Animals and Sacred Bodies in Early Medieval Ireland
Animals and Sacred Bodies in Early Medieval Ireland

Author: John Soderberg

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2022-01-04

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 1793630402

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Clonmacnoise was among the busiest, most economically complex, and intensely sacred places in early medieval Ireland. In Animals and Sacred Bodies in Early Medieval Ireland: Religion and Urbanism at Clonmacnoise, John Soderberg argues that animals are the key to understanding Clonmacnoise’s development as a thriving settlement and a sacred space. At this sanctuary city on the River Shannon, animal bodies were an essential source of food and raw materials. They were also depicted extensively on religious objects. Drawing from new theories about the intersections between religion and economics, John Soderberg explores how transformations emerging from animal encounters made Clonmacnoise a sacred settlement and created the sacred bodies of early medieval Ireland.

Exploring Ireland’s Viking-Age Towns
Exploring Ireland’s Viking-Age Towns

Author: Rebecca Boyd

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-10-20

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 1000984397

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Exploring Ireland’s Viking-Age Towns discusses the emergence of towns, urban lifestyles, and urban identities in Ireland. This coincides with the arrival of the Vikings and the appearance of the post-and-wattle Type 1 house. These houses reflect this crucial transition to urban living with its attendant changes for individuals, households, and society. Exploring Ireland’s Viking-Age Towns uses household archaeology as a lens to explore the materiality, variability, and day-to-day experiences of living in these houses. It moves from the intimate scale of individual households to the larger scale of Ireland’s earliest urban communities. For the first time, this book considers how these houses were more than just buildings: they were homes, important places where people lived, worked, and died. These new towns were busy places with a multitude of people, ideas, and things. This book uses the mass of archaeological data to undertake comparative analyses of houses and properties, artefact distribution patterns, and access analysis studies to interrogate some 500 Viking-Age urban houses. This analysis is structured in three parts: an investigation of the houses, the households, and the town. Exploring Ireland’s Viking-Age Towns discusses how these new urban households managed their homes to create a sense of place and belonging in these new environments and allow themselves to develop a new, urban identity. This book is suited to advanced students and specialists of the Viking Age in Ireland, but archaeologists and historians of the early medieval and Viking worlds will find much of interest here. It will also appeal to readers with interests in the archaeology of house and home, households, identities, and urban studies.

History and Salvation in Medieval Ireland
History and Salvation in Medieval Ireland

Author: Elizabeth Boyle

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-12-30

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 0429879601

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

History and Salvation in Medieval Ireland explores medieval Irish conceptions of salvation history, using Latin and vernacular sources from c. 700–c. 1200 CE which adapt biblical history for audiences both secular and ecclesiastical. This book examines medieval Irish sources on the cities of Jerusalem and Babylon; reworkings of narratives from the Hebrew Scriptures; literature influenced by the Psalms; and texts indebted to Late Antique historiography. It argues that the conceptual framework of salvation history, and the related theory of the divinely-ordained movement of political power through history, had a formative influence on early Irish culture, society and identity. Primarily through analysis of previously untranslated sources, this study teases out some of the intricate connections between the local and the universal, in order to situate medieval Irish historiography within the context of that of the wider world. Using an overarching biblical chronology, beginning with the lives of the Jewish Patriarchs and ending with the Christian apostolic missions, this study shows how one culture understood the histories of others, and has important implications for issues such as kingship, religion and literary production in medieval Ireland. This book will appeal to scholars and students of medieval Ireland, as well as those interested in religious and cultural history.

Celtic Saints and Animal Stories
Celtic Saints and Animal Stories

Author: Edward Cletus Sellner

Publisher:

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 96

ISBN-13: 9780809154579

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This Book Explores the rich tradition of the stories of the Celtic saints and their kinship with animals. The lives of the Celtic saints constitute the largest body of hagiographies of any group in Christian history to have so many creature stories included in them, revealing early and medieval Irish as true lovers of animals, with the saints sharing this quality to the full. Anyone who studies these hagiographies can discern not only what the saints did for animals, often protecting them from hunters, but also what the animals did for the saints. This pattern of reciprocity that transcends species-differences so that all benefit in the circle of life has a great deal to teach contemporaries about what can be called "a new spirituality of holiness." Book jacket.

