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City, Citizen, Citizenship, 400–1500
This open access book explores how medieval societies conversed about the city and citizen in texts, visual imagery and material culture. It adopts a long-term, interdisciplinary, and cross-cultural perspective, bringing together contributions on the early, high, and later Middle Ages, covering both the medieval East and West, and representing a wide variety of disciplinary angles and sources. The volume is first and foremost about medieval perceptions and their articulation in text, image and material form. The principal focus is not on cities or citizenship per se, but on those who used such concepts, wrote about them, and visualized and depicted them. At the same time, the book seeks to address why the city remained such a salient concept also in non-urban contexts – the periphery, the desert, the monastery – and how medieval thinking on the ideal city and civic community could involve denunciation of the earthly city and its institutional trappings. It thus pushes scholarly boundaries, but also seeks to escape deeply entrenched notions of citizenship as either a form of political participation or legal status.
The Trans/National Study of Culture
This volume introduces key concepts for a trans/national expansion in the study of culture. Using translation as an analytical category, it explores what is translatable and untranslatable between nation-specific approaches such as British/American cultural studies, German Kulturwissenschaften and other traditions in studying culture. The range of articles included in the book covers both theoretical reflections and specific case studies that analyze the tensions and compatibilities amongst contemporary perspectives on the study of culture. By testing various key concepts – translation, cultural transfer, travelling concepts – this volume reflects on an essential vocabulary and common points of reference for scholars seeking new frameworks and methodologies for the foundation of a trans/national study of culture that is commensurate with the entangled nature of our world society.
A Companion to Gregory of Tours
Gregory, bishop of Tours (573-594), was among the most prolific writers of his age and uniquely managed to cover the genres of history, hagiography, and ecclesiastical instruction. He not only wrote about events (of the secular, spiritual, and even natural variety) but about himself as an actor and witness. Though his work (especially the Histories) has been recycled and studied for centuries, our grasp of an even basic understanding of it, never mind Gregory’s significance in the history of the late antique West, has hardly yet attained a definitive perspective. A Companion to Gregory of Tours brings together fourteen scholars who provide an expert guide to interpreting his works, his period, and his legacy in religious and historical studies. Contributors are: Pascale Bourgain, Roger Collins, John J. Contreni, Stefan Esders, Martin Heinzelmann, Yitzhak Hen, John K. Kitchen, Simon Loseby, Alexander Callander Murray, Patrick Périn, Joachim Pizarro, Helmut Reimitz, Michael Roberts, Richard Shaw.
Preaching Christology in the Roman Near East
This study develops a methodology for approaching homilies that draws on a broader understanding of audience as both the physical audience and the readership of sermons. It then offers a case study on the Syriac preacher Jacob of Serguh whose metrical homilies form one of the largest sermon collections in any language from late antiquity.
Emerging Powers in Eurasian Comparison, 200–1100
This book compares the ways in which new powers arose in the shadows of the Roman Empire and its Byzantine and Carolingian successors, of Iran, the Caliphate and China in the first millennium CE. These new powers were often established by external military elites who had served the empire. They remained in an uneasy balance with the remaining empire, could eventually replace it, or be drawn into the imperial sphere again. Some relied on dynastic legitimacy, others on ethnic identification, while most of them sought imperial legitimation. Across Eurasia, their dynamic was similar in many respects; why were the outcomes so different? Contributors are Alexander Beihammer, Maaike van Berkel, Francesco Borri, Andrew Chittick, Michael R. Drompp, Stefan Esders, Ildar Garipzanov, Jürgen Paul, Walter Pohl, Johannes Preiser-Kapeller, Helmut Reimitz, Jonathan Shepard, Q. Edward Wang, Veronika Wieser, and Ian N. Wood.
Rethinking Authority in the Carolingian Empire
By the early ninth century, the responsibility for a series of social, religious and political transformations had become an integral part of running the Carolingian empire. This became especially clear when, in 813/4, Louis the Pious and his court seized the momentum generated by their predecessors and broadened the scope of these reforms ever further. These reformers knew they represented a movement greater than the sum of its parts; the interdependence between those wielding imperial authority and those bearing responsibility for ecclesiastical reforms was driven by comprehensive, yet still surprisingly diverse expectations. Taking this diversity as a starting point, this book takes a fresh look at the optimistic first decades of the ninth century. Extrapolating from a series of detailed case studies rather than presenting a new grand narrative, it offers new interpretations of contemporary theories of personal improvement and institutional correctio, and shows the self-awareness of its main instigators as they pondered what it meant to be a good Christian in a good Christian empire.
Texts and Identities in the Early Middle Ages
For seven years, a collaboration between the Institute for Medieval Studies of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Universities of Utrecht, Cambridge, Leeds and Paris I, Sorbonne provided the opportunity for young researchers to discuss and coordinate their work. The title of the project and of this volume, Texts and identities, provides the framework for case studies in different fields of early medieval history. They include apparently disparate topics such as historiography and hagiography, monastic spaces and memories, lay and ecclesiastic legislation, as well as liturgy and penance. Rather than defining a common field of research, the meetings from which these papers have emerged d...
Franks, Northmen, and Slavs
Cursor Mundi is a publication series of inter- and multi-disciplinary studies of the medieval and early modern world, viewed broadly as the period between late antiquity and the Enlightenment. Like its companion, the journal Viator, Cursor Mundi brings together outstanding work by medieval and early modern scholars from a wide range of disciplines, emphasizing studies which focus on processes such as cultural exchange or the course of an idea through the centuries, and including investigations beyond the traditional boundaries of Europe and the Mediterranean.
Post-Roman Transitions
This volume traces the interplay between Christianity, ethnicity, and the formation of political identities in a post-Roman world. Through a variety of case studies, the papers explore the tenacity and the malleability of Roman and Christian forms of identification and othering in the barbarian kingdoms of the early medieval West.
Old Worlds, New Worlds
Pre-modern European history is replete with moments of encounter. At the end of arduous sea and land journeys, and en route, Europeans met people who challenged their assumptions and certainties about the world. Some sought riches, others allies; some looked for Christian converts and some aimed for conquest. Others experienced the forced cultural encounter of exile. Many travelled only in imagination, forming ideas which have become foundational to modern mentalities: race, ethnicity, nation, and the nature of humanity. The consequences were profound: both productive and destructive. At the beginning of the third millennium CE we occupy a world shaped by those centuries of travel and encoun...
