Regna and Gentes

Regna and Gentes

Author: Hans-Werner Goetz

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 720

ISBN-13: 9004125248

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This book is the first comprehensive and comparative study of the difficult relationship between ethnic identities and political organisation in the post-Roman and early medieval kingdoms. 16 authors (historians, archaeologists and linguists) deal with ten important kingdoms of this period and with its political and legal context.


History and Identity in Early Medieval Wales

History and Identity in Early Medieval Wales

Author: Rebecca Thomas

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2022

Total Pages: 218

ISBN-13: 1843846276

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Crucial texts from ninth- and tenth-century Wales analysed to show their key role in identify formation. WINNER OF THE FRANCIS JONES PRIZE 2022 Early medieval writers viewed the world as divided into gentes ("peoples"). These were groups that could be differentiated from each other according to certain characteristics - by the language they spoke or the territory they inhabited, for example. The same writers played a key role in deciding which characteristics were important and using these to construct ethnic identities. This book explores this process of identity construction in texts from early medieval Wales, focusing primarily on the early ninth-century Latin history of the Britons (Historia Brittonum), the biography of Alfred the Great composed by the Welsh scholar Asser in 893, and the tenth-century vernacular poem Armes Prydein Vawr ("The Great Prophecy of Britain"). It examines how these writers set about distinguishing between the Welsh and the other gentes inhabiting the island of Britain through the use of names, attention to linguistic difference, and the writing of history and origin legends. Crucially important was the identity of the Welsh as Britons, the rightful inhabitants of the entirety of Britain; its significance and durability are investigated, alongside its interaction with the emergence of an identity focused on the geographical unit of Wales.


The Symbolic Language of Royal Authority in the Carolingian World (c.751-877)

The Symbolic Language of Royal Authority in the Carolingian World (c.751-877)

Author: Ildar H. Garipzanov

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 417

ISBN-13: 9004166696

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This book is not a conventional political narrative of Carolingian history shaped by narrative sources, capitularies, and charter material. It is structured, instead, by numismatic, diplomatic, liturgical, and iconographic sources and deals with political signs, images, and fixed formulas in them as interconnected elements in a symbolic language that was used in the indirect negotiation and maintenance of Carolingian authority. Building on the comprehensive analysis of royal liturgy, intitulature, iconography, and graphic signs and responding to recent interpretations of early medieval politics, this book offers a fresh view of Carolingian political culture and of corresponding roles that royal/imperial courts, larger monasteries, and human agents played there.


History, Frankish Identity and the Framing of Western Ethnicity, 550-850

History, Frankish Identity and the Framing of Western Ethnicity, 550-850

Author: Helmut Reimitz

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015-08-06

Total Pages: 529

ISBN-13: 1107032334

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This pioneering study explores early medieval Frankish identity as a window into the formation of a distinct Western conception of ethnicity. Focusing on the turbulent and varied history of Frankish identity in Merovingian and Carolingian historiography, it offers a new basis for comparing the history of collective and ethnic identity in the Christian West with other contexts, especially the Islamic and Byzantine worlds. The tremendous political success of the Frankish kingdoms provided the medieval West with fundamental political, religious and social structures, including a change from the Roman perspective on ethnicity as the quality of the 'Other' to the Carolingian perception that a variety of Christian peoples were chosen by God to reign over the former Roman provinces. Interpreting identity as an open-ended process, Helmut Reimitz explores the role of Frankish identity in the multiple efforts through which societies tried to find order in the rapidly changing post-Roman world.


A Companion to the Early Middle Ages

A Companion to the Early Middle Ages

Author: Pauline Stafford

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2012-12-26

Total Pages: 578

ISBN-13: 1118425138

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Drawing on 28 original essays, A Companion to the Early Middle Ages takes an inclusive approach to the history of Britain and Ireland from c.500 to c.1100 to overcome artificial distinctions of modern national boundaries. A collaborative history from leading scholars, covering the key debates and issues Surveys the building blocks of political society, and considers whether there were fundamental differences across Britain and Ireland Considers potential factors for change, including the economy, Christianisation, and the Vikings


The Dating of Beowulf

The Dating of Beowulf

Author: Colin Chase

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 1997-12-15

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 1442657995

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The date of Beowulf, debated for almost a century, is a small question with large consequences. Does the poem provide us with an accurate if idealized view of early Germanic culture? Or is it rather a creature of nostalgia and imagination, born of the desire of a later age to create for itself a glorious past? If we cannot decide when, between the 5th and 11th centuries, the poem was composed, we cannot distinguish what elements in Beowulf belong properly to the history of material culture, to the history of myth and legend, to political history, or to the development of the English literary imagination. This book represents both individual and concerted attempts to deal with this important question, and presents one of the most important inconclusions in the study of Old English. The contributors raise so many doubts, turn up so much new and disturbing information, dismantle so many long-accepted scholarly constructs that Beowulf studies will never be the same: henceforth every discussion of the poem and its period will begin with reference to this volume.


East and West in Late Antiquity

East and West in Late Antiquity

Author: J.H.W.F. Liebeschuetz

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2015-05-19

Total Pages: 507

ISBN-13: 9004289526

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East and West in Late Antiquity combines published and unpublished articles by emeritus professor Wolf Liebeschuetz. The collection concerns aspects of what Gibbon called 'the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'. This interpretation is now much criticized, but the author agrees with Gibbon. Topics discussed are defensive strategies, the settlement inside the Empire of invaders and immigrants, and the modification of identities with the formation of new communities. Liebeschuetz is interested in both the eastern and the western halves of the Empire. In the East he is particularly concerned with Syria, the expansion of settlement up to the edge of the desert, and Christianisation. The book ends with an examination of the role of the Christian Arab Ghassanids in the defense of the Syrian provinces in the century leading up to the conquest of the provinces by the Islamic Arabs.


The Languages of Early Medieval Charters

The Languages of Early Medieval Charters

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2020-11-23

Total Pages: 564

ISBN-13: 9004432337

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This is the first major study of the interplay between Latin and Germanic vernaculars in early medieval records, examining the role of language choice in the documentary cultures of the Anglo-Saxon and eastern Frankish worlds.


Theories of Nationalism

Theories of Nationalism

Author: Umut Ozkirimli

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2017-09-16

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 1137411163

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This widely-used and highly-acclaimed text provides a comprehensive and balanced introduction to the main theoretical perspectives on nationalism. The 3rd edition has been revised and updated throughout and includes a new chapter on the practical outworking of theory in the contemporary politics of nationalism.