A Companion to the Medieval World E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Blackwell Companions to European History
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 1571

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Drawing on the expertise of 26 distinguished scholars, this important volume covers the major issues in the study of medieval Europe, highlighting the significant impact the time period had on cultural forms and institutions central to European identity.

• Examines changing approaches to the study of medieval Europe, its periodization, and central themes
  
• Includes coverage of important questions such as identity and the self, sexuality and gender, emotionality and ethnicity, as well as more traditional topics such as economic and demographic expansion; kingship; and the rise of the West
  
• Explores Europe’s understanding of the wider world to place the study of the medieval society in a global context

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

WILEY-BLACKWELL COMPANIONS TO HISTORY

Title page

Copyright page

Notes on Contributors

Part I: The Middle Ages

Chapter One: The Idea of a Middle Ages

Part II: Early Medieval Foundations

Chapter Two: Economies and Societies in Early Medieval Western Europe

Living through the Crisis of the Roman Empire

Rome’s Shadow and the Study of the Early Middle Ages

Urbanism and the Economy: The Rhythms of Change

A World of Villages: The Transformation of the Countryside

Changing Aristocracies: Wealth and Social Status

The End of the Early Middle Ages?

Chapter Three: Politics and Power

Chapter Four: Religious Culture and the Power of Tradition in the Early Medieval West

Some Preliminary Historiographical Observations

Paganism, Christianity, and the Conversion of Europe

The Threefold Liturgical Cycle

Religion and Political Ideology

Part III: Populations and the Economy

Chapter Five: Economic Takeoff and the Rise of Markets

Chapter Six: Rural Families in Medieval Europe

The Rural Family

The Economy of the Rural Family

The Culture of the Rural Family

Conclusion

Chapter Seven: Marriage in Medieval Latin Christendom

Secular Imperatives

Enter the Church

The Bonds of Kinship and Conjugality in the Later Middle Ages

Marital Woes

Chapter Eight: Gender and Sexuality

Historiography and Gender

Patriarchies, Misogynies, Femininities

Masculinities

Sexualities

Gender as Lived Experience

Chapter Nine: Society, Elite Families, and Politics in Late Medieval Italian Cities

Sources

Families

Elite Political Dynamics

Part IV: Religious Culture

Chapter Ten: New Religious Movements and Reform

The Early Middle Ages

“Gregorian Reform”

The Origins of the Eleventh-Century Reform Movements

Characterizations and Evaluations of Eleventh-Century Reform

New Religious Movements

Chapter Eleven: Monastic and Mendicant Communities

Chapter Twelve: Hospitals in the Middle Ages

Chapter Thirteen: Popular Belief and Heresy

The Problem of Sources

Belief and Skepticism

Heresy

Women and Gender

Persecution

Deconstruction

Chapter Fourteen: Jews in the Middle Ages

Jews and their Rulers

Jews and Culture

Sexuality and Family

The Corpus Christi and its Absence

Chapter Fifteen: Muslims in Medieval Europe

Part V: Politics and Power

Chapter Sixteen: Conflict Resolution and Legal Systems

Disputes and Settlements in the Early Middle Ages

Ordeals and Proof

Meaning of Ordeal

“Revolution” in Law

Ius commune and Ius proprium

Courts and Procedures

English Common Law

Conclusion

Chapter Seventeen: Medieval Rulers and Political Ideology

The Two Powers Problem

Dualism from Gelasius I to Charlemagne

Dualism in the High Middle Ages: Papal Monarchy

Opposition to the Church’s Claims

Political Change, the “ Western Schism,” and the Conciliar Movement

Chapter Eighteen: Papal Monarchy

The Foundations

The Early Stages

Expansion

Reaching out to the World

The Pope as Monarch in the Church

Chapter Nineteen: Urban Historical Geography and the Writing of Late Medieval Urban History

Medieval Urban History

Cities and Towns

Urban History Reconsidered

Town and Country: Rethinking the City

Urban Historical Geography: What is it?

