Medieval history (c. 500-1500): genres & specific topics
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La voix de son maître
Les hérauts d’armes au service des ducs de Bourgogne (1363-1519)
Le héraut d’armes est un personnage incontournable du Moyen Âge occidental. Spécialiste des tournois présent au côté du prince lors des grandes cérémonies constamment sur les routes pour porter des lettres aux différents souverains il est aussi l’un des meilleurs connaisseurs de la noblesse occidentale.
L’émergence de ces officiers dans la société de cour est fulgurante. Apparus à la fin du XIIe siècle au sein du groupe des jongleurs et des ménestrels ils se mettent dès la fin du XIVe siècle au service des grands seigneurs des villes et des princes pour devenir au dernier siècle du Moyen Âge une véritable institution en France en Angleterre ou en Bourgogne.
Les Pays-Bas bourguignons offrent sans aucun doute un des meilleurs exemples de l’épanouissement de l’office d’armes au sein d’une cour médiévale. Véritables porte-voix du duc chargés de prononcer les déclarations de guerre et de publier la paix les hérauts sont omniprésents dans la conduite de la guerre ou dans la diplomatie de Philippe le Bon et de Charles le Téméraire. Baptisés du nom de provinces bourguignonnes vêtus de leur cotte d’armes ils représentent l’État bourguignon autant que le duc lui même jusqu’à en devenir son avatar.
Reconsidering Consent and Coercion
Power, Vulnerability, and Sexual Violence in Medieval Literature
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.
Massa Marittima (1470-1500)
Essai sur les ressources naturelles en Toscane
Cet ouvrage vise à explorer les modalités d’exploitation des ressources naturelles dans la Maremme siennoise – autour de la ville de Massa Marittima – à la fin du Moyen Âge. La séquence chronologique resserrée permet d’embrasser une ample documentation (urbaine notariée) provenant de différents fonds archivistiques ou des données archéologiques et d’étudier ensemble un large panel d’activités rurales artisanales et industrielles qui jusqu’alors n’avaient pas toutes été analysées ensemble. La période retenue (1470-1500) correspond à un moment de basculement marqué notamment par la reprise de la production métallurgique par l’essor de la production d’alun et par des bouleversements politiques majeurs qui affectent l’État siennois (avec notamment la mise en place à partir de 1487 d’un régime oligarchique). Les ressources sont au coeur des relations nouvelles qui se nouent entre les Massétans et désormais les élites siennoises qui entendent tirer profit de nouvelles richesses. L’ouvrage entend proposer un aperçu des modifications sociales politiques et environnementales qui confèrent un destin singulier à la Maremme.
Small Churches and Religious Landscapes in the North Atlantic c. 900–1300
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.
Medicine in the Medieval North Atlantic World
Vernacular Texts and Traditions
Studies of medical learning in medieval England Wales Ireland and Scandinavia have traditionally focused on each geographical region individually with the North Atlantic perceived as a region largely peripheral to European culture. Such an approach however means that knowledge within this part of the world is never considered in the context of more global interactions where scholars were in fact deeply engaged in wider intellectual currents concerning medicine and healing that stemmed from both continental Europe and the Middle East.
The chapters in this interdisciplinary collection draw together new research from historians literary scholars and linguists working on Norse English and Celtic material in order to bring fresh insights into the multilingual and cross-cultural nature of medical learning in northern Europe during the Middle Ages c. 700–1600. They interrogate medical texts and ideas in both Latin and vernacular languages addressing questions of translation cultural and scientific inheritance and exchange and historical conceptions of health and the human being within nature. In doing so this volume offers an in-depth study of the reception and transmission of medical knowledge that furthers our understanding both of scholarship in the medieval North Atlantic and across medieval Europe as a whole.
Armeeführung und Militäreliten in Byzanz, 1081–1203
Selektion, Hierarchie, Repräsentation
Das mittelalterliche Byzanz erlebte während des „langen“ zwölften Jahrhunderts (1081-1204) eine letzte Phase als mediterrane Großmacht. Nach den Krisen des ausgehenden elften Jahrhunderts führte die Etablierung der komnenischen Herrscherdynastie zu einer Periode innerer und äußerer Stabilität. Erst in den politisch und militärisch turbulenten 1180er Jahren sollte das System erneut unter massiven Druck geraten bevor die Zäsur des IV. Kreuzzuges (1204) gar das vorläufige Ende der staatlichen Einheit brachte.
