Download or read book The Charisma of Distant Places written by Courtney Luckhardt and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-07-15 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This cultural history of early medieval travel and religion reveals how movement affected society, demonstrating the connectedness of people and regions between 500 and 850 CE. In The Charisma of Distant Places, Courtney Luckhardt enriches our understanding of migration through her examination of religious movement. Vertical links to God and horizontal links to distant regions identified religious travelers – both men and women – as holy, connected to the human and the divine across physical and spiritual distances. Using textual sources, material culture, and place studies, this project is among the first to contextualize the geographic and temporal movement of early medieval people to reveal the diversity of religious travel, from the voluntary journeys of pilgrims to the forced travel of Christian slaves. Luckhardt offers new ways of understanding ideas about power, holiness, identity, and mobility during the transformation of the Roman world in the global Middle Ages. By focusing on the religious dimensions of early medieval people and the regions they visited, this book addresses probing questions, including how and why medieval people communicated and connected with one another across boundaries, both geographical and imaginative.

Download or read book Borders and the Norman World written by Dan Armstrong and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2023-12-05 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Study of the Norman World's borders, frontiers, and boundaries in Europe, shedding fresh light on their nature and extent. The Normans exerted great influence across Christendom and beyond in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Figures like William the Conqueror and Robert Guiscard subdued vast territories, their feats recorded for posterity by chroniclers such as Orderic Vitalis and Geoffrey Malaterra. Through travel and conquest, the Normans encountered, created, and conceptualised many borders, with the areas of Europe that they ruled and most affected often being grouped together as the "Norman World".This volume examines the nature, forms, and function of borders in and around this "Norman World", looking at Normandy, the British-Irish Isles, and Southern Italy. Three sections frame the collection. The first concerns physical features, from broad frontier expanses, to rivers and walls that were both literally and metaphorically lines of division. The second shows how borders were established, contested, and negotiated between the papacy and lay rulers and senior churchmen. Finally, the third highlights the utility of conceptual frontiers for both medieval authors and modern historians. Among the subjects covered are Archbishop Anselm's travels across Christendom; the portrayal of borders in the writings of William of Jumièges, Orderic Vitalis, and Gerald of Wales; and the limits of Norman seigneurial and papal power at the edges of Europe. Overall, the essays demonstrate the role that the manipulation of borders played in the creation of the "Norman World", and address what these borders did and whom they benefited.and negotiated between the papacy and lay rulers and senior churchmen. Finally, the third highlights the utility of conceptual frontiers for both medieval authors and modern historians. Among the subjects covered are Archbishop Anselm's travels across Christendom; the portrayal of borders in the writings of William of Jumièges, Orderic Vitalis, and Gerald of Wales; and the limits of Norman seigneurial and papal power at the edges of Europe. Overall, the essays demonstrate the role that the manipulation of borders played in the creation of the "Norman World", and address what these borders did and whom they benefited.and negotiated between the papacy and lay rulers and senior churchmen. Finally, the third highlights the utility of conceptual frontiers for both medieval authors and modern historians. Among the subjects covered are Archbishop Anselm's travels across Christendom; the portrayal of borders in the writings of William of Jumièges, Orderic Vitalis, and Gerald of Wales; and the limits of Norman seigneurial and papal power at the edges of Europe. Overall, the essays demonstrate the role that the manipulation of borders played in the creation of the "Norman World", and address what these borders did and whom they benefited.and negotiated between the papacy and lay rulers and senior churchmen. Finally, the third highlights the utility of conceptual frontiers for both medieval authors and modern historians. Among the subjects covered are Archbishop Anselm's travels across Christendom; the portrayal of borders in the writings of William of Jumièges, Orderic Vitalis, and Gerald of Wales; and the limits of Norman seigneurial and papal power at the edges of Europe. Overall, the essays demonstrate the role that the manipulation of borders played in the creation of the "Norman World", and address what these borders did and whom they benefited.eurial and papal power at the edges of Europe. Overall, the essays demonstrate the role that the manipulation of borders played in the creation of the "Norman World", and address what these borders did and whom they benefited.