New Approaches

Chapter Twenty: Bureaucracy and Literacy

The Early Middle Ages (400–750)

The High Middle Ages (750–1100)

The Later Middle Ages (1100–1500)

Chapter Twenty-one: The Practice of War

Overview

Gathering a Force

Developing a Strategy

Devastation and Shadowing

Skirmishes and Ambushes

Assaults

Siege Warfare

Battle

Little War and Private War

Truce and Peace

Chapter Twenty-two: Expansion and the Crusades

Part VI: Technologies and Culture

Chapter Twenty-three: Romanesque and Gothic Church Architecture

The Problem: Historiographic Overview

Representation and Production of Space

Telling the Story of Romanesque and Gothic

Conclusion

Chapter Twenty-four: Aristocratic Culture: Kinship, Chivalry, and Court Culture

Lineage and Kinship Structures

Chivalry and Courtliness

Courts, Courtliness, and Civilizing Processes

Chapter Twenty-five: Philosophy and Humanism

Medieval Philosophical Humanism: Three Phases

Conclusion

A Note on Petrarch

Chapter Twenty-six: Philosophy and Theology in the Universities

The Legacy of the Twelfth Century

The Journey of the Corpus Aristotelicum around the Mediterranean

Thirteenth-Century Scholasticism: The New Aristotle

Thomas Aquinas

The Condemnation of 1277

The Nominalist Alternative

Reactions to Nominalism

Part VII: The European Middle Ages

Chapter Twenty-seven: Medieval Europe in World History

The Master Narrative of Academic History

Getting away from Gibbon

The Expansion of Civilization

The Great Transformation

The First Great Divergence

Index

WILEY-BLACKWELL COMPANIONS TO HISTORY

This series provides sophisticated and authoritative overviews of the scholarship that has shaped our current understanding of the past. Defined by theme, period and/or region, each volume comprises between twenty-five and forty concise essays written by individual scholars within their area of specialization. The aim of each contribution is to synthesize the current state of scholarship from a variety of historical perspectives and to provide a statement on where the field is heading. The essays are written in a clear, provocative, and lively manner, designed for an international audience of scholars, students, and general readers.

WILEY-BLACKWELL COMPANIONS TO BRITISH HISTORY

A Companion to Roman BritainEdited by Malcolm Todd

A Companion to Britain in the Later Middle AgesEdited by S. H. Rigby

A Companion to Tudor BritainEdited by Robert Tittler and Norman Jones

A Companion to Stuart BritainEdited by Barry Coward

A Companion to Eighteenth-Century BritainEdited by H. T. Dickinson

A Companion to Nineteenth-Century BritainEdited by Chris Williams

A Companion to Early Twentieth-Century BritainEdited by Chris Wrigley

A Companion to Contemporary BritainEdited by Paul Addison and Harriet Jones

A Companion to the Early Middle Ages: Britain and Ireland c.500–c.1100Edited by Pauline Stafford

WILEY-BLACKWELL COMPANIONS TO EUROPEAN HISTORY

A Companion to Europe 1900–1945Edited by Gordon Martel

A Companion to Eighteenth-Century EuropeEdited by Peter H. Wilson

A Companion to Nineteenth-Century EuropeEdited by Stefan Berger

A Companion to the Worlds of the RenaissanceEdited by Guido Ruggiero

A Companion to the Reformation WorldEdited by R. Po-chia Hsia

A Companion to Europe Since 1945Edited by Klaus Larres

A Companion to the Medieval WorldEdited by Carol Lansing and Edward D. English

A Companion to the French RevolutionEdited by Peter McPhee

WILEY-BLACKWELL COMPANIONS TO WORLD HISTORY

A Companion to Western Historical ThoughtEdited by Lloyd Kramer and Sarah Maza

A Companion to Gender HistoryEdited by Teresa A. Meade and Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks

A Companion to the History of the Middle EastEdited by Youssef M. Choueiri

A Companion to Japanese HistoryEdited by William M. Tsutsui

A Companion to International History 1900–2001Edited by Gordon Martel

A Companion to Latin American HistoryEdited by Thomas Holloway

A Companion to Russian HistoryEdited by Abbott Gleason

A Companion to World War IEdited by John Horne

A Companion to Mexican History and CultureEdited by William H. Beezley

A Companion to World HistoryEdited by Douglas Northrop

A Companion to Global Environmental HistoryEdited by J. R. McNeill and Erin Stewart Mauldin

A Companion to World War IIEdited by Thomas W. Zeiler, with Daniel M. DuBois

For further information on these and other titles in the series please visit our website at

www.wiley.com.

This paperback edition first published 2013

© 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Edition history: Blackwell Publishing Ltd (hardback, 2007)

Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’s publishing program has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A companion to the medieval world / edited by Carol Lansing and Edward D. English.

p. cm. – (Blackwell companions to European history)

 Includes bibliographical references and index.

