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One of the most important aspects of David Bates’s distinguished career has been his readiness to engage — as few of his predecessors did — with the world of modern French scholarship. The outcome of this engagement and of his familiarity with French archives has been the reshaping of our understanding of the Anglo-Norman realm founded by William the Conqueror. The Norman Conquest has always been seen as a defining event in medieval English history, and David’s work has enabled us to place it in its broader European context. He has also welcomed insights from other disciplines, including archaeology, architectural history, and numismatics. His impact as a scholar has been profound. His writings have made academic debate accessible to the general public and the scholar alike, and he has conveyed his enthusiasm and commitment to both. He has brought together a generation of academics of various nationalities and from a broad range of disciplines to forge a new understanding of the relationship of England and Normandy in the central Middle Ages. This collection — offered in recognition of his contribution — acknowledges the many strands of his scholarship. It brings together specialist studies of Anglo-French culture, law, gender, and historiography.

Continuity and change enclose a problem field that is fundamental to the interpretation of historical material. On the one hand the notions that are necessary to perceive the historical account as a narrative: continuity, tradition, constancy, consistency, identity; on the other those that provide an impetus or drive to that account: change, innovation, rupture, or discontinuity.

Resonances: Historical Essays on Continuity and Change explores the historiographical question of the modes of interrelation between these motifs in historical narratives. The essays in the collection attempt to realize theoretical consciousness through historical narrative ‘in practice’, by discussing selected historical topics from Western cultural history, within the disciplines of history, literature, visual arts, musicology, archaeology, philosophy, and theology.

The title Resonances indicates the overall perspective of the book: how connotations of past meanings may resonate through time, in new contexts, assuming new meanings without surrendering the old.

This volume aims to define the changing nature of lordship in Viking and early medieval Scandinavia. Advances in settlement archaeology and cultural geography have revealed new aspects of social power in Viking Age and early medieval Scandinavia. The organization of settlement is increasingly well understood and gives evidence of strong social differentiation in rural settlement. Historical research, however, increasingly portrays these societies as characterized by elementary social networks at a personal level rather than at the level of formal institutions. Can these representations be reconciled? When did the possession of land, in the form of manors or large demesne farms, become an important source of power and authority? This question has generated intense debate internationally in recent years, but there is no comprehensive overview for Scandinavia. New sources and approaches allow us to question the traditional view that Scandinavian aristocrats developed from Viking raiders into Christian landlords. Seventeen thematic chapters by leading scholars survey and assess the state of research and provide a new baseline for interdisciplinary discussions. How were social ties structured? How did lordship and dependency materialize in modes of agriculture, settlement, landscape, and monuments? The book traces the power of tributary relations, forged through personal ties, gifts, duties, and feasting in great halls, and their gradual transformation into the feudal bonds of levies and land-rent.

Of all the new monastic and religious groups to settle in the British Isles in the course of the twelfth century the regular canons were the most prolific. At the heart of their existence was the vita apostolica, but even more than other such groups the regular canons became involved in active spiritual care of their communities. Perhaps as a result of this feature they also enjoyed sustained support from founders, patrons, and benefactors, and new foundations continued to be made long after the main force of the expansion of the monastic orders had declined. This interdisciplinary volume brings together scholars from Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and England who work on aspects of the history, culture, art history, and archaeology of the regular canons in the medieval British Isles. Between them, the chapters of this book consider the regular canons in their wider historical and historiographical context, assessing their role in the religious, social, cultural, economic, and political world of the medieval British Isles, and introducing new and recent research on this important religious group.

Medieval Church Studies is a series of monographs and, sometimes, collections devoted to the history of the Western Church from, approximately, the Carolingian reform to the Council of Trent. It builds on Brepols’ longstanding interest in editions of texts and primary sources, and presents studies that are founded on a traditional close analysis of primary sources but which confront current research issues and adopt contemporary methodological approaches.

Space has always played a crucial part in defining the place that monks and nuns occupy in the world. Even during the first centuries of the monastic phenomenon, when the possible varieties of monastic practice were nearly infinite, there was a common thread in the need to differentiate the monk from the rest: whatever else they were supposed to be, monks were beings apart, unique, in some sense separate from the mainstream. The physical contours of monastic topographies, natural and constructed, are thus fundamental to an understanding of how early monks went about defining the parameters of their everyday lives, their modes of religious observance, and their interactions with the larger world around them. The group of eminent historians and archaeologists present at the American Academy in Rome in March, 2007 for the conference ‘Western monasticism ante litteram. The spaces of early monastic observance’, whose contributions comprise the bulk of this volume, have sought to reconsider the theory, the practice and above all the spaces of early monasticism in the West, in the hope of creating a more complete picture of that seminal period, from the fourth century until the ninth, when notions of what it meant to be a monk were as numerous as they were varied and (often) conflicting.

The period from 1200 to 1600 was the golden age of fools. From representations of irreverent acts to full-blown insanity, fools appeared on the misericords of gothic churches and in the plots of Arthurian narratives, before achieving a wider prominence in literature and iconography in the decades around 1500. But how are we to read these figures appropriately? Is it possible to reconstruct the fascination that fools exerted on the medieval and early modern mind? While modern theories give us the analytical tools to explore this subject, we are faced with the paradox that by striving to understand fools and foolishness we no longer accept their ways but impose rational categories on them. Together these essays propose one way out of this dilemma. Instead of attempting to define the fool or trying to find the common denominator behind his many masks, this volume focuses on the qualities, acts, and gestures that signify foolishness. By investigating different manifestations of foolery rather than the figure of the fool himself, we can begin to understand the proliferation of fools and foolish behaviour in the texts and illustrations of manuscripts and early books.

