This book examines the remarkable Velestino hoard, found in Thessaly in the 1920s, and analyses the light that this collection of artifacts sheds on a poorly studied period of Byzantine history, and on largely neglected aspects of Byzantine civilization. Many collections of Byzantine gold- and silverware, such as Vrap and Seuso, have been surrounded by controversy. None, however, has been under more suspicion than the Velestino hoard, particularly with regards to its authenticity. The hoard contains no gold and no silver, and is in fact a collection of bronze and leaden plaques, some with human, and others with animal or geometric representations. The authors examine three distinct aspects of the hoard: the iconography of its components, the method of its production, and the function of those components. The conclusions that they reached provide valuable new insights into eighth-century Byzantine culture. The book explores the Byzantine cultural and political context of the Velestino hoard and will appeal to historians and art historians of early Byzantium, as well as archaeologists and historians of early medieval technologies.

Twilight of Empire is the first book in English to examine the Brest-Litovsk Peace Conference during the later stages of World War I with the use of extensive archival sources. Two separate peace treaties were signed at Brest-Litovsk - the first between the Central Powers and Ukraine and the second between the Central Powers and Bolshevik Russia. Borislav Chernev, through an insightful and in-depth analysis of primary sources and archival material, argues that although its duration was short lived, the Brest-Litovsk settlement significantly affected the post-Imperial transformation of East Central Europe. The conference became a focal point for the interrelated processes of peacemaking, revolution, imperial collapse, and nation-state creation in the multi-ethnic, entangled spaces of East Central Europe. Chernev's analysis expands beyond the traditional focus on the German-Russian relationship, paying special attention to the policies of Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and Ukraine. The transformations initiated by the Brest-Litovsk conferences ushered in the twilight of empire as the Habsburg, Hohenzollern, and Ottoman Empires all shared the fate of their Romanov counterpart at the end of World War I.

The objects unearthed in 1939 from an Anglo-Saxon ship-burial at Sutton Hoo, Suffolk, rank among the most splendid treasures in the collection of the British Museum. Bringing together fine craftsmanship from England, Germany, Scandinavia, Alexandria and far Byzantium, the spectacular finds included gold and garnet jewellery, silverware, drinking vessels with silver-gilt fittings, a lyre and a sceptre, as well as the iconic helmet, all deliberately buried in the early seventh century as grave-goods for an important, though unidentified, warrior. The Sutton Hoo ship-burial was one of the most exciting discoveries ever made in British archaeology. This beautifully designed introduction to the treasure details the most significant pieces contained within it and explores the circumstances of its burial, discovery and excavation, as well as its lasting legacy and fame.

In England in Europe, Elizabeth Tyler focuses on two histories: the Encomium Emmae Reginae, written for Emma the wife of the thelred II and Cnut, and The Life of King Edward, written for Edith the wife of Edward the Confessor. Tyler offers a bold literary and historical analysis of both texts and reveals how the two queens actively engaged in the patronage of history-writing and poetry to exercise their royal authority. Tyler's innovative combination of attention to intertextuality and regard for social networks emphasizes the role of women at the centre of Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman court literature. In doing so, she argues that both Emma and Edith's negotiation of conquests and factionalism created powerful models of queenly patronage that were subsequently adopted by individuals such as Queen Margaret of Scotland, Countess Adela of Blois, Queen Edith/Matilda, and Queen Adeliza. England in Europe sheds new lighton the connections between English, French, and Flemish history-writing and poetry and illustrates the key role Anglo-Saxon literary culture played in European literature long after 1066.

My People as Your People provides an in-depth analysis of the chronology, history, and archaeology associated with the reign of Jehoshaphat of Judah. The synthesis of these various elements illuminates a diverse geo-political picture of the southern Levant in the mid-ninth century BCE. In recent years, archaeologists and biblical scholars have dealt quite extensively with the tenth and eighth centuries BCE due to both the controversial aspects of recent interpretations associated with the so-called United Kingdom and the established archaeological data relating to Judah's rise as a significant polity in the eighth century BCE. On the other hand, the ninth century BCE has received considerably less scholarly treatment, despite the fact that many new archaeological strata have been uncovered in recent years that have a direct bearing upon this period. My People as Your People is an attempt to fill this gap in our knowledge. In accomplishing this, it both provides a nuanced understanding of Judah in the mid-ninth century BCE and also demonstrates the significance of this period in the larger setting of the history of the Divided Kingdom.

Since its invention by Renaissance humanists, the myth of the "Middle Ages" has held a uniquely important place in the Western historical imagination. Whether envisioned as an era of lost simplicity or a barbaric nightmare, the medieval past has always served as a mirror for modernity. This book gives an eye-opening account of the ways various political and intellectual projects-from nationalism to the discipline of anthropology-have appropriated the Middle Ages for their own ends. Deploying an interdisciplinary toolkit, author K. Patrick Fazioli grounds his analysis in contemporary struggles over power and identity in the Eastern Alps, while also considering the broader implications for scholarly research and public memory.