Die byzantinischen Streitkräfte spielten in dieser Zeit stets eine zentrale Rolle für Staat und Gesellschaft nicht nur als Instrument der Gewaltausübung und Herrschaftsdurchsetzung sondern auch als Arbeitgeber Konsument von Gütern und Dienstleistungen Betätigungsfeld der Machtelite Kanal sozialen Aufstiegs und Ort der Integration ausländischer Eliten. Die kaiserlichen Feldherren und Kommandeure lassen sich nicht als reine Funktionselite betrachten sondern sie waren eingebunden in den Mikrokosmos des Hofes in Familien- und Patronagebeziehungen regionale und ethnische Netzwerke. Ihre Geschichte ist nicht nur Militär- sondern stets auch Sozial- Politik- Wirtschafts- und Kulturgeschichte.
Das vorliegende Werk analysiert zum ersten Mal systematisch die personelle soziale ethnische und regionale Zusammensetzung der kaiserlichen Feldherren und Offiziere. Die Dynamik politischer gesellschaftlicher und militärischer Rahmenbedingungen veränderte immer wieder die Personalstrategien der aufeinanderfolgenden Regierungen wie auch die Praktiken der Auswahl und Selektion sowie den Umgang mit formellen und informellen Hierarchien. Die Strukturen und Praktiken militärischer Führung waren dabei stets in gesellschafts- und zeitspezifische Semantiken und Diskurse eingebettet die ein spezifisch byzantinisches Bild militärischer Führungskultur erkennen lassen.
The Byzantine Historiographical Prefaces (4th–15th Centuries)
A Study on the Praxis and Culture of Writing History in Byzantium
In recent years a lively debate has developed on the features of Byzantine historiography. The increasingly dominant tendency today is to treat historical texts more as pleasant literary narratives than as systematic historical accounts of the political and military history of Byzantium. The present study aims to contribute to this debate by revisiting the voices of the Byzantine authors themselves focusing on the extant historical prefaces from the Early Middle and Late Byzantine eras. This seemed timely more than a century after the publication of Ηeinrich Lieberich’s fundamental work on Byzantine historiographical proems.
Obviously not all prefaces are of equal interest: some serve a purely conventional function while others are composed more thoughtfully and merit more careful attention. The book’s goal is twofold: firstly to outline the details of the prefatory function of the Byzantine historiographical proems as microtexts; secondly to detect and evaluate the theoretical views expressed by the authors of each period regarding the genre of Byzantine historiography. This will expand our knowledge of how the Byzantines wrote (praxis) and thought (culture) about historiography.
Diplomatics in the Netherlands
The Use, Editing, and Study of Charters by Dutch Historians from the Middle Ages to the Present
Charters and other administrative texts have long had the full attention of medievalists as primary sources in their historiographical work. This also applies to scholars from the Netherlands. Ever since the late Middle Ages they recognised the value of these sources included them as testimony in their historiography and gradually began to realise that charters and other documents required a specific form of textual criticism and a special way of editing. In this Dutch historians usually followed developments abroad. Sometimes as in the early seventeenth century they were ahead methodologically but for long periods they depended for new insights on developments elsewhere. This was especially true in the nineteenth century when scientific diplomatic methods and editing techniques emerged which would only be introduced and applied in the Netherlands in the next century. In the twenty-first century Dutch scholars are fully participating in the ‘digital turn’ that is creating new research tools in diplomatics.
Ultimately the history of diplomatics in the Netherlands is part of the broad development of historiography in the country and therefore a valuable aspect of the history of scholarship in general.
The Legacy of Medieval Scandinavian Encounters with England and the Insular World
The Vikings had a major and lasting impact on the English language. This volume is a unique companion to the study of Anglo-Scandinavian language contact providing expert discussions of its contexts backgrounds and the considerable afterlife of its effects through the Middle Ages and down to the present day. It contains thirteen new articles by leading specialists in the fields of early medieval languages literature and history specially commissioned in order to explore as wide a range as possible of the historical and cultural contexts for Anglo-Scandinavian encounters in the Viking Age and the evidence for them. These essays analyse in detail the Old Norse influence on English offering studies of words and their meanings in their textual and literary contexts and including lexicography dialectology and syntactic research; they explore findings from archaeology inscriptions and place-names; and they situate Anglo-Scandinavian contacts in the larger multilingual multicultural contexts of the North Sea and Irish Sea worlds.