Author: Constance Brittain Bouchard
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812246365
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 384
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Book Description
Thinkers in medieval France constantly reconceptualized what had come before, interpreting past events to give validity to the present and help control the future. The long-dead saints who presided over churches and the ancestors of established dynasties were an especially crucial part of creative memory, Constance Brittain Bouchard contends. In Rewriting Saints and Ancestors she examines how such ex post facto accounts are less an impediment to the writing of accurate history than a crucial tool for understanding the Middle Ages. Working backward through time, Bouchard discusses twelfth-century scribes contemplating the ninth-century documents they copied into cartularies or reworked into narratives of disaster and triumph, ninth-century churchmen deliberately forging supposedly late antique documents as weapons against both kings and other churchmen, and sixth- and seventh-century Gallic writers coming to terms with an early Christianity that had neither the saints nor the monasteries that would become fundamental to religious practice. As they met with political change and social upheaval, each generation decided which events of the past were worth remembering and which were to be reinterpreted or quietly forgotten. By considering memory as an analytic tool, Bouchard not only reveals the ways early medieval writers constructed a useful past but also provides new insights into the nature of record keeping, the changing ways dynasties were conceptualized, the relationships of the Merovingian and Carolingian kings to the church, and the discovery (or invention) of Gaul's earliest martyrs.
Author: John Higgins
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1501515608
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 247
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Book Description
As part of the historicizing corpus of seventh-century Irish writing, the Lives framed the narrative of the early saints as an effective weapon in contemporary political and ecclesiastical conflicts. Cogitosus’s Life of Brigit, Muirchú’s and Tírechán’s accounts of Saint Patrick, and Adomnán’s Life of Columba created the understanding of the history of early Ireland that has endured to this day. How did the writers accomplish this through their literary choices? The authors of Irish saints’ Lives used the literary form of hagiography (Christian biography), miracle stories, and an elaborate rhetorical style to present the words and actions of their subjects. These Lives created a narrative of early Irish history that supported the political/ecclesiastical elites by showing that their power derived from the actions of their patron saints.
Author: David Crouch
Publisher: Leuven University Press
ISBN: 9462701709
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 332
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Book Description
In popular imagination few phenomena are as strongly associated with medieval society as knighthood and chivalry. At the same time, and due to a long tradition of differing national perspectives and ideological assumptions, few phenomena have continued to be the object of so much academic debate. In this volume leading scholars explore various aspects of knightly identity, taking into account both commonalities and particularities across Western Europe. Knighthood and Society in the High Middle Ages addresses how, between the eleventh and the early thirteenth centuries, knighthood evolved from a set of skills and a lifestyle that was typical of an emerging elite habitus, into the basis of a consciously expressed and idealised chivalric code of conduct. Chivalry, then, appears in this volume as the result of a process of noble identity formation, in which some five key factors are distinguished: knightly practices, lineage, crusading memories, gender roles, and chivalric didactics.