Download or read book Mobile Saints written by Kate M. Craig and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-04-22 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mobile Saints examines the central medieval (ca. 950–1150 CE) practice of removing saints’ relics from rural monasteries in order to take them on out-and-back journeys, particularly within northern France and the Low Countries. Though the permanent displacements of relics—translations— have long been understood as politically and culturally significant activities, these temporary circulations have received relatively little attention. Yet the act of taking a medieval relic from its “home,” even for a short time, had the power to transform the object, the people it encountered, and the landscape it traveled through. Using hagiographical and liturgical texts, this study reveals both the opportunities and tensions associated with these movements: circulating relics extended the power of the saint into the wider world, but could also provoke public displays of competition, mockery, and resistance. By contextualizing these effects within the discourses and practices that surrounded traveling relics, Mobile Saints emphasizes the complexities of the central medieval cult of relics and its participants, while speaking to broader questions about the role of movement in negotiating the relationships between sacred objects, space, and people.

Download or read book Instituting Nature written by Andrew S. Mathews and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2011-11-04 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of how encounters between forestry bureaucrats and indigenous forest managers in Mexico produced official knowledge about forests and the state. Greater knowledge and transparency are often promoted as the keys to solving a wide array of governance problems. In Instituting Nature, Andrew Mathews describes Mexico's efforts over the past hundred years to manage its forests through forestry science and biodiversity conservation. He shows that transparent knowledge was produced not by official declarations or scientists' expertise but by encounters between the relatively weak forestry bureaucracy and the indigenous people who manage and own the pine forests of Mexico. Mathews charts the performances, collusions, complicities, and evasions that characterize the forestry bureaucracy. He shows that the authority of forestry officials is undermined by the tension between local realities and national policy; officials must juggle sweeping knowledge claims and mundane concealments, ambitious regulations and routine rule breaking. Moving from government offices in Mexico City to forests in the state of Oaxaca, Mathews describes how the science of forestry and bureaucratic practices came to Oaxaca in the 1930s and how local environmental and political contexts set the stage for local resistance. He tells how the indigenous Zapotec people learned the theory and practice of industrial forestry as employees and then put these skills to use when they become the owners and managers of the area's pine forests—eventually incorporating forestry into their successful claims for autonomy from the state. Despite the apparently small scale and local contexts of this balancing act between the power of forestry regulations and the resistance of indigenous communities, Mathews shows that it has large implications—for how we understand the modern state, scientific knowledge, and power and for the global carbon markets for which Mexican forests might become valuable.

Download or read book Teaching and Learning History Online written by Stephen K. Stein and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-04-17 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Teaching and Learning History Online: A Guide for College Instructors offers everything a new online history instructor needs in one package, including how to structure courses, integrate multimedia, and manage and grade discussions, as well as advice for department chairs on curriculum management, student advising, and more. In today’s technological society, online courses are quickly becoming the new normal in terms of collegiate instruction, providing the ideal environment to "flip the classroom" and encourage students to hone critical thinking skills by engaging deeply with historical sources. While much of the attention in online teaching focuses on STEM, business, and education courses, online history courses have also proven consistently popular. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, new history instructors are rushed into online teaching with little or no training or experience, creating a need for a guide to ease the transition from classroom to online course development and teaching. A timely text, this book aims to provide both new and experienced college history teachers the information they need to develop dynamic online courses.

Download or read book Religious Commodifications in Asia written by Pattana Kitiarsa and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-11-09 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses the growing academic concerns of the market-religion convergences in Asia. Bringing together a group of leading scholars from Asia, Europe, Australia and North America, it discusses multiple issues regarding religious commodifications and their consequences across Asia’s diverse religious traditions. Covering key issues in the anthropology and sociology of contemporary Asian religion, it draws theoretical implications for the study of religions in the light of the shift of religious institutions from traditional religious beliefs to material prosperity. The fact that religions compete with each other in a ‘market of faiths’ is also at the core of the analysis. The contributions show how ordinary people and religious institutions in Asia adjusted to, and negotiated with, the penetrative forces of a global market economy into the region’s changing religio-cultural landscapes. An excellent contribution to the growing demands of ethnographically and theoretically updated interpretations of Asian religions, Religious Commodifications in Asia will be of interest to scholars of Asian religion and new religious movements.

