This collection brings together current research into the development of the market for pre-modern manuscripts. Between 1890 and 1945 thousands of manuscripts made in Europe before 1600 appeared on the market. Many entered the collections in which they have remained, shaping where and how we encounter the books today. These collections included libraries that bear their founders' names, as well as national and regional public libraries. The choices of the super-rich shaped their collections and determined what was available to those with fewer resources. In addition, wealthy collectors sponsored scholarship on their manuscripts and participated in exhibitions, raising the profile of some books. This volume examines the collectors, dealers, and scholars who engaged with pre-modern books, and the cultural context of the manuscript trade in this era.
The Book of Roger is a twelfth-century Arabic geographical treatise commissioned by King Roger II of Sicily and compiled by the Muslim polymath al-Idrisi. On its completion in around 1157 it was the most detailed description of the known world produced up to that point. This translation covers Sicily, the seat of King Roger's government, along with the other parts of the Norman kingdom in the South: southern Italy, the Adriatic, and Ifriqiya, as well as the book's preface. Presented in English translation for the first time this text offers insight into Roger's motivation in commissioning such an endeavour, and the relationship between king and scholar. A comprehensive introduction explores what this important work tells us about the Norman kingdom in the South in the Middle Ages, while a series of detailed maps will enhance the reader's appreciation of the richness of al-Idrisi's data.
This book explores the profound impact the Battle of Lyndanise in 1219 (on the site of Tallinn today) had on both Denmark and Estonia from the thirteenth century to the present day.
This facing-page Latin and English edition of the customary for the shrine of St. Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral, provides valuable insights into the management of one of the most popular pilgrimage sites in Europe.
Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History is an annual publication of historiographical essays on the pre-modern world. As a venue for sustained investigations, it plays a significant role in the dissemination of interpretative scholarship that falls in the niche between the journal article and the monograph. This is the final volume in series 3 and primarily comprises essays in memory of Paul E. Szarmach, the eminent Old English scholar and former executive director of the Medieval Academy of America and director of the Medieval Institute at Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo.
The Battle of Manzikert on August 26, 1071 is widely regarded as one of the most significant turning points in medieval history, frequently presented as the culmination of a Turco-Islamic assault upon the Byzantine bulwark of a Christian world struggling for survival. Emperor Romanus IV's campaigns between 1068 and 1071 do, in many ways, represent the empire's fightback against an enemy that for decades had penetrated deep into Asia Minor, its heartland and strategic bulwark. Yet Manzikert was not a disaster. This book examines the geopolitical background and the origins of the campaign that led to the battle, the main protagonists, and their strategies and battle tactics. It also evaluates the primary sources and the enduring legacy of the battle, for both the Greek and Turkish historiography of the twentieth century.
Jewish presence in the Malabar Coast of southwestern India is attested since the ninth century in various sources and diverse languages. Malabar Jewry emerged out of the Indian Ocean maritime trade networks that connected people and communities in West and South Asia forging kinship alliances and cross-cultural exchange. This book traces the evolution of Malabar Jewry in the history of contact and exchange that gave rise to Indo-Arab coastal communities in the period between 849 and 1489.
Caroline Bergvall's celebrated trilogy of interdisciplinary medievalist texts and projects--Meddle English (2011), Drift (2014), and Alisoun Sings (2019)--documents methods of reading and making that are poetically and politically alert, critically and culturally aware, linguistically attuned, and historically engaged. Drawing on the wide-ranging body of criticism dedicated to Bergvall's work and material from Bergvall's archive, together with newly commissioned texts by scholars, theorists, linguists, translators, and poets, this book situates the trilogy in relation to key themes including mixed temporalities; interdisciplinarity and performance; art and activism; and the geopolitical, psychosexual, and social complexities of subjectivity. It follows routes laid down by the trilogy to move between the medieval past and our contemporary moment to uncover new forms of encounter and exchange.
This book addresses Christendom's eastern frontier, the principality of Moldavia: its political, economic, and cultural history from its formation in 1359 to the early sixteenth century.
