Author: Sarah Greer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198850131
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 221
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Book Description
Commemorating Power looks at how the past was evoked for political purposes under a new Saxon dynasty, the Ottonians, who came to dominate post-Carolingian Europe after 888 as the rulers of a new empire in Germany and Italy, focusing on two convents of monastic women who played a significant role in Ottonian politics.
Author: Sarah Greer (Researcher)
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780192590404
Category : Electronic books
Languages : en
Pages : 224
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Book Description
This title looks at how the past was evoked for political purposes under a new Saxon dynasty, the Ottonians, who came to dominate post-Carolingian Europe after 888 as the rulers of a new empire in Germany and Italy. Two convents of monastic women who played a significant role in Ottonian politics are the main focus of the book.
Author: Sarah Greer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192590413
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 221
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Book Description
In the early medieval world, the way people remembered the past changed how they saw the present. New accounts of former leaders and their deeds could strengthen their successors, establish novel claims to power, or criticize the current ruler. After 888, when the Carolingian Empire fractured into the smaller kingdoms of medieval western Europe, memory became a vital tool for those seeking to claim royal power for themselves. Commemorating Power in Early Medieval Saxony looks at how the past was evoked for political purposes under a new Saxon dynasty, the Ottonians, who came to dominate post-Carolingian Europe as the rulers of a new empire in Germany and Italy. With the accession of the first Ottonian king, Henry I, in 919, sites commemorating the king's family came to the foreground of the medieval German kingdom. The most remarkable of these were two convents of monastic women, Gandersheim and Quedlinburg, whose prominence and prestige in Ottonian politics have been seen as exceptional in the history of early medieval western Europe. In this volume, Sarah Greer offers a fresh interpretation of how these convents became central sites in the new Ottonian empire by revealing how the women in these communities themselves were skilful political actors who were more than capable of manipulating memory for their own benefit. In this first major study in English of how these Saxon convents functioned as memorial centres, Greer presents a new vision of the first German dynasty, one characterized by contingency, versatility, and the power of the past.
Author: Joshua M. Cragle
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000969215
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 345
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Book Description
Utilizing a “crusading ethos,” from 772 to 804 AD, Charlemagne, King of the Franks, waged war against the continental Saxons to integrate them within the growing Frankish Empire and facilitate their conversion to Christianity. While substantial research has been produced concerning various components of Carolingian history, this work offers a unique examination of Charlemagne’s Saxon Wars as a case study for understanding methods of conversion used in the Christianization of Europe, as well as their significance for subsequent conversion strategies employed around the globe. Converting the Saxons builds on prior scholarly research, is grounded in primary sources, and is contextualized with a robust historical introduction. Throughout the text, particular emphasis is given to Christian encounters with paganism and the way paganism was interpreted, confronted, and transformed. Within those encounters, we observe myriad forces of coercion and incentivization used in societal religious conversion, demonstrating the need for a serious reconsideration of the standard narratives surrounding Christian missions. This book provides a scholarly and accessible resource for students and researchers interested in transhistorical methods of conversion, the history of Christianity, Early Medieval paganism, Colonial religious encounters, and the nature of religious conversion.
Author: Albrecht Classen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3111190609
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 628
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Book Description
Although it is fashionable among modernists to claim that globalism emerged only since ca. 1800, the opposite can well be documented through careful comparative and transdisciplinary studies, as this volume demonstrates, offering a wide range of innovative perspectives on often neglected literary, philosophical, historical, or medical documents. Texts, images, ideas, knowledge, and objects migrated throughout the world already in the pre-modern world, even if the quantitative level compared to the modern world might have been different. In fact, by means of translations and trade, for instance, global connections were established and maintained over the centuries. Archetypal motifs developed in many literatures indicate how much pre-modern people actually shared. But we also discover hard-core facts of global economic exchange, import of exotic medicine, and, on another level, intensive intellectual debates on religious issues. Literary evidence serves best to expose the extent to which contacts with people in foreign countries were imaginable, often desirable, and at times feared, of course. The pre-modern world was much more on the move and reached out to distant lands out of curiosity, economic interests, and political and military concerns. Diplomats crisscrossed the continents, and artists, poets, and craftsmen traveled widely. We can identify, for instance, both the Vikings and the Arabs as global players long before the rise of modern globalism, so this volume promises to rewrite many of our traditional notions about pre-modern worldviews, economic conditions, and the literary sharing on a global level, as perhaps best expressed by the genre of the fable.
