How medieval songbooks were composed in collaboration with the community—and across languages and societies: "Eloquent…clearly argued."— Times Literary Supplement Today we usually think of a book of ...poems as composed by a poet, rather than assembled or adapted by a network of poets and readers. But the earliest European vernacular poetries challenge these assumptions. Medieval songbooks remind us how lyric poetry was once communally produced and received—a collaboration of artists, performers, live audiences, and readers stretching across languages and societies. The only comparative study of its kind, Songbook treats what poetry was before the emergence of the modern category poetry: that is, how vernacular songbooks of the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries shaped our modern understanding of poetry by establishing expectations of what is a poem, what is a poet, and what is lyric poetry itself. Marisa Galvez analyzes the seminal songbooks representing the vernacular traditions of Occitan, Middle High German, and Castilian, and tracks the process by which the songbook emerged from the original performance contexts of oral publication, into a medium for preservation, and, finally, into an established literary object. Galvez reveals that songbooks—in ways that resonate with our modern practice of curated archives and playlists—contain lyric, music, images, and other nonlyric texts selected and ordered to reflect the local values and preferences of their readers. At a time when medievalists are reassessing the historical foundations of their field and especially the national literary canons established in the nineteenth century, a new examination of the songbook's role in several vernacular traditions is more relevant than ever.
The story of the beliefs and practices called 'magic' starts in ancient Iran, Greece, and Rome, before entering its crucial Christian phase in the Middle Ages. Centering on the Renaissance and ...Marsilio Ficino - whose work on magic was the most influential account written in premodern times - this groundbreaking book treats magic as a classical tradition with foundations that were distinctly philosophical. Besides Ficino, the premodern story of magic also features Plotinus, Iamblichus, Proclus, Aquinas, Agrippa, Pomponazzi, Porta, Bruno, Campanella, Descartes, Boyle, Leibniz, and Newton, to name only a few of the prominent thinkers discussed in this book. Because pictures play a key role in the story of magic, this book is richly illustrated.
In Forged in the Shadow of Mars, Peter W. Sposato traces chivalry's powerful influence on the mentalitè and behavior of a sizeable segment of the elite in late medieval Florence. He finds that the ...strenuous knights and men-at-arms of the Florentine chivalric elite—a cultural community comprised of men from both traditional and newly emerged elite lineages—embraced a chivalric ideology that was fundamentally martial and violent. Chivalry helped to shape a common identity among these men based on the profession of arms and the ready use of violence against both their peers and those they perceived to be their social inferiors. This violence, often transgressive in nature, was not only crucial to asserting and defending personal, familial, and corporate honor, but was also inherently praiseworthy. In this way, Sposato highlights the sharp differences between chivalry and the more familiar civic ideology of the popolo grasso, the Florentine mercantile and banking elite who came to dominate Florence politically and economically during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. As a result, in Forged in the Shadow of Mar s, Sposato challenges the traditional scholarly view of chivalry as foreign to the social and cultural landscape of Florence and contests its reputation as a civilizing force. By reexamining the connection between chivalric literature and actual practice and identity formation among historical knights and men-at-arms, he likewise provides an important corrective to assumptions about the nature of elite violence and identity in medieval Italian cities.
This reprint aims to investigate some of the numerous ways in which Christianity venerated and represented the Virgin Mary in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Fifteen researchers in various areas ...of the Arts and Humanities have brought together here their efforts to address in part this inexhaustible objective. The reprint is divided into two main parts. In one of them, composed of six chapters, we study some of the several ways in which the Christian faithful rendered worship and devotion to the Virgin Mary during the more than one thousand years under consideration. The other part, made up of seven chapters, analyzes various iconographic manifestations through which medieval and Renaissance Christians made their devotion to the mother of Christ visible in pictorial or sculptural forms. Therefore, this reprint will be very useful not only for specialists in Christian studies, especially in Marian themes but also for those interested in the development of the societies and cultures of medieval and Renaissance Europe.
This monograph represents an expansion and deepening of previous works by Ole J. Benedictow - the author of highly esteemed monographs and articles on the history of plague epidemics and historical ...demography. In the form of a collection of articles, the author presents an in-depth monographic study on the history of plague epidemics in Scandinavian countries and on controversies of the microbiological and epidemiological fundamentals of plague epidemics.