Ce volume recueille les actes d’un colloque tenu à Bruxelles dans le cadre du programme international «Les élites au haut Moyen Âge» et se propose d’étudier la richesse comme critère d’appartenance à l’élite sociale, politique ou religieuse et les usages faits de leurs biens matériels par les membres de ces groupes.

La possession de biens matériels, qu’il s’agisse de terres, de demeures, de bijoux, d’armes, de biens de production ou de biens de prestige, fait partie des éléments permettant à des groupes sociaux ou à des individus d’exercer leur domination sur les autres. À côté du prestige qu’assure la culture ou de la situation à la tête de réseaux complexes dans une société où les hiérarchies sont essentielles, la richesse classe et contribue à l’établissement du rang d’un individu ou d’un groupe dans l’ordre social.

Être riche entraîne un certain nombre de comportements et contraint à la satisfaction d’obligation de tous ordres: il existe un usage chrétien de la richesse et donc tout un discours sur sa signification et sa destination. La composition des fortunes, leur évolution, leur gestion et leur transmission sont de véritables problèmes auxquels le colloque «Les élites et la richesse durant le haut Moyen Âge» s’est efforcé de répondre, en axant ses interrogations sur les rationalités à l’œuvre dans les comportements des grands agents économiques de la période, qu’il s’agisse d’abbés, d’évêques ou de membres de l’aristocratie laïque.

Pour cette raison, les vingt contributions de l’ouvrage sont distribuées en trois parties, «Discourir sur la richesse», «Être riche» et «Obtenir et utiliser les richesses» qui marquent toutes trois un point de vue sur les interactions entre la richesse et la domination sociale telle qu’elle apparaît à travers les sources à notre disposition.

Cet ouvrage présente les résultats des travaux effectués dans le cadre d’un Groupement de recherche (GDR) initié par le CNRS en 2003 pour une durée de quatre ans et portant sur les matériaux du livre médiéval.

Ce groupement de recherche avait pour but de fédérer, dans un travail collectif interdisciplinaire et pluridisciplinaire, des équipes de recherche en sciences humaines, des laboratoires de sciences dites «dures», autrement dit des historiens, des paléographes, des archivistes-paléographes, des chimistes, des physiciens, des conservateurs de bibliothèques, d’archives, de musées, mais également des enseignants, des artisans-papetiers et formaires (les formaires étant des fabricants de formes à faire le papier à la main); participaient aussi au projet parcheminiers, enlumineurs, calligraphes, relieurs, etc., ainsi qu’un cinéaste documentariste. L’objectif était de faire progresser la connaissance des matériaux du livre médiéval sur le plan livresque, historique, expérimental ou analytique, en mettant en synergie et en fédérant les approches et les compétences spécifiques des personnels et des laboratoires participant au GDR. Connaissance indispensable pour son apport à l’histoire du livre et capitale pour gérer au mieux les problèmes de la conservation et de la sauvegarde de tout patrimoine.

L’originalité de ce GDR fut d’associer des recherches à la fois très différentes et très complémentaires qui pourraient, pour citer T. Delcourt, être regroupées en trois grandes catégories: «les recherches techniques sur les supports matériels de l’écrit que sont le papier, le parchemin, les encres; les recherches sur les différentes étapes intervenant dans la fabrication du livre autour de la reliure, mais aussi des ateliers de parcheminiers ou des moulins à papier; enfin des recherches sur le vocabulaire du livre et de l’écrit au Moyen Age si l’on veut comprendre avec un peu de certitude les textes, les inventaires ou les recettes qui traitent de la fabrication du livre au Moyen Age.»

Ces travaux ont été exposés au cours d’un colloque qui s’est tenu à Paris en novembre 2007.

In September 2008, the seventh edition of the International Colloquium of Greek Palaeography (Madrid-Salamanca, 15-20 September 2008) celebrated the 300th anniversary of the Palaeographia Graeca, the pioneer work of the Benedictine Bernard de Montfaucon that established the fundamentals of the discipline. Papers by renowned specialists in the field contributed to the methodology of study and to our knowledge of Greek manuscripts, and opened new perspectives for the study of the Greek manuscripts preserved mostly in European libraries, taking into account new methodological approaches, the possibilities of online resources and the results of ongoing research projects.

The Proceedings published here include contributions by specialists from over ten different countries, dealing with palaeographical issues such as ancient capital and lower-case lettering, writing and books in the Macedonian, Comnenian and Palaeologan periods, and Greek scribes and ateliers in the Renaissance (especially in manuscripts from the Iberian Peninsula). Many contributors also take a codicological approach and consider the material aspects of the codex, as well as other new research techniques. Finally, some papers deal with the book as object and how this relates to its content, as well as with the history of texts.

The International Colloquia of Greek Palaeography are organized by the International Committee of Greek Palaeography, presided by Prof. Dieter Harlfinger. The seventh edition payed tribute to the memory of the late Jean Irigoin, who died in 2006.