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Those Of My Blood - Creating Noble Families In Medieval Francia

by Constance Brittain Bouchard

81,11€ + 10% CARD

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 "A wonderful introduction to those new to the subject as well as a welcome contribution to the debate on the nature of the medieval nobility."-Medieval Review
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House Of Condulmer - The Rise And Decline Of A Venetian Family In The Century Of The Black Death

by Alan M. Stahl

~~59,63€~~ 53,67€ 10% OFF

 How a lower patrician Venetian family strove for status and wealth over the course of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries The House of Condulmer tells the story of a lower patrician Venetian family in the wake of the Black Death, as they strove for status and wealth over the course of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. The Condulmers experienced mixed fortunes in their efforts at social mobility. Exiled after their participation in a failed revolt against the Venetian state, they nevertheless managed to accrue a great deal of wealth in the period before the Black Death. In the aftermath of the plague, which ravaged Venice and wiped out many lines of the family, the fortune of the Condulmers was concentrated in two main branches, whose members are the subject of this book. Through original research drawing on hundreds of unpublished archival sources, Alan M. Stahl traces the careers and changing personal circumstances of five members of the Condulmer family: Jacobello, who used his civic participation and donations to achieve noble status for himself and his descendants but impoverished himself and his family in the process; Vielmo, a moneychanger who paraded around in the trappings of wealth, attempting to imitate the appearance of his noble cousins; Franceschina, who used her power over dowries to get noble husbands for her daughters and stepdaughters; Simoneto, who achieved great wealth through Mediterranean commerce but lost it in the crash of the bank in which he was a partner; and Gabriele, who would eventually become one of the most consequential and reviled popes of the Renaissance, Eugene IV. The House of Condulmer brings readers into the world of intrigue, finance, religion, and plague in medieval Venice, capturing the vicissitudes of life in the one of the wealthiest cities of the world on the eve of the Renaissance.
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Domesticating Saints In Medieval And Early Modern Rome

by Maya Maskarinec

~~92,68€~~ 83,41€ 10% OFF

 How elite Roman families used genealogy, architecture, and the urban fabric to appropriate the city’s saints for their own Domesticating Saints in Medieval and Early Modern Rome explores the creative efforts of some of Rome’s most prominent noble families to weave themselves into Rome’s Christian past. Maya Maskarinec shows how, from late antiquity to early modernity, elite Roman families used genealogy, architecture, and the urban fabric to appropriate the city’s saints for their own, eventually claiming them as ancestors. Over the course of the Middle Ages, there developed a pronounced sense that churches and their saints belonged to specific regions, neighborhoods, and even families. These associations, coupled with a resurgent interest in Rome’s Christian antiquity as well as in noble lineages, enabled Roman families to "domesticate" the city’s saints and dominate the urban landscape and its politics into the early modern era. These families cultivated saintly genealogies and saintly topologies (exploiting, for example, the increasingly prolific identification of churches as the former residences of early Christian and late antique saints), cementing presumed connections between place, descent, and moral worth. Drawing from sources spanning the fourth to the late sixteenth century, Maskarinec brings into conversation saints’ lives, documentary evidence, family genealogies, monumental and domestic architecture, and medieval and early modern guidebooks, sources not often studied together. Bridging the divide between secular and sacred histories of Rome, Domesticating Saints in Medieval and Early Modern Rome repositions these materials within a new story, of how Romans made the city’s classical and Christian past their own and thereby empowered and immortalized their families.
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Unruly Tongue - Speech And Violence In Medieval Italy

by Melissa Vise

~~92,68€~~ 83,41€ 10% OFF

 A cultural history of speech in medieval ItalyThe Unruly Tongue, a cultural history of speech in medieval Italy, offers a new account of how the power of words changed in Western thought. Despite the association of freedom of speech with the political revolutions of the eighteenth century that ushered in the era of modern democracies, historian Melissa Vise locates the history of the repression of speech not in Europe's monarchies but rather in Italy's republics. Exploring the cultural process through which science and medicine, politics, law, literature, and theology together informed a new political ethics of speech, Vise uncovers the formation of a moral code where the regulation of the tongue became an integral component of republican values in medieval Europe.The medieval citizens of Italy's republics understood themselves to be wholly subject to the power of words not because they lived in an age of persecution or doctrinal rigidity, but because words had furnished the grounds for their political freedom. Speech-making was the means for speaking the republic itself into existence against the opposition of aristocracy, empire, and papacy. But because words had power, they could also be deployed as weapons. Speech contained the potential for violence and presented a threat to political and social order, and thus needed to be controlled. Vise shows how the laws that governed and curtailed speech in medieval Italy represented broader cultural understandings of human susceptibility to speech. Tracing anthropologies of speech from religious to political discourse, from civic courts to ecclesiastical courts, from medical texts to the works of Dante and Boccaccio, The Unruly Tongue demonstrates that the thirteenth century marked a major shift in how people perceived the power, and the threat, of speech: a change in thinking about "what words do."
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In Plain Sight - Muslims Of The Latin Kingdom Of Jerusalem

