Download or read book Community and Clientele in Twelfth century Tuscany written by Chris Wickham and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 1998 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses a gap in Italian historiography by examining rural rather than city communes. In recent years, historians have increasingly focused on local and regional studies of village communities as a way of understanding medieval European history. This discussion of a group ofvillages around Lucca is the first detailed study of the origin of organized village communities in Italy for over seventy years, showing how the social and political structures of the countryside ran alongside those of the city. Chris Wickham analyses how local politics took recognizable shape asits ruling structures gradually emerged over time. His argument does not end there, and indeed extends beyond Italy, to France and Spain, providing sustained comparisons of rural development and social organization. The result is a rare combination of systematic local analysis and wide synthesis,aimed at illuminating the whole area of social transformation in twelfth-century Europe.
Download or read book The Crisis of the Twelfth Century written by Thomas N. Bisson and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2015-09-22 with total page 719 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Medieval civilization came of age in thunderous events like the Norman Conquest and the First Crusade. Power fell into the hands of men who imposed coercive new lordships in quest of nobility. Rethinking a familiar history, Thomas Bisson explores the circumstances that impelled knights, emperors, nobles, and churchmen to infuse lordship with social purpose. Bisson traces the origins of European government to a crisis of lordship and its resolution. King John of England was only the latest and most conspicuous in a gallery of bad lords who dominated the populace instead of ruling it. Yet, it was not so much the oppressed people as their tormentors who were in crisis. The Crisis of the Twelfth Century suggests what these violent people—and the outcries they provoked—contributed to the making of governments in kingdoms, principalities, and towns.
Download or read book The Aristocracy in England and Tuscany 1000 1250 written by Peter Coss and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2019-10-17 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines the aristocracy in Tuscany and in England across a period of two and a half centuries (1000-1250). It deals first with Tuscany, tracing the history of the aristocracy and illustrating its nature and evolution, and observing aristocratic behaviour and attitudes, and how aristocrats related to other members of society. Peter Coss then examines the history of England in the same periods. It is not, however, a comparative history, but employs Italian insights to look at the aristocracy in England and to move away from the traditional interpretation which revolves around Magna Carta and the idea of English exceptionalism. By offering a study of the aristocracy across a wide time-frame and with themes drawn from Italian historiography, Coss offers a new approach to studying aristocracy within its own contexts.
Download or read book Peasant and Community in Medieval England 1200 1500 written by P. Schofield and published by Springer. This book was released on 2002-12-17 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, work on the medieval English peasant has tended to stress the degree of interaction between the village and the world beyond its bounds. This book not only provides an overview of this research, but also develops this approach. Phillipp R. Schofield describes the traditional world of the peasant - with attention given to such issues as relations between lord and tenant, and the nature of the peasant family - and places the peasantry of the late middle ages within the wider political, legal, ecclesiastical and commercial world of the medieval community.
Download or read book Captivity and Imprisonment in Medieval Europe 1000 1300 written by J. Dunbabin and published by Springer. This book was released on 2002-10-23 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the growing importance of prisons, both lay and ecclesiastical, in western Europe between 1000 and 1300. It attempts to explain what captors hoped to achieve by restricting the liberty of others, the means of confinement available to them, and why there was an increasingly close link between captivity and suspected criminal activity. It discusses conditions within prisons, the means of release open to some captives, and writing in or about prison.
Download or read book Estate Management Around Florence and Lucca 1000 1250 written by Lorenzo Tabarrini and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-09-14 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the forms of estate management in the countryside of Florence and Lucca between the eleventh and the middle of the thirteenth centuries. It argues that their change reflects wider transformations of medieval economic patterns, and specifically the surge in overall demand that occurred in the decades bridging the twelfth and the thirteenth centuries. The reasons for a comparison between the Florentine and the Lucchese countryside lie in the alleged differences of their historical evolution--as it has been outlined by scholars so far. The so-called manorial system (sistema curtense) is believed to have ceased to exist in the Lucchesia around the beginning of the tenth century, whereas in the Fiorentino its disappearance can be dated to the early thirteenth century. Similarly, the Florentine countryside is generally regarded as the birthplace of a particular type of sharecropping regime, the mezzadria poderale, which spread over much of central Italy during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and would later become an essential component of Italian agrarian identity. On the contrary, the mezzadria poderale is thought to have never developed at any point in the history of medieval and early modern Lucchesia--and this was indeed the case with all the coastal areas of Tuscany. The book endeavours to examine the characteristics of estate management in the central Middle Ages in their own right; that is to say, by detaching those transformations from any teleological view, and by placing them within the economic and sociopolitical context of the period 1000-1250.
Download or read book A Companion to Medieval Pisa written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-04-25 with total page 639 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume comprises a multidisciplinary study of Pisa’s socio-economic, cultural, and political history, art history, and archaeology at the time of the city’s greatest fame and prosperity during the transformative period of the Middle Ages.
