Law and Language in the Middle Ages investigates the encounter between law and legal practice from the linguistic perspective. The essays explore how legal language expresses and advances power relations, along with the ways in which the language of law legitimates power. The wide geographical and chronological scope showcases how power, legitimacy and language interact, moving the discussion beyond traditional issues of identity or the formation of nation-states and their institutions. What emerges are different strategies reflective of the diverse and pluralistic political, legal, and cultural worlds of the Middle Ages. Contributors are Michael H. Gelting, Dirk Heirbaut, Carole Hough, Anette Kremer, Ada Maria Kuskowski, Anders Leegaard Knudsen, Andre Marques, Matthew McHaffie, Bruce O'Brien, Paul Russell, Werner Schafke, and Vincenz Schwab.

The Carolingian period represented a Golden Age for the abbey of St Gall, an Alpine monastery in modern-day Switzerland. Its bloom of intellectual activity resulted in an impressive number of scholarly texts being copied into often beautifully written manuscripts, many of which survive in the abbey's library to this day. Among these books are several of Irish origin, while others contain works of learning originally written in Ireland. This study explores the practicalities of the spread of this Irish scholarship to St Gall and the reception it received once there. In doing so, this book for the first time investigates a part of the network of knowledge that fed this important Carolingian centre of learning with scholarship. By focusing on scholarly works from Ireland, this study also sheds light on the contribution of the Irish to the Carolingian revival of learning. Historians have often assumed a special relationship between Ireland and the abbey of St Gall, which was built on the grave of the Irish saint Gallus. This book scrutinises this notion of a special connection. The result is a new viewpoint on the spread and reception of Irish learning in the Carolingian period.

Literature serves many purposes, and one of them certainly proves to be to convey messages, wisdom, and instruction, and this across languages, religions, and cultures. Beyond that, as the contributors to this volume underscore, people have always endeavored to reach out to their community members, that is, to build community, to learn from each other, and to teach. Hence, this volume explores the meaning of communication, translation, and community building based on the medium of language. While all these aspects have already been discussed in many different venues, the contributors endeavor to explore a host of heretofore less considered historical, religious, literary, political, and linguistic sources. While the dominant focus tends to rest on conflicts, hostility, and animosity in the pre-modern age, here the emphasis rests on communication with its myriad of challenges and potentials for establishing a community. As the various studies illustrate, a close reading of communicative issues opens profound perspectives regarding human relationships and hence the social context. This understanding invites intensive collaboration between medical historians, literary scholars, translation experts, and specialists on religious conflicts and discourses. We also learn how much language carries tremendous cultural and social meaning and determines in a most sensitive manner the interactions among people in a communicative and community-based fashion.

The essays in Living Dangerously, written by some of the leading scholars in the fields of history and literature, examine the lives of those who lived on the margins of medieval and early modern European society. While some essays explore obvious marginalized classes, such as criminals, gypsies, and prostitutes, others challenge traditional understandings of the margin by showing that female mystics, speculators in the Dutch mercantile empire, and writers of satire, for example, could fall into the margins. These essays reveal the symbiotic relationship that exists between the marginalized and the social establishment: the dominant culture needs its margins. This well-written and lively collection covers a wide geographical area, including England, Spain, Germany, Italy, France, and the Netherlands, making it an ideal resource for a broad range of courses in European history and literature. Contributors: Barbara A. Hanawalt, Richard Firth Green, Vickie Ziegler, Dyan Elliott, Anne J. Cruz, Ian Frederick Moulton, and Mary Lindemann.

A set of essays intended to recognize the scholarship of Professor Cynthia Neville, the papers gathered here explore borders and boundaries in medieval and early modern Britain. Over her career, Cynthia has excavated the history of border law and social life on the frontier between England and Scotland and has written extensively of the relationships between natives and newcomers in Scotland's Middle Ages. Her work repeatedly invokes jurisdiction as both a legal and territorial expression of power. The essays in this volume return to themes and topics touched upon in her corpus of work, all in one way or another examining borders and boundaries as either (or both) spatial and legal constructs that grow from and shape social interaction. Contributors are Douglas Biggs, Amy Blakeway, Steve Boardman, Sara M. Butler, Anne DeWindt, Kenneth F. Duggan, Elizabeth Ewan, Chelsea D.M. Hartlen, K.J. Kesselring, Tom Lambert, Shannon McSheffrey, and Cathryn R. Spence.

A folkloric research project on Sefer ha-ma'asim.