This book is a first presentation of pottery samples from el-Balu' in the northern Ard el-Kerak, the ancient Moabitis which today is Central Jordan. The forms presented here are dating from the Late Bronze and Early Iron Age down to the Persian periods of occupation of the site of el-Balu'. The book does not discuss the pottery in the wider context of Jordanian or Palestinian ceramics; however, the intention was to present pottery from the hitherto only sparsely published Iron Age pottery of the region. With this documentation scholars of the Archaeology of Jordan are invited to work on the ceramics excavated in the Areas A, B, C, D, E, and G of el-Balu'.

The Visions of Amram (4Q543-547), five copies of an Aramaic text found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, stems from the pre-Hasmonean period and provides evidence of a highly variegated society in early Judaism. In this book, Robert R. Duke offers a new reading of all the fragments and an in-depth discussion of their significance, illuminating a time period in Jewish history that needs more understanding and culminating in a suggested social location for its production. Duke concludes that 4Q543-547 was written by a disenfranchised group of priests who resided in Hebron. The importance of the patriarchal burials, chronology, endogamy, the figure of Moses, and angelology argue for a priestly group, whose members were also influenced by apocalyptic thinking. The suggestion of Hebron as the geographical location for this group is based on the theories of George Nickelsburg's and David Suter's work on 1 Enoch. Pre-Hasmonean Judaism was an intense time of dialogue and disagreement, and 4Q543-547 is one more item to consider in reconstructing these social realities.

Take a cast of archaeologists and historians who inhabit different worlds. Add a medieval king who died in battle, and was revived by Shakespeare as the ultimate anti-hero. Throw in a forensic quest with almost unbelievable twists, and a theatrical modern burial with no parallel, and you have the material for an irresistible story for our times. In the hands of a leading archaeologist and award-winning journalist, the search for a king's grave becomes the page-turning, entertaining, informed narrative that makes Digging for Richard III the must-read title on the most sensational archaeological find for generations.

As president of the Italian Liberal Party, Benedetto Croce was one of the most influential intellectuals involved in Italian public affairs after the fall of Mussolini. Placing Croce at the centre of historical events between 1943 and 1952, this book details his participation in Italy's political life, and his major contributions to the rebirth of Italian democracy. Drawing on a great amount of primary material, including Croce's political speeches, correspondences, diaries, and official documents from post-war Italy, this book illuminates the dynamic and progressive nature of Croce's liberalism and the shortcomings of the old Liberal leaders. Providing a year-by-year account of Croce's initiatives, author Fabio Fernando Rizi fills the gap in Croce's biography, covering aspects of his public life often neglected, misinterpreted, or altogether ignored, and restores his standing among the founding fathers of modern Italy.

A multi-disciplinary investigation of the links between people and animals, in reality and representation. Domestic animals played a range of roles in the imaginative world of medieval Icelanders: from partners in settlement and household allies, to violent offenders, foster-kin and surrogate wives, they were vital and effective members of the multispecies communities established from the ninth century onwards. This book examines the domestic animals of early Iceland in their physical and textual contexts, through detailed analysis of the spaces and places of the Icelandic farm and farming landscape, and textual sources such as The Book of Settlements, the earliest Icelandic laws, and various episodes from the Sagas and Tales of Icelanders. Taking a multidisciplinary approach to animal-human relationships, it sees animals not solely as symbols, metaphors, or objects, but as subjects in affective relationships with their human co-settlers who become the focus of intense exploration, delight, anxiety and condemnation in later textual narratives. By inviting readers to question how these sources form, embrace, or reject animal-human relationships, it provides a resource for understanding these archaeological sites and textual narratives differently: as products of multispecies communities in which animals and humans lived, worked, and died together.

The Merovingian era is one of the best studied yet least well known periods of European history. From the fifth to the eighth centuries, the inhabitants of Gaul (what now comprises France, southern Belgium, Luxembourg, Rhineland Germany, and part of modern Switzerland), a mix of Gallo-Roman inhabitants and Germanic arrivals under the political control of the Merovingian dynasty, sought to preserve, use, and reimagine the political, cultural, and religious power of ancient Rome while simultaneously forging the beginnings of what would become medieval European culture. The forty-six essays included in this volume highlight why the Merovingian era is at the heart of historical debates about what happened to Western Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire. The essays demonstrate that the inhabitants of the Merovingian kingdoms in these centuries created a culture that was the product of these traditions and achieved a balance between the world they inherited and the imaginative solutions they bequeathed to Europe. The Handbook highlights new perspectives and scientific approaches that shape our changing view of this extraordinary era by showing that Merovingian Gaul was situated at the crossroads of Europe, connecting the Mediterranean and the British Isles with the Byzantine empire, and it benefited from the global reach of the late Roman Empire. It tells the story of the Merovingian world through archaeology, bio-archaeology, architecture, hagiographic literature, history, liturgy, visionary literature and eschatology, patristics, numismatics, and material culture.