 ISBN 978-1-4051-0922-2 (cloth) – ISBN 978-1-118-42512-1 (pbk.)

 1. Europe – History – 476-1492. 2. Middle Ages. 3. Civilization, Medieval. I. Lansing, Carol, 1951– II. English, Edward D.

 D117.C657 2009

 940.1 – dc22

2008051691

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover image: 14th-century king administers justice to his subjects. Photo: The Art Archive / Real biblioteca de lo Escorial / Alfredo Dagli Orti.

Cover design by Richard Boxall Design Associates

Notes on Contributors

John Arnold is Professor in the School of History, Classics, and Archaeology, Birkbeck, University of London. He is the author of Belief and Unbelief in Medieval Europe (London: Edward Arnold, 2005); co-edited with K. J. Lewis, A Companion to the Book of Margery Kempe (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell, 2004); Inquisition and Power: Catharism and the Confessing Subject in Medieval Languedoc (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001); History: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); co-edited with S. Ditchfield and K. Davies, History and Heritage: Consuming the Past in Contemporary Culture (Lower Coombe, Dorset: Donhead, 1998); and most recently What is Medieval History? (Cambridge: Polity, 2008).

Richard E. Barton is Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. He is the author of “Making a Clamor to the Lord: Noise, Justice and Power in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century France,” in Feud, Violence and Practice: Essays in Medieval Studies in Honor of Stephen D. White, ed. B. Tuten and T. Billado (Aldershot: Ashgate, forthcoming); “Gendering Anger: Ira, Furor and Discourses of Power and Masculinity in the 11th and 12th Centuries,” in In the Garden of Evil: the Vices in the Middle Ages, ed. Richard Newhauser (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 371–392; and Lordship in the County of Maine, c. 890–1160 (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2004).

Constance H. Berman is Professor of History at the University of Iowa. She is the editor and a contributor to Medieval Religion: New Approaches (London: Routledge, 2005); The Cistercian Evolution: The Invention of a Religious Order in Twelfth-Century Europe (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000); a co-editor of Medieval Agriculture, the Southern-French Countryside, and the Early Cistercians. A Study of Forty-three Monasteries (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1986); co-editor of The Worlds of Medieval Women: Creativity, Influence, Imagination (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 1985); the editor and translator of Women and Monasticism in Medieval Europe: Sisters and Patrons of the Cistercian Order, (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2002) and has two works in progress: The White Nuns: Cistercian Abbeys for Women and Their Property and After the Millennium: Women’s Work and European Economic Growth, 1050–1250.

Richard Britnell is emeritus professor of economic history at the University of Durham, fellow of the British Academy and co-editor of the Surtees Society. He is the author of many articles, editions, and Growth and Decline in Colchester, 1300–1525 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, reprint 2008); The Commercialisation of English Society, 1000–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993; 2nd edn, 1996); co-edited with B. M. S. Campbell, A Commercialising Economy: England 1086 to c. 1300 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995); co-edited with A. J. Pollard, The McFarlane Legacy: Studies in Late Medieval Politics and Society (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1995); The Closing of the Middle Ages? England, 1471–1529 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997); edited Pragmatic Literacy, East and West, 1200–1330 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1997); and Britain and Ireland 1050–1530: Economy and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

James W. Brodman is a Professor of History at the University of Central Arkansas, a past President of the American Academy of Research Historians of Medieval Spain, and founder and director of LIBRO: The Library of Iberian Resources Online. He has published Ransoming Captives in Crusader Spain: The Order of Merced on the Christian-Islamic Frontier (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986); L’Ordre de la Merce: El rescat de captius a l’Espanya de les croades (Barcelona: Edicions dels Quaderns Crema, 1990); Charity and Welfare: Hospitals and the Poor in Medieval Catalonia. The Middle Ages Series (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998); and Charity and Religion in Medieval Europe. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2009.

Olivia Remie Constable is Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. She has published Trade and Traders in Muslim Spain: The Commercial Realignment of the Iberian Peninsula 900–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Medieval Iberia: Readings from Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Sources (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997); Housing the Stranger in the Mediterranean World: Lodging, Trade, and Travel in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and a new book project entitled Muslims in Medieval Europe.

Robert W. Dyson was Lecturer in the School of Government and International Affairs and a member of the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and the Centre for the History of Political Thought at the University of Durham. Among his numerous publications are St. Augustine of Hippo and the Christian Transformation of Political Philosophy (London: Continuum Press, 2005); Giles of Rome’s “On Ecclesiastical Power”: A Medieval Theory of World Government (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); St Thomas Aquinas: The Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); St Augustine of Hippo: The City of God Against the Pagans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); James of Viterbo On Christian Government (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1995); and Giles of Rome on Ecclesiastical Power (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1986).

