Download or read book Barbarians to Angels The Dark Ages Reconsidered written by Peter S. Wells and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2009-08-24 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A rich and surprising look at the robust European culture that thrived after the collapse of Rome. The barbarians who destroyed the glory that was Rome demolished civilization along with it, and for the next four centuries the peasants and artisans of Europe barely held on. Random violence, mass migration, disease, and starvation were the only ways of life. This is the picture of the Dark Ages that most historians promote. But archaeology tells a different story. Peter Wells, one of the world’s leading archaeologists, surveys the archaeological record to demonstrate that the Dark Ages were not dark at all. The kingdoms of Christendom that emerged starting in the ninth century sprang from a robust, previously little-known European culture, albeit one that left behind few written texts.
Download or read book Reconsidering Gender Time and Memory in Medieval Culture written by Elizabeth Cox and published by Boydell & Brewer Ltd. This book was released on 2015 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A consideration of the ways in which the past was framed and remembered in the pre-modern world. The training and use of memory was crucial in medieval culture, given the limited literacy at the time, but to date, very little thought has been given to the complex and disparate ways in which the theory and practices of memoryinteracted with the inherently unstable concepts of time and gender at the time. The essays in this volume, drawing on approaches from applied poststructural and queer theory among others, reassess those ideologies, meanings and responses generated by the workings of memory within and over "time". Ultimately, they argue for the inherent instability of the traditional gender-time-memory matrix (within which men are configured as the recorders of "history"and women as the repositories of a more inchoate familial and communal knowledge), showing the Middle Ages as a locus for a far more fluid conceptualization of time and memory than has previously been considered. Elizabeth Cox is Lecturer in Old English at Swansea University; Roberta Magnani is Lecturer in Medieval Literature at Swansea University; Liz Herbert McAvoy is Professor of Medieval Literature at Swansea University. Contributors: Anne E. Bailey, Daisy Black, Elizabeth Cox, Fiona Harris-Stoertz, Ayoush Lazikani, Liz Herbert McAvoy, Pamela E. Morgan, William Rogers, Patricia Skinner, Victoria Turner.
Download or read book The Idea of the Book in the Middle Ages written by Jesse Gellrich and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-15 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book assess the relationship of literature to various other cultural forms in the Middle Ages. Jesse M. Gellrich uses the insights of such thinkers as Levi-Strauss, Foucault, Barthes, and Derrida to explore the continuity of medieval ideas about speaking, writing, and texts.
Download or read book The Middle Ages Reconsidered written by Barbara G. Keller and published by Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers. This book was released on 1994 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Held in low esteem since the Renaissance, scorned by Englightenment authors as incompatible with the theory of progress, the Middle Ages found a place in other French literature of the eighteenth century with its increasing taste for sentimentality and need for moral edification. A metaphor for the Ancien Régime following the Revolution, the medieval period gained perception as le bon vieux temps. As «national» became increasingly synonymous with «medieval» and backlash against the Church led to a new religiosity, Romantic writers greatly exploited a subjective ideal they sought in the Middle Ages. This fascinating study thoroughly explores the reception of the Middle Ages in French literature during these periods.
Download or read book The Middle Ages Revisited Studies in the Archaeology and History of Medieval Southern England Presented to Professor David A Hinton written by Ben Jervis and published by Archaeopress Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2018-11-17 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume, produced in honour of Professor David A. Hinton’s contribution to medieval studies, re-visits the sites, archaeologists and questions which have been central to the archaeology of medieval southern England. Contributions are focused on the medieval period (from the Anglo-Saxon period to the Reformation) in southern England.
