Micro Middle Ages

Micro Middle Ages PDF

Author: Paul Edward Dutton

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Published: 2023-11-02

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9783031382666

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Micro Middle Ages brings together five microhistorical case studies focusing on small or seemingly inconsequential evidence that leads to broader conclusions about medieval history and the way we do and understand history in general. Paul Dutton provides an overview of microhistorical approaches and theorizes about its use in pre-modern history. As opposed to studying history “from above” or history “from below,” Dutton shows the advantages for historians of doing history “from the inside out,” starting from some single, overlooked, but potentially knowable thing, delving deep inside, and then reattaching it to its time and place. Such an approach has one abiding advantage: its insistence on being grounded in the particularity of the evidence. The book highlights what the microhistorical is, its conceptual and practical challenges. Dutton argues that the attention to the micro has always been with us and is a constitutive, cognitive part of who we are as human beings.

Micro Middle Ages

Micro Middle Ages PDF

Author: Paul Edward Dutton

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2023-12-01

Total Pages: 442

ISBN-13: 3031382676

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Micro Middle Ages brings together five microhistorical case studies focusing on small or seemingly inconsequential evidence that leads to broader conclusions about medieval history and the way we do and understand history in general. Paul Dutton provides an overview of microhistorical approaches and theorizes about its use in pre-modern history. As opposed to studying history “from above” or history “from below,” Dutton shows the advantages for historians of doing history “from the inside out,” starting from some single, overlooked, but potentially knowable thing, delving deep inside, and then reattaching it to its time and place. Such an approach has one abiding advantage: its insistence on being grounded in the particularity of the evidence. The book highlights what the microhistorical is, its conceptual and practical challenges. Dutton argues that the attention to the micro has always been with us and is a constitutive, cognitive part of who we are as human beings.

A Poisoned Past

A Poisoned Past PDF

Author: Steven Bednarski

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2014-04-29

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 1442604778

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This is the story of Margarida de Portu, a medieval French woman accused of poisoning her husband to death. Through the depositions and accusations made in court, the reader learns not only about Margarida herself, but also about medieval women, female agency, kin networks, solidarity, sex, sickness, medicine, and law. Unlike most histories, this compelling book does not remove the author from the analysis. Rather, it lays bare the working method of the historian, helping the reader learn how historians "do" history and discover the rewards and pitfalls of working with primary sources. The book opens with a chapter on microhistory as a genre, explaining its strengths, weaknesses, and inherent risks. It then tells the narrative of Margarida's criminal trial, including chapters on the civil suits, appeal, and Margarida's eventual fate. A map of late medieval Manosque is provided, as well as an example of a court notary's rough copy, a notarial act, a sample folio of a criminal inquest record. A timeline of Margarida?s life, list of characters, and two family trees provide useful information on key people in the story.

Flamboyant Architecture and Medieval Technicality (c. 1400-c. 1530)

Flamboyant Architecture and Medieval Technicality (c. 1400-c. 1530) PDF

Author: Jean-Marie Guillouët

Publisher: Brepols Publishers

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9782503577296

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This book seeks to further our understanding of the socio-genesis of artistic modernity by turning to micro-history. It explores a late-medieval decorative procedure that emerged and spread in northern and central France from the early fifteenth century to the start of the following century. Using the well-known miniature, the Building of Solomon's temple in Jerusalem from the fifteenth-century codex of Les Antiquites judaiques as a starting point, this study deals with architecture and technical knowledge of builders. This investigation unpacks and reveals many aspects of the technical and visual culture of late medieval craftsmen and artists. The virtuosic skills these artisans displayed are worthy of inclusion in the development of technical practices of Flamboyant Gothic architecture. They also reflect broader cultural and social configurations, which go far beyond the history of building. This micro-historical perspective on what can be called hyper-technical Gothic contributes to our appreciation of the role of technical mastery in establishing social hierarchies and artistic individuation processes during the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern period.

Medieval Christianity

Medieval Christianity PDF

Author: Kevin Madigan

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2015-01-01

Total Pages: 512

ISBN-13: 0300158726

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A new narrative history of medieval Christianity, spanning from A.D. 500 to 1500, focuses on the role of women in Christianity; the relationships among Christians, Jews and Muslims; the experience of ordinary parishioners; the adventure of asceticism, devotion and worship; and instruction through drama, architecture and art.

The Absent Image

The Absent Image PDF

Author: Elina Gertsman

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2021-06-24

Total Pages: 599

ISBN-13: 0271089016

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Winner of the 2022 Charles Rufus Morey Award from the College Art Association Guided by Aristotelian theories, medieval philosophers believed that nature abhors a vacuum. Medieval art, according to modern scholars, abhors the same. The notion of horror vacui—the fear of empty space—is thus often construed as a definitive feature of Gothic material culture. In The Absent Image, Elina Gertsman argues that Gothic art, in its attempts to grapple with the unrepresentability of the invisible, actively engages emptiness, voids, gaps, holes, and erasures. Exploring complex conversations among medieval philosophy, physics, mathematics, piety, and image-making, Gertsman considers the concept of nothingness in concert with the imaginary, revealing profoundly inventive approaches to emptiness in late medieval visual culture, from ingenious images of the world’s creation ex nihilo to figurations of absence as a replacement for the invisible forces of conception and death. Innovative and challenging, this book will find its primary audience with students and scholars of art, religion, physics, philosophy, and mathematics. It will be particularly welcomed by those interested in phenomenological and cross-disciplinary approaches to the visual culture of the later Middle Ages.

