Converting the Isles
Converting the Isles

Author: Roy Flechner

Publisher: Brepols Publishers

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9782503554624

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Volume II : "This volume analyses the effects of religious conversion on landscapes of cult and on religious practice in Europe, focusing in particular on Britain and Ireland. Adopting an interdisciplinary and comparative approach, the volume investigates the interaction between different forms of belief, their coexistence and competition. It discusses the coming of writing, the power of the word, landscapes of ritual, and converting communities. The contributors include leading historians, archaeologists, linguists, and literary scholars. This is the second volume to emerge from research undertaken by contributors to the Converting the Isles Research Network and forms a companion volume to The Introduction of Christianity into the Early Medieval Insular World."--

Transforming Landscapes of Belief in the Early Medieval Insular World and Beyond
Transforming Landscapes of Belief in the Early Medieval Insular World and Beyond

Author: Nancy Edwards

Publisher: Cultural Encounters in Late An

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 525

ISBN-13: 9782503568683

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Conversion to Christianity is arguably the most revolutionary social and cultural change that Europe experienced throughout Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. Christianization affected all strata of society and transformed not only religious beliefs and practices, but also the nature of government, the priorities of the economy, the character of kinship, and gender relations. It is against this backdrop that an international array of leading medievalists gathered under the auspices of the Converting the Isles Research Network (funded by the Leverhulme Trust) to investigate social, economic, and cultural aspects of conversion in the early medieval Insular world, covering different parts of Britain, Ireland, Scandinavia, and Iceland. This volume analyses the effects of religious conversion on landscapes of cult and on religious practice in Europe, focusing in particular on Britain and Ireland. Adopting an interdisciplinary and comparative approach, the volume investigates the interaction between different forms of belief, their coexistence and competition. It discusses the coming of writing, the power of the word, landscapes of ritual, and converting communities. The contributors include leading historians, archaeologists, linguists, and literary scholars. This is the second volume to emerge from research undertaken by contributors to the Converting the Isles Research Network and forms a companion volume to The Introduction of Christianity into the Early Medieval Insular World.

A History of Christianity in Wales
A History of Christianity in Wales

Author: David Ceri Jones

Publisher: University of Wales Press

Published: 2022-02-15

Total Pages: 396

ISBN-13: 1786838222

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Christianity, in its Catholic, Protestant and Nonconformist forms, has played an enormous role in the history of Wales and in the defining and shaping of Welsh identity over the past two thousand years. Biblical place names, an urban and rural landscape littered with churches, chapels, crosses and sacred sites, a bardic and literary tradition deeply imbued with Christian themes in both the Welsh and English languages, and the songs sung by tens of thousands of rugby supporters at the national stadium in Cardiff, all hint at a Christian presence that was once universal. Yet for many in contemporary Wales, the story of the development of Christianity in their country remains little known. While the history of Christianity in Wales has been a subject of perennial interest for Welsh historians, much of their work has been highly specialised and not always accessible to a general audience. Standing on the shoulders of some of Wales’s finest historians, this is the first single-volume history of Welsh Christianity from its origins in Roman Britain to the present day. Drawing on the expertise of four leading historians of the Welsh Christian tradition, this volume is specifically designed for the general reader, and those beginning their exploration of Wales’s Christian past.

Symbolic Reproduction in Early Medieval England
Symbolic Reproduction in Early Medieval England

Author: Katharine Sykes

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2024-07-02

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 019265912X

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In the early Middle Ages, the conversion of the early English kingdoms acted as a catalyst for significant social and cultural change. One of the most visible of these changes was the introduction of a new type of household: the monastic household. These reproduced through education and training, rather than biological means; their inhabitants practised celibacy as a lifelong state, rather than as a stage in the life course. Because monastic households depended on secular households to produce the next generation of recruits, previous studies have tended to view them as more mutable than their secular counterparts, which are implicitly regarded as natural and ahistorical. Katharine Sykes charts some of the significant changes to the structure of households between the seventh to eleventh centuries, as ideas of spiritual, non-biological reproduction first fostered in monastic households were adopted in royal households in the tenth and eleventh centuries, and as ideas about kinship that were generated in secular households, such as the relationship between genealogy and inheritance, were picked up and applied by their monastic counterparts. In place of binary divisions between secular and monastic, biological and spiritual, real and imagined, Sykes demonstrates that different forms of kinship and reproduction in this period were intimately linked.