"The market for rare books has been characterized as unpredictable, and driven by the whims of a small number of rich individuals. Yet behind the headlines announcing new auction records, a range of sources make it possible to analyze the market as a whole. This book introduces the economics of the trade in manuscripts and rare books during the turbulent period ca. 1890-1939. It demonstrates how surviving sources, even when incomplete and inconsistent, can be used to tackle questions about the operation of the rare book trade, including how books were priced, profit margins, accounting practices, and books as investments, from the perspectives of both dealers and collectors."--
This study explores tropes concerned with the Middle Ages in Imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet Russia, seeking to explain why an often romanticized medieval past remains potent in Russian politics, society, and culture today.
Examines the nature and socialization of disabled performers in the medieval and early Tudor periods.
In a young American republic seeking to define itself in relation to European cultural and political models past and present, it was assumed that the history of Europe's peoples could be tracked across time over the longue durée. From this perspective, even the barbarous long-haired kings of the distant Merovingian era helped to define the political and cultural identity of a France--and, indeed, a Europe--whose actions Americans recognized as relevant to their own republic. Americans saw medieval parallels not only in the actions of successive French regimes, but in contemporary transatlantic issues of anxiety, including the adjudication of claims of political legitimacy and the debate over the perpetuation of racial slavery. That early American writers located their own meanings in the history of Merovingian Francia is indicative of a less linear, and more diverse and transnational, historiography than previously recognized.
This book explores the ways in which contemporary authors respond to and rework key aspects of Old Norse history and viking culture for young twenty-first-century audiences. Why are contemporary authors and audiences so manifestly attracted to the viking past? In what ways do writers respond to Norse sources? How do the narratives they tell reflect our beliefs about and desires for the past, our constructions of childhood and adolescence, our anxieties around gender, sexuality, and ethnicity? How do these texts engage with a future occluded by apocalyptic ecological threat? David Clark explores these questions through readings of a rich body of diverse material which retells, updates, and transforms Norse culture. The volume contextualizes Norse medievalism and explores how thematic foci on gender, sexuality, disability, and ethnicity relate to contemporary concerns around these topics, and the construction of childhood.
This book combines the history of charitable institutions with the study of power in urban and rural spaces from the late medieval to the early modern era. Focusing on the Ospedale di Santa Maria della Scala in Siena, the book goes beyond examining hospitals in an urban context to also consider the significant impact of charitable institutions in rural spaces. Case studies of Santa Maria della Scala's farms allow an investigation of the relationship between urban institutions and their rural properties, while looking at subject hospitals outside the Sienese state offers a glimpse into the competition for power with non-Sienese entities. As Siena's politics shifted in the sixteenth century, Santa Maria della Scala and its rural spaces became sites where power was negotiated. The book thus demonstrates how geographies of power affected the practice of charity for both urban hospitals and the rural communities they influenced.
This book examines feminist textual and cinematic engagements with the idea of the Middle Ages in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, arguing that the idea of the medieval past is central to the work of novelists and directors interested in embodiment and vulnerability. Careful and illuminating analysis of particular moments in fiction, film, and political discourse dismantles the false binary between popular and intellectual medievalisms, which rests on gendered understandings of genre and audience, while demonstrating that masculinist or patriarchal medievalisms have an equal but understudied counterpart. The book's first three chapters cover Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey and its afterlives, the final works of Virginia Woolf, and late twentieth-century film and music videos from the United States. The final chapter examines the treatment of women's bodies and vulnerability in both political theory and recent electoral politics, arguing that they share a common thread of misogyny rooted in the idea of the medieval past, and that one way to challenge that misogyny is by looking at complex feminist engagements with that same past, both real and imagined.
This book is a collection of essays offering a wide range of approaches to teaching with commonplace books. In the medieval period and beyond, commonplace books promoted a blend of excerpting, memorization, creative writing, and journaling, making them the analogue equivalent to modern-day digital journaling, bookmarking, and note-taking tools. Covering a variety of methods for introducing students to the medieval and Renaissance reading practice known as commonplacing, this volume provides instructors with concrete guidelines for using commonplace books as a teaching and learning tool. The enclosed essays provide a point of reference for best practices as well as concrete models for teaching and learning with commonplace books, helping instructors develop more student-centred, inclusive curricula.