Download or read book Ancestor Worship and the Elite in Late Iron Age Scandinavia written by Triin Laidoner and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-01-14 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ancestor worship is often assumed by contemporary European audiences to be an outdated and primitive tradition with little relevance to our societies, past and present. This book questions that assumption and seeks to determine whether ancestor ideology was an integral part of religion in Viking Age and early medieval Scandinavia. The concept is examined from a broad socio-anthropological perspective, which is used to structure a set of case studies which analyse the cults of specific individuals in Old Norse literature. The situation of gods in Old Norse religion has been almost exclusively addressed in isolation from these socio-anthropological perspectives. The public gravemound cults of deceased rulers are discussed conventionally as cases of sacral kingship, and, more recently, religious ruler ideology; both are seen as having divine associations in Old Norse scholarship. Building on the anthropological framework, this study introduces the concept of ‘superior ancestors’, employed in social anthropology to denote a form of political ancestor worship used to regulate social structure deliberately. It suggests that Old Norse ruler ideology was based on conventional and widely recognised religious practices revolving around kinship and ancestors and that the gods were perceived as human ancestors belonging to elite families.

Download or read book Supernatural Encounters written by Stephen Gordon and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-12-06 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The belief in the reality of demons and the restless dead formed a central facet of the medieval worldview. Whether a pestilent-spreading corpse mobilised by the devil, a purgatorial spirit returning to earth to ask for suffrage, or a shape-shifting demon intent on crushing its victims as they slept, encounters with supernatural entities were often met with consternation and fear. Chroniclers, hagiographers, sermon writers, satirists, poets, and even medical practitioners utilised the cultural ‘text’ of the supernatural encounter in many different ways, showcasing the multiplicity of contemporary attitudes to death, disease, and the afterlife. In this volume, Stephen Gordon explores the ways in which conflicting ideas about the intention and agency of supernatural entities were understood and articulated in different social and literary contexts. Focusing primarily on material from medieval England, c.1050–1450, Gordon discusses how writers such as William of Malmesbury, William of Newburgh, Walter Map, John Mirk, and Geoffrey Chaucer utilised the belief in demons, nightmares, and walking corpses for pointed critical effect. Ultimately, this monograph provides new insights into the ways in which the broad ontological category of the ‘revenant’ was conceptualised in the medieval world.

Download or read book Rethinking Medieval Margins and Marginality written by Ann Zimo and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-03-02 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marginality assumes a variety of forms in current discussions of the Middle Ages. Modern scholars have considered a seemingly innumerable list of people to have been marginalized in the European Middle Ages: the poor, criminals, unorthodox religious, the disabled, the mentally ill, women, so-called infidels, and the list goes on. If so many inhabitants of medieval Europe can be qualified as "marginal," it is important to interrogate where the margins lay and what it means that the majority of people occupied them. In addition, we scholars need to reexamine our use of a term that seems to have such broad applicability to ensure that we avoid imposing marginality on groups in the Middle Ages that the era itself may not have considered as such. In the medieval era, when belonging to a community was vitally important, people who lived on the margins of society could be particularly vulnerable. And yet, as scholars have shown, we ought not forget that this heightened vulnerability sometimes prompted so-called marginals to form their own communities, as a way of redefining the center and placing themselves within it. The present volume explores the concept of marginality, to whom the moniker has been applied, to whom it might usefully be applied, and how we might more meaningfully define marginality based on historical sources rather than modern assumptions. Although the volume’s geographic focus is Europe, the chapters look further afield to North Africa, the Sahara, and the Levant acknowledging that at no time, and certainly not in the Middle Ages, was Europe cut off from other parts of the globe.