Christopher Loveluck's study explores the transformation of Northwest Europe (primarily Britain, France and Belgium) from the era of the first post-Roman 'European Union' under the Carolingian Frankish kings to the so-called 'feudal' age, between c. AD 600 and 1150. During these centuries radical changes occurred in the organisation of the rural world. Towns and complex communities of artisans and merchant-traders emerged and networks of contact between northern Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Middle and Far East were redefined, with long-lasting consequences into the present day. Loveluck provides the most comprehensive comparative analysis of the rural and urban archaeological remains in this area for twenty-five years. Supported by evidence from architecture, relics, manuscript illuminations and texts, this book explains how the power and intentions of elites were confronted by the aspirations and actions of the diverse rural peasantry, artisans and merchants, producing both intended and unforeseen social changes.

This book contains the contributions to a workshop on apologetics in early Christianity which took place at the Fifteenth International Conference on Patristic Studies in Oxford in the summer of 2007. The workshop was arranged by scholars from Germany, Finland and Denmark who had for some time worked together in a project on early Christian apologetics. The aim of the workshop was thus to present and discuss some of the results and still unsolved problems which arose from this project. The book presents the contributions to the workshop. Hereby the editors hope to reach a larger audience and thus to be able to further the discussion of the topic of early Christian apologetics.

Marriage as Political Strategy and Cultural Expression is the first comprehensive study of Mongolian royal marriages from World Empire (1206-1279) to the Yuan dynasty (1279-1368) in Asia. This study examines the Mongolian royal family's marriage strategies and the political implications of these royal marriages, specifically, the intermarriages between the Mongolian royal house and its allies, including the Onggirat, the Oirat, and other Mongol peoples as well as the Uighur State and Korea in Central and East Asia. This book concludes that the short lifespans of Mongol royalty after Khubilai Khan were the result of consanguineous marriage and inbreeding - genetic factors that contributed to the collapse of the Mongol dynasty.

Among the few surviving archaeological sites from the medieval Christian kingdom of Nubia-located in present day Sudan-Qasr Ibrim is unique in a number of ways. It is the only site in Lower Nubia that remained above water after the completion of the Aswan high dam. In addition, thanks to the aridity of the climate in the area the site is marked by extraordinary preservation of organic material, especially textual material written on papyrus, leather, and paper. Particularly rich is the textual material from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries CE, written in Old Nubian, the region's indigenous language. As a result, Qasr Ibrim is probably the best documented ancient and medieval site in Africa outside of Egypt and North Africa. Medieval Nubia will be the first book to make available this remarkable material, much of which is still unpublished. The evidence discovered reveals a more complicated picture of this community than originally thought. Previously, scholars had thought medieval Nubia had existed in relative isolation from the rest of the world and had a primitive economy. Legal documents, accounts, and letters, however, reveal a complex, monetized economy with exchange rates connected to those of the wider world. Furthermore, they reveal public festive practices, in which lavish feasting and food gifts reinforced the social prestige of the participants. These documents show medieval Nubia to have been a society combining legal elements inherited from the Greco-Roman world with indigenous African social practices. In reconstructing the social and economic life of medieval Nubia based on the Old Nubian sources from the site, as well as other previously examined materials, Giovanni R. Ruffini will correct previous assumptions and produce a new picture of Nubia, one that connects it to the wider Mediterranean economy and society of its time.

This volume contains the first results from the excavation of a terp at Wijnaldum in the province of Friesland, the Netherlands. The excavation was carried out as a joint venture between the University of Groningen and the University of Amsterdam from 1991 until 1993, and was the starting point of an interdisciplinary project on Frisia Magna in the first millennium AD: a time when Frisia became an important influence on the international trade and political stage in Northwest Europe.
This volume describes Wijnaldum, how it was once a cradle of political and economic growth, and how the cultural heritage of the great days of Frisian history is now severely threatened in parts of the terp region.

