Death and Memory in Early Medieval Britain

Death and Memory in Early Medieval Britain PDF Author: Howard Williams
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139457934
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
How were the dead remembered in early medieval Britain? Originally published in 2006, this innovative study demonstrates how perceptions of the past and the dead, and hence social identities, were constructed through mortuary practices and commemoration between c. 400–1100 AD. Drawing on archaeological evidence from across Britain, including archaeological discoveries, Howard Williams presents a fresh interpretation of the significance of portable artefacts, the body, structures, monuments and landscapes in early medieval mortuary practices. He argues that materials and spaces were used in ritual performances that served as 'technologies of remembrance', practices that created shared 'social' memories intended to link past, present and future. Through the deployment of material culture, early medieval societies were therefore selectively remembering and forgetting their ancestors and their history. Throwing light on an important aspect of medieval society, this book is essential reading for archaeologists and historians with an interest in the early medieval period.

Death and Memory in Early Medieval Britain

Death and Memory in Early Medieval Britain PDF Author: Howard Williams
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139457934
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 222

Get Book Here

Book Description
How were the dead remembered in early medieval Britain? Originally published in 2006, this innovative study demonstrates how perceptions of the past and the dead, and hence social identities, were constructed through mortuary practices and commemoration between c. 400–1100 AD. Drawing on archaeological evidence from across Britain, including archaeological discoveries, Howard Williams presents a fresh interpretation of the significance of portable artefacts, the body, structures, monuments and landscapes in early medieval mortuary practices. He argues that materials and spaces were used in ritual performances that served as 'technologies of remembrance', practices that created shared 'social' memories intended to link past, present and future. Through the deployment of material culture, early medieval societies were therefore selectively remembering and forgetting their ancestors and their history. Throwing light on an important aspect of medieval society, this book is essential reading for archaeologists and historians with an interest in the early medieval period.

Death and Memory in Early Medieval Britain

Death and Memory in Early Medieval Britain PDF Author: Howard Williams
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780511245183
Category : Death
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
Addresses the commemorative functions of funerary ritual between 400OCo1100 AD using archaeological remains as its evidence base."

Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History 14

Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History 14 PDF Author: Sarah Semple
Publisher: Oxbow Books
ISBN: 178297508X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 626

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Book Description
Volume 14 of the Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History series is dedicated to the archaeology of early medieval death, burial and commemoration. Incorporating studies focusing upon Anglo-Saxon England as well as research encompassing western Britain, Continental Europe and Scandinavia, this volume originated as the proceedings of a two-day conference held at the University of Exeter in February 2004. It comprises of an Introduction that outlines the key debates and new approaches in early medieval mortuary archaeology followed by eighteen innovative research papers offering new interpretations of the material culture, monuments and landscape context of early medieval mortuary practices. Papers contribute to a variety of ongoing debates including the study of ethnicity, religion, ideology and social memory from burial evidence. The volume also contains two cemetery reports of early Anglo-Saxon cemeteries from Cambridgeshire.

Death in Medieval England

Death in Medieval England PDF Author: Dawn M. Hadley
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Drawing on a cross-section of evidence--excavated cemeteries, sculpture and funerary monuments, documentary sources, and iconography--and using a series of regional case studies, this book explores the changing attitudes to death and the commemoration of the dead during the medieval period. The book addresses a number of themes, including the changing location of burial, the evidence for burial rite and funerals, the great wealth of funerary monuments and other forms of ecclesiastical patronage, the nature of the funerary industry, and the relationship of the dead to the living community.

