"'May they be cursed in town and cursed in the fields. May their barns be cursed and may their bones be cursed. May the fruit of their loins be cursed as well as the fruit of their lands.' French monks of the Middle Ages hurled curses like these at their enemies, seeking supernatural assistance when no secular judge could help them. In a long-awaited book written with elegance and erudition, Lester Little undertakes the first full-length study of these maledictions.... The book's focus is the way that religious communities—especially the monks who followed Benedict's Rule and hence were known by his name—used liturgical cursing to safeguard their integrity and their possessions, against both laymen and other ecclesiastics." —Journal of Social History
“The most interesting book I have read in years. . . . WTF?! is like Freakonomics on steroids.” —Steven D. Levitt, New York Times–bestselling coauthor of Freakonomics Did you know that “pre-owned” wives were sold at auction in nineteenth-century England? That today, in Liberia, accused criminals sometimes drink poison to determine their fate? How about the fact that, for 250 years, Italy criminally prosecuted cockroaches and crickets? Do you wonder why? Then this book is for you! Introducing us to a cast of colorful characters, economist Peter T. Leeson explains how to use economic thinking to reveal the hidden sense behind seemingly senseless human behavior—including your own. Leeson shows that far from “irrational” or “accidents of history,” humanity’s most outlandish rituals are ingenious solutions to pressing problems—developed by clever people, driven by incentives, and tailor-made for their time and place. "A fascinating tour of some of the world’s strangest customs and behaviors, led by a brilliant, funny, and eccentric tour guide dedicated to the proposition that no matter how strange it looks, there’s always a reason for it—and a lesson to be learned by discovering that reason.” —Steven E. Landsburg, author of The Armchair Economist
This book provides a needed overview of the scholarship on medieval public culture and popular movements such as the Peace of God, heresy, and the crusades and illustrates how a changing sense of the populus, the importance of publics and public opinion and public spheres was influential in the evolution of medieval cultures. Public opinion did play an important role, even in the Middle Ages; it did not wait until the era of modern history to do so. Using modern research on such aspects of culture as textual communities, large and small publics, cults, crowds, rumor, malediction, gossip, dispute resolution and the European popular revolution, the author focuses on the Peace of God movement, the era of Church reform in the tenth and eleventh centuries, the rise and combat of heresy, the crusades, and the works of fourteenth-century political thinkers such as Marsiglio of Padua regarding the role of the populus as the basis for the analysis. The pattern of changes reflected in this study argues that just as in the modern world the simplistic idea of “the public” was a phantom. Instead there were publics large and small that were influential in shaping the cultures of the era under review.
From late medieval reenactments of the Deposition from the Cross to Sol Lewitt’s “Buried Cube,” Depositions is about taking down images and about images that anticipate being taken down. Foretelling their own depositions, as well as their re-elevations in contexts far from those in which they were made, the images studied in this book reveal themselves to be untimely — no truer to their first appearance than to their later reappearances. In Depositions, Amy Knight Powell makes the case that late medieval paintings and ritual reenactments of the Deposition from the Cross not only picture the deposition of Christ (the imago Dei) but also allegorize the deposition of the image as such and, in so doing, prefigure the lowering of “dead images” during the Protestant Reformation. Late medieval pre-figurations of Reformation iconoclasm anticipate, in turn, the repeated “deaths” of art since the advent of photography: that is the premise of the vignettes devoted to twentieth-century works of art that conclude each chapter of this book. In these vignettes, images that once stood in late medieval churches now find themselves among works of art from the more recent past with which they share certain formal characteristics. These surreal encounters compel us to reckon with affinities between images from different times and places. Turning on its head the pejorative (art-historical) use of the term pseudomorphosis — formal resemblance where there is no similarity of artistic intent — Powell explores what happens to our understanding of historically and conceptually distant works of art when they look alike.
This book compares the cultures of the different social groups living in the Low Countries in the early Middle Ages. Clergy, nobility, peasants and townsmen greatly varied in their attitudes to labor, property, violence, and the handling and showing of emotions. Künzel explores how these social groups looked at themselves as a group, and how they looked at the other groups. Image and self-image could differ radically. The results of this research are specified and tested in four case studies on the interaction between group cultures, focusing respectively on the influence of oral and written traditions on a literary work, rituals as a means of conflict management in weakly centralized societies, stories as an expression of an urban group mentality, and beliefs on death and the afterlife.