Author: Robert F. Berkhofer, III
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1783276916
Category : Europe
Languages : en
Pages : 344
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Book Description
A close analysis of forgeries and historical writings at Saint Peter''s, Ghent; Saint-Denis near Paris; and Christ Church, Canterbury, offering valuable access to why medieval people often rewrote their pasts.What modern scholars call "forgeries" (be they texts, seals, coins, or relics) flourished in the central Middle Ages. Although lying was considered wrong throughout the period, such condemnation apparently did not extend to forgeries. Rewriting documents was especially common among monks, who exploited their mastery of writing to reshape their records. Monastic scribes frequently rewrote their archives, using charters, letters, and narratives, to create new usable pasts for claiming lands and privileges in their present or future. Such imagined histories could also be deployed to "reform" their community or reshape its relationship with lay and ecclesiastical authorities. Although these creative rewritings were forgeries, they still can be valuable evidence of medieval mentalities. While forgeries cannot easily be used to reconstruct what did happen, forgeries embedded in historical narratives show what their composers believed should have happened and thus they offer valuable access to why medieval people rewrote their pasts.This book offers close analysis of three monastic archives over the long eleventh century: Saint Peter''s, Ghent; Saint-Denis near Paris; and Christ Church, Canterbury. These foci provide the basis for contextualizing key shifts in documentary culture in the twelfth century across Europe. Overall, the book argues that connections between monastic forgeries and historical writing in the tenth through twelfth centuries reveal attempts to reshape reality. Both sought to rewrite the past and thereby promote monks'' interests in their present or future. easily be used to reconstruct what did happen, forgeries embedded in historical narratives show what their composers believed should have happened and thus they offer valuable access to why medieval people rewrote their pasts.This book offers close analysis of three monastic archives over the long eleventh century: Saint Peter''s, Ghent; Saint-Denis near Paris; and Christ Church, Canterbury. These foci provide the basis for contextualizing key shifts in documentary culture in the twelfth century across Europe. Overall, the book argues that connections between monastic forgeries and historical writing in the tenth through twelfth centuries reveal attempts to reshape reality. Both sought to rewrite the past and thereby promote monks'' interests in their present or future. easily be used to reconstruct what did happen, forgeries embedded in historical narratives show what their composers believed should have happened and thus they offer valuable access to why medieval people rewrote their pasts.This book offers close analysis of three monastic archives over the long eleventh century: Saint Peter''s, Ghent; Saint-Denis near Paris; and Christ Church, Canterbury. These foci provide the basis for contextualizing key shifts in documentary culture in the twelfth century across Europe. Overall, the book argues that connections between monastic forgeries and historical writing in the tenth through twelfth centuries reveal attempts to reshape reality. Both sought to rewrite the past and thereby promote monks'' interests in their present or future. easily be used to reconstruct what did happen, forgeries embedded in historical narratives show what their composers believed should have happened and thus they offer valuable access to why medieval people rewrote their pasts.This book offers close analysis of three monastic archives over the long eleventh century: Saint Peter''s, Ghent; Saint-Denis near Paris; and Christ Church, Canterbury. These foci provide the basis for contextualizing key shifts in documentary culture in the twelfth century across Europe. Overall, the book argues that connections between monastic forgeries and historical writing in the tenth through twelfth centuries reveal attempts to reshape reality. Both sought to rewrite the past and thereby promote monks'' interests in their present or future.lose analysis of three monastic archives over the long eleventh century: Saint Peter''s, Ghent; Saint-Denis near Paris; and Christ Church, Canterbury. These foci provide the basis for contextualizing key shifts in documentary culture in the twelfth century across Europe. Overall, the book argues that connections between monastic forgeries and historical writing in the tenth through twelfth centuries reveal attempts to reshape reality. Both sought to rewrite the past and thereby promote monks'' interests in their present or future.
Author: Kathleen Ashley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000396789
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 262
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Book Description
Bringing together artifacts, texts, and practices within an interpretive framework that stresses the cultural work performed by saints, Kathleen Ashley presents a comparative study of the cults of the medieval Sainte Foy at a number of the sites where she was especially venerated. This book analyzes how each cult site produced the saint it needed, appropriating or creating whatever was required to that end. Ashley’s approach is thoroughly interdisciplinary, incorporating visual, religious, medieval, and women’s and gender studies as well as literary studies and social history. She uses the theoretical framework of "cultural work" to analyze how the cult of Sainte Foy was sponsored and received by specific groups in different locales in Europe. The book is comprehensive in terms of historical as well as geographical range, tracing the history of the cult from the early Middle Ages into the present day. It also includes historiographical analysis, examining the way the cults of Sainte Foy have been represented in various historical accounts. Ashley’s narrative challenges the boundary between "elite" and "popular" culture and complicates the traditional vernacular vs. Latin language binary. A chief aim of the study is to show how "art" objects always operated in conjunction with other cultural texts to construct a saint’s cult. The volume is heavily illustrated, showing artifacts such as stained-glass windows and wall paintings which are not readily available from any other source. This book will be of special interest to scholars in art history, medieval history, gender studies, and religion.