Author: Customer Laura L Gathagan
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1783277890
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313
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Book Description
Considers the role gender played in the production, use and preservation of documents. How was the world of medieval documentation and memory creation affected by gender? This question is central to the essays collected here, which bring together aspects of gender and documentary culture that are usually studied only in isolation. Covering the tenth to the thirteenth centuries, the volume offers a broad geographical reach - England, France, Flanders, Germany, Spain - and an array of sources, from charters, letters and court proceedings to seals, iconography, and illumination. There is a particular focus on lay female communities, including women's collective legal action in pre-Conquest England, documentary initiatives of Castilian peasant widows, and urban Flemish women's sealing practices. Re-examinations of noblewomen's centrality - and erasure - in charters focus on Ermengarde of Brittany, Mathilda of Boulogne and Berengaria of Navarre. Contributions on gender and historical writing explore their development in Ottonian courts, tenth-century English coronation portraits, Orderic Vitalis' Historia Ecclesiastica, and French chroniclers' rhetorical strategies for writing noblewomen's rage. Further chapters consider monastic spaces, including women's houses at Auxerre and Marcigny and at Holy Trinity, Caen, and explore women's memory preservation efforts, at Spanish houses - San Salvador de Oña and Santa María de Piasca - and a community at Bouxières. This volume demonstrates the new insights that can be gleaned by viewing various processes, such as legal disputes and monastic narratives and foundation, through a gendered lens.
Author: Benjamin Pohl
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192514709
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 433
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Book Description
This book argues that abbatial authority was fundamental to monastic historical writing in the period c.500-1500. Writing history was a collaborative enterprise integral to the life and identity of medieval monastic communities, but it was not an activity for which time and resources were set aside routinely. Each act of historiographical production constituted an extraordinary event, one for which singular provision had to be made, workers and materials assigned, time carved out from the monastic routine, and licence granted. This allocation of human and material resources was the responsibility and prerogative of the monastic superior. Drawing on a wide and diverse range of primary evidence gathered from across the medieval Latin West, this book is the first to investigate systematically how and why abbots and abbesses exercised their official authority and resources to lay the foundations on which their communities' historiographical traditions were built by themselves and others. It showcases them as prolific authors, patrons, commissioners, project managers, and facilitators of historical narratives who not only regularly put pen to parchment personally, but also, and perhaps more importantly, enabled others inside and outside their communities by granting them the resources and licence to write. Revealing the intrinsic relationship between abbatial authority and the writing of history in the Middle Ages with unprecedented clarity, Benjamin Pohl urges us to revisit and revise our understanding of monastic historiography, its processes, and its protagonists in ways that require some radical rethinking of the medieval historian's craft in communal and institutional contexts.
Author: Jonathan R. Lyon
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009084097
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 439
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Book Description
What was an “advocate” (Latin: advocatus; German: Vogt) in the Middle Ages? What responsibilities came with the position and how did they change over time? With this groundbreaking study, Jonathan R. Lyon challenges the standard narrative of a “medieval” Europe of feudalism and lordship being replaced by a “modern” Europe of government, bureaucracy and the state. By focusing on the position of advocate, he argues for continuity in corrupt practices of justice and protection between 750 and 1800. This book traces the development of the role of church advocate from the Carolingian period onward and explains why this position became associated with the violent abuse of power on churches' estates. When other types of advocates became common in and around Germany after 1250, including territorial and urban advocates, they were not officeholders in developing bureaucracies. Instead, they used similar practices to church advocates to profit illicitly from their positions, which calls into question scholarly arguments about the decline of violent lordship and the rise of governmental accountability in European history.
Author: Mayke de Jong
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047404041
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 630
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Book Description
The 19 papers presented in this volume by North American and European historians and archaeologists discuss how early medieval political and religious elites constructed ‘places of power’, and how such places, in turn, created powerful people. They also examine how the ‘high-level’ power exercised by elites was transformed in the post-Roman kingdoms of Europe, as Roman cities gave way as central stages for rituals of power to a multitude of places and spaces where political and religious power were represented. Although the Frankish kingdoms receive a large share of attention, contributions also focus on the changing topography of power in the old centres of the Roman world, Rome and Constantinople, to what ‘centres of power’ may have meant in the steppes of Inner Asia, Scandinavia or the lower Vistula, where political power was even more mobile and decentralised than in the post-Roman kingdoms, as well as to monasteries and their integration into early medieval topographies of power.
Author: John W. Bernhardt
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521521833
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 412
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Book Description
In examining the relationship between the royal monasteries in tenth- and eleventh-century Germany and the German monarchs, this book assimilates a great deal of European scholarship on a central problem - that of the realities and structures of power. It focuses on the practical aspects of governing without a capital and while constantly in motion, and on the payments and services which monasteries provided to the king and which in turn supported the king's travel economically and politically. Royal-monastic relations are investigated in the context of the 'itinerant kingship' of the period to determine how this relationship functioned in practice. It emerges that German rulers did in fact make much greater use of their royal monasteries than has hitherto been recognised.
