Download or read book Assembly Places and Practices in Medieval Europe written by Aliki Pantos and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In medieval England and elsewhere in northwestern Europe the moot or assembly represented the first resort to law and government. An institution, through which a free man could obtain judgment and recompense, defend himself or seek to change the law, it encapsulated many of the features that today distinguish judicial and political process in north-western Europe. A collection of ten papers by a number of academic specialists, this volume presents a European perspective on the origin and evolution of medieval royal, judicial and popular assemblies. It is the first study in over a century to focus on this remarkable aspect of the early political process.
Download or read book The Archaeology of Medieval Europe 1 written by James Graham-Campbell and published by Aarhus Universitetsforlag. This book was released on 2007-12-31 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The two volumes of The Archaeology of Medieval Europe will together comprise the first complete account of medieval archaeology across Europe. Archaeologists from academic institutions in fifteen countries are collaborating to produce these two books of sixteen thematic chapters each. In addition, every chapter will feature a number of 'box-texts', by specialist contributors, highlighting sites or themes of particular importance. The books will be comprehensively illustrated throughout, in both colour and b/w, including line drawings and specially commissioned maps. This ground-breaking set, which is divided chronologically into two (Vol. 1 extending from the Eighth to Twelfth Centuries AD, and Vol. 2 from the Twelfth to Sixteenth Centuries - to appear 2008), will enable readers to track the development of different cultures, and of regional characteristics, throughout the full extent of medieval Catholic Europe. In addition to revealing shared contexts and technological developments, the complete work will also provide the opportunity for demonstrating the differences that were inevitably present across the Continent - from Iceland to Italy, and from Portugal to Finland - and to study why such differences existed.
Download or read book Early Medieval Europe 300 1050 written by David Rollason and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-05-22 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The centuries following the collapse of the Roman Empire saw extraordinary change across Western Europe - in institutions, social structure, rural and urban life, religion, learning, scholarship and art. This innovative textbook provides students coming to the study of Early Medieval Europe for the first time with the conceptual and methodological tools to investigate the period for themselves. It identifies major research questions and historiographical debates and offers guidance on how to engage with and evaluate the major documentary sources and the evidence of art history and archaeology. Ideally structured to support courses and classes in Medieval European history, the book's features include: Over 50 carefully selected maps and illustrations accompanied by explanatory commentary Detailed guidance on further reading with research questions to aid understanding Timelines and maps to orientate the reader in each chapter An extensive companion website providing practical study guidance, reference materials and access to further primary sources Offering a road map to the rich written and non-written sources for this period, and the exciting recent scholarship, this book is an essential guide for any student wishing to gain a deeper level of understanding and greater confidence in creative and independent historical thought.
Download or read book Carved Stones and Christianisation written by Anouk Busset and published by . This book was released on 2021-04-22 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The early medieval period witnessed one of the deepest and most significant transformations of European societies and cultures with the process of Christianisation. The emergence and establishment of Christianity created a new dimension of power in society with an appeal to supernatural forces combined with an access to a broader transnational authority. Carved stones did not merely reflect these changes, but enabled them within northern societies with traditions of sculpture and epigraphic representations. This book looks at three datasets of monuments from Ireland, Scotland and Sweden using an innovative comparative framework to offer new insights on these monuments and the societies that erected them.Analysed through the three major themes of place, movement, and memory, the case studies are presented from a holistic perspective comprising the monument, their landscape settings and historical and archaeological contexts (when available). The results of this research demonstrate that by means of comparisons across national boundaries, new interpretations emerge on the use and functions of early medieval carved stones. The thematic approach adopted emphasises similarities and contrasts in a more efficient manner than a geographical approach, freed from historiographical biases within scholarly traditions of 'Celtic' or 'Scandinavian' archaeologies. Furthermore, a multi-scale analysis places the monuments within their local contexts but also within a broader narrative of Christianisation.
Download or read book Beyond the Burghal Hidage written by John Baker and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2013-03-27 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the title suggests, Beyond the Burghal Hidage takes the study of Anglo-Saxon civil defence away from traditional historical and archaeological fields, and uses a groundbreaking interdisciplinary approach to examine warfare and public responses to organised violence through their impact on the landscape. By bringing together the evidence from a wide range of archaeological, onomastic and historical sources, the authors are able to reconstruct complex strategic and military landscapes, and to show how important detailed knowledge of early medieval infrastructure and communications is to our understanding of Anglo-Saxon preparedness for war, and to the situating of major defensive works within their wider strategic context. The result is a significant and far-reaching re-evaluation of the evolution of late Anglo-Saxon defensive arrangements. Winner of the 2013 Verbruggen prize, given annually by De Re Militari society for the best book on medieval military history.