The work published in this third, and final, volume of Brill's handbook on the tradition of the Book of Sentences breaks new ground in three ways. First, several chapters contribute to the debate concerning the meaning of medieval authority and authorship. For some of the most influential literature on the Sentences consisted of study aids and compilations that were derivative or circulated anonymously. Consequently, the volume also sheds light on theological education "on the ground"-the kind of teaching that was dispensed by the average master and received by the average student. Finally, the contributors show that Peter Lombard's textbook played a much more dynamic role in later medieval theology than hitherto assumed. The work remained a force to be reckoned with until at least the sixteenth century, especially in the Iberian Peninsula. Contributors are Claire Angotti, Monica Brinzei, Franklin T. Harkins, Severin V. Kitanov, Lidia Lanza, Philipp W. Rosemann, Chris Schabel, John T. Slotemaker, Marco Toste, Jeffrey C. Witt, and Ueli Zahnd.

Eleven major scholars of the Anglo-Saxon period consider Alfred the Great, his cultural milieu, and his achievements. With revised or revived views of the Alfredian revival, the contributors help set the agenda for future work on a most challenging period. The collection features the methods of history, art history, and literature in a newer key and with an interdisciplinary view on a period that offers less evidence than inference. Major themes linking the essays include authorship, translation practice and theory, patristic influence, Continental connections, and advances in textual criticism. The Alfredian moment has always surprised scholars because of its intellectual reach and its ambition. The contributors to this collection describe how we must now understand that ambition.

The Rhetorical Arts in Late Antique and Early Medieval Ireland represents the first study of the art of rhetoric in medieval Ireland, a culture often neglected by medieval rhetorical studies. In a series of three case studies, Brian James Stone traces the textual transmission of rhetorical theories and practices from the late Roman period to those early Irish monastic communities who would not only preserve and pass on the light of learning, but adapt an ancient tradition to their own cultural needs, contributing to the history of rhetoric in important ways. The manuscript tradition of early Ireland, which gave us the largest body of vernacular literature in the medieval period and is already appreciated for its literary contributions, is also a site of rhetorical innovation and creative practice.

The objective of this book is to identify the narrative strategy and chronology applied in The Chronicle of Halych-Volhynia, and to consider whether this source was intended to form part of a historical collection from the beginning. From the early 13th century in Rus', chronicling began to be cultivated in various centres, focusing on the history of the local area, and therefore in this period historiographical material was collected for specific ideological purposes, providing a genesis of the history of the Rus'. By re-working this history, subsequent authors gave their writings a novel quality, albeit one that remained firmly rooted in older historiographic collections. This study offers a fresh new look at the complexities of Rus'ian historiography in the Middle Ages.

FR: Rares mais marquantes ont ete les denonciations et les condamnations des crimes ou des vices des gouvernants. Le volume interroge les formes et les raisons de ces mises en cause, alors meme que les traditions antiques, medievales ou modernes etaient plutot accommodantes envers les abus de pouvoir. EN: Denunciations and convictions of rulers' crimes or vices are uncommon but striking. This volume investigates the forms and reasons for these accusations, even though antique, medieval or modern tradition has tended to be quite accommodating towards the abuse of power.

First English translation of seminal essays on heresy and other aspects of medieval religious history. In the field of medieval religious history, few scholars have matched the originality of the German academic Herbert Grundmann (1902-1970). Trained at the University of Leipzig and president of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica from 1959 until his death, Grundmann published a series of brilliant books and articles that fundamentally reshaped how historians of culture and religion conceptualized the medieval past. Yet although later generations of scholarshave since approached their research from vantage points shaped by his arguments, few of his writings have been previously accessible to an Anglophone audience. This volume presents translations of six of Grundmann's most significant essays on the intertwined themes of medieval heresy, literacy, and inquisition. Together, they offer new access to Grundmann's scholarship, one which will catalyze new perspectives on the medieval religious past and enable a fresh consideration of his intellectual legacy in the twenty-first century. JENNIFER KOLPACOFF DEANE is Professor of History at the University of Minnesota, Morris.