This monograph examines how Korean women and men came to engage with Catholic missions during Europe's late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a profoundly volatile period in East Asian history during which political, cultural, and social disruption created opportunities for new interactions in the region. It analyzes the nature of that engagement, as women and men became both subjects for, and agents of, catechizing practices. As their evangelization, experience of faith, proselytizing, and suffering were recorded in mission archives, the monograph explores contact between Catholic Christianity and Korean women in particular. Broomhall demonstrates how gender ideologies shaped interactions between missionary men and Korean women, and how women's experiences would come to be narrated, circulated, and memorialized.
This reference work examines the ways in which some medieval behaviours and identities were categorized as criminal or deviant. It also explores the implications of modern demonization of the Middle Ages. As well as discussing constructions of deviance, this book also explores the behaviours and identities which provoked these labels and processes. The model is one of reciprocity between behaviours and processes of demonisation and criminalisation. Each authoritative essay engages carefully with this approach, examining behaviours, the ways they were demonized, and the relationship between the two processes. The three parts of the volume are centred around forms of discursive and normative power--religious ideologies, political ideologies, and legalism. The authors also explore issues of political discourse, spiritual censure, justice and punishment, and the construction of taboos.
The authors comprehensively analyze all the available information regarding the ritual practices of Slavic pre-Christian religion that can be found in written medieval texts. After investigating every kind of reference to such practices, they offer a reconstruction of Slavic pre-Christian religion on the basis of these medieval testimonies. In doing so, they overcome the challenges presented by the fact that all of these sources are indirect, since the Slavs did not acquire literacy until they became Christians. Thus the writers of these texts mostly professed a monotheistic religion, being Christians and in some cases Muslims. The picture that they offer is biased and determined by their own faith. The present analysis innovatively combines testimonies from every Slavic area (Eastern, Western, and Southern), showing their mutual correspondences and emphasizing the relationship between the Slavic pre-Christian religion and its Indo-European roots.
This historical anthology of Korean poetry, Ancient, Medieval, and Premodern Korean Songs and Poems highlights the evolution of poetic composition in the vernacular. The book is a manifesto of the uniquely Korean poetic tradition, which flourished quite separately along with the literary tradition retained by the men of letters devoted to the scholarship in classical Chinese. The beauty of the Korean language and the tradition of verse-making in it are sumptuously demonstrated by this book, which contains both the original texts in the unique Korean orthography of phonograms and the translator's English version that runs in parallel with the original poems.
From the fall of Islamic Isbīliya in 1248 to the conquest of the New World, Seville was a nexus of economic and religious power where interconfessional living among Christians, Jews, and Muslims was negotiated on public stages. From out of seemingly irreconcilable ideologies of faith, hybrid performance culture emerged in spectacles of miraculous transformation, disciplinary processionals, and representations of religious identity. Ritual, Spectacle, and Theatre in Late Medieval Seville reinvigorates the study of medieval Iberian theatre by revealing the ways in which public expressions of devotion, penance, and power fostered cultural reciprocity, rehearsed religious difference, and ultimately helped establish Seville as the imperial centre of Christian Spain.
This study features essays from leading scholars highlighting the important Jewish contributions to the popular medieval genre of romance. Writing against strict notions of genre boundaries and canonization, this volume provides a new understanding of medieval and early modern romance through a working definition consisting of variable elements, including language, literary devices, plot, and characters. The contributions in this volume establish that many texts written in the medieval and early modern Jewish communities across Europe and beyond can be classified as "romance." Each of the nine chapters as well as the afterword by Eli Yassif discusses romance as it relates to the medieval and early modern Jewish world, as well as the greater non-Jewish context. This volume places Jewish texts into the scholarly conversation as sources for forming a new understanding of the genre of romance across religious and cultural boundaries.
The comparative or connected study of localized intellectual traditions poses special challenges to the global turn in medieval studies. How can we enable conversations across language groups and intricate cultural formations, as well as disciplines? Practices of commentary offer a compelling opportunity: their visual layouts reveal assumptions about the relative status of text and gloss, while interpretive interlinear or marginal prompts capture the dynamic relationships among generations of teachers, students, and readers. The material traces of manuscript usage--from hastily scrawled marginal notes to vivid rubrication--illuminate the shared didactic and communicative practices developed within scholarly communities. By bringing together researchers working on specific cultures and discourses across Eurasia, this volume moves toward a global account of premodern commentary traditions.