Routledge Revivals: Medieval Ireland (2005)
Routledge Revivals: Medieval Ireland (2005)

Author: Sean Duffy

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 579

ISBN-13: 1351666177

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

First published in 2005 Medieval Ireland: An Encyclopedia brings together in one authoritative resource the multiple facets of life in Ireland before and after the Anglo-Norman invasion of 1169, from the sixth to sixteenth century.

Holy Wells of Ireland
Holy Wells of Ireland

Author: Celeste Ray

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2023

Total Pages: 335

ISBN-13: 0253066697

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The storied landscapes of Ireland are dotted with holy wells--hallowed springs, pools, ponds, and lakes credited with curative powers and often associated with Catholic and indigenous saints. While many of these sites have been recently lost to development, others are visited daily for devotions and remain the focus of annual community gatherings. Encouraging both their use and protection, Holy Wells of Ireland delves into these irreplaceable resources of spiritual, archaeological, and historical significance. Reserves of localized spiritual practices, holy wells are also ecosystems in themselves and provide habitats for rare and culturally meaningful flora and fauna. The shift toward a "post-Catholic" Ireland has prompted renewed interest in holy wells as popular domains with organic faith traditions. Of the roughly 3,000 holy wells documented across Ireland, some attract international pilgrims and others are stewarded by a single family. Featuring 140 color images, this remarkable volume shares the transdisciplinary work of contributors who study these wells through the overlapping lenses of anthropology, archaeology, art history, biomedicine, folklore, geography, history, and hydrology. Braiding community perspectives with those of scholars across academia, Holy Wells of Ireland considers Irish holy wells as a resilient feature of ever-evolving Irish Christianity, as inspiration to other faith traditions, as places of pilgrimage and healing, and as threatened biocultural resources.

Medieval Ireland
Medieval Ireland

Author: Seán Duffy

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2005-01-15

Total Pages: 962

ISBN-13: 1135948240

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Medieval Ireland: An Encyclopedia brings together in one authoritative resource the multiple facets of life in Ireland before and after the Anglo-Norman invasion of 1169, from the sixth to sixteenth century. Multidisciplinary in coverage, this A–Z reference work provides information on historical events, economics, politics, the arts, religion, intellectual history, and many other aspects of the period. With over 345 essays ranging from 250 to 2,500 words, Medieval Ireland paints a lively and colorful portrait of the time. For a full list of entries, contributors, and more, visit the Routledge Encyclopedias of the Middle Ages website.

European Archaeology as Anthropology
European Archaeology as Anthropology

Author: Pam J. Crabtree

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2017-01-25

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 1934536903

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Since the days of V. Gordon Childe, the study of the emergence of complex societies has been a central question in anthropological archaeology. However, archaeologists working in the Americanist tradition have drawn most of their models for the emergence of social complexity from research in the Middle East and Latin America. Bernard Wailes was a strong advocate for the importance of later prehistoric and early medieval Europe as an alternative model of sociopolitical evolution and trained generations of American archaeologists now active in European research from the Neolithic to the Middle Ages. Two centuries of excavation and research in Europe have produced one of the richest bodies of archaeological data anywhere in the world. The abundant data show that technological innovations such as metallurgy appeared very early, but urbanism and state formation are comparatively late developments. Key transformative process such as the spread of agriculture did not happen uniformly but rather at different rates in different regions. The essays in this volume celebrate the legacy of Bernard Wailes by highlighting the contribution of the European archaeological record to our understanding of the emergence of social complexity. They provide case studies in how ancient Europe can inform anthropological archaeology. Not only do they illuminate key research topics, they also invite archaeologists working in other parts of the world to consider comparisons to ancient Europe as they construct models for cultural development for their regions. Although there is a substantial corpus of literature on European prehistoric and medieval archaeology, we do not know of a comparable volume that explicitly focuses on the contribution that the study of ancient Europe can make to anthropological archaeology.