Download or read book Building Anglo Saxon England written by John Blair and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-10-12 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize A radical rethinking of the Anglo-Saxon world that draws on the latest archaeological discoveries This beautifully illustrated book draws on the latest archaeological discoveries to present a radical reappraisal of the Anglo-Saxon built environment and its inhabitants. John Blair, one of the world's leading experts on this transformative era in England's early history, explains the origins of towns, manor houses, and castles in a completely new way, and sheds new light on the important functions of buildings and settlements in shaping people's lives during the age of the Venerable Bede and King Alfred. Building Anglo-Saxon England demonstrates how hundreds of recent excavations enable us to grasp for the first time how regionally diverse the built environment of the Anglo-Saxons truly was. Blair identifies a zone of eastern England with access to the North Sea whose economy, prosperity, and timber buildings had more in common with the Low Countries and Scandinavia than the rest of England. The origins of villages and their field systems emerge with a new clarity, as does the royal administrative organization of the kingdom of Mercia, which dominated central England for two centuries. Featuring a wealth of color illustrations throughout, Building Anglo-Saxon England explores how the natural landscape was modified to accommodate human activity, and how many settlements--secular and religious—were laid out with geometrical precision by specialist surveyors. The book also shows how the Anglo-Saxon love of elegant and intricate decoration is reflected in the construction of the living environment, which in some ways was more sophisticated than it would become after the Norman Conquest.
Download or read book The Land of the English Kin written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-04-28 with total page 717 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume draws together a series of papers that present some of the most up-to-date thinking on the history, archaeology and toponymy of Wessex and Anglo-Saxon England more broadly. In honour of one of early medieval European scholarship’s most illustrious doyennes, no less than twenty-nine contributions demonstrate the indelible impression Barbara Yorke’s work has made on her peers and a generation of new scholars, some of whom have benefitted directly from her tutorage. From the identities that emerged in the immediate post-Roman period, through to the development of kingdoms, the role of the church, and impacts felt beyond the eleventh century, the rich and diverse character of the studies presented here are testimony to the versatility and extensive range of the honorand’s contribution to the academic field.
Download or read book Kingship Legislation and Power in Anglo Saxon England written by Gale R. Owen-Crocker and published by Boydell & Brewer Ltd. This book was released on 2013 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The relationship between Anglo-Saxon kingship, law, and the functioning of power is explored via a number of different angles. The essays collected here focus on how Anglo-Saxon royal authority was expressed and disseminated, through laws, delegation, relationships between monarch and Church, and between monarchs at times of multiple kingships and changing power ratios. Specific topics include the importance of kings in consolidating the English "nation"; the development of witnesses as agents of the king's authority; the posthumous power of monarchs; how ceremonial occasions wereused for propaganda reinforcing heirarchic, but mutually beneficial, kingships; the implications of Ine's lawcode; and the language of legislation when English kings were ruling previously independent territories, and the delegation of local rule. The volume also includes a groundbreaking article by Simon Keynes on Anglo-Saxon charters, looking at the origins of written records, the issuing of royal diplomas and the process, circumstances, performance and function of production of records. GALE R. OWEN-CROCKER is Professor of Anglo-Saxon Culture at the University of Manchester. Contributors: Ann Williams, Alexander R. Rumble, Carole Hough, Andrew Rabin, Barbara Yorke, Ryan Lavelle, Alaric Trousdale
Download or read book Perceptions of the Prehistoric in Anglo Saxon England written by Sarah Semple and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-10 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Represents an unparalleled exploration of the place of prehistoric monuments in the Anglo-Saxon psyche, and examines how Anglo-Saxon communities perceived and used these monuments during the period AD 400-1100.
Download or read book The Power of Place written by David Rollason and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2016-07-19 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores the nature of power - the power of kings, emperors and popes - through the places that these rulers created or developed, including palaces, cities, landscapes, holy places, inauguration sites and burial places. Ranging across all of Europe from the 1st to the 16th centuries, David Rollason examines how these places conveyed messages of power and what those messages were.