The problem of fraternal relations in the early Middle Ages has not been hitherto studied in detail, especially in comparison with the multitude of studies dealing with the models of marriage, gender-based social roles, or the relations between generations. Historians have been often prone to assume that relations between siblings in European culture were naturally constant, based on loyalty, solidarity, and readiness to act in the common interest, stemming from blood ties. However, this conviction equates the category of brotherhood/fraternitas used by medieval authors with concepts associated with sources from later periods. This study does not concern narrowly defined family history, but is an attempt to examine fraternal relations in the early Middle Ages as a multidimensional cultural phenomenon. As the author seeks to demonstrate, it is difficult to speak of kinship in the ninth century and later without being aware of the religious and ideological implications of the transformations taking place at the time, even if direct traces of the impact of moralizing and theological teachings on the conduct of individuals are hard to capture in the sources.
It is well known that in several of her works, Christine de Pizan actively sought to valorize and empower women; she notably made the case for women's education, argued for the protection of widows, and famously attacked the misogyny of the all-pervasive Roman de la Rose. Whilst numerous examinations have shown that Christine sought to empower women through her texts, this book demonstrates that the visual programmes of her works offer further evidence of Christine's championing women in their role as educators and activists, whilst challenging some assumptions made about gender in Christine's works. It also examines the conduits and structures by which power is conferred upon women within them. When read together, the text and image across Christine's oeuvre reveal a consistent picture: one in which women educate and empower one another.
This book uses sociological perspectives to bring together work on war and identity in the Middle Ages relating to a range of peoples and geographical settings from Europe, the eastern Mediterranean, the Middle East, and Asia. Focusing on the interrelation between ideological practices and group formation, it examines the role of warfare in the emergence and decline of particular social structures, and changing patterns of collective identification. It contributes to the debate on the longue durée development of the phenomena of ethnicity and nationhood by drawing attention to the impact of war on the evolution of various types of polity and visions of community in the Middle Ages. Its use of non-European as well as European exemplars provides a wealth of fruitful comparative material, shedding new light on the relationship between medieval warfare and high-level identities.
The first extended study of supernatural discourse in Old English poetry, Supernatural Speakers in Old English Verse fills a conspicuous gap in the scholarship of early medieval literature. Drawing insights from various disciplines, including critical discourse analysis, social psychology, and oral poetry studies, Supernatural Speakers demonstrates how and why three poets--the poets of Genesis A, Christ C, and Guthlac A--marshalled their distinction as experts of the Old English poetic medium to perform the power of supernatural speech by means of masterful poetics. By offering new analytical paths through these early medieval poems, Supernatural Speakers elucidates the importance of poetics as a critical window on the social and religious functions of verbal art in early medieval England.
Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, historia septentrional (1617) is Miguel de Cervantes's last major work. Virtually ignored for the past four hundred years and overshadowed by the acclaim accorded Don Quixote, it is due a revival. As indicated by this new English title, The Perils of Persiles and Sigismunda, a Northern Saga, this challenging saga-like fiction follows an attractive young prince and princess who undertake a perilous pilgrimage by sea and on land from their North Atlantic islands to Rome. This new translation by William Thomas Little takes full account of recent scholars' ground-breaking research and their new readings. It also includes a selected bibliography, a contextualizing introduction, and footnotes on the text that clarify for contemporary readers cultural issues that were readily known to seventeenth-century readers in Spain, France, Italy, Portugal, and England.
This book explores the dimensions of medieval monastic meditation, prayer, and contemplation in the heyday of Benedictine and Cistercian spiritual writing, the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Mancia aims to answer the following questions: What did extra-liturgical prayer and meditation look like for medieval monks and nuns in western medieval Europe? When, where, and how was it practised? Was there a set way to engage with monastic meditation, or were there a variety of medieval monastic meditative experiences in the eleventh and twelfth centuries? What did monks and nuns perceive as the limitations of monastic prayer and meditation, and how did they understand their own imperfections and failures to perform "perfect" devotion? What extra-textual tools--art, manuscripts, diagrams, spaces--did monks and nuns rely upon to stimulate their practices of meditation? What does monastic meditation reveal about the emotional lives of Benedictine and Cistercian monks and nuns in the high Middle Ages? And, finally, what does the monastic struggle to pursue a prayerful Christian life have to teach the secular world of the twenty-first century?
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