An examination of the tradition that the Ark of the Covenant was held in a Roman church, and how it developed. Why did the twelfth-century canons at the Lateran church (San Giovanni in Laterano) in Rome claim the presence of the Ark of the Covenant inside their high altar? This book argues that the claim responded to new challenges in theaftermath of the First Crusade in 1099. The Christian possession of Jerusalem questioned the legitimation of the papal cathedral in Rome as the summit of sacerdotal representation. To meet this challenge, what may be described astranslatio templi (the transfer of the temple) was used to strengthen the status of the Lateran. The Ark of the Covenant was central as part of the treasure from the Jerusalem temple, allegedly transported to Rome, and according to contemporary accounts depicted on the arch of Titus. The author explores the history of the Lateran Ark of the Covenant through a reading of the description of the Lateran Church (Descriptio Lateranensis Ecclesiae), composed around 1100. She follows the transmission of the text both in the Lateran Archive and in a monastic settings in northern France and Belgium, comparing the claim to the Ark with similar claims in texts from Jerusalem. The book also includes a new edition of the Descriptio and an English translation. EIVOR ANDERSEN OFTESTAD holds a PhD in Church History.

This lively narrative, written by a monk, relates the history of the abbey of Saffron Walden from its foundation around 1136 to the year 1203. Its characters include the English kings, the earls of Essex, and other local landowners, large and small, as well as the monks and other ecclesiastics. Its interest extends far beyond the local: the editors' introduction and notes establish the chronicle's position as a valuable historical source.

Nest of Deheubarth was one of the most notorious women of the Middle Ages, mistress of Henry I and many other men, famously beautiful and strong-willed, object of one of the most notorious abduction/elopements of the period and ancestress of one of the most famous dynasties in medieval Ireland, the Fitzgeralds. This volume sheds light on women, gender, imperialism and conquest in the Middle Ages. From it emerges a picture of a woman who, though remarkable, was not exceptional, representative not of a group of victims or pawns in the dramatic transformations of the high Middle Ages but powerful and decisive actors. The book examines beauty, love, sex and marriage and the interconnecting identities of Nest as wife/concubine/mistress, both at the time and in the centuries since her death, when for Welsh writers and other commentators she has proved a powerful symbol. -- .

This volume comprises nine articles on Islamic astronomy published since 1989 by Benno van Dalen. Van Dalen was the first historian of Islamic astronomy who made full use of the new possibilities of computers in the early 1990s. He implemented various statistical and numerical methods that can be used to determine the mathematical properties of medieval astronomical tables, and utilized these to obtain entirely new, until then unattainable historical results concerning the interdependence of individual tables and hence of entire astronomical works. His programmes for analysing tables, making sexagesimal calculations and converting calendar dates continue to be widely used. The five articles in the first part of this collection explain the principles of a range of statistical methods for determining unknown parameter values underlying astronomical tables and present extensive step-by-step examples for their use. The four articles in the second part provide extensive studies of materials in unpublished primary sources on Islamic astronomy that heavily depend on these methods. The volume is completed with a detailed index.

Medieval queens led richly complex lives and were highly visible women active in a man's world. Linked to kings by marriage, family, and property, queens were vital to the institution of monarchy.
In this comprehensive and accessible introduction to the study of queenship, Theresa Earenfight documents the lives and works of queens and empresses across Europe, Byzantium, and the Mediterranean in the Middle Ages. The book:
* introduces pivotal research and sources in queenship studies, and includes exciting and innovative new archival research
* highlights four crucial moments across the full span of the Middle Ages - ca. 300, 700, 1100, and 1350 - when Christianity, education, lineage, and marriage law fundamentally altered the practice of queenship
* examines theories and practices of queenship in the context of wider issues of gender, authority, and power.
This is an invaluable and illuminating text for students, scholars and other readers interested in the role of royal women in medieval society.

This enlightening book aims to fill the gap in the literature on women's lives from the mid-fourteenth to the mid-seventeenth century, a time in which Italian urban societies saw much debate on the nature of women and on their roles, education and behaviour. Indeed these were debates which would in subsequent years resonate throughout Europe as a whole. Using a broad range of contemporary source material, most of which has never been translated before, this book illuminates the ideals and realities informing the lives of women within the context of civic and courtly culture. The text is divided into three sections: contemporary views on the nature of women, and ethical and aesthetic ideals seen as suitable to them; life cycles from birth to death, punctuated by the rites of passage of betrothal, marriage and widowhood; women's roles in the convent, the court, the workplace, and in cultural life. Through their exploration of these themes, Rogers and Tinagli demonstrate that there was no single 'Renaissance woman'. The realities of women(1)s experiences were rich and various, and their voices speak of diverse possibilities for emotionally rich and socially useful lives. This will be essential reading for students and teachers of society and culture during the Italian Renaissance, as well as gender historians working on early modern Europe. -- .