Download or read book Transformation by Fire written by Ian Kuijt and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2014-11-27 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ash, bone, and memories are all that remains after cremation. Yet for societies and communities, the act of cremation after death is highly symbolic, rich with complex meaning, touching on what it means to be human. In the process of transforming the dead, the family, the community, and society as a whole create and partake in cultural symbolism. Cremation is a key area of archaeological research, but its complexity has been underappreciated and undertheorized. Transformation by Fire offers a fresh assessment of archaeological research on this widespread social practice. Editors Ian Kuijt, Colin P. Quinn, and Gabriel Cooney’s volume examines cremation by documenting the material signatures of cremation events and processes, as well as its transformative impact on social relations and concepts of the body. Indeed, examining why and how people chose to cremate their dead serves as an important means of understanding how people in the past dealt with death, the body, and the social world. The contributors develop new perspectives on cremation as important mortuary practices and social transformations. Varying attitudes and beliefs on cremation and other forms of burial within the same cultural paradigm help us understand what constitutes the body and what occurs during its fiery transformation. In addition, they explore issues and interpretive perspectives in the archaeological study of cremation within and between different cultural contexts. The global and comparative perspectives on cremation render the book a unique contribution to the literature of anthropological and mortuary archaeology.
Download or read book Anglo Saxon Deviant Burial Customs written by Andrew Reynolds and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-03-26 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A detailed study of the ways in which Anglo-Saxon society dealt with social outcasts. It begins with the period following Roman rule and ends in the century following the Norman Conquest. The author argues that outcast burials in this period showed a clear pattern of development.
Download or read book AngloSaxon ist Pasts PostSaxon Futures written by Donna Beth Ellard and published by punctum books. This book was released on 2019 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Over the past several years, Anglo-Saxon studies-alongside the larger field of medieval studies-has undergone a reckoning. Outcries against the misogyny and sexism of prominent figures in the field have quickly turned to issues of racism, prompting Anglo-Saxonists to recognize an institutional, structural whiteness that not only bars the door to people of color but also prohibits scholars from confronting the very idea that race and racism operate within the field's scholarship, scholarly practices, and intellectual history. Anglo-Saxon(ist) Pasts, postSaxon Futures traces the integral role that colonialism and racism play in Anglo-Saxon studies by tracking the development of the "Anglo-Saxonist," an overtly racialized term that describes a person whose affinities point towards white nationalism. That scholars continue to call themselves "Anglo-Saxonists," despite urgent calls to combat racism within the field, suggests that this term is much more than just a professional appellative. It is, this book argues, a ghost in the machine of Anglo-Saxon studies-a spectral figure created by a group of nineteenth-century historians, archaeologists, and philologists responsible for not only framing the interdisciplinary field of Anglo-Saxon studies but for also encoding ideologies of British colonialism and Anglo-American racism within the field's methods and pedagogies. Anglo-Saxon(ist) pasts, postSaxon Futures is at once a historiography of Anglo-Saxon studies, a mourning of its Anglo-Saxonist "fathers," and an exorcism of the colonial-racial ghosts that lurk within the field's scholarly methods and pedagogies. Part intellectual history, part grief work, this book leverages the genres of literary criticism, auto-ethnography, and creative nonfiction in order to confront Anglo-Saxonist pasts in order to imagine speculative postSaxon futures inclusive of voices and bodies heretofore excluded from the field of Anglo-Saxon studies"--
Download or read book A Norse Settlement in the Outer Hebrides written by Niall Sharples and published by Oxbow Books. This book was released on 2019-12-19 with total page 726 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The settlement at Bornais in the Western Isles of Scotland is one of the largest rural settlements known from the Norse period in Britain. It spans the period from the fifth to the fifteenth century AD when the Atlantic seaboard was subject to drastic changes. The islands were systematically ravaged by Viking raiders and then colonised by Norse settlers. In the following centuries the islanders were central to the emergence of the Kingdom of Man and the Isles, played a crucial role in the development of the Lordship of the Isles and were finally assimilated into the Kingdom of Scotland. This volume explores the stratigraphic sequence uncovered by the excavation of Bornais mounds 2 and 2A. The excavation of mound 2 revealed a sequence of high status buildings that span the Norse occupation of the settlement. One of these houses, constructed at the end of the eleventh century AD, was a well preserved bow-walled longhouse and the careful excavation and detailed recording of the floor layers has revealed a wealth of finds that provides invaluable insight into the activities taking place in this building. The final house in this sequence is very different in form and use, and clearly indicates the increasing Scottish influence on the region at the beginning of the thirteenth century. The excavation of mound 2A provides an insight into the less prestigious areas of the settlement and contributes a significant amount of evidence on the settlement economy. The area was initially cultivated before it became a settlement local and throughout its life a focus on agricultural activities, such as grain drying and processing, appears to have been important. In the thirteenth century the mound was occupied by a craftsman who produced composite combs, gaming pieces and simple tools. The evidence presented in this volume makes a major contribution to the understanding of Norse Scotland and the colonisation of the North Atlantic in a period of dramatic transformations.