Download or read book Church Society and University written by Deborah Grice and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-08-06 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1241/4 the theology masters at the university at Paris with their chancellor, Odo of Chateauroux, mandated by their bishop, William of Auvergne, met to condemn ten propositions against theological truth. This book represents the first comprehensive examination of what hitherto has been a largely ignored instrument in a crucial period of the university’s early maturation. However, the book’s ambition goes wider than this. The condemnation provides a window through which to view the wider doctrinal, intellectual, institutional and historical developments within the emerging university. These include the advent of the Dominicans and Franciscans at the university; and the developing focus of Paris theologians on using their learning for preaching at a time of a rapid and sometimes divergent development of doctrine and concerns over the newly-translated Aristotelian and associated Arab and Jewish works, heresy, the Greek Church and the Jews. The book compares the condemnation’s ten articles with the major statement of Catholic principles in the first canon of the Fourth Lateran Council, 1215, and assesses what conclusions can be drawn from their apparent correlation. Its examination of the condemnation in the context of the surrounding wider developments provides the basis for a much better understanding of the university and its theology faculty in the formative years between the grant of its statutes in 1215 and the better known period from the 1250s onwards, which included major figures such as Thomas Aquinas; and this, in turn, should lead to a better understanding of the later period itself and its doctrinal and institutional developments.

Download or read book The Age of Liutprand written by Christopher Heath and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2024-11-14 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Age of Liutprand provides a thematic analysis of Lombard Italy in the pivotal early part of the 8th century. It surveys the crucial role and rule of Liutprand [712-44], the powerful and effective Lombard king. By restoring this successful exemplar of Lombard kingship to the centre of events and developments in the Italian peninsula, this book pulls together all the pertinent evidence for a 'new' kingship in Lombard Italy that used a sophisticated set of strategies to enhance, deepen and expand its effectiveness. In presenting an evaluation of Italy on the cusp of dramatic change, this book explains how not only the kingship of Liutprand, but also his legal reforms and his relationships with the Church and neighbouring peoples all contributed to a model of kingship successfully and subsequently deployed by Charlemagne and his successors later in the 8th century.

Download or read book Margaret s Monsters written by Michael E. Heyes and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-12-06 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: St. Margaret of Antioch was one of the most popular saints in medieval England and, throughout the Middle Ages, the various Lives of St. Margaret functioned as a blueprint for a virginal life and supernatural assistance to pregnant women during the dangerous process of labor. In her narrative, Margaret is accosted by various demons and, having defeated each monster in turn, she is taken to the place of her martyrdom where she prays for supernatural boons for her adherents. This book argues that Margaret’s monsters are a key element in understanding Margaret’s importance to her adherents, specifically how the sexual identities of her adherents were constructed and maintained. More broadly, this study offers three major contributions to the field of medieval studies: first, it argues for the utility of a diachronic analysis of Saints’ Lives literature in a field dominated by synchronic analyses; second, this diachronic analysis is important to interpreting the intertext of Saints’ Lives, not only between different Lives but also different versions of the same Life; and third, the approach further suggests that the most valuable socio-cultural information in hagiographic literature is found in the auxiliary characters and not in the figure of the saint him/herself.

Download or read book Travel Pilgrimage and Social Interaction from Antiquity to the Middle Ages written by Jenni Kuuliala and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-10-10 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mobility and travel have always been key characteristics of human societies, having various cultural, social and religious aims and purposes. Travels shaped religions and societies and were a way for people to understand themselves, this world and the transcendent. This book analyses travelling in its social context in ancient and medieval societies. Why did people travel, how did they travel and what kind of communal networks and negotiations were inherent in their travels? Travel was not only the privilege of the wealthy or the male, but people from all social groups, genders and physical abilities travelled. Their reasons to travel varied from profane to sacred, but often these two were intermingled in the reasons for travelling. The chapters cover a long chronology from Antiquity to the end of the Middle Ages, offering the reader insights into the developments and continuities of travel and pilgrimage as a phenomenon of vital importance.