Standing on Holy Ground in the Middle Ages illuminates how the floor surface shaped the ways in which people in medieval western Europe and beyond experienced sacred spaces. The ground beneath our feet plays a crucial, yet often overlooked, role in our relationship with the environments we inhabit and the spaces with which we interact. By focusing on this surface as a point of encounter, Lucy Donkin positions it within a series of vertically stacked layers—the earth itself, permanent and temporary floor coverings, and the bodies of the living above ground and the dead beneath—providing new perspectives on how sacred space was defined and decorated, including the veneration of holy footprints, consecration ceremonies, and the demarcation of certain places for particular activities. Using a wide array of visual and textual sources, Standing on Holy Ground in the Middle Ages also details ways in which interaction with this surface shaped people's identities, whether as individuals, office holders, or members of religious communities. Gestures such as trampling and prostration, the repeated employment of specific locations, and burial beneath particular people or actions used the surface to express likeness and difference. From pilgrimage sites in the Holy Land to cathedrals, abbeys, and local parish churches across the Latin West, Donkin frames the ground as a shared surface, both a feature of diverse, distant places and subject to a variety of uses over time—while also offering a model for understanding spatial relationships in other periods, regions, and contexts.
The diffusion of personal signs of identity during the twelfth century introduced individuals to mediated forms of communication. The book analyses the conditions for and the implications of their partnering with material signs and images in expressing self and accountability.
A new generation of historians today is borrowing from cultural anthropology, post-modern critical theory, and gender studies to understand the social meanings of medieval religious movements, practices, figures, and cults. In this volume Sharon Farmer and Barbara H. Rosenwein bring together essays—all hitherto unpublished—that combine some of the best of these new approaches with rigorous research and traditional scholarship. Some of these essays re-envision the professionals of religion: the monks and nuns who carried out crucial social functions as mediators between living and dead, repositories for social memory, and loci of vicarious piety. In their religious life these people embodied an image of the society that produced them. Other contributions focus on social categories, usually expressed as dichotomies: male/female, insider/outsider, saint/outcast. Monks and Nuns, Saints and Outcasts is the first book to show the interaction of seemingly antithetical groups of medieval people and the ways in which they were defined by, as well as against, each other. All of the essays, taken together, form a tribute to Lester K. Little, pioneer in the study of religion in medieval society.
This volume aims to balance the traditional literature available on medieval feuding with an exploration of other aspects of vengeance and culture in the Middle Ages. A diverse assortment of interdisciplinary essays from scholars in Europe and North America contest or enlarge traditional approaches to and interpretations of vengeance in the Middle Ages. Each essay attempts to clarify the multifaceted experience of vengeance within a specific medieval context”a particular region, a particular text, a particular social movement. By asking what relationship a distinct factor like authorship or religion has with the concept of vengeance, each author points towards the breadth of meanings of medieval vengeance, and to the heart of the deeper and broader questions that spur scholarly interest in the subject. Geographically, the essays in the volume highlight Western Europe (particularly the Anglo-Norman world), Scotland, Ireland, Spain, and Portugal. Thematically, the essays are concerned with heroic cultures of vengeance, vengeance as a legal and political tool, Christian justification and expression of vengeance, literature and the distinction between discourse and reality, and the emotions of vengeance. Methodologically, these interdisciplinary studies incorporate tools borrowed from anthropology, the study of emotion, and modern social and literary theories. This volume is aimed at professional scholars and graduate students within the broad field of medieval studies, including the subfields of history, literature, and religious studies, and is intended to inspire further research on medieval vengeance. However, this collection will also prove interesting to non-medievalists interested in the history of emotion, the justification of human conflict, and the concept of feud and its applicability to specific historical periods.
In early medieval Europe, monasticism constituted a significant force in society because the prayers of the religious on behalf of others featured as powerful currency. The study of this phenomenon is at once full of potential and peril, rightly drawing attention to the wider social involvement of an otherwise exclusive group, but also describing a religious community in terms of its service provision. Previous scholarship has focused on the supply and demand of prayer within the medieval economy of power, patronage, and gift exchange. Intercessory Prayer and the Monastic Ideal in the Time of the Carolingian Reforms is the first volume to explain how this transactional dimension of prayer factored into monastic spirituality. Renie S. Choy uncovers the relationship between the intercessory function of monasteries and the ascetic concern for moral conversion in the minds of prominent religious leaders active between c. 750-820. Through sustained analysis of the devotional thought of Benedict of Aniane and contemporaneous religious reformers during the reigns of Charlemagne and Louis the Pious, Choy examines key topics in the study of Carolingian monasticism: liturgical organization and the intercessory performances of the Mass and the Divine Office, monastic theology, and relationships of prayer within monastic communities and with the world outside. Arguing that monastic leaders showed new interest on the intersection between the interiority of prayer and the functional world of social relationships, this study reveals the ascetic ideal undergirding the provision of intercessory prayer by monasteries.