Download or read book The Ancient Ways of Wessex written by Alexander Langlands and published by Windgather Press. This book was released on 2019-11-30 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Ancient Ways of Wessex tells the story of Wessex’s roads in the early medieval period, at the point at which they first emerge in the historical record. This is the age of the Anglo-Saxons and an era that witnessed the rise of a kingdom that was taken to the very brink of defeat by the Viking invasions of the ninth century. It is a period that goes on to become one within which we can trace the beginnings of the political entity we have come to know today as England. In a series of ten detailed case studies the reader is invited to consider historical and archaeological evidence, alongside topographic information and ancient place-names, in the reconstruction of the networks of routeways and communications that served the people and places of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex. Whether you were a peasant, pilgrim, drover, trader, warrior, bishop, king or queen, travel would have been fundamental to life in the early middle ages and this book explores the physical means by which the landscape was constituted to facilitate and improve the movement of people, goods and ideas from the seventh through to the eleventh centuries. What emerges is a dynamic web of interconnecting routeways serving multiple functions and one, perhaps, even busier than that in our own working countryside. A narrative of transition, one of both of continuity and change, provides a fresh and alternative window into the everyday workings of an early medieval landscape through the pathways trodden over a millennium ago.
Download or read book Law and Order in Anglo Saxon England written by Tom Lambert and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-02-23 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Law and Order in Anglo-Saxon England explores English legal culture and practice across the Anglo-Saxon period, beginning with the essentially pre-Christian laws enshrined in writing by King Æthelberht of Kent in c. 600 and working forward to the Norman Conquest of 1066. It attempts to escape the traditional retrospective assumptions of legal history, focused on the late twelfth-century Common Law, and to establish a new interpretative framework for the subject, more sensitive to contemporary cultural assumptions and practical realities. The focus of the volume is on the maintenance of order: what constituted good order; what forms of wrongdoing were threatening to it; what roles kings, lords, communities, and individuals were expected to play in maintaining it; and how that worked in practice. Its core argument is that the Anglo-Saxons had a coherent, stable, and enduring legal order that lacks modern analogies: it was neither state-like nor stateless, and needs to be understood on its own terms rather than as a variant or hybrid of these models. Tom Lambert elucidates a distinctively early medieval understanding of the tension between the interests of individuals and communities, and a vision of how that tension ought to be managed that, strikingly, treats strongly libertarian and communitarian features as complementary. Potentially violent, honour-focused feuding was an integral aspect of legitimate legal practice throughout the period, but so too was fearsome punishment for forms of wrongdoing judged socially threatening. Law and Order in Anglo-Saxon England charts the development of kings' involvement in law, in terms both of their authority to legislate and their ability to influence local practice, presenting a picture of increasingly ambitious and effective royal legal innovation that relied more on the cooperation of local communal assemblies than kings' sparse and patchy network of administrative officials.
Download or read book Creating Material Worlds written by Louisa Campbell and published by Oxbow Books. This book was released on 2016-05-07 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite a growing literature on identity theory in the last two decades, much of its current use in archaeology is still driven toward locating and dating static categories such as ‘Phoenician’, ‘Christian’ or ‘native’. Previous studies have highlighted the various problems and challenges presented by identity, with the overall effect of deconstructing it to insignificance. As the humanities and social sciences turn to material culture, archaeology provides a unique perspective on the interaction between people and things over the long term. This volume argues that identity is worth studying not despite its slippery nature, but because of it. Identity can be seen as an emergent property of living in a material world, an ongoing process of becoming which archaeologists are particularly well suited to study. The geographic and temporal scale of the papers included is purposefully broad to demonstrate the variety of ways in which archaeology is redefining identity. Research areas span from the Great Lakes to the Mediterranean, with case studies from the Mesolithic to the contemporary world by emerging voices in the field. The volume contains a critical review of theories of identity by the editors, as well as a response and afterward by A. Bernard Knapp.
