EMISCS14
Collection Contents
2 results
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Jerusalem the Golden
show More to view fulltext, buy and share links for:Jerusalem the Golden show Less to hide fulltext, buy and share links for: Jerusalem the GoldenThis collection brings together new work by an international cast of distinguished scholars, who explore areas as diverse as the military and ecclesiastical aspects of the First Crusade; its representation in contemporary sculpture; and the way it has been portrayed in modern fiction and film. Further contributions analyse and compare primary sources and historiography, and yet others consider the crusade in its Mediterranean context, which is sometimes overlooked. These definitive studies of established areas of research are augmented by the ground-breaking work of a number of early-career academics who are working in relatively new areas: the ‘emotional language’ used in the narrative sources; the memorialization of the crusades; and the use of literary sources for crusade studies: notably there are complementary papers on the heroes and villains depicted in the Old French poetic accounts of the First Crusade. In these twenty-one essays every historian and interested reader of medieval history will find illumination and food for thought.
Susan B. Edgington is a teaching and research fellow at Queen Mary University of London. She is an authority on the sources for the First Crusade and the early history of the kingdom of Jerusalem.
Luis García-Guijarro is reader in Medieval History at the University of Zaragoza. His many books and articles deal with crusades, military orders, church history, socio-economic history, and Iberia in the central Middle Ages.
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Jews in Early Christian Law
show More to view fulltext, buy and share links for:Jews in Early Christian Law show Less to hide fulltext, buy and share links for: Jews in Early Christian LawThe sixth to eleventh centuries are a crucial formative period for Jewish communities in Byzantium and Latin Europe: this is also a period for which sources are scarce and about which historians have often had to speculate on the basis of scant evidence. The legal sources studied in this volume provide a relative wealth of textual material concerning Jews, and for certain areas and periods are the principal sources. While this makes them particularly valuable, it also makes their interpretation difficult, given the lack of corroborative sources.
The scholars whose work has been brought together in this volume shed light on this key period of the history of Jews and of Jewish-Christian relations, focusing on key sources of the period: Byzantine imperial law, the canons of church councils, papal bulls, royal legislation from the Visigoths or Carolingians, inscriptions, and narrative sources in Hebrew, Greek and Latin. The picture that emerges from these studies is variegated. Some scholars, following Bernhard Blumenkranz, have depicted this period as one of relative tolerance towards Jews and Judaism; others have stressed the intolerance shown at key intervals by ecclesiastical authors, church councils and monarchs.
Yet perhaps more than revealing general tendencies towards “tolerance” or “intolerance”, these studies bring to light the ways in which law in medieval societies serves a variety of purposes: from providing a theologically-based rationale for social tolerance, to attempting to regulate and restrict inter-religious contact, to using anti-Jewish rhetoric to assert the authority or legitimacy of one party of the Christian elite over and against another. This volume makes an important contribution not only to the history of medieval Jewish-Christian relations, but also to research on the uses and functions of law in medieval societies.
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