answered: First, how can we characterize the urban influence in each of these fields? Can it be considered a stimulus for the rural economy or rather an obstacle? Second, what was the economic response of the rural economy to the urban impact? Did it respond by specializing, according to the model presented by J. de Vries, and others, or were there obstacles that obstructed specialization? Third, what role did the medieval legacies play in the interaction between the ‘capitalist’ metropolis and the 'feudal' countryside?

Michael Limberger teaches at the Catholic University Brussels (KUB) and at Ghent University. His research covers late medieval and early modern economic and social history, especially of the Low Countries.

Les dialogues de Salomon et Saturne emmènent le lecteur dans un monde religieux chrétien où se côtoient, s'entrecroisent et s'amalgament des idées, des croyances parfaitement orthodoxes, canoniques, et d'autres apocryphes et légendaires, qui se sont tissés autour des premiers. Ensuite, ces textes sont le fruit de ce que l'on pourrait appeler "le mode de pensée apocryphe", qui n'est pas le propre des premiers siècles seulement, et qui n'a jamais cessé de fonctionner.

Ainsi, les moines des monastères irlandais et anglais du haut moyen âge, du VIIe au XIe siècle, nourris autant par la Bible, les Pères de l'Église, les grands théologiens de l'époque, que par les apocryphes, même les plus fantastiques, ont continué à créer des mondes foisonnant de "fables apocryphes". Ici, ils leur ont donné comme cadre des dialogues entre le roi sage Salomon et le mystérieux Saturne.

Par ces deux dialogues en prose et ses deux poèmes, le lecteur est invité à goûter la saveur d'un ancien monde où les thèmes du christianisme s'expriment sur l'arrière fond culturel germanique.

Robert Faerber a enseigné, à la Faculté des Lettres et Sciences humaines de Strasbourg, la linguistique historique et la poésie médiévale anglaises. Il a déjà fait connaître des thèmes et des textes apocryphes en vieil-anglais, notamment l'Apocalypse de Thomas.