Manmade marvels of the later medieval courts--animated golden birds, mechanical angels, and other fantastic machines--were not merely amusing distractions, but also agents of social negotiation and political import. In "Manmade Marvels," the dancing metal peacocks, animated statuary, and spectacular illusions of the romance tradition are disembedded from traditional literary representation as supernatural fictions, and situated in the political culture where mechanical marvels were fashioned to delight courts, garner prestige, and symbolize power. This book provides a synthesis of court politics and technological history, intellectual traditions, and the practices of everyday life. Lightsey restores these marvels to the cultural roles they played as they were created by craftsmen and consumed by elite culture, invigorating our understanding of the role of craft in embellishing noble lives with the marvelous.

Never before have the women of the Capetian royal dynasty in France been the subject of a study in their own right. The new research in Capetian Women challenges old paradigms about the restricted roles of royal women, uncovering their influence in social, religious, cultural, and even political spheres. The scholars in the volume consider medieval chroniclers' responses to the independent actions of royal women as well as modern historians' use of them as vehicles for constructing the past. The essays also delineate the creation of reginal identity through cultural practices such as religious patronage and the commissioning of manuscripts, tomb sculpture, and personal seals.

Five hundred years after his death at the stake, Girolamo Savonarola remains one of the most fascinating figures of the Italian Renaissance. This volume, which contains an introduction by historian Alison Brown, is the first comprehensive collection of Savonarola's works in English. It includes translations of his sermons and treatises on pastoral ministry, prophecy, politics and moral reform, as well as the correspondence with Alexander VI that led to Savonarola's silencing and excommunication. Also included are first-hand accounts of religio-civic festivities instigated by Savonarola and of his last moments. This collection demonstrates the remarkable extent of Savonarola's contributions to the religious, political and aesthetic debates of the late fifteenth century. Winner of the 2004 Scaglione Publication Award for a manuscript in Italian literary studies awarded by the MLA.

The Ibadi Muslims, a little-known minority community, have lived in North Africa for over a thousand years. Combining an analysis of Arabic manuscripts with digital tools used in network analysis, Paul M. Love, Jr takes readers on a journey across the Maghrib and beyond as he traces the paths of a group of manuscripts and the Ibadi scholars who used them. Ibadi scholars of the Middle Period (eleventh-sixteenth century) wrote a series of collective biographies (prosopographies), which together constructed a cumulative tradition that connected Ibadi Muslims from across time and space, bringing them together into a 'written network'. From the Mzab valley in Algeria to the island of Jerba in Tunisia, from the Jebel Nafusa in Libya to the bustling metropolis of early-modern Cairo, this book shows how people and books worked in tandem to construct and maintain an Ibadi Muslim tradition in the Maghrib.

The Cathars and the Albigensian Crusade brings together a rich and diverse range of medieval sources to examine key aspects of the growth of heresy and dissent in southern France in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and the Church's response to that threat through the subsequent authorisation of the Albigensian crusade. Aimed at students and scholars alike, the documents it discusses - papal letters, troubadour songs, contemporary chronicles in Latin and the vernacular, and inquisitorial documents - reflect a deeper perception of medieval heresy and the social, political and religious implications of crusading than has hitherto been possible. The reader is introduced to themes which are crucial to our understanding of the medieval world: ideologies of crusading and holy war, the complex nature of Catharism, the Church's implementation of diverse strategies to counter heresy, the growth of papal inquisition, southern French counter-strategies of resistance and rebellion, and the uses of Latin and the vernacular to express regional and cultural identity. This timely and highly original collection not only brings together previously unexplored and in some cases unedited material, but provides a nuanced and multi-layered view of the religious, social and political dimensions of one of the most infamous conflicts of the High Middle Ages. This book is a valuable resource for all students, teachers and researchers of medieval history and the crusades.

This original and authoritative text reveals how chivalry was part of the problem of violence in medieval Europe, not merely it's solution. If one ideal was to internalize restraint in knights, chivalry also worshipped hands-on violence, as a close reading of chivalric literature shows. In a developing society, chivalric ideals and practices were both praised and feared by those who sought its reform.