by Ann E. Zimo

~~86,13€~~ 77,52€ 10% OFF

 How Muslims integrated themselves into the Kingdom of Jerusalem, founded in the wake of the First Crusade In Plain Sight draws from a wide array of interdisciplinary sources to show how Muslims, seemingly hostile to the entire crusading enterprise, integrated themselves into the kingdom founded in the wake of the First Crusade. The book examines how Muslims, whether Sunni or Shi‘a or Druze, fit into society in the crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, uncovering the daily reality of their experience. Exploring how and to what extent Muslims interacted with the Frankish ruling elite, historian Ann E. Zimo presents a new vantage point from which to reconsider the popularly accepted notion that the crusades, and by extension the crusader states, were a locus of a monolithic clash between West and East or between Christianity and Islam. By untangling the relations between the Muslim communities and their rulers, Zimo offers a more fully realized image of a society too multifaceted to be reasonably reduced to a black-and-white binary opposition. Zimo not only re-reads the well-known Frankish sources, including narrative chronicles, letters, charters, and legal treatises, but combines them with an investigation of the Arabic documentary base, including chronicles, biographies, fatwa literature, pilgrimage guides, and treaties which are not translated and largely inaccessible to most historians of the crusades. She also draws from the enormous and growing body of scholarship generated by archaeologists whose work can often provide insights into the aspects of the past not recorded in the historical record. By casting such a wide evidentiary net, In Plain Sight sheds new light on Frankish society and how Muslims fit into it, offering major revisions to the current conception of population distribution within the kingdom and the nature of the Frankish polity itself.
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Fixing The Liturgy - Friars, Sisters, And The Dominican Rite, 1256-1516

by Cj Jones

~~87,87€~~ 79,08€ 10% OFF

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 This book opens a window into the daily practice of medieval liturgy, uncovering what is required to coordinate each dayâ€™s worship. Focusing on the Dominican order through a set of unseen records, Jones shows how changes in medieval piety and ritual legislation disrupted the system instituted in the thirteenth century.
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Leon And Galicia Under Queen Sancha And King Fernando I

by Bernard F. Reilly e Simon R. Doubleday

~~86,13€~~ 77,52€ 10% OFF

 A corrective to conventional accounts of the reign of Queen Sancha and King Fernando I in medieval Iberia Acclaimed historians Bernard F. Reilly and Simon R. Doubleday tell the story of the reign of Queen Sancha and King Fernando I, who together ruled the territories of León and Galicia between 1038 and 1065—often regarded as a period in which Christian kings and their vassals asserted themselves more successfully in the face of external rivals, both Viking and Muslim. The reality was more complex. The Iberian Peninsula remained a space of multiple, intertwined forms of power and surprisingly nuanced relationships between—and among—the diverse configurations of Christian and Muslim authority. Some of these complexities would be obscured by later generations of medieval chroniclers, whose narratives focused on the singular authority of the king and expressed a more binary view of interreligious relations. Through their account of the key events and turning points of Sancha and Fernando’s reign, Reilly and Doubleday propose a revised understanding of its political culture, offering a corrective to accounts that have emphasized a stark opposition between Christian and Muslim powers, a supposedly steady growth and centralization of royal government, and the individual figure of the monarch. Exploring the interplay of crown and elites, underscoring the role of royal women, and rejecting the Reconquista paradigm, León and Galicia Under Queen Sancha and King Fernando I reenvisions medieval Iberia at a pivotal stage in European history.
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Coterie Poetics And The Beginnings Of The English Literary Tradition - From Chaucer To Spenser