Edward D. English is Executive Director of Medieval Studies and Adjunct Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is finishing the first of two volumes on the society and politics of Siena in the fourteenth century. His other publications include Enterprise and Liability in Sienese Banking, 1230–1350 (Cambridge: Medieval Academy of America, 1988) and The Encyclopedia of the Medieval World, 2 volumes (New York: Facts-on-File, 2005).

Stephen Gersh is Professor of Medieval Studies in the Medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame. His publications include: Kinesis Akinetos. A Study of Spiritual Motion in the Philosophy of Proclus (Leiden: Brill 1973); From Iamblichus to Eriugena. An Investigation of the Prehistory and Evolution of the Pseudo-Dionysian Tradition (Leiden: Brill 1978); Middle Platonism and Neoplatonism. The Latin Tradition, 2 volumes (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986); Concord in Discourse. Harmonics and Semiotics in Late Classical and Early Medieval Platonism (Berlin: Mouton-De Gruyter 1996); and with Maarten J. F. M. Hoenen, Plato in the Middle Ages. A Doxographical Approach (Berlin: De Gruyter 2002).

Yitzhak Hen is Associate Professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He has published Culture and Religion in Merovingian Gaul, A.D. 481–751 (Leiden: Brill, 1995); The Sacramentary of Echternach, Henry Bradshaw Society, 110 (London: Boydell and Brewer, 1997); co-edited with Matthew Innes, The Uses of the Past in the Early Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); De Sion Exibit Lex et Verbum Domini de Hierusalem. Studies on Medieval Law, Liturgy and Literature in Honour of Amnon Linder, Cultural Encounters in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001); The Royal Patronage of Liturgy in Frankish Gaul to the Death of Charles the Bald (877), Henry Bradshaw Society Subsidia series, 3 (London: Boydell and Brewer, 2001); co-edited with Rob Meens, The Bobbio Missal: Liturgy and Religious Culture in Merovingian Gaul, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Roman Barbarians: The Royal Court and Culture in the Early Medieval West (London: Palgrave, 2007); and is General Editor of the Series “Cultural Encounters in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages” for Brepols.

Martha C. Howell is Miriam Champion Professor of History in Columbia University. She has published From Reliable Sources with Walter Prevenier (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001); The Marriage Exchange: Property, Social Place and Gender in Cities of the Low Countries, 1300–1550 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); and Women, Production, and Patriarchy in Late Medieval Cities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); with Marc Boone, In But Not of the Market: Movable Goods in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Economy (2007), and Commerce before Capitalism in Europe, 1300–1600. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

Hans Hummer is an Associate Professor in History at Wayne State University. He has published Politics and Power in Early Medieval Europe: Alsace and the Frankish Realm, 600–1000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); “The Identity of Ludovicus Piissimus Augustus in the Praefatio in Librum Antiquum Lingua Saxonica Conscriptum,” Francia 31/1 (2004), pp. 1–14; “Die merowingische Herkunft der Vita Sadalbergae,” Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters 59, 2 (2003), pp. 459–93.

Matthew Innes is Professor of History in the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck in the University of London and has been an editor of the journal Early Medieval Europe. He has published State and Society in the Early Middle Ages: the Middle Rhine Valley, 400–1000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); co-edited, with Yitzhak Hen, The Uses of the Past in the Early Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); The Sword, the Book and the Plough: An Introduction to Early Medieval Western Europe, 300–900 (London: Routledge, 2006); co-authored with Marios Costambeys and Simon Maclean, The Carolingian World (Cambridge: CUP, 2007); and is co-editing with Warren Brown, Marios Costambeys, and Adam Kosto, Laypeople and Documents in the Early Middle Ages (currently in preparation for publication).

Thomas Kuehn is professor of History at Clemson University. He is the author of numerous articles and Emancipation in Late Medieval Florence (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press 1982); Law, Family, and Women: Toward a Legal Anthropology of Renaissance Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Illegitimacy in Renaissance Florence (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), Heirs, Kin, and Creditors in Renaissance Florence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); and has edited two collections of essays: with Anne Jacobson Schutte and Silvana Seidel Menchi, Time, Space, and Women’s Lives in Early Modern Europe (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press 2001); and with John A. Marino, A Renaissance of Conflicts: Visions and Revisions of Law and Society in Italy and Spain (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2004).