Death and the Regeneration of Life

Death and the Regeneration of Life PDF Author: Maurice Bloch
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316582299
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
It is a classical anthropological paradox that symbols of rebirth and fertility are frequently found in funerary rituals throughout the world. The original essays collected here re-examine this phenomenon through insights from China, India, New Guinea, Latin America, and Africa. The contributors, each a specialist in one of these areas, have worked in close collaboration to produce a genuinely innovative theoretical approach to the study of the symbolism surrounding death, an outline of which is provided in an important introduction by the editors. The major concern of the volume is the way in which funerary rituals dramatically transform the image of life as a dialectic flux involving exchange and transaction, marriage and procreation, into an image of a still, transcendental order in which oppositions such as those between self and other, wife-giver and wife-taker, Brahmin and untouchable, birth and therefore death have been abolished. This transformation often involves a general devaluation of biology, and, particularly, of sexuality, which is contrasted with a more spiritual and controlled source of life. The role of women, who are frequently associated with biological processes, mourning and death pollution, is often predominant in funerary rituals, and in examining this book makes a further contribution to the understanding of the symbolism of gender. The death rituals and the symbolism of rebirth are also analysed in the context of the political processes of the different societies considered, and it is argued that social order and political organisation may be legitimated through an exploitation of the emotions and biology.

Digging into the Dark Ages

Digging into the Dark Ages PDF Author: Howard Williams
Publisher: Archaeopress Publishing Ltd
ISBN: 1789695287
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Book Description
What does the ‘Dark Ages’ mean in contemporary society? Tackling public engagements through archaeological fieldwork, heritage sites and museums, fictional portrayals and art, and increasingly via a broad range of digital media, this is the first-ever dedicated collection exploring the public archaeology of the Early Middle Ages.

The Archaeology of Death and Burial

The Archaeology of Death and Burial PDF Author: Mike Parker Pearson
Publisher: The History Press
ISBN: 0750999039
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 510

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Book Description
The archaeology of death and burial is central to our attempts to understand vanished societies. Through the remains of funerary rituals we can learn not only about the attitudes of prehistoric people to death and the afterlife, but also about their way of life, their social organisation and their view of the world. This ambitious book reviews the latest research in this huge and important field, and describes the sometimes controversial interpretations that have led to rapid advances in our understanding of life and death in the distant past. A unique overview and synthesis of one of the most revealing fields of research into the past, it covers archaeology's most breathtaking discoveries, from Tutankhamen to the Ice Man, and will find a keen market among archaeologists, historians and others who have a professional interest in, or general curiosity about, death and burial.

Northern memories and the English Middle Ages

Northern memories and the English Middle Ages PDF Author: Tim William Machan
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526145375
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
This book provocatively argues that much of what English writers of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries remembered about medieval English geography, history, religion and literature, they remembered by means of medieval and modern Scandinavia. These memories, in turn, figured in something even broader. Protestant and fundamentally monarchical, the Nordic countries constituted a politically kindred spirit in contrast with France, Italy and Spain. Along with the so-called Celtic fringe and overseas colonies, Scandinavia became one of the external reference points for the forging of the United Kingdom. Subject to the continual refashioning of memory, the region became at once an image of Britain’s noble past and an affirmation of its current global status, rendering trips there rides on a time machine.

Symbolic Reproduction in Early Medieval England

Symbolic Reproduction in Early Medieval England PDF Author: Katharine Sykes
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192659138
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
In the early Middle Ages, the conversion of the early English kingdoms acted as a catalyst for significant social and cultural change. One of the most visible of these changes was the introduction of a new type of household: the monastic household. These reproduced through education and training, rather than biological means; their inhabitants practised celibacy as a lifelong state, rather than as a stage in the life course. Because monastic households depended on secular households to produce the next generation of recruits, previous studies have tended to view them as more mutable than their secular counterparts, which are implicitly regarded as natural and ahistorical. Katharine Sykes charts some of the significant changes to the structure of households between the seventh to eleventh centuries, as ideas of spiritual, non-biological reproduction first fostered in monastic households were adopted in royal households in the tenth and eleventh centuries, and as ideas about kinship that were generated in secular households, such as the relationship between genealogy and inheritance, were picked up and applied by their monastic counterparts. In place of binary divisions between secular and monastic, biological and spiritual, real and imagined, Sykes demonstrates that different forms of kinship and reproduction in this period were intimately linked.

Early Medieval Stone Monuments

Early Medieval Stone Monuments PDF Author: Howard Williams
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1783270748
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
New insights into inscribed and stone monuments from across Europe in the early middle ages.