Although we often think of friendship today as an indisputable value of human social life, for thinkers and writers across late medieval Christian society friendship raised a number of social and ethical dilemmas that needed to be carefully negotiated. On Amista analyses these dilemmas and looks at how Dante's strategic articulations of friendship evolved across the phases of his literary career as he maneuvered between different social groups and settings. Elizabeth Coggeshall reveals that friendship was not an unequivocal moral good for the writers of late medieval Italy. Instead, it was an ambiguous term to be deployed strategically, describing a wide range of social relationships such as allies, collaborators, servants, patrons, rivals, and enemies. Drawing on the use of the language of friendship in the letters, correspondence poems, dedications, narratives, and treatises composed by Dante and his interlocutors, Coggeshall examines the way they skillfully negotiated around the dilemmas that friendship raised in the spheres of medieval Italian literary society. The book addresses instances of inclusivity and exclusivity, collaboration and self-interest, hierarchy and equality, and alterity and identity. Employing literary, historical, and sociological analysis, On Amista presents a genealogy for the innovative and tactical use of the terms of friendship among the works of late medieval Italian authors.

This book sets a new agenda for mortuary archaeology. Applying explicit case studies based on a range of European sites (from Scandinavia to Britain, Southern France to the Black Sea), 'Mortuary Practices and Social Identities in the Middle Ages' fulfills the need for a volume that provides accessible material to students and engages with current debates in mortuary archaeology's methods and theories. The book builds upon Heinrich Harke's influential research on burial archaeology and early medieval migrations, focusing in particular on his ground-breaking work on the relationship between the theory and practice of burial archaeology. Using diverse archaeological and historical data, the essays explore how mortuary practices have served in the make-up and expression of medieval social identities. Themes explored include masculinity, kinship, ethnicity, migration, burial rites, genetics and the perception of landscape.

This book provides the first global analysis of the relationship between trade and civilisation from the beginning of civilisation 3000 BC until the modern era 1600 AD. Encompassing the various networks including the Silk Road, the Indian Ocean trade, Near Eastern family traders of the Bronze Age, and the Medieval Hanseatic League, it examines the role of the individual merchant, the products of trade, the role of the state, and the technical conditions for land and sea transport that created diverging systems of trade and in the development of global trade networks. Trade networks, however, were not durable. The book focuses on the establishment and decline of great trading network systems, and how they related to the expansion of civilisation, and to different forms of social and economic exploitation. Case studies focus on local conditions as well as global networks until the sixteenth century when the whole globe was connected by trade.

This book brings together the cumulative results of a three-year project focused on the assemblies and administrative systems of Scandinavia, Britain, and the North Atlantic islands in the 1st and 2nd millennia AD. In this volume we integrate a wide range of historical, cartographic, archaeological, field-based, and onomastic data pertaining to early medieval and medieval administrative practices, geographies, and places of assembly in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Scotland, and eastern England. This transnational perspective has enabled a new understanding of the development of power structures in early medieval northern Europe and the maturation of these systems in later centuries under royal control. In a series of richly illustrated chapters, we explore the emergence and development of mechanisms for consensus. We begin with a historiographical exploration of assembly research that sets the intellectual agenda for the chapters that follow. We then examine the emergence and development of the thing in Scandinavia and its export to the lands colonised by the Norse. We consider more broadly how assembly practices may have developed at a local level, yet played a significant role in the consolidation, and at times regulation, of elite power structures. Presenting a fresh perspective on the agency and power of the thing and cognate types of local and regional assembly, this interdisciplinary volume provides an invaluable, in-depth insight into the people, places, laws, and consensual structures that shaped the early medieval and medieval kingdoms of northern Europe.

This book shines a much needed light on the city in the later Medieval Ages. Essays include studies of buildings and objects in the city and its immediate surrounds, both from archaeological and thematic approaches. In addition, a number of chapters reflect on the legacy and influence medieval art and architecture had on the later city. The volume also provides detailed studies of some of the most important master masons, glassmakers and carpenters in the medieval city, as well as of patrons, building types and institutional development

Who Should Be King in Israel? attempts to link common messianic issues found in some Dead Sea Scrolls with the Gospel of John. These messianic issues are studied in relation to the political situation facing the Johannine community in dealing with the Roman empire. The readers/hearers of the Fourth Gospel had to deal with different challenges from the Roman government and the non-Christian Jewish community in the era between the Jewish Revolt and the Bar-Kochba Revolt. Jesus is presented as the new David, the Son of God, who is the solution to all of humanity's problems. The fall of the Temple in 70 CE had created a political and religious situation that meant early Christians of the post-70 CE socio-political environment had to deal with Roman suspicion and Jewish disappointment. The Fourth Gospel uses vocabulary and imagery designed to communicate the message that Jesus is the Christ without inflaming either Roman or Jewish sensibilities. This book is written in a manner designed to deal intelligently with that difficult era in Christian history.

This book argues that Robert Willis's presentations were fundamental to the format of British Archaeological Association meetings and to the creation of medieval architectural history. It discusses the background to his study of Canterbury in terms of his own research.