Carol Lansing is Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research focuses on medieval Italian politics, society, and culture. Her previous publications include The Florentine Magnates: Lineage and Faction in a Medieval Commune (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); Power and Purity: Cathar Heresy in Medieval Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Passion and Order: Restraint of Grief in the Medieval Italian Communes (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008).

James Paul Masschaele is an Associate Professor in History, at Rutgers University. He has published “The Public Space of the Marketplace in Medieval England,” Speculum, 77 (2002), pp. 383–421; “Trade, Domestic: Markets and Fairs,” in David Loades, ed., Reader’s Guide to British History (London: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 2003); and Peasants, Merchants, and Markets: Inland Trade in Medieval England, c. 1150–c. 1350 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997).

Andreas Meyer is Professor at Philipps University, Marburg in Germany. He has published extensively on the hospitals, the papal curia, late Medieval piety and Italian notaries, especially those in Lucca. His books include Zürich und Rom: ordentliche Kollatur und päpstliche Provisionen am Frau- und Grossmünster 1316–1523 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1986); “Felix et inclitus notarius”: Studien zum italienischen Notariat vom 7. bis zum 13. Jahrhundert (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2000).

Maureen C. Miller is Professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Berkeley. She has published Power and the Holy in the Age of the Investiture Conflict: A Brief Documentary History (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2005); The Bishop’s Palace: Architecture and Authority in Medieval Italy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000); The Formation of a Medieval Church: Ecclesiastical Change in Verona, 950–1150 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993) translated as Chiesa e società in Verona medievale (950–1150), ed. Paolo Golinelli (Verona: CIERRE, 1999).

Robert I. Moore is Professor Emeritus in the School of Historical Studies in the University of Newcastle. He has published The Birth of Popular Heresy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1976); The Origins of European Dissent (New York: B. Blackwell, 1985); The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Authority and Deviance in Western Europe, 950–1250, 2nd edn (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007); The First European Revolution, c. 970–1215 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000); and Atlas of World History (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1992).

Steven Murray is Professor of Art History in the Department of Art History and Archaeology and Director of the Media Center in Columbia University. His publications include Building Troyes Cathedral: The Late Gothic Campaigns (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); Beauvais Cathedral: Architecture of Transcendence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989); Notre-Dame, Cathedral of Amiens: The Power of Change in Gothic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); A Gothic Sermon: Making a Contract with the Mother of God, Saint Mary of Amiens (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); and The Amiens Trilogy, a video recording on the building and design of Amiens Cathedral.

Clifford J. Rogers is Professor of History at the United States Military Academy at West Point. He has published War Cruel and Sharp: English Strategy under Edward III, 1327–1360 (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2000); edited, The Wars of Edward III: Sources and Interpretations (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1999); edited with Mark Grimsley, Civilians in the Path of War (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2002); and is co-editor of The Journal of Medieval Military History.

Philipp W. Rosemann is Professor in the Philosophy Department at the University of Dallas. He has edited Tabula for Opera Roberti Grosseteste Lincolniensis, vol. 1, Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Mediaevalis, 130 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1995) and published Omne ens est aliquid. Introduction à la lecture du “système” philosophique de saint Thomas d’Aquin. (Louvain/Paris: Peeters, 1996); Omne agens agit sibi simile: A “Repetition” of Scholastic Metaphysics (Louvain: Leuven University Press, 1996); Understanding Scholastic Thought with Foucault (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999); Peter Lombard (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); edited with Thomas A. F. Kelly, Amor amicitiae – On the Love that is Friendship: Essays in Medieval Thought and Beyond in Honor of the Rev. Professor James McEvoy, (Louvain/Paris/Dudley, MA: Peeters, 2004); and edited John Scottus Eriugena, Special Issue of the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 79:4 (Fall, 2005), pp. 521–671; The Story of a Great Medieval Book: Peter Lombard’s “Sentences” (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007); and is the Associate Editor of the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly and the editor of Dallas Medieval Texts and Translations.

Teofilo F. Ruiz is Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has published Sociedad y poder real en Castilla (Barcelona: Ariel, 1981); The City and the Realm: Burgos and Castile in the Late Middle Ages (London: Variorum, 1992); Crisis and Continuity: Land and Town in Late Medieval Castile (Philadel- phia: University of Pennsylvania Press: Philadelphia, 1994); Spanish Society, 1400–1600 (London: Longman, 2001); From Heaven to Earth: The Reordering of Castilian Society, 1150–1350 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); with Robin Winks Medieval Europe and the World (Oxford, 2005); and Centuries of Crises (Oxford: Blackwell Press, 2007).