Download or read book Medieval Rome written by Chris Wickham and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Medieval Rome analyses the history of the city of Rome between 900 and 1150, a period of major change in the city. This volume doesn't merely seek to tell the story of the city from the traditional Church standpoint; instead, it engages in studies of the city's processions, material culture,legal transformations, and sense of the past, seeking to unravel the complexities of Roman cultural identity, including its urban economy, social history as seen across the different strata of society, and the articulation between the city's regions.This new approach serves to underpin a major reinterpretation of Rome's political history in the era of the "reform papacy", one of the greatest crises in Rome's history, which had a resonance across the entire continent. Medieval Rome is the most systematic analysis ever made of two and a halfcenturies of Rome's history, one which saw centuries of stability undermined by external crisis and the long period of reconstruction which followed.
Download or read book Sleepwalking Into a New World written by Chris Wickham and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-19 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A bold new history of the rise of the medieval Italian commune Amid the disintegration of the Kingdom of Italy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, a new form of collective government—the commune—arose in the cities of northern and central Italy. Sleepwalking into a New World takes a bold new look at how these autonomous city-states came about, and fundamentally alters our understanding of one of the most important political and cultural innovations of the medieval world. Chris Wickham provides richly textured portraits of three cities—Milan, Pisa, and Rome—and sets them against a vibrant backcloth of other towns. He argues that, in all but a few cases, the elites of these cities and towns developed one of the first nonmonarchical forms of government in medieval Europe, unaware that they were creating something altogether new. Wickham makes clear that the Italian city commune was by no means a democracy in the modern sense, but that it was so novel that outsiders did not know what to make of it. He describes how, as the old order unraveled, the communes emerged, governed by consular elites "chosen by the people," and subject to neither emperor nor king. They regularly fought each other, yet they grew organized and confident enough to ally together to defeat Frederick Barbarossa, the German emperor, at the Battle of Legnano in 1176. Sleepwalking into a New World reveals how the development of the autonomous city-state took place, which would in the end make possible the robust civic culture of the Renaissance.
Download or read book Peace and Penance in Late Medieval Italy written by Katherine Ludwig Jansen and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-31 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Medieval Italian communes are known for their violence, feuds, and vendettas, yet beneath this tumult was a society preoccupied with peace. Peace and Penance in Late Medieval Italy is the first book to examine how civic peacemaking in the age of Dante was forged in the crucible of penitential religious practice. Focusing on Florence in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, an era known for violence and civil discord, Katherine Ludwig Jansen brilliantly illuminates how religious and political leaders used peace agreements for everything from bringing an end to neighborhood quarrels to restoring full citizenship to judicial exiles. She brings to light a treasure trove of unpublished evidence from notarial archives and supports it with sermons, hagiography, political treatises, and chronicle accounts. She paints a vivid picture of life in an Italian commune, a socially and politically unstable world that strove to achieve peace. Jansen also assembles a wealth of visual material from the period, illustrating for the first time how the kiss of peace—a ritual gesture borrowed from the Catholic Mass—was incorporated into the settlement of secular disputes. Breaking new ground in the study of peacemaking in the Middle Ages, Peace and Penance in Late Medieval Italy adds an entirely new dimension to our understanding of Italian culture in this turbulent age by showing how peace was conceived, memorialized, and occasionally achieved.
Download or read book The Proprietary Church in the Medieval West written by Susan Wood and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2006-08-03 with total page 1035 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although there have been many regional studies of the proprietary church or particular aspects of it, this is the first extensive study of it covering most of western Europe, from the end of the Roman Empire in the West to about 1200. The book aims at a broad survey in varying degrees of intensity and with a shifting geographical focus; and it asks questions that are as much social and religious as legal or administrative.The book vindicates, for village and estate churches, Ulrich Stutz's basic concept of a church with its possessions, revenues, and priestly office as an object of what we can reasonably call property. But it largely rejects his and his followers' application of this to great churches, and sees the position of intermediate churches (such as small or middling monasteries) as various, changeable, and ambivalent. Above all it turns away from Stutz's view of the property relationship as a distinctinstitution or system of 'Germanic church law', presenting it rather as a fluid set of assumptions and practices taking shape as customary law.The book considers also the changing background of ideas and the bearing on it of important polemical writings (with some questioning of their established interpretations). Finally the book discusses how property in churches was imperfectly superseded by the new canon-law patronage, in the increasingly bureaucratic post-Gregorian Church.