by R. D. Perry

~~92,68€~~ 83,41€ 10% OFF

 In Coterie Poetics and the Beginnings of the English Literary Tradition, R. D. Perry reveals how poetic coteries formed and maintained the English literary tradition. Perry shows that, from Geoffrey Chaucer to Edmund Spenser, the poets who bridged the medieval and early modern periods created a profusion of coterie forms as they sought to navigate their relationships with their contemporaries and to the vernacular literary traditions that preceded them. Rather than defining coteries solely as historical communities of individuals sharing work, Perry reframes them as products of authors signaling associations with one another across time and space, in life and on the page. From Geoffrey Chaucer’s associations with both his fellow writers in London and with his geographically distant French contemporaries, to Thomas Hoccleve’s emphatic insistence that he was "aqweyntid" with Chaucer even after Chaucer’s death, to John Lydgate’s formations of "virtual coteries" of a wide range of individuals alive and dead who can only truly come together on the page, the book traces how writers formed the English literary tradition by signaling social connections. By forming coteries, both real and virtual, based on shared appreciation of a literary tradition, these authors redefine what should be valued in that tradition, shaping and reshaping it accordingly. Perry shows how our notion of the English literary tradition came to be and how it could be imagined otherwise.
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Fixing The Liturgy - Friars, Sisters, And The Dominican Rite, 1256-1516

by Cj Jones

~~99,38€~~ 89,44€ 10% OFF

 A new history of the medieval Dominican liturgy, from the perspective of women’s communities In Fixing the Liturgy, CJ Jones opens a window into the daily practice of medieval liturgy, uncovering the astounding breadth of knowledge, the deep expertise, and the critical thinking required just to coordinate each day’s worship. Focusing on the Dominican order, Jones shows how changes in medieval piety and ritual legislation disrupted the fine-tuned system that Dominicans instituted in the thirteenth century. World-historical events, including the Great Western Schism and the expansion of the Ottoman Empire, had an impact on the practice of liturgy even in individual communities. Through a set of never-before-studied records from Dominican convents, Jones shows how women’s communities reacted and adapted to historical change and how their surviving sources inform our understanding of the friars’ lives, as well. Tracing the narrative up to the eve of the Protestant Reformation, this study culminates in a multi-media reconstruction of the sounds, sights, and smells of worship in the rightfully famous southern German convent of St. Katherine in Nuremberg. Fixing the Liturgy makes this late medieval world accessible through clear introductions to medieval liturgy and to the Dominican order’s governance. Jones illustrates how Dominican friars and sisters reconciled their order’s rules with their own concrete circumstances and with the changing world around them. On the way, a new history of the medieval Dominican liturgy unfolds, told from the perspective of women’s communities.
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Between Christian And Jew - Conversion And Inquisition In The Crown Of Aragon, 1250-1391

by Paola Tartakoff

35,14€ + 10% CARD

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 In 1341 in Aragon, a Jewish convert to Christianity described a Jewish conspiracy to persuade recent converts to denounce their newfound Christian faith. His claims became the catalyst for a series of trials that unfolded. Tartakoff closely analyzes these events, which she considers paradigmatic of inquisitorial proceedings against Jews in the period.
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Knowledge True And Useful - A Cultural History Of Early Scholasticism

by Frank Rexroth

92,68€ + 10% CARD

 A radical shift took place in medieval Europe that still shapes contemporary intellectual life: freeing themselves from the fixed beliefs of the past, scholars began to determine and pursue their own avenues of academic inquiry. In Knowledge True and Useful, Frank Rexroth shows how, beginning in the 1070s, a new kind of knowledge arose in Latin Europe that for the first time could be deemed "scientific." In the twelfth century, when Peter Abelard proclaimed the primacy of reason in all areas of inquiry (and started an affair with his pupil Heloise), it was a scandal. But he was not the only one who wanted to devote his life to this new enterprise of "scholastic" knowledge. Rexroth explores how the first students and teachers of this movement came together in new groups and schools, examining their intellectual debates and disputes as well as the lifelong connections they forged with one another through the scholastic communities to which they belonged. Rexroth shows how the resulting transformations produced a new understanding of truth and the utility of learning, as well as a new perspective on the intellectual tradition and the division of knowledge into academic disciplines—marking a turning point in European intellectual culture that culminated in the birth of the university and, with it, traditions and forms of academic inquiry that continue to organize the pursuit of knowledge today.
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England'S Jews - Finance, Violence, And The Crown In The Thirteenth Century