Phillipp R. Schofield is Professor of History in the Department of History and Welsh History at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. He has published numerous articles on agrarian history, manorial courts, peasant debt, diet, the social economy of the medieval village, co-edited with N. J. Mayhew, Credit and Debt in Medieval England, c. 1180–c. 1320 (Oxford: Oxbow, 2002 and Peasant and Community in Medieval England (New York: Palgrave, 2003).

Kenneth R. Stow is Professor of Jewish History at the University of Haifa, the editor of Jewish History: A Journal of Jewish Historical Studies, and the author of numerous articles and monographs such as Catholic Thought and Papal Jewry Policy, 1555–1593 (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1977); Taxation, Community and State: The Jews and the Fiscal Foundations of the Early Modern Papal State (Stuttgart: A. Hiersemann, 1982); The 1007 Anonymous and Papal Sovereignty: Jewish Perceptions of the Papacy and Papal Policy in the Middle Ages. (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College, 1984); The Jews in Rome, 2 vols. Leiden: Brill, 1995–97); Alienated Minority: The Jews of Medieval Latin Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); Theater of Acculturation: The Roman Ghetto in the Sixteenth Century (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2000); Jewish Dogs: An Image and Its Interpreters: Continuity in the Catholic-Jewish Encounter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006).

Christopher Tyerman is Supernumerary Fellow and Tutor in History, Lecturer in Medieval History, Hertford College and New College, in Oxford. He is the author of England and the Crusades, 1095–1588 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); The Invention of the Crusades (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan Press, 1998); Fighting for Christendom: Holy war and the Crusades (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); The Crusades: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); and God’s War: A New History of the Crusades (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006).

Part I

The Middle Ages

Chapter One

The Idea of a Middle Ages

Edward D. English and Carol Lansing

Understandings of the European Middle Ages have long been shaped by the old master narrative, in contradictory ways. The name itself was, of course, coined first by Renaissance humanists to characterize what they saw as a long stagnant, barbaric period between the cultural flowering of Antiquity and its rebirth in fourteenth-century Italy.1 The idea was taken up by Enlightenment philosophes, who saw the period as one of superstitious ignorance. The term medieval is still commonly used to evoke savage barbarity; medieval scholars were amused when in Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 film Pulp Fiction Ving Rhames turned on his former torturers and threatened to “get medieval” on them.2

“Medieval” continues to be associated with backwardness, darkness, indiscriminate violence. Bruce Holsinger has recently analyzed the ways in which politicians and pundits in a bizarre twist of Orientalism use the term to characterize Islamic opponents like al-Qaeda and the Taliban. In 2006, Donald Rumsfeld, then US Secretary of Defense, said of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi: “He personified the dark, sadistic and medieval vision of the future – of beheadings, suicide bombings, and indiscriminate killings.”3 Some professional medievalists have echoed this approach, faintly, when they argue that the Middle Ages are best understood in terms of The Other or the grotesque.4

Other views of the medieval were also driven by ideology. Crucially, many of the great source collections were created in the eighteenth century by professional religious who sought to demonstrate the rationality of medieval religion while protecting the property and reputation of their contemporary Church.5 The emphases in those collections have profoundly shaped the field of medieval history: orderly edited sources attract the most study. Popular culture has had a variety of influences as well. With the opening of travel to a wider number of people from the mid-nineteenth century, Anglophone travelers and expatriates created a huge literature describing, for example, medieval and early Renaissance Italy, especially the city states, often with an emphasis on the oppressive hands of a retrogressive Catholicism.6 The same period – even in the United States, founded as separate from the evils of the old European regimes – saw a romantic fascination with medieval culture and architecture.7 The Middle Ages were popular with pre-Civil War southern aristocrats worried about honor and chivalry.8 Movies throughout the twentieth century brought a variety of ideas about what was medieval to popular culture. This was done complete with knights riding by the occasional telephone pole and enriched by the use of a faux dialect called “speaking medieval.”9