The Medieval Church: A Brief History argues for the pervasiveness of the Church in every aspect of life in medieval Europe. It shows how the institution of the Church attempted to control the lives and behaviour of medieval people, for example, through canon law, while at the same time being influenced by popular movements like the friars and heresy. This fully updated and illustrated second edition offers a new introductory chapter on 'the Basics of Christianity,' for students who might be unfamiliar with this territory. The book now has new material on some of the key individuals in church history: Benedict of Nursia, Hildegard of Bingen, Bernard of Clairvaux and Francis of Assisi as well as a more comprehensive study throughout of the role of women in the medieval church. Lynch and Adamo seek to explain the history of the Church as an institution, and to explore its all-pervasive role in medieval life. In the course of the thousand years covered in this book, we see the members and leaders of the Western Church struggle with questions that are still relevant today: What is the nature of God? How does a church keep beliefs from becoming diluted in a diverse society? What role should the state play in religion? The book is now accompanied by a website with textual, visual, and musical primary sources making it a fantastic resource for students of medieval history.

"Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People" was completed in 731 AD and still ranks among the most popular of history books. By the end of the 8th century, copies of it were to be found in many parts of England and on the Continent, some of which are still extant. If it were not for Bede's work, little would be known about the Anglo-Saxon invasion and the beginnings of Christianity in England, and such familiar names as Edwin and Oswald, Cuthbert and Chad, Hilda and Caedmon would be almost forgotten. This corrected reissue of the work makes use for the first time of a mid-8th-century manuscript discovered in Leningrad, provides a survey of the extant manuscripts and a new translation. It also attempts to bring up to date Plummer's edition of the work, published 80 years ago. It has been corrected to take into account J.M. Wallace-Hadrill's "Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People: A Historical Commentary" and to enable the reader to use the two in conjunction.

This book brings together challenging new essays from some of the leaders in Italian scholarship in three countries, to show the range of work that is currently being done not only on Florence but also on Naples, Ferrara and Lucca and on the relationship between cities and countryside.

'An important and timely book.' - Philippa Gregory Joan of Navarre was the richest woman in the land, at a time when war-torn England was penniless. Eleanor Cobham was the wife of a weak king's uncle - and her husband was about to fall from grace. Jacquetta Woodville was a personal enemy of Warwick the Kingmaker, who was about to take his revenge. Elizabeth Woodville was the widowed mother of a child king, fighting Richard III for her children's lives. In Royal Witches, Gemma Hollman explores the lives of these four unique women, looking at how rumours of witchcraft brought them to their knees in a time when superstition and suspicion was rife.

Contrary to common assumptions, medieval and early modern writers and poets often addressed the high value of freedom, whether we think of such fable authors as Marie de France or Ulrich Bonerius. Similarly, medieval history knows of numerous struggles by various peoples to maintain their own freedom or political independence. Nevertheless, as this study illustrates, throughout the pre-modern period, the loss of freedom could happen quite easily, affecting high and low (including kings and princes) and there are many literary texts and historical documents that address the problems of imprisonment and even enslavement (Georgius of Hungary, Johann Schiltberger, Hans Ulrich Krafft, etc.). Simultaneously, philosophers and theologians discussed intensively the fundamental question regarding free will (e.g., Augustine) and political freedom (e.g., John of Salisbury). Moreover, quite a large number of major pre-modern poets spent a long time in prison where they composed some of their major works (Boethius, Marco Polo, Charles d'Orleans, Thomas Malory, etc.). This book brings to light a vast range of relevant sources that confirm the existence of this fundamental and impactful discourse on freedom, imprisonment, and enslavement.

This volume offers the first comprehensive account of the monetary logic that guided the payment of wergild and blood money in early medieval conflict resolution. In the early middle ages, wergild played multiple roles: it was used to measure a person's status, to prevent and end conflicts, and to negotiate between an individual and the agents of statehood. This collection of interlocking essays by historians, philologists and jurists represents a major contribution to the study of law and society in Western Europe during the early Middle Ages. Contributors are Lukas Bothe, Warren Brown, Stefan Esders, Wolfgang Haubrichs, Paul Hyams, Tom Lambert, Ralph W. Mathisen, Rob Meens, Han Nijdam, Lisi Oliver, Harald Siems, Karl Ubl, and Helle Vogt. See inside the book.