by John Tolan

59,63€ + 10% CARD

 In 1290, Jews were expelled from England and subsequently largely expunged from English historical memory. Yet for two centuries they occupied important roles in medieval English society. England’s Jews revisits this neglected chapter of English history—one whose remembrance is more important than ever today, as antisemitism and other forms of racism are on the rise. Historian John Tolan tells the story of the thousands of Jews who lived in medieval England. Protected by the Crown and granted the exclusive right to loan money with interest, Jews financed building projects, provided loans to students, and bought and rented out housing. Historical texts show that they shared meals and beer, celebrated at weddings, and sometimes even ended up in bed with Christians. Yet Church authorities feared the consequences of Jewish contact with Christians and tried to limit it, though to little avail. Royal protection also proved to be a double-edged sword: when revolts broke out against the unpopular king Henry III, some of the rebels, in debt to Jewish creditors, killed Jews and destroyed loan records. Vicious rumors circulated that Jews secretly plotted against Christians and crucified Christian children. All of these factors led Edward I to expel the Jews from England in 1290. Paradoxically, Tolan shows, thirteenth-century England was both the theatre of fruitful interreligious exchange and a crucible of European antisemitism.
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Reimagining Christendom - Writing Iceland''S Bishops Into The Roman Church, 1200-1350

by Joel D. Anderson

72,88€ + 10% CARD

 With its expanding legal system and its burgeoning throngs of lawyers, legates, and documents, the papacy of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries has often been credited with spearheading a governmental revolution that molded the high medieval church into an increasingly disciplined, uniform, and machine-like institution. Reimagining Christendom offers a fresh appraisal of these developments from a surprising and distinctive vantage point. Tracing the web of textual ties that connected the northern fringes of Europe to the Roman see, Joel D. Anderson explores the ways in which Norse writers recruited, refashioned, and repurposed the legal principles and official documents of the Roman church for their own ends. Drawing on little-known vernacular sagas, Reimagining Christendom is populated with tales of married bishops, fictitious and forged papal bulls, and imagined canon law proceedings. These narratives, Anderson argues, demonstrate how Norse writers adapted and reconfigured the institutional power of the church in order to legitimize some of the thoroughly abnormal practices of their native bishops. In the process, Icelandic clerics constructed their own visions of ecclesiastical order—visions that underscore the thoroughly malleable character of the Roman church’s text-based government and that articulate diverse ways of belonging to the far-flung imagined community of high medieval Christendom.
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Female Apostle In Medieval Italy - The Life Of Clare Of Rimini

by Jacques Dalarun, Sean L. Field e Valerio Cappozzo

39,68€ + 10% CARD

 This book centers on a fascinating woman, Clare of Rimini (c. 1260 to c. 1324-29), whose story is preserved in a fascinating text. Composed by an anonymous Franciscan, the Life of the Blessed Clare of Rimini is the earliest known saint’s life originally written in Italian, and one of the few such lives to be written while its subject was still living. It tells the story of a controversial woman, set against the background of her roiling city, her star-crossed family, and the tumultuous political and religious landscape of her age. Twice married, twice widowed, and twice exiled, Clare established herself as a penitent living in a roofless cell in the ruins of the Roman walls of Rimini. She sought a life of solitary self-denial, but was denounced as a demonic danger by local churchmen. Yet she also gained important and influential supporters, allowing her to establish a fledgling community of like-minded sisters. She traveled to Assisi, Urbino, and Venice, spoke out as a teacher and preacher, but also suffered a revolt by her spiritual daughters. A Female Apostle in Medieval Italy presents the text of the Life in English translation for the first time, bringing modern readers into Clare’s world in all its excitement and complexity. Each chapter opens a different window into medieval society, exploring topics from political power to marriage and sexuality, gender roles to religious change, pilgrimage to urban structures, sanctity to heresy. Through the expert guidance of scholars and translators Jacques Dalarun, Sean L. Field, and Valerio Cappozzo, Clare’s life and context become a springboard for readers to discover what life was like in a medieval Italian city.
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What Kind Of A Thing Is A Middle English Lyric?

