This book contains essays written over the past 25 years about medieval urban communities and about the loyalties and beliefs of medieval lay people in general. Most writing about medieval religious, political, legal, and social ideas starts from treatises written by academics and assumes that ideas trickled down from the clergy to the laity. Susan Reynolds, whether writing about the struggles for liberty of small English towns, the national solidarities of the Anglo-Saxons, or the capacity of medieval peasants to formulate their own attitudes to religion, rejects this assumption. She suggests that the medieval laity had ideas of their own that deserve to be taken seriously.
This book contains essays written over the past 25 years about medieval urban communities and about the loyalties and beliefs of medieval lay people in general. Most writing about medieval religious, political, legal, and social ideas starts from treatises written by academics and assumes that ideas trickled down from the clergy to the laity. Susan Reynolds, whether writing about the struggles for liberty of small English towns, the national solidarities of the Anglo-Saxons, or the capacity of medieval peasants to formulate their own attitudes to religion, rejects this assumption. She suggests that the medieval laity had ideas of their own that deserve to be taken seriously.
The primary focus of this collection by leading medieval historians is the laity, in particular the ideas and ideals of lay people. The contributors explore lay attitudes as expressed in legal cases, charters, chronicles and collective activities. Highlights the centrality of kinship, whilst stressing its limitations as an all purpose social bond. Ranges chronologically and geographically from the seventh century to the eve of the Reformation, from Western Britain to papal and urban Italy, from Carolingian dynastic politics to the decline of medieval pilgrimage in the sixteenth century, and from the courts of twelfth-century France to the fifteenth-century wards of London.
This groundbreaking collection brings the Middle Ages to life and conveys the distinctiveness of this diverse, constantly changing period. Thirty-eight scholars bring together one medieval world from many disparate worlds, from Connacht to Constantinople and from Tynemouth to Timbuktu. This extraordinary set of reconstructions presents the reader with a vivid re-drawing of the medieval past, offering fresh appraisals of the evidence and modern historical writing. Chapters are thematically linked in four sections: identities beliefs, social values and symbolic order power and power-structures elites, organizations and groups. Packed full of original scholarship, The Medieval World is essential reading for anyone studying medieval history.
Early Medieval Europe 300–1050: A Guide for Studying and Teaching empowers students by providing them with the conceptual and methodological tools to investigate the period. Throughout the book, major research questions and historiographical debates are identified and guidance is given on how to engage with and evaluate key documentary sources as well as artistic and archaeological evidence. The book’s aim is to engender confidence in creative and independent historical thought. This second edition has been fully revised and expanded and now includes coverage of both Islamic and Byzantine history, surveying and critically examining the often radically different scholarly interpretations relating to them. Also new to this edition is an extensively updated and closely integrated companion website, which has been carefully designed to provide practical guidance to teachers and students, offering a wealth of reference materials and aids to mastering the period, and lighting the way for further exploration of written and non-written sources. Accessibly written and containing over 70 carefully selected maps and images, Early Medieval Europe 300–1050 is an essential resource for students studying this period for the first time, as well as an invaluable aid to university teachers devising and delivering courses and modules on the period.
Medieval Sovereignty examines the idea of sovereignty in the Middle Ages and asks if it can be considered a fundamental element of medieval constitutional order. Francesco Maiolo analyzes the writings of Marsilius of Padua (1275/80-1342/43) and Bartolous of Saxoferrato (1314-57) and assesses their relative contributions as early proponents of popular sovereignty. Both are credited with having provided the legal justification for medieval popular government. Maiolo's cogent reconsideration of this primacy is an important addition to current medieval studies.
Two themes uniting the essays in this collection are the provenance and history of medieval manuscripts during the Middle Ages, and the fates that befell them in England in the period after the invention of printing and the 16th-century dissolution of the religious houses and visitations of the universities. The section 'Libraries and collectors' includes papers on seven major English collectors of the 16th and 17th centuries, and the section 'Manuscripts' concerns the fates of five manuscripts or groups of manuscripts from England, Belgium and Italy. Of the other chapters one is concerned with the post-medieval history of the library of All Souls College, Oxford, and another with the provenance of hundreds of manuscripts in the Harleian collection in the British Library. For this volume Andrew Watson has provided extensive additional notes and indexes.
Guild and State examines the values of social solidarity and fraternity that emerged from medieval guilds and city-communes, and the effect of traditional corporate organization of labor on socioeconomic attitudes and theories of the state. What ordinary guildsmen and townsmen thought about these issues can be gleaned from chronicles, charters, and reported slogans. But in tracing attitudes toward the guilds of early Germanic times to today's equivalent-trade unions-a distinction must be made between popular "ethos" and learned "philosophy." In Europe, from the twelfth to the seventeenth centuries, the corporate organization of labor and of town-market communities developed side-by-side with the ideals of personal liberty, market freedom, and legal equality. Self-governing labor organizations and civil freedom developed together as coherent practices. The values of mutual aid and craft honor on the one hand, and of personal freedom and legal equality on the other, formed the moral infrastructure of our civilization. Alternate ideals balanced, harmonized, and even cross-fertilized one another-as in the principle of freedom of association. Contrary to preconceptions, however, corporate values were seldom expressed philosophically in the Middle Ages. Political theory and the world of learning from the start emphasized liberal values. It was only after the Reformation that guild and communal values found expression in political theory. Even then only a few philosophers acknowledged that solidarity and exchange-the poles around which the values of guild and civil society, respectively, rotate-are not opposites but complementary, and attempted to weave these together into a texture as tough and complex as that of urban society itself. By showing that the ideals of social solidarity and workers' rights have often been intertwined with liberty and equality rather than in opposition to them, this book provides an unexpected explanation and rationale for the "Third Way." The Enlightenment and industrialization led to an apotheosis of liberal values. Guilds disappeared and were only in part replaced by labor unions; the values of market exchange have since been in the ascendant-though Hegel, Durkheim, and more recently, advocates of liberal corporatism maintain the possibility of a symbiosis between corporate and liberal values. In Guild and State there emerges an alternative history of political thought, which will be fascinating to the general as well as the specialist reader.
This book discusses how secular authorities made use of churches and monasteries in the Low Countries, the German regions and the British Isles during the late medieval period.
