"The image of eating and drinking in the middle ages is mainly determined by vernacular poetry. However, it not only imparts a very fragmented but also ideal concept of past conditions. The analogy with contemporary illustrations and statues as with archaeological finds can complete if not revise previous assumptions. In addition to the living spaces of the nobility, it also examines urban and rural communities as well as cloisters."--
Das Politische der Mahlzeit reicht vom komplexen Setting am Familientisch bis zum Staatsbankett, vom Status einer Speise bis zur Verweigerung von Nahrung im Hungerstreik. Die Beiträger/innen des vorliegenden Bandes nutzen diese Spannbreite, um das Essen als den politischen Brennpunkt auszuloten, den es nicht nur, aber besonders in der Gegenwart darstellt. The political meal encompasses the complex setting of meals at the family table as well as the state banquet; it reaches from the social status of a dish to the refusal of food in a hunger strike. The contributors of this volume use this breadth to examine food and eating as the kind of political arena they constitute not only but particularly in the present.
17 papers take a holistic view of beekeeping archaeology (including honey, wax, associated products, hive construction, and trade) in one large interconnected geographic region, the Mediterranean, central Europe, and the Atlantic Façade. The book serves as a handbook for current and future researchers considering the archaeology of beekeeping.
The medieval Ashkenazi manuscripts of the Small Book of Commandments (Sefer Mitzvot Katan, or ‘SeMaK’ for short), which was written by Isaac of Corbeil, attest a scribal culture in which rabbinical knowledge and piety were combined with creative freedom in manuscript design. This study is concerned with the creation, composition and circulation of manuscripts of the SeMaK and concentrates on the book as an artefact. The focus of the author’s attention is the manuscripts’ material nature, their artistic embellishment and the personal touches that scribes added to them. With the act of writing a text and decorating a SeMaK manuscript, they ‘appropriated’ the text, so to speak, giving it a character of its very own. They drew on a visual language in the process – or rather, on visual languages, which occupy a special place between pure writing culture and pure painting culture. It was in this area ‘in between’ the two that spontaneous touches arose, ranging from changes in the physical arrangement of the text (mise-en-page) to drawings and doodles added in the margins. An examination of paratextual elements broadens the reader’s knowledge about Jewish scribal culture and grants insights into medieval book art, material culture and Judeo-Christian co-existence in the Middle Ages as well as throwing some light on Jewish values, ideals and eschatological hopes.
This volume is dedicated to the topic of the human evaluation and interpretation of animals in ancient and medieval cultures. From a transcultural perspective contributions from Assyriology, Byzantine Studies, Classical Archaeology, Egyptology, German Medieval Studies and Jewish History look into the processes and mechanisms behind the transfer by people of certain values to animals, and the functions these animal-signs have within written, pictorial and performative forms of expression.
This definitive environmental history of medieval fish and fisheries provides a comprehensive examination of European engagement with aquatic systems between c. 500 and 1500 CE. Using textual, zooarchaeological, and natural records, Richard C. Hoffmann's unique study spans marine and freshwater fisheries across western Christendom, discusses effects of human-nature relations and presents a deeper understanding of evolving European aquatic ecosystems. Changing climates, landscapes, and fishing pressures affected local stocks enough to shift values of fish, fishing rights, and dietary expectations. Readers learn what the abbess Waldetrudis in seventh-century Hainault, King Ramiro II (d.1157) of Aragon, and thirteenth-century physician Aldebrandin of Siena shared with English antiquarian William Worcester (d. 1482), and the young Martin Luther growing up in Germany soon thereafter. Sturgeon and herring, carp, cod, and tuna played distinctive roles. Hoffmann highlights how encounters between medieval Europeans and fish had consequences for society and the environment - then and now.
A follow-up publication to the Handbook of Medieval Studies, this new reference work turns to a different focus: medieval culture. Medieval research has grown tremendously in depth and breadth over the last decades. Particularly our understanding of medieval culture, of the basic living conditions, and the specific value system prevalent at that time has considerably expanded, to a point where we are in danger of no longer seeing the proverbial forest for the trees. The present, innovative handbook offers compact articles on essential topics, ideals, specific knowledge, and concepts defining the medieval world as comprehensively as possible. The topics covered in this new handbook pertain to issues such as love and marriage, belief in God, hell, and the devil, education, lordship and servitude, Christianity versus Judaism and Islam, health, medicine, the rural world, the rise of the urban class, travel, roads and bridges, entertainment, games, and sport activities, numbers, measuring, the education system, the papacy, saints, the senses, death, and money.
Understanding the senses is indispensable for comprehending the Middle Ages because both a theoretical and a practical involvement with the senses played a central role in the development of ideology and cultural practice in this period. For the long medieval millennium, the senses were not limited to the five we think of: speech, for example, was categorized among the senses of the mouth. And sight and hearing were not always the dominant senses: for the medical profession, taste was more decisive. Nor were the senses only passive receptors: they were understood to play an active role in the process of perception and were also a vital element in the formation of each individual's moral identity. From the development of specifically urban or commercial sensations to the sensory regimes of holiness, from the senses as indicators of social status revealed in food to the Scholastic analysis of perception, this volume demonstrates the importance of sensory experience and its manifold interpretations in the Middle Ages. A Cultural History of the Senses in the Middle Ages presents essays on the following topics: the social life of the senses; urban sensations; the senses in the marketplace; the senses in religion; the senses in philosophy and science; medicine and the senses; the senses in literature; art and the senses; and sensory media.
Dieser Band bietet aufgrund seiner interdisziplinären Perspektive, die Ansätze der Medizin-, Kunst-, Kultur- und Liturgiegeschichte miteinander verbindet, Einsichten in die kulturelle Bedeutung der menschlichen Hand in der Vormoderne. Autorinnen und Autoren aus unterschiedlichen Disziplinen greifen u. a. voneinander abweichende religiöse Traditionen auf und vergleichen diese in einem neuen Licht. Ein besonderer Schwerpunkt liegt dabei auf dem Waschen der Hände (im Christentum, Judentum und Islam), der mit der Hand zusammenhängenden Materialität (Gießgefäße, Handprothesen), auf der Frage des Einsatzes der Hand in verschiedenen Kontexten (als wichtigstes Instrument des Arztes, des Künstlers, in der Masturbation), ihrer symbolischen und liturgischen Aufladung (etwa in der Hagiographie, in Geistergeschichten), auf Gesten (insbesondere Schmähgesten) und der plastischen Abbildung der Hand (mittelalterliche Handreliquiare, medizinische Handmoulagen).