Political regimes in the twentieth century recognized the value of the medieval past as a tool to legitimate themselves and also to encourage tourism. Mussolini in Italy did not just promote the cult of imperial Rome but also co-opted the Italian Middle Ages and Renaissance in spectacles and schemes to “restore” buildings and piazzas.10 In contemporary Italy, one political party claims legitimation from the medieval past by holding rallies attended by men dressed as “Lombard Knights.”11 The Middle Ages turned up again as part of the “Culture Wars” of the 1990s when the attack of the newly elected congress led by Newt Gingrich on the funding of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) included ridicule of medieval projects. An NEH-funded program on teaching ways in which medieval people understood sex and gender directed by Edward English, one of this volume’s editors, came under attack. Besides a plain old-fashioned anti-intellectualism, these Republican members of Congress were uncomfortable with ideas that such concepts as sexuality and gender might have history that should be discussed in colleges and universities.12

The discipline of medieval history was shaped in part by responses to these caricatures. Twentieth-century professional medievalists in part responded with an emphasis on the ways in which the modern world originated in the Middle Ages. Colin Morris argued for a twelfth-century “discovery of the individual.”13 Joseph Strayer’s 1970 On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State is an influential example. Strayer promoted parliamentary systems and constitutional democracy, in response to the world wars and totalitarianism. It is, of course, correct that many aspects of the modern world ultimately derive from the European Middle Ages, including institutions such as universities and the Catholic Church. However, one effect of this approach has been to privilege the historical winners, aspects of medieval Europe that became important in later centuries, above all the nation state. To give a favorite example, arguably the liveliest cultural innovation in the thirteenth century was Mediterranean, centered on Frederick II’s polyglot court and administration in Palermo. Frederick’s response to papal pressure to go on Crusade was to travel to Jerusalem and hammer out a diplomatic solution, an effort that won him a papal excommunication. Sicily and the Italian south in later centuries suffered a long slide into overtaxed poverty and marginality. Textbook narratives therefore focus not on medieval Palermo, with its Muslim and Jewish bureaucrats and Arabic-speaking monarch, but on the historical winners, Paris and London.

What would the European Middle Ages look like without this contradictory intellectual baggage? The project is, of course, an impossibility: the questions of scholars are always informed by their experience. Our past is in the present. Still, some dramatic scholarship has recovered aspects of medieval culture that have simply been left out. To give an example that is not reflected in this volume, the field of medieval English literature has recently been shaken up by Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, who is mapping “the French of England”: late medieval English elites kept writing in French, producing a large volume of literature that has been little studied because specialists focus on the winner, Middle English. More generally, much recent medieval scholarship has been devoted to the effort to identify and then strip away received intellectual categories and seek a fresh understanding of medieval culture and society. That approach is reflected in most of the chapters in this volume, on topics such as reform, the Crusades, the family, Romanesque and Gothic architecture. R. I. Moore even sketches an approach to a genuinely comparative world history that would set aside European exceptionalism. Ironically, medieval nevertheless often still appears as both other and origins of modern.

Notes

 1 Two excellent recent studies of ideas about the Middle Ages are Arnold, What is Medieval History? and Bull, Thinking Medieval.

 2 Dinshaw, Getting Medieval, esp. “Getting Medieval: Pulp Fiction, Foucault, and the Use of the Past,” pp. 183–206; for ideas about contemporary critical theory, especially French, and medievalism, see Holsinger, The Premodern Condition.

 3 Quoted by Holsinger, Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror, p. 1.

 4 Freedman and Spiegel, “Medievalism Old and New.”

 5 Damico and Zavadil, eds, Medieval Scholarship; see the biographies of Bolland, Mabillon, Muratori, Waitz, and Delisle; Knowles, “Jean Mabillon”; Knowles, “The Bollandists” and “The Maurists” in Great Historical Enterprises; much of this came together in Edward Gibbon’s work; see Pocock, Barbarism and Religion.

 6 See the essays in Law and Østermark-Johnson, eds, Victorian and Edwardian Responses to the Italian Renaissance. Much of this had to do with a romantic nostalgia for a lost past that was much better, a kind of medieval dreamland inherited from Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Walter Scott, John Ruskin, and François-René de Chateaubriand.

 7 See, e.g., Fleming, “Picturesque History and the Medieval.”

 8 Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor.

 9 Among a number of books on the Middle Ages in the movies, see Aberth, A Knight at the Movies; the “Middle Ages” also lives on in computer games.

10 Lazzaro and Crum, eds, Donatello among the Blackshirts, and essays in Lasansky, The Renaissance Perfected, esp. ch. 3, “Urban Politics: The Fascist Rediscovery of Medieval Arezzo,” pp. 107–43.