The study of the Middle Ages in every aspect of the modern liberal arts—the humanities, STEM, and the social sciences—has significant importance for society and the individual. There is a common ...belief that the peoples of the past were somehow exempt from (positive, especially) human nature, had less of a sense of morality (by any definition) than we do now, or were unaware of basic human dilemmas or triumphs. Relegating the Middle Ages to primitive distances us from close examination of what has not changed in society—or what has, which might not be for the better. Exploring and exploding these (mis)conceptions is essential to experience the benefits of a liberal education.
This book brings together the cumulative results of a three-year project focused on the assemblies and administrative systems of Scandinavia, Britain, and the North Atlantic islands in the 1st and ...2nd millennia AD. In this volume we integrate a wide range of historical, cartographic, archaeological, field-based, and onomastic data pertaining to early medieval and medieval administrative practices, geographies, and places of assembly in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Scotland, and eastern England. This transnational perspective has enabled a new understanding of the development of power structures in early medieval northern Europe and the maturation of these systems in later centuries under royal control. In a series of richly illustrated chapters, we explore the emergence and development of mechanisms for consensus. We begin with a historiographical exploration of assembly research that sets the intellectual agenda for the chapters that follow. We then examine the emergence and development of the thing in Scandinavia and its export to the lands colonised by the Norse. We consider more broadly how assembly practices may have developed at a local level, yet played a significant role in the consolidation, and at times regulation, of elite power structures. Presenting a fresh perspective on the agency and power of the thing and cognate types of local and regional assembly, this interdisciplinary volume provides an invaluable, in-depth insight into the people, places, laws, and consensual structures that shaped the early medieval and medieval kingdoms of northern Europe.
In Roads to Health, G. Geltner demonstrates that urban dwellers in medieval Italy had a keen sense of the dangers to their health posed by conditions of overcrowding, shortages of food and clean ...water, air pollution, and the improper disposal of human and animal waste. He consults scientific, narrative, and normative sources that detailed and consistently denounced the physical and environmental hazards urban communities faced: latrines improperly installed and sewers blocked; animals left to roam free and carcasses left rotting on public byways; and thoroughfares congested by artisanal and commercial activities that impeded circulation, polluted waterways, and raised miasmas. However, as Geltner shows, numerous administrative records also offer ample evidence of the concrete measures cities took to ameliorate unhealthy conditions. Toiling on the frontlines were public functionaries generally known as viarii, or "road-masters, " appointed to maintain their community's infrastructures and police pertinent human and animal behavior. Operating on a parallel track were the camparii, or "field- masters, " charged with protecting the city's hinterlands and thereby the quality of what would reach urban markets, taverns, ovens, and mills. Roads to Health provides a critical overview of the mandates and activities of the viarii and camparii as enforcers of preventive health and safety policies between roughly 1250 and 1500, and offers three extended case studies, for Lucca, Bologna, and the smaller Piedmont town of Pinerolo. In telling their stories, Geltner contends that preventive health practices, while scientifically informed, emerged neither solely from a centralized regime nor as a reaction to the onset of the Black Death. Instead, they were typically negotiated by diverse stakeholders, including neighborhood residents, officials, artisans, and clergymen, and fostered throughout the centuries by a steady concern for people's greater health.
What do we mean when we talk about disability in the Middle Ages? This volume brings together dynamic scholars working on the subject in medieval literature and history, who use the latest approaches ...from the field to address this central question. Contributors discuss such standard medieval texts as the Arthurian Legend, The Canterbury Tales and Old Norse Sagas, providing an accessible entry point to the field of medieval disability studies to medievalists. The essays explore a wide variety of disabilities, including the more traditionally accepted classifications of blindness and deafness, as well as perceived disabilities such as madness, pregnancy and age.
Adopting a ground-breaking new approach to the study of disability in the medieval period, this provocative book will interest medievalists and scholars of disability throughout history.
The modern state, however we conceive of it today, is based on a pattern that emerged in Europe in the period from 1100 to 1600. Written from the experience of a lifetime of teaching and research in ...the field, this short, clear book is the classic work on what is known about the early history of the European state. Charles Tilly's foreword shows how Strayer's book set the agenda for a whole generation of historical analysts, not just in medieval history but also in the comparative study of state formation. William Chester Jordan's foreword addresses the scholarly and pedagogical setting within which Strayer produced his book, and how this both enhanced its accessibility and informed its focus on peculiarly English and French accomplishments in early state-building.
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