119,18€ + 10% CARD

 What Kind of a Thing Is a Middle English Lyric? considers issues pertaining to a corpus of several hundred short poems written in Middle English between the twelfth and early fifteenth centuries. The chapters draw on perspectives from varied disciplines, including literary criticism, musicology, art history, and cognitive science. Since the early 1900s, the poems have been categorized as "lyrics," the term now used for most kinds of short poetry, yet neither the difficulties nor the promise of this treatment have received enough attention. In one way, the book argues, considering these poems to be lyrics obscures much of what is interesting about them. Since the nineteenth century, lyrics have been thought of as subjective and best read without reference to cultural context, yet nonetheless they are taken to form a distinct literary tradition. Since Middle English short poems are often communal and usually spoken, sung, and/or danced, this lyric template is not a good fit. In another way, however, the very differences between these poems and the later ones on which current debates about the lyric still focus suggest they have much to offer those debates, and vice versa. As its title suggests, this book thus goes back to the basics, asking fundamental questions about what these poems are, how they function formally and culturally, how they are (and are not) related to other bodies of short poetry, and how they might illuminate and be illuminated by contemporary lyric scholarship. Eleven chapters by medievalists and two responses by modernists, all in careful conversation with one another, reflect on these questions and suggest very different answers. The editors’ introduction synthesizes these answers by suggesting that these poems can most usefully be read as a kind of "play," in several senses of that word. The book ends with eight "new Middle English lyrics" by seven contemporary poets.
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Immaculate Deception And Further Ribaldries - Yet Another Dozen Medieval French Farces In Modern English

by Jody Enders

79,43€ + 10% CARD

 Did you hear the one about the Mother Superior who was so busy casting the first stone that she got caught in flagrante delicto with her lover? What about the drunk with a Savior complex who was fool enough to believe himself to be the Second Coming? And that''s nothing compared to what happens when comedy gets its grubby paws on the confessional. Enter fifteenth- and sixteenth-century French farce, the "bestseller" of a world that stands to tell us a lot about the enduring influence of a Shakespeare or a Molière. It''s the sacrilegious world of Immaculate Deception, the third volume in a series of stage-friendly translations from the Middle French. These twelve engagingly funny satires target religious hypocrisy in that in-your-face way that only true slapstick can muster. There is literally nothing sacred. Why this repertoire and why now? The current political climate has had dire consequences for the pleasures of satire at a cultural moment when we have never needed it more. It turns out that the proverbial Dark Ages had a lighter side; and France''s over 200 rollicking, frolicking, singing, and dancing comedies—more extant than in any other vernacular—have waited long enough for their moment in the spotlight. They are seriously funny: funny enough to reclaim their place in cultural history, and serious enough to participate in the larger conversation about what it means to be a social influencer, then and now. Rather than relegate medieval texts to the dustbin of history, an unabashedly feminist translation can reframe and reject the sexism of bygone days by doing what theater always invites us to do: interpret, inflect, and adapt.
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Balaam'S Ass: Vernacular Theology Before The English Reformation - Volume 1: Frameworks, Arguments, English To 1250

by Nicholas Watson

119,18€ + 10% CARD

 For over seven hundred years, bodies of writing in vernacular languages served an indispensable role in the religious and intellectual culture of medieval Christian England, yet the character and extent of their importance have been insufficiently recognized. A longstanding identification of medieval western European Christianity with the Latin language and a lack of awareness about the sheer variety and quantity of vernacular religious writing from the English Middle Ages have hampered our understanding of the period, exercising a tenacious hold on much scholarship. Bringing together work across a range of disciplines, including literary study, Christian theology, social history, and the history of institutions, Balaam''s Ass attempts the first comprehensive overview of religious writing in early England''s three most important vernacular languages, Old English, Insular French, and Middle English, between the ninth and sixteenth centuries. Nicholas Watson argues not only that these texts comprise the oldest continuous tradition of European vernacular writing, but that they are essential to our understanding of how Christianity shaped and informed the lives of individuals, communities, and polities in the Middle Ages. This first of three volumes lays out the long post-Reformation history of the false claim that the medieval Catholic Church was hostile to the vernacular. It analyzes the complicated idea of the vernacular, a medieval innovation instantiated in a huge body of surviving vernacular religious texts. Finally, it focuses on the first, long generation of these writings, in Old English and early Middle English.
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Embodying The Soul - Medicine And Religion In Carolingian Europe

by Meg Leja

119,18€ + 10% CARD

 Embodying the Soul argues that classical medicine was reconfigured as a sacred Christian art across the Carolingian Empire in the ninth century, becoming not simply a method of physical rehabilitation but also a tool of spiritual transformation.
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Poisoned Wells - Accusations, Persecution, And Minorities In Medieval Europe, 1321-1422