The Gregorian Mission to Kent in Bede's Ecclesiastical History
The Gregorian Mission to Kent in Bede's Ecclesiastical History

Author: Richard Shaw

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-01-29

Total Pages: 476

ISBN-13: 1351669443

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Historians have long relied on Bede’s Ecclesiastical History for their narrative of early Christian Anglo-Saxon England, but what material lay behind Bede’s own narrative? What were his sources and how reliable were they? How much was based on contemporary material? How much on later evidence? What was rhetoric? What represents his own agendas, deductions or even inventions? This book represents the first systematic attempt to answer these questions for Bede’s History, taking as a test case the coherent narrative of the Gregorian mission and the early Church in Kent. Through this critique, it becomes possible, for the first time, to catalogue Bede’s sources and assess their origins, provenance and value – even reconstructing the original shape of many that are now lost. The striking paucity of his primary sources for the period emerges clearly. This study explains the reason why this was the case. At the same time, Bede is shown to have had access to a greater variety of texts, especially documentary, than has previously been realised. This volume thus reveals Bede the historian at work, with implications for understanding his monastery, library and intellectual milieu together with the world in which he lived and worked. It also showcases what can be achieved using a similar methodology for the rest of the Ecclesiastical History and for other contemporary works. Most importantly, thanks to this study, it is now feasible – indeed necessary – for subsequent historians to base their reconstructions of the events of c.600 not on Bede but on his sources. As a result, this book lays the foundations for future work on the conversion of Anglo-Saxon England and offers the prospect of replacing and not merely refining Bede’s narrative of the history of early Christian Kent.

The Origins of Early Christian Ireland
The Origins of Early Christian Ireland

Author: Harold Mytum

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-11-18

Total Pages: 480

ISBN-13: 1040297145

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The cultural developments of Early Christian Ireland have long been recognised and described. There have, however, been few attempts to date to explain why the flowering of culture should happen at the time and in the way that it did. First published in 1992, The Origins of Early Christian Ireland (now with a new preface by the author) explains changes in the period up to AD 800 in Ireland. External stimuli, most notably from Irish settlers in western Britain acted as catalysts which transformed a relatively moribund Iron Age culture into one of extraordinary vigour. All aspects of the culture changed radically, and changes in each had knock-on effects on others. Beliefs were revolutionised by Christianity; society was transformed by the church as an institution and the rise of the individual; agriculture was expanded by more advanced technology and the entrepreneurial flair of individual decision-making; craft production became more widespread and offered a vehicle for the display of personal wealth and status. Long-distance trade and ecclesiastical contacts integrated Ireland with the rest of Europe more effectively than ever before. The book has two distinctive features, which means that it relates to two forms of academic market, each of which can be defined. Firstly, it deals with a particular culture-historical period, that of Early Christian Ireland, and presents an explanation of its origins and development to AD 800. This appeals to archaeologists and historians of Ireland, Britain and, indeed, Europe. Secondly, it takes a specific theoretical position and develops it using primarily archaeological but also extensive historical information. This is the most detailed application of processualist theory yet undertaken for a historic period in Europe. This appeals to archaeologists and anthropologists in Britain, and also North America where the processualist approach is the most popular theoretical position.

The Cambridge History of Medieval Monasticism in the Latin West
The Cambridge History of Medieval Monasticism in the Latin West

Author: Alison I. Beach

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-01-09

Total Pages: 1244

ISBN-13: 1108770630

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Monasticism, in all of its variations, was a feature of almost every landscape in the medieval West. So ubiquitous were religious women and men throughout the Middle Ages that all medievalists encounter monasticism in their intellectual worlds. While there is enormous interest in medieval monasticism among Anglophone scholars, language is often a barrier to accessing some of the most important and groundbreaking research emerging from Europe. The Cambridge History of Medieval Monasticism in the Latin West offers a comprehensive treatment of medieval monasticism, from Late Antiquity to the end of the Middle Ages. The essays, specially commissioned for this volume and written by an international team of scholars, with contributors from Australia, Belgium, Canada, England, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States, cover a range of topics and themes and represent the most up-to-date discoveries on this topic.

Saint Patrick Retold
Saint Patrick Retold

Author: Roy Flechner

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2021-03-02

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 0691217467

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Saint Patrick Retold draws on recent research to offer a fresh assessment of Patrick's travails and achievements. This is the first biography in nearly fifty years to explore Patrick's career against the background of historical events in late antique Britain and Ireland.