Church rituals were a familiar feature of life throughout much of the Anglo-Saxon period. In this innovative study, Helen Gittos examines ceremonies for the consecration of churches and cemeteries, processional feasts like Candlemas, Palm Sunday, and Rogationtide, as well as personal rituals such as baptisms and funerals. Drawing on little-known surviving liturgical sources as well as other written evidence, archaeology, and architecture, she considers the architectural context in which such rites were performed. The research in this book has implications for a wide range of topics, such as: how liturgy was written and disseminated in the early Middle Ages, when Christian cemeteries first began to be consecrated, how the form of Anglo-Saxon monasteries changed over time and how they were used, the centrality and nature of processions in early medieval religious life, the evidence church buildings reveal about changes in how they functioned, beliefs about relics, and the attitudes of different archbishops to the liturgy. Liturgy, Architecture, and Sacred Places in Anglo-Saxon England will be of particular interest to architectural specialists wanting to know more about liturgy, and church historians keen to learn more about architecture, as well as those with a more general interest in the early Middle Ages and in church buildings.

The spectacle of the wounded body figured prominently in the Middle Ages, from images of Christ's wounds on the cross, to the ripped and torn bodies of tortured saints who miraculously heal through divine intervention, to graphic accounts of battlefield and tournament wounds-evidence of which survives in the archaeological record-and literary episodes of fatal (or not so fatal) wounds. This volume offers a comprehensive look at the complexity of wounding and wound repair in medieval literature and culture, bringing together essays from a wide range of sources and disciplines including arms and armaments, military history, medical history, literature, art history, hagiography, and archaeology across medieval and early modern Europe. Contributors are Stephen Atkinson, Debby Banham, Albrecht Classen, Joshua Easterling, Charlene M. Eska, Carmel Ferragud, M.R. Geldof, Elina Gertsman, Barbara A. Goodman, Maire Johnson, Rachel E. Kellett, Ilana Krug, Virginia Langum, Michael Livingston, Iain A. MacInnes, Timothy May, Vibeke Olson, Salvador Ryan, William Sayers, Patricia Skinner, Alicia Spencer-Hall, Wendy J. Turner, Christine Voth, and Robert C. Woosnam-Savage.

Interrogations of materiality and geography, narrative framework and boundaries, and the ways these scholarly pursuits ripple out into the wider cultural sphere. Early medieval England as seen through the lens of comparative and interconnected histories is the subject of this volume. Drawn from a range of disciplines, its chapters examine artistic, archaeological, literary, and historical artifacts, converging around the idea that the period may not only define itself, but is often defined from other perspectives, specifically here by modern scholarship. The first part considers the transmission of material culture across borders, while querying the possibilities and limits of comparative and transnational approaches, taking in the spread of bread wheat, the collapse of the art-historical "decorative" and "functional", and the unknowns about daily life in an early medieval English hall. The volume then moves on to reimagine the permeable boundaries of early medieval England, with perspectives from the Baltic, Byzantium, and the Islamic world, including an examination of Vercelli Homily VII (from John Chrysostom's Greek Homily XXIX), Harun ibn Yahya's Arabic descriptions of Bartiniyah ("Britain"), and an consideration of the Old English Orosius. The final chapters address the construction of and responses to "Anglo-Saxon" narratives, past and present: they look at early medieval England within a Eurasian perspective, the historical origins of racialized Anglo-Saxonism(s), and views from Oceania, comparing Hiberno-Saxon and Anglican Melanesian missions, as well as contemporary reactions to exhibitions of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and Pacific Island cultures. Contributors: Debby Banham, Britton Elliott Brooks, Caitlin Green, Jane Hawkes, John Hines, Karen Louise Jolly, Kazutomo Karasawa, Carol Neuman de Vegvar, John D. Niles, Michael W. Scott, Jonathan Wilcox

Mamluk Cairo, a Crossroads for Embassies offers an up-to-date insight into the diplomacy and diplomatics of the Mamluk sultanate with Muslim and non-Muslim powers. This rich volume covers the whole chronological span of the sultanate as well as the various areas of the diplomatic relations established by (or with) the Mamluk sultanate. Twenty-six essays are divided in geographical sections that broadly respect the political division of the world as the Mamluk chancery perceived it. In addition, two introductory essays provide the present stage of research in the fields of, respectively, diplomatics and diplomacy. With contributions by Frederic Bauden, Lotfi Ben Miled, Michele Bernardini, Barbara Boloix Gallardo, Anne F. Broadbridge, Mounira Chapoutot-Remadi, Stephan Conermann, Nicholas Coureas, Malika Dekkiche, Remi Dewiere, Kristof D'hulster, Marie Favereau, Gladys Frantz-Murphy, Yehoshua Frenkel, Hend Gilli-Elewy, Ludvik Kalus, Anna Kollatz, Julien Loiseau, Maria Filomena Lopes de Barros, John L. Meloy, Pierre Moukarzel, Lucian Reinfandt, Alessandro Rizzo, Eric Vallet, Valentina Vezzoli and Patrick Wing.