by Tzafrir Barzilay

92,68€ + 10% CARD

 Between 1348 and 1350, Jews throughout Europe were accused of having caused the spread of the Black Death by poisoning the wells from which the entire population drank. Hundreds if not thousands were executed from Aragon and southern France into the eastern regions of the German-speaking lands. But if the well-poisoning accusations against the Jews during these plague years are the most frequently cited of such cases, they were not unique. The first major wave of accusations came in France and Aragon in 1321, and it was lepers, not Jews, who were the initial targets. Local authorities, and especially municipal councils, promoted these charges so as to be able to seize the property of the leprosaria, Tzafrir Barzilay contends. The allegations eventually expanded to describe an international conspiracy organized by Muslims, and only then, after months of persecution of the lepers, did some nobles of central France implicate the Jews, convincing the king to expel them from the realm. In Poisoned Wells Barzilay explores the origins of these charges of well poisoning, asks how the fear took root and moved across Europe, which groups it targeted, why it held in certain areas and not others, and why it waned in the fifteenth century. He argues that many of the social, political, and environmental factors that fed the rise of the mass poisoning accusations had already appeared during the thirteenth century, a period of increased urbanization, of criminal poisoning charges, and of the proliferation of medical texts on toxins. In studying the narratives that were presented to convince officials that certain groups committed well poisoning and the legal and bureaucratic mechanisms that moved rumors into officially accepted and prosecutable crimes, Barzilay has written a crucial chapter in the long history of the persecution of European minorities.
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Inventing William Of Norwich - Thomas Of Monmouth, Antisemitism, And Literary Culture, 1150–1200

by Heather Blurton

79,43€ + 10% CARD

 William of Norwich is the name of a young boy purported to have been killed by Jews in or about 1144, thus becoming the victim of the first recorded case of such a ritual murder in Western Europe and a seminal figure in the long history of antisemitism. His story is first told in Thomas of Monmouth''s The Life and Miracles of William of Norwich, a work that elaborates the bizarre allegation, invented in twelfth-century England, that Jews kidnapped Christian children and murdered them in memory and mockery of the crucifixion of Christ. In Inventing William of Norwich Heather Blurton resituates Thomas''s account by offering the first full analysis of it as a specifically literary work. The second half of the twelfth century was a time of great literary innovation encompassing an efflorescence of saints'' lives and historiography, as well as the emergence of vernacular romance, Blurton observes. She examines The Life and Miracles within the framework of these new textual developments and alongside innovations in liturgical and devotional practices to argue that the origin of the ritual murder accusation is imbricated as much in literary culture as it is in the realities of Christian-Jewish relations or the emergence of racially based discourses of antisemitism. Resisting the urge to interpret this first narrative of the blood libel with the hindsight knowledge of later developments, she considers only the period from about 1150-1200. In so doing, Blurton redirects critical attention away from the social and economic history of the ritual murder accusation to the textual genres and tastes that shaped its forms and themes and provided its immediate context of reception. Thomas of Monmouth''s narrative in particular, and the ritual murder accusation more generally, were strongly shaped by literary convention.
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Cultures Of Witnessing - Law And The York Plays

by Emma Lipton

86,13€ + 10% CARD

 Like other compilations of medieval urban drama, the plays that were performed in the streets of York on the Feast of Corpus Christi from the late fourteenth century until the third quarter of the sixteenth have most frequently been discussed in the context of the devotional cultures and practices of the later Middle Ages. The pageants'' preoccupation with law, and with witnessing in particular, has received much less attention, Emma Lipton observes, yet the cycle of forty-seven plays, which together tell the story of human history from the Creation through the Last Judgment, contains an extended sequence that stages the trials of Christ leading up to the Crucifixion, and legal discourse features prominently elsewhere as well. While the play collections associated with other cities also engage with legal concepts, the York Plays devote an unusual amount of attention to the law, Lipton contends. It is no coincidence that the plays themselves are preserved alongside a wide range of legal records in the York Memorandum Books, repositories of civic documents that were kept in the city''s guildhall. Engaging both theater and legal studies, Lipton is concerned in particular with the interfaces in the York Plays between dramatic practice and legal concepts of witnessing. In medieval English courts, witnesses were defined as neighbors; they spoke both to what they had seen and heard and also to common knowledge of events. At the same time, many legal theorists were concerned by how the temporal gap between initial experience and testimony might reshape the record of the past in light of the motives and emotions of individual witnesses and allied groups. With chapters focusing on space, speech, affect, and temporality, Cultures of Witnessing considers how civic performance and the legal theory and practice of witnessing promoted a shared sense of urban citizenship, and how this in turn provides a way to theorize late medieval religious drama, whose players performed on the streets and neighborhoods in which they conducted their daily lives.
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Pious Belligerence - Dialogical Warfare And The Rhetoric Of Righteousness In The Crusading Near East