Download or read book Framing the Early Middle Ages written by Chris Wickham and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2006-11-30 with total page 1019 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Roman empire tends to be seen as a whole whereas the early middle ages tends to be seen as a collection of regional histories, roughly corresponding to the land-areas of modern nation states. As a result, early medieval history is much more fragmented, and there have been few convincing syntheses of socio-economic change in the post-Roman world since the 1930s. In recent decades, the rise of early medieval archaeology has also transformed our source-base, but this has not been adequately integrated into analyses of documentary history in almost any country. In Framing the Early Middle Ages Chris Wickham combines documentary and archaeological evidence to create a comparative history of the period 400-800. His analysis embraces each of the regions of the late Roman and immediately post-Roman world, from Denmark to Egypt. The book concentrates on classic socio-economic themes, state finance, the wealth and identity of the aristocracy, estate management, peasant society, rural settlement, cities, and exchange. These give only a partial picture of the period, but they frame and explain other developments. Earlier syntheses have taken the development of a single region as 'typical', with divergent developments presented as exceptions. This book takes all different developments as typical, and aims to construct a synthesis based on a better understanding of difference and the reasons for it.
Download or read book The City State in Europe 1000 1600 written by Tom Scott and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-02-09 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No detailed comparison of the city-state in medieval Europe has been undertaken over the last century. Research has concentrated on the role of city-states and their republican polities as harbingers of the modern state, or else on their artistic and cultural achievements, above all in Italy. Much less attention has been devoted to the cities' territorial expansion: why, how, and with what consequences cities in the urban belt, stretching from central and northern Italy over the Alps to Switzerland, Germany, and the Low Countries, succeeded (or failed) in constructing sovereign polities, with or without dependent territories. Tom Scott goes beyond the customary focus on the leading Italian city-states to include, for the first time, detailed coverage of the Swiss city-states and the imperial cities of Germany. He criticizes current typologies of the city-state in Europe advanced by political and social scientists to suggest that the city-state was not a spent force in early modern Europe, but rather survived by transformation and adaption. He puts forward instead a typology which embraces both time and space by arguing for a regional framework for analysis which does not treat city-states in isolation, but within a wider geopolitical setting.
Download or read book Human Agency in Medieval Society 1100 1450 written by Ionuţ Epurescu-Pascovici and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2021 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Argues the case for the individual as autonomous moral agent in the later Middle Ages.
Download or read book Borders and the Politics of Space in Late Medieval Italy written by Luca Zenobi and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-08 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Space matters. It situates our history, structures our daily lives, and often determines what we can and cannot do. Borders are central to this reality. Tools and symbols of separation, power, and identity, they bring people together as much as they set them apart. This book explores how borders were understood, made, and encountered at the end of the Middle Ages, and what they can tell us about the spatial fabric of society at the threshold of modernity. It shows that pre-modern borders were nothing like the fuzzy lines they are typically made out to be, that border-making was rarely a top-down process and should instead be studied as an interactive endeavour, and that space was shaped by communities far more than states in this period. At its core, Borders and the Politics of Space in Late Medieval Italy is the account of a frontier which would mark the Italian peninsula for centuries, that between the territories of the Duchy of Milan and those of the Republic of Venice. But it is also a study of how rulers and subjects alike defined spaces they could call their own. Luca Zenobi combines methods from several disciplines and applies them to a range of evidence from twenty different libraries and archives, including theoretical treatises and pragmatic records, written chronicles and cartographic visualisations, private documents and official correspondence. The cast of characters is equally eclectic, featuring influential thinkers and pragmatic statesmen, zealous factions and clumsy bureaucrats, hopeless beggars and ambitious princes. On the border, their stories intersect and reveal their part in a shared history.
Download or read book Medieval Europe written by Chris Wickham and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-01 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chapter nine 1204: the failure of alternatives -- chapter ten Defining society: gender and community in late medieval Europe -- chapter eleven Money, war and death, 1350-1500 -- chapter twelve Rethinking politics, 1350-1500 -- chapter thirteen Conclusion -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index
Download or read book Medieval Italy written by Katherine L. Jansen and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2011-09-21 with total page 620 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Medieval Italy gathers together an unparalleled selection of newly translated primary sources from the central and later Middle Ages, a period during which Italy was famous for its diverse cultural landscape of urban towers and fortified castles, the spirituality of Saints Francis and Clare, and the vernacular poetry of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. The texts highlight the continuities with the medieval Latin West while simultaneously emphasizing the ways in which Italy was exceptional, particularly for its cities that drove Mediterranean trade, its new communal forms of government, the impact of the papacy's temporal claims on the central peninsula, and the richly textured religious life of the mainland and its islands. A unique feature of this volume is its incorporation of the southern part of the peninsula and Sicily—the glittering Norman court at Palermo, the multicultural emporium of the south, and the kingdoms of Frederick II—into a larger narrative of Italian history. Including Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, and Lombard sources, the documents speak in ethnically and religiously differentiated voices, while providing wider chronological and geographical coverage than previously available. Rich in interdisciplinary texts and organized to enable the reader to focus by specific region, topic, or period, this is a volume that will be an essential resource for anyone with a professional or private interest in the history, religion, literature, politics, and built environment of Italy from ca. 1000 to 1400.