Download or read book Christians and Muslims in Early Medieval Italy written by Luigi Andrea Berto and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-11-27 with total page 125 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early Middle Ages, Italy became the target of Muslim expansionist campaigns. The Muslims conquered Sicily, ruling there for more than two centuries, and conducted many raids against the Italian Peninsula. During this period, however, Christians and Muslims were not always at war – trade flourished, and travel to the territories of the ‘other’ was not uncommon. By examining how Muslims and Christians perceived each other and how they communicated, this book brings the relationship between Muslims and Christians in early medieval Italy into clearer focus, showing that the followers of the Cross and those of the Crescent were in reality not as ignorant of one another as is commonly believed.

Download or read book The Death Penalty in Late Medieval Catalonia written by Flocel Sabaté and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-09-03 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The death penalty was unusual in medieval Europe until the twelfth century. From that moment on, it became a key instrument of rule in European society, and we can study it in the case of Catalonia through its rich and varied unpublished documentation. The death penalty was justified by Roman Law; accepted by Theology and Philosophy for the Common Good; and used by rulers as an instrument for social intimidation. The application of the death penalty followed a regular trial, and the status of the individual dictated the method of execution, reserving the fire for the worst crimes, as the Inquisition applied against the so-called heretics. The executions were public, and the authorities and the people shared the common goal of restoring the will of God which had been broken by the executed person. The death penalty took an important place in the core of the medieval mind: people included executions in the jokes and popular narratives while the gallows filled the landscape fitting the jurisdictional limits and, also, showing rotten corpses to assert that the best way to rule and order the society is by terror. This book utilises previously unpublished archival sources to present a unique study on the death penalty in late Medieval Europe.

Download or read book The Sense of Smell in the Middle Ages written by Katelynn Robinson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-09-09 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Odors, including those of incense, spices, cooking, and refuse, were both ubiquitous and meaningful in central and late medieval Western Europe. The significance of the sense of smell is evident in scholastic Latin texts, most of which are untranslated and unedited by modern scholars. Between the late eleventh and thirteenth century, medieval scholars developed a logical theory of the workings of the sense of smell based on Greek and Arabic learning. In the thirteenth through fifteenth century, medical authors detailed practical applications of smell theory and these were communicated to individuals and governing authorities by the medical profession in the interests of personal and public health. At the same time, religious authors read philosophical and medical texts and gave their information religious meaning. This reinterpretation of scholastic philosophy and medicine led to the development of what can be termed a medically aware theology of smell that was communicated to popular audiences alongside traditional olfactory theory in sermons. Its impact on popular thought is reflected in late medieval mystical texts. While the senses have received increasing scholarly attention in recent decades, this volume presents the first detailed research into the sense of smell in the later European Middle Ages.

Download or read book Stories Senses and the Charismatic Relation written by Jamie Barnes and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stories, Senses and the Charismatic Relation offers a uniquely intimate and auto-ethnographic exploration of Christian experience, rendering a deep, phenomenological account of how devotional worlds become real – how they are experienced, shaped, constituted and performed by those who live them. The book starts from a reflexive exploration of the author’s own experiences of the divine, considers the spiritual journeys of family members and the ‘spiritual community’ of which he was a part, and draws on ethnographic fieldwork in the southern Balkans where that community was based. Jamie Barnes considers three main elements: firstly, the role that sensory aspects of experience play in constituting one’s lived world and one’s ideas about the kinds of beings inhabiting it; secondly, how stories and metaphors are tactically employed, not only in the process of expressing aspects of past experience, but also in shaping and forming both desired worlds and future pathways; thirdly, how such sensed, narrated and lived worlds are tentatively held together - in hope, trust and love – through charismatic relationships of devotion with a divine Other. This unusual and innovative ethnography offers a unique and reflexive view from within the world of Christian experience.