This volume provides a complex discussion of the variety of social efforts which were undertaken to create meaningful communities in the process of the formation of the early medieval gentes and kingdoms in the post-Roman west.
This highly original book is both a study of emotional discourse in the Early Middle Ages and a contribution to the debates among historians and social scientists about the nature of human emotions.
This volume explores some of the many different meanings of community across medieval Eurasia. How did the three ‘universal’ religions, Christianity, Islam and Buddhism, frame the emergence of various types of community under their sway? The studies assembled here in thematic clusters address the terminology of community; genealogies; urban communities; and monasteries or ‘enclaves of learning’: in particular in early medieval Europe, medieval South Arabia and Tibet, and late medieval Central Europe and Dalmatia. It includes work by medieval historians, social anthropologists, and Asian Studies scholars. The volume present the results of in-depth comparative research from the Visions of Community project in Vienna, and of a dialogue with guests, offering new and exciting perspectives on the emerging field of comparative medieval history. Contributors are (in order within the volume) Walter Pohl, Gerda Heydemann, Eirik Hovden, Johann Heiss, Rüdiger Lohlker, Elisabeth Gruber, Oliver Schmitt, Daniel Mahoney, Christian Opitz, Birgit Kellner, Rutger Kramer, Pascale Hugon, Christina Lutter, Diarmuid Ó Riain, Mathias Fermer, Steven Vanderputten, Jonathan Lyon and Andre Gingrich.
Twenty-three contributions by leading archaeologists from across Europe explore the varied forms, functions and significances of fortified settlements in the 8th to 10th centuries AD. These could be sites of strongly martial nature, upland retreats, monastic enclosures, rural seats, island bases, or urban nuclei. But they were all expressions of control - of states, frontiers, lands, materials, communities - and ones defined by walls, ramparts or enclosing banks. Papers run from Irish cashels to Welsh and Pictish strongholds, Saxon burhs, Viking fortresses, Byzantine castra, Carolingian creations, Venetian barricades, Slavic strongholds, and Bulgarian central places, and coverage extends fully from northwest Europe, to central Europe, the northern Mediterranean and the Black Sea. Strongly informed by recent fieldwork and excavations, but drawing also where available on the documentary record, this important collection provides fully up-to-date reviews and analyses of the archaeology of the distinctive settlement forms that characterized Europe in the Early Middle Ages.
Barbarian Gaul -- Evidence and control -- Social structure I : hierarchy, mobility and aristocracies -- Social structure II : free and servile ranks -- The passive poor : prisoners -- The active poor : pauperes at church -- Healing and authority I : physicians -- Healing and authority II : enchanters
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.
Charles I, often known as Charlemagne, is one of the most extraordinary figures ever to rule an empire. Driven by unremitting physical energy and intellectual curiosity, he was a man of many parts, a warlord and conqueror, a judge who promised 'for each their law and justice', a defender of the Latin Church, a man of flesh-and-blood. In the twelve centuries since his death, warfare, accident, vermin, and the elements have destroyed much of the writing on his rule, but a remarkable amount has survived. Janet Nelson's wonderful new book brings together everything we know about Charles, sifting through the available evidence, literary and material, to paint a vivid portrait of the man and his motives. Charles's legacy lies in his deeds and their continuing resonance, as he shaped counties, countries, and continents, founded and rebuilt towns and monasteries, and consciously set himself up not just as King of the Franks, but as the head of the renewed Roman Empire. His successors--in some ways even up to the present day--have struggled to interpret, misinterpret, copy, or subvert his legacy.
Jonas of Bobbio, writing in the mid seventh century, was not only a major Latin monastic author, but also an historical figure in his own right. Born in the ancient Roman town of Susa in the foothills of the Italian Alps, he became a monk of Bobbio, the monastery founded by the Irish exile Columbanus, soon after his death in 615. He became the archivist and personal assistant to successive Bobbio abbots, travelled to Rome to obtain the first papal privilege of immunity, and served as a missionary priest on the northern borderlands of the Frankish kingdom. He spent the rest of his life in Merovingian Gaul as abbot of the double monastic community of Marchiennes-Hamage, where he wrote his Life of Columbanus, one of the most influential works of early medieval hagiography. This book, the first major study devoted to Jonas of Bobbio, his corpus of three saints' Lives, and the Columbanian familia, explores the development of the Columbanian monastic network and its relationship to its founder. The Life of Columbanus was written following a period of crisis within the Columbanian familia and it was in response to this crisis that the Bobbio community in Lombard Italy commissioned Jonas to write the work. Alexander O'Hara presents the Life of Columbanus as a subtle and clever critique of the changes and crises that had taken place in the monastic communities since Columbanus's death. It also considers the life of Jonas as reflecting many of the changing political, cultural, and religious circumstances of the seventh century, and his writings as instrumental in shaping new concepts of sanctity and community. The result of the study is a unique perspective on the early medieval Age of Saints and the monastic and political worlds of Merovingian Gaul and Lombard Italy in the seventh century.
Embodying the Soul explores the possibilities and limitations of human intervention in the body's health across the ninth-century Carolingian Empire. Early medieval medicine has long been cast as a superstitious, degraded remnant of a vigorous, rational Greco-Roman tradition. Against such assumptions, Meg Leja argues that Carolingian scholars engaged in an active debate regarding the value of Hippocratic knowledge, a debate framed by the efforts to define Christian orthodoxy that were central to the reforms of Charlemagne and his successors. From a subject with pagan origins that had suspicious links with magic, medical knowledge gradually came to be classified as a sacred art. This development coincided with an intensifying belief that body and soul, the two components of individual identity, cultivated virtue not by waging combat against one another but by working together harmoniously. The book demonstrates that new discussions regarding the legitimacy of medical learning and the merits of good health encouraged a style of self-governance that left an enduring mark on medieval conceptions of individual responsibility. The chapters tackle questions about the soul's material occupation of the body, the spiritual meaning of illness, and the difficulty of diagnosing the ills of the internal bodily cavity. Combating the silence on "dark-age" medicine, Embodying the Soul uncovers new understandings of the physician, the popularity of preventative regimens, and the theological importance attached to dietary regulation and bloodletting. In presenting a cultural history of the body, the book considers a broad range of evidence: theological and pastoral treatises, monastic rules, court poetry, capitularies, hagiographies, biographies, and biblical exegesis. Most important, it offers a dynamic reinterpretation of the large numbers of medical manuscripts that survive from the ninth century but have rarely been the focus of historical study.