Released for the first time in the English language, and marking the centennial of Albania's independence, Serbs and Albanians delivers an at once refreshing and comprehensive insight into the cultural composition of Southeast Europe. A wider audience can now appreciate the work of Milan ufflay, a controversial figure of his time whose assassination was denounced by leading intellectuals, Albert Einstein and Heinrich Mann. With a measured and often poetic voice, ufflay takes us on a journey through the Middle Ages as it unfolded on a land where opposing cultures were distilled and interwoven, dynasts and whole cities upturned and reborn.

This book deals with the remarkable life of a powerful and fiery woman at the heart of the turbulent Barons' Wars. As sister of Henry III and aunt of the future Edward I, Eleanor de Montfort was at the heart of the bloody conflict between the Crown and the English barons. At Lewes in 1264 Simon de Montfort captured the king and secured control of royal government. A woman of fiery nature, Eleanor worked tirelessly in supporting her husband's cause. She assumed responsibility for the care of the royal prisoners and she regularly dispatched luxurious gifts to Henry III and the Lord Edward. But the family's political fortunes were shattered at the battle of Evesham in August 1265 where Simon de Montfort was killed. The newly-widowed Eleanor rose to her role as matriarch of her family, sending her surviving sons - and the family treasure - overseas to France, negotiating the surrender of Dover Castle and securing her own safe departure from the realm. The last ten years of her life were spent in the Dominican convent at Montargis. Drawing on chronicles, letters and public records this book reconstructs the narrative of Eleanor's remarkable life.

Anglo-Danish Empire is an interdisciplinary handbook for the Danish conquest of England in 1016 and the subsequent reign of King Cnut the Great. Bringing together scholars from the fields of history, literature, archaeology, and manuscript studies, the volume offers comprehensive analysis of England's shift from Anglo-Saxon to Danish rule. It follows the history of this complicated transition, from the closing years of the reign of King AEthelred II and the Anglo-Danish wars, to Cnut's accession to the throne of England and his consolidation of power at home and abroad. Ruling from 1016 to 1035, Cnut drew England into a Scandinavian empire that stretched from Ireland to the Baltic. His reign rewrote the place of Denmark and England within Europe, altering the political and cultural landscapes of both countries for decades to come.

Although studies of specific time concepts, expressed in Renaissance philosophy and literature, have not been lacking, few art-historians have endeavored to meet the challenge in the visual arts. This book presents a multifaceted picture of the dynamic concepts of time and temporality in medieval and Renaissance art, adopted in speculative, ecclesiastical, socio-political, propagandist, moralistic, and poetic contexts. It has been assumed that time was conceived in a different way by those living in the Renaissance as compared to their medieval predecessors. Changing perceptions of time, an increasingly secular approach, the sense of self-determination rooted in the practical use and control of time, and the perception of time as a threat to human existence and achievements are demonstrated through artistic media. Chapters dealing with time in classical and medieval philosophy and art are followed by studies that focus on innovative aspects of Renaissance iconography.

The present volume has grown out of the conference held at Princeton University on November 12-14, 2009. Its essays explore a coherent, interrelated nexus of topics that illuminate our understanding of the cultural transactions (social, political, economic, religious and artistic) of the Greek East and Latin West: unexpected cultural appropriations and forms of resistance, continuity and change, the construction and hybridization of traditions in a wide expanse of the eastern Mediterranean. Areas that the volume addresses include the benefits and liabilities of periodization, philosophical and political exchanges, monastic syncretism between the Orthodox and Catholic faiths, issues of romance composition, and economic currency and the currency of fashion as East and West interact. Contributors are Roderick Beaton, Peter Brown, Marina S. Brownlee, Giles Constable, Maria Evangelatou, Dimitri Gondicas, Judith Herrin, Elizabeth Jeffreys, Marc D. Lauxtermann, Stuart M. McManus, John Monfasani, Maria G. Parani, Linda Safran, Teresa Shawcross and Alan M. Stahl.

A Companion to Ostrogothic Italy is a concise yet comprehensive survey of Italy's first barbarian kingdom, the Ostrogothic state (ca. 489-554 CE). The volume's 18 essays cover both traditional topics (such as the Ostrogothic army) and hitherto under-examined subjects (for example Italy's environmental history), and are designed for new students and specialists.