Author: Carsten Selch Jensen
Publisher: Medieval Institute Publications
ISBN: 1580443249
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337
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Book Description
This volume addresses the history of saints and sainthood in the Middle Ages in the Baltic Region, with a special focus on the cult of saints in Russia, Prussia, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Estonia, and Latvia (Livonia). Essays explore such topics as the introduction of foreign (and "old") saints into new regions, the creation of new local cults of saints in newly Christianized regions, the role of the cult of saints in the creation of political and lay identities, and the potential role of saints in times of war.
Author: Martha Rampton
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501735314
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 409
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Book Description
Trafficking with Demons explores how magic was perceived, practiced, and prohibited in western Europe during the first millennium CE. Through the overlapping frameworks of religion, ritual, and gender, Martha Rampton connects early Christian reckonings with pagan magic to later doctrines and dogmas. Challenging established views on the role of women in ritual magic during this period, Rampton provides a new narrative of the ways in which magic was embedded within the foundational assumptions of western European society, informing how people understood the cosmos, divinity, and their own Christian faith. As Rampton shows, throughout the first Christian millennium, magic was thought to play a natural role within the functioning of the universe and existed within a rational cosmos hierarchically arranged according to a "great chain of being." Trafficking with the "demons of the lower air" was the essense of magic. Interactions with those demons occurred both in highly formalistic, ritual settings and on a routine and casual basis. Rampton tracks the competition between pagan magic and Christian belief from the first century CE, when it was fiercest, through the early Middle Ages, as atavistic forms of magic mutated and found sanctuary in the daily habits of the converted peoples and new paganisms entered Europe with their own forms of magic. By the year 1000, she concludes, many forms of magic had been tamed and were, by the reckoning of the elite, essentially ineffective, as were the women who practiced it and the rituals that attended it.
Author:
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526154099
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 388
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Book Description
A new and accessible translation of Hariulf’s History of St Riquier, this book examines the history of a monastic community from the seventh to the eleventh century. It covers the ascetic life of the founding saint and the development of the community under the Carolingians in the late eighth and ninth centuries. There were setbacks when the house was sacked by the Vikings and the founder’s relics were stolen for political ends, but it recovered in the tenth and eleventh centuries and developed the links with both the Norman and English courts that enable Hariulf to make interesting observations about the Norman Conquest of England. Hariulf’s description of the monastic site with its three churches and the liturgical arrangements practised there, as well as the relics, treasures, books and endowments of a great monastic foundation, make his history an important source for monastic history.
Author: Jane Bliss
Publisher: Open Book Publishers
ISBN: 1783743166
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 1044
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Book Description
This book is an anthology with a difference. It presents a distinctive variety of Anglo-Norman works, beginning in the twelfth century and ending in the nineteenth, covering a broad range of genres and writers, introduced in a lively and thought-provoking way. Facing-page translations, into accessible and engaging modern English, are provided throughout, bringing these texts to life for a contemporary audience. The collection offers a selection of fascinating passages, and whole texts, many of which are not anthologised or translated anywhere else. It explores little-known byways of Arthurian legend and stories of real-life crime and punishment; women’s voices tell history, write letters, berate pagans; advice is offered on how to win friends and influence people, how to cure people’s ailments and how to keep clear of the law; and stories from the Bible are retold with commentary, together with guidance on prayer and confession. Each text is introduced and elucidated with notes and full references, and the material is divided into three main sections: Story (a variety of narrative forms), Miscellany (including letters, law and medicine, and other non-fiction), and Religious (saints' lives, sermons, Bible commentary, and prayers). Passages in one genre have been chosen so as to reflect themes or stories that appear in another, so that the book can be enjoyed as a collection or used as a resource to dip into for selected texts. This anthology is essential reading for students and scholars of Anglo-Norman and medieval literature and culture. Wide-ranging and fully referenced, it can be used as a springboard for further study or relished in its own right by readers interested to discover Anglo-Norman literature that was written to amuse, instruct, entertain, or admonish medieval audiences.
Author: Caroline Brett
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108486517
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 497
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Book Description
"Brittany is rich in arch ...