11 For the contemporary party called the Lombard League in Italy, see Coleman, “The Lombard League: Myth and History.”

12 For a view into the culture wars of the 1990s see a summary of the discussion in the US House of Representatives attacking the National Endowment for the Humanities sponsorship of the Summer Institute on teaching about Sex and Gender in the Middle Ages in Dinshaw, Getting Medieval, pp. 173–82.

13 Morris, The Discovery of the Individual.

Bibliography

Aberth, John, A Knight at the Movies: Medieval History on Film (London: Routledge, 2003).

Arnold, John, What is Medieval History? (Cambridge: Polity, 2008).

Bull, Marcus, Thinking Medieval: An Introduction to the Study of the Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

Coleman, Edward, “The Lombard League: Myth and History,” in Howard. B. Clarke and Judith Devlin (eds), European Encounters: Essays in Memory of Albert Lovett (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2003), or online at www.threemonkeysonline.com/als/Umberto%20Bossi%20and%20the%20Lega%20Nord.html.

Damico, Helen, and Zavadil, Joseph B., eds, Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline, vol. 1: History (New York: Garland Publishing, 1995).

Dinshaw, Carolyn, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999).

Fleming, Robin, “Picturesque History and the Medieval in Nineteenth-Century America,” American Historical Review, 100 (1995), pp. 1061–94.

Freedman, Paul, and Spiegel, Gabrielle M., “Medievalism Old and New: The Rediscovery of Alterity in North American Medieval Studies,” American Historical Review, 103/3 (June 1998), pp. 677–704.

Holsinger, Bruce, The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

Holsinger, Bruce Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2007).

Knowles, David, “Jean Mabillon,” in David Knowles, The Historian and Character and Other Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), pp. 213–39; repr. from Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 10 (1959), pp. 153–73.

Knowles, David, “The Bollandists” and “The Maurists,” in David Knowles, Great Historical Enterprises: Problems in Monastic History (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1963), pp. 2–32, 34–62; repr. from Transactions of the Royal Historical Society.

Lasansky, D. Medina, The Renaissance Perfected: Architecture, Spectacle, and Tourism in Fascist Italy (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004).

Law, John E., and Østermark-Johnson, Lene, eds, Victorian and Edwardian Responses to the Italian Renaissance (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005).

Lazzaro, Claudia, and Crum, Roger J., eds, Donatello among the Blackshirts: History and Modernity in the Visual Culture of Fascist Italy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005).

Morris, Colin, The Discovery of the Individual, 1050–1200 (New York: Harper & Row, 1972).

Pocock, J. G. A., Barbarism and Religion, 5 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999–2011).

Wyatt-Brown, Bertram, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982).

Part II

Early Medieval Foundations

Chapter Two

Economies and Societies in Early Medieval Western Europe

Matthew Innes

Living through the Crisis of the Roman Empire

In 459, an 83-year-old man living in Bordeaux composed a long poem reflecting on his life. Paulinus had lived through turbulent times, and in those times had experienced both fame and fortune, disaster and disgrace. In looking back, he sought consolation of a distinctly Christian type: “I, who indeed felt that I owed my whole life to God, should show that my whole life’s doings also have been subject to his direction; and, by telling over the seasons granted me by his same grace, I should form a little work, a Thanksgiving to him, in the guise of a narrative memoir.”1

Paulinus was born into the highest echelon of imperial society, the aristocracy of huge landowners whose status was reinforced by the legal and political privileges associated with membership of the Senate of Rome. Paulinus’ paternal grandfather, Ausonius, had been the real architect of his family’s rise to the very top of the hierarchy. Ausonius’ father was a well-to-do landowner from southeastern Gaul, and his mother the daughter of a famous Greek physician. Ausonius himself achieved fame as a teacher and poet at Bordeaux; as tutor and then chief adviser to the Emperor Gratian (reigned 367–83), and spent fifteen years at the western imperial court, serving in the highest political office of Praetorian Prefect. Paulinus was born in Pella, the site of Alexander the Great’s ancient capital, whilst his father was cutting his political teeth as governor of Macedonia. Promotion to the largely honorific position of subconsul of Africa saw the family move to Carthage, and then, once the eighteen-month term had ended, to Rome, before finally settling at Ausonius’ residence in Bordeaux. Paulinus there followed the typical pattern of privileged youth, with a period of wild misdeeds following his education, before his marriage saw a portion of the family property settled on him.