Settlement Change Across Medieval Europe

Settlement Change Across Medieval Europe PDF

Author: Niall Brady

Publisher: Ruralia

Published: 2019-09-09

Total Pages: 350

ISBN-13: 9789088908064

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Innovations, transmissions and transformations had profound spatial, economic and social impacts on the environments, landscapes and habitats evident at micro- and macro-levels. This volume explores how these changes affected how land was worked, how it was organized, and the nature of buildings and rural complexes.

Legions of Pigs in the Early Medieval West

Legions of Pigs in the Early Medieval West PDF

Author: Jamie Kreiner

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2020-10-27

Total Pages: 397

ISBN-13: 0300255551

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An exploration of life in the early medieval West, using pigs as a lens to investigate agriculture, ecology, economy, and philosophy From North Africa to the British Isles, pigs were a crucial part of agriculture and culture in the early medieval period. Jamie Kreiner examines how this ubiquitous species was integrated into early medieval ecologies and transformed the way that people thought about the world around them. In this world, even the smallest things could have far‑reaching consequences. Kreiner tracks the interlocking relationships between pigs and humans by drawing on textual and visual evidence, bioarchaeology and settlement archaeology, and mammal biology. She shows how early medieval communities bent their own lives in order to accommodate these tricky animals—and how in the process they reconfigured their agrarian regimes, their fiscal policies, and their very identities. In the end, even the pig’s own identity was transformed: by the close of the early Middle Ages, it had become a riveting metaphor for Christianity itself.

Reimagining Europe

Reimagining Europe PDF

Author: Christian Raffensperger

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2012-03-12

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 0674068548

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An overriding assumption has long directed scholarship in both European and Slavic history: that Kievan Rus' in the tenth through twelfth centuries was part of a Byzantine commonwealth separate from Europe. Christian Raffensperger refutes this conception and offers a new frame for two hundred years of history, one in which Rus' is understood as part of medieval Europe and East is not so neatly divided from West. With the aid of Latin sources, the author brings to light the considerable political, religious, marital, and economic ties among European kingdoms, including Rus', restoring a historical record rendered blank by Russian monastic chroniclers as well as modern scholars ideologically motivated to build barriers between East and West. Further, Raffensperger revises the concept of a Byzantine commonwealth that stood in opposition to Europe-and under which Rus' was subsumed-toward that of a Byzantine Ideal esteemed and emulated by all the states of Europe. In this new context, appropriation of Byzantine customs, law, coinage, art, and architecture in both Rus' and Europe can be understood as an attempt to gain legitimacy and prestige by association with the surviving remnant of the Roman Empire. Reimagining Europe initiates an expansion of history that is sure to challenge ideas of Russian exceptionalism and influence the course of European medieval studies.

Abortion in the Early Middle Ages, C. 500-900

Abortion in the Early Middle Ages, C. 500-900 PDF

Author: Zubin Mistry

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 358

ISBN-13: 1903153573

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First full-length study of attitudes to abortion in the early medieval west. When a Spanish monk struggled to find the right words to convey his unjust expulsion from a monastery in a desperate petition to a sixth-century king, he likened himself to an aborted fetus. Centuries later, a ninth-century queenfound herself accused of abortion in an altogether more fleshly sense. Abortion haunts the written record across the early middle ages. Yet, the centuries after the fall of Rome remain very much the "dark ages" in the broader history of abortion. This book, the first to treat the subject in this period, tells the story of how individuals and communities, ecclesiastical and secular authorities, construed abortion as a social and moral problem across anumber of post-Roman societies, including Visigothic Spain, Merovingian Gaul, early Ireland, Anglo-Saxon England and the Carolingian empire. It argues early medieval authors and readers actively deliberated on abortion and a cluster of related questions, and that church tradition on abortion was an evolving practice. It sheds light on the neglected variety of responses to abortion generated by different social and intellectual practices, including church discipline, dispute settlement and strategies of political legitimation, and brings the history of abortion into conversation with key questions about gender, sexuality, Christianization, penance and law. Ranging across abortion miracles in hagiography, polemical letters in which churchmen likened rivals to fetuses flung from the womb of the church and uncomfortable imaginings of resurrected fetuses in theological speculation, this volume also illuminates the complex cultural significance of abortion in early medieval societies. Zubin Mistry is Lecturer in Early Medieval European History, University of Edinburgh.