Articles showcasing the fruits of the most recent scholarship in the field of fourteenth-century studies. The wide-ranging studies collected here reflect the latest concerns of and trends in fourteenth-century research, including work on politics, the law, religion, and chronicle writing. The lively (and controversial) debate around the death of Edward II, and the brief but eventful career of John of Eltham, earl of Cornwall, receive detailed treatment, as does the theory and implementation of both the law of treason in England and high status execution in Ireland. There is an investigation of the often overlooked, yet ever present, lesser parish clergy of pre-Black Death England, along with the notable connections between Roman remains and craft guild piety in fourteenth-century York.There are also chapters shedding new light on fourteenth-century chronicles: one examines the St Albans chronicle through the prism of chivalric culture, another analyses the importance of the Chester Annals of 1385-8 in the writing culture of the Midlands. Introduced with this volume is a new section on "Notes and Documents"; re-examined here is an often-cited letter from the reign of Richard II and the problematic, yet crucial, issue of its authorship and dating. James Bothwell is Lecturer in Later Medieval History at the University of Leicester; Gwilym Dodd is Associate Professor of Medieval History at the University of Nottingham Contributors: Paul Dryburgh, Aine Foley, Christopher Guyol, Andy King, Jessica Knowles, E. Amanda McVitty, D.A.L. Morgan, Philip Morgan, David Robinson.

Annie Abram was born in London in 1869 and died in Sussex in 1930. She contributed significantly to the twentieth-century historiography of late medieval England, researching the social, cultural and religious mores of the English laity and clergy. First published in 1909, this title explores the impact of economic changes on society during the fifteenth century. This was a period of important developments both socially and economically, which witnessed the rise of the middle class through industrialisation, agrarian change, and the growing economic and commercial character of towns. The chapters discuss these areas, as well as the industrial position of women and children, the economic position of the Church and the development of a national character. This is a fascinating classic work, which will be of great value to students researching the socio-economic history of late medieval England.

Annie Abram was born in London in 1869 and died in Sussex in 1930. As an historian, she contributed significantly to the twentieth-century historiography of late medieval England, researching the social, cultural and religious mores of the English laity and clergy. This title, first published in 1919, comprehensively explores the fabrics of late medieval society using evidence drawn from historical and literary works, official documents and illustrated manuscripts. Largely concentrating on the years between the start of the Black Death in 1348 and the end of the fifteenth century, a period in which we see important developments in the character and organisation of medieval England, chapters discuss the make-up of social order, life in a medieval town, the position of women in society, and the Church's relationship with the laity. A complementary title to Social Life in England in the Fifteenth Century (Routledge Revivals, 2013), this fascinating work will be of great value to history students requiring a detailed overview of the framework of late medieval English society and culture.

New scientific methods offer new insights in the past. Promising opportunities for archaeology and historiography are confronted with the challenges of interdisciplinary cooperation between the sciences and the humanities. This volume presents contributions by European researchers, arranged in four sections: fundamental questions of archaeology and biosciences, migrations, transformations, and social structures.

Albert of Aachen's History of the Journey to Jerusalem presents the story of the First Crusade (1095-1099) and the first generation of Latin settlers in the Levant (1099-1119). Volume 2, The Early History of the Latin States, provides a surprising level of detail about the reign of King Baldwin I (1100-1118), especially its earlier years and the crusading expeditions of 1101. It offers much more information than the only other substantial Latin account of the same events, by Fulcher of Chartres, and where it can be tested against other narratives, including Arabic and Greek sources, it proves to be worthy of both trust and respect. Susan B. Edgington's English translation has been widely praised, following its first publication in the Oxford Medieval Texts series, and is here presented with a new introduction and updated notes and bibliography.

Winner of the 2018 Josef IJsewijn Prize for Best Book on a Neo-Latin Topic Although many humanists, from Petrarch to Fulvio Orsini, had written briefly about library history, the De bibliothecis of Justus Lipsius was the first self-contained monograph on the topic. The De bibliothecis proved to be a seminal achievement, both in redefining the scope of library history and in articulating a vision of a public, secular, research institution for the humanities. It was repeatedly reprinted and translated, plagiarized and epitomized. Through the end of the nineteenth century, scholars turned to it as the ultimate foundation for any discussion of library history. In Ancient Libraries and Renaissance Humanism, Hendrickson presents a critical edition of Lipsius's work with introductory studies, a Latin text, English translation, and a substantial historical commentary.