by Uri Zvi Shachar

125,88€ + 10% CARD

 In A Pious Belligerence Uri Zvi Shachar examines one of the most contested and ideologically loaded issues in medieval history, the clash between Christians, Muslims, and Jews that we call the Crusades. He does so not to write about the ways these three groups waged war to hold onto their distinct identities, but rather to think about how these identities were framed in relation to one another. Notions of militant piety in particular provided Muslims, Christians, and Jews paths for thinking about both cultural boundaries and codependencies. Ideas about holy warfare, Shachar contends, were not shaped along sectarian lines, but were dynamically coproduced among the three religions. The final decades of the twelfth century saw a rapid collapse of the Frankish and Ayyubid hegemonies in the Levant, followed by struggles for political dominion that lasted for most of the thirteenth century. The fragmented political landscape gave rise to the formation of multiple coalitions across political, religious, and linguistic divides. Alongside a growing anxiety about the instability of cultural boundaries, there emerged a discourse that sought to realign and reevaluate questions of similarity and difference. Where Christians and Muslims regularly joined forces against their own coreligionists, Shachar writes, warriors were no longer assumed to mark or protect lines of physical or political separation. Contemporary authors recounting these events describe a landscape of questionable loyalties, shifting identities, and unstable appearances. Shachar demonstrates how in chronicles, apocalyptic treatises, and a variety of literary texts in Latin, French, Arabic, Hebrew, and Judeo-Arabic holy warriors are increasingly presented as having been rhetorically and anthropologically shaped through their contacts with their neighbors and adversaries. Writers articulated their thoughts about pious warfare through rhetorical devices that crossed confessional lines, and the meaning and force of these articulations lay in their invocation of tropes and registers that had purchase in the various literary communities of the Near East. By the late twelfth century, he argues, there had emerged a notion that threads through Christian, Muslim, and Jewish texts alike: that the Holy Land itself generates a particular breed of pious warriors by virtue of the hybridity that it encompasses.
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Uncertain Refuge - Sanctuary In The Literature Of Medieval England

by Elizabeth Allen

79,43€ + 10% CARD

 To seek sanctuary from persecution by entering a sacred space is an act of desperation, but also a symbolic endeavor: fugitives invoke divine presence to reach a precarious safe haven that imbues their lives with religious, social, or political significance. In medieval England, sanctuary was upheld under both canon and common law, and up to five hundred people sought sanctuary every year. What they found, however, was not so much a static refuge as a temporary respite from further action—confession and exile—or from further violence—jurisdictional conflict, harrying or starvation, a breaching of the sanctuary. While sanctuary has usually been analyzed as part of legal history, in Uncertain Refuge Elizabeth Allen explores the symbolic consequences of sanctuary seeking in English literary works—miracle collections, chronicles, romances, and drama. She ponders the miracle of a stag''s escape from the hunt into a churchyard as well as the account of a fallen political favorite who gains a sort of charisma as he takes sanctuary three times in succession; the figure of Sir Gawain, seeking refuge in a stark land far from the court and Robin Hood, hiding in his local forest refuge among his Merry Men. Her consideration of medieval sanctuary extends to its resonances in a seventeenth-century play about the early Tudor usurper Perkin Warbeck and even into modern America, with the case of a breach of sanctuary in southwest Georgia in 1963, when sheriffs took over a voter registration meeting in a local church. Uncertain Refuge illuminates a fantasy of protection and its impermanence that animated late medieval literary culture, and one that remains poignantly alive, if no longer written into law, in today''s troubled political world.
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Household Goods And Good Households In Late Medieval London - Consumption And Domesticity After The Plague

by Katherine L. French

46,31€ + 10% CARD

 Household Goods and Good Households in Late Medieval London looks at how increased consumption in the aftermath of the Black Death reconfigured long-held gender roles and changed the domestic lives of London's merchants and artisans for years to come.
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