Download or read book The Bright Ages written by Matthew Gabriele and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2021-12-07 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The beauty and levity that Perry and Gabriele have captured in this book are what I think will help it to become a standard text for general audiences for years to come….The Bright Ages is a rare thing—a nuanced historical work that almost anyone can enjoy reading.”—Slate "Incandescent and ultimately intoxicating." —The Boston Globe A lively and magisterial popular history that refutes common misperceptions of the European Middle Ages, showing the beauty and communion that flourished alongside the dark brutality—a brilliant reflection of humanity itself. The word “medieval” conjures images of the “Dark Ages”—centuries of ignorance, superstition, stasis, savagery, and poor hygiene. But the myth of darkness obscures the truth; this was a remarkable period in human history. The Bright Ages recasts the European Middle Ages for what it was, capturing this 1,000-year era in all its complexity and fundamental humanity, bringing to light both its beauty and its horrors. The Bright Ages takes us through ten centuries and crisscrosses Europe and the Mediterranean, Asia and Africa, revisiting familiar people and events with new light cast upon them. We look with fresh eyes on the Fall of Rome, Charlemagne, the Vikings, the Crusades, and the Black Death, but also to the multi-religious experience of Iberia, the rise of Byzantium, and the genius of Hildegard and the power of queens. We begin under a blanket of golden stars constructed by an empress with Germanic, Roman, Spanish, Byzantine, and Christian bloodlines and end nearly 1,000 years later with the poet Dante—inspired by that same twinkling celestial canopy—writing an epic saga of heaven and hell that endures as a masterpiece of literature today. The Bright Ages reminds us just how permeable our manmade borders have always been and of what possible worlds the past has always made available to us. The Middle Ages may have been a world “lit only by fire” but it was one whose torches illuminated the magnificent rose windows of cathedrals, even as they stoked the pyres of accused heretics. The Bright Ages contains an 8-page color insert.
Download or read book The Middle Ages Revisited written by Alexander Del Mar and published by . This book was released on 1899 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Transformations of Magic written by Frank Klaassen and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Explores two principal genres of illicit learned magic in late Medieval manuscripts: image magic, which could be interpreted and justified in scholastic terms, and ritual magic, which could not"--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book Reassessing Jewish Life in Medieval Europe written by Robert Chazan and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-09-27 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book re-evaluates the prevailing notion that Jews in medieval Christian Europe lived under an appalling regime of ecclesiastical limitation, governmental exploitation and expropriation, and unceasing popular violence. Robert Chazan argues that, while Jewish life in medieval Western Christendom was indeed beset with grave difficulties, it was nevertheless an environment rich in opportunities; the Jews of medieval Europe overcame obstacles, grew in number, explored innovative economic options, and fashioned enduring new forms of Jewish living. His research also provides a reconsideration of the legacy of medieval Jewish life, which is often depicted as equally destructive and projected as the underpinning of the twentieth-century catastrophes of antisemitism and the Holocaust. Dr Chazan's research proves that, although Jewish life in the medieval West laid the foundation for much Jewish suffering in the post-medieval world, it also stimulated considerable Jewish ingenuity, which lies at the root of impressive Jewish successes in the modern West.
Download or read book The Holy Roman Empire Reconsidered written by Jason Philip Coy and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Holy Roman Empire has often been anachronistically assumed to have been defunct long before it was actually dissolved at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The authors of this volume reconsider the significance of the Empire in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Their research reveals the continual importance of the Empire as a stage (and audience) for symbolic performance and communication; as a well utilized problem-solving and conflict-resolving supra-governmental institution; and as an imagined political, religious, and cultural "world" for contemporaries. This volume by leading scholars offers a dramatic reappraisal of politics, religion, and culture and also represents a major revision of the history of the Holy Roman Empire in the early modern period.
Download or read book Accounts and Accountability in Late Medieval Europe written by Ionuţ Epurescu-Pascovici and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume stems from a conference organised in November 2018 at theUniversity of Bucharest in the frame of the European Research Councilproject CASTELLANY ACCOUNTS, "Record-keeping, fiscal reform, andthe rise of institutional accountability in late-medieval Savoy: A source-orientedapproach". Both the conference and the volume have received fundingfrom the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 638436).The volume traces the momentous transformation of institutions and administration under the impact of accounting records and procedures, c. 1250-1500. The focus on the materiality and organising logic of a range of accounts is complemented by close attention to the socio-political contexts in which they functioned and the agency of central and local officials.
Download or read book Toward a Global Middle Ages written by Bryan C. Keene and published by Getty Publications. This book was released on 2019-09-03 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This important and overdue book examines illuminated manuscripts and other book arts of the Global Middle Ages. Illuminated manuscripts and illustrated or decorated books—like today’s museums—preserve a rich array of information about how premodern peoples conceived of and perceived the world, its many cultures, and everyone’s place in it. Often a Eurocentric field of study, manuscripts are prisms through which we can glimpse the interconnected global history of humanity. Toward a Global Middle Ages is the first publication to examine decorated books produced across the globe during the period traditionally known as medieval. Through essays and case studies, the volume’s multidisciplinary contributors expand the historiography, chronology, and geography of manuscript studies to embrace a diversity of objects, individuals, narratives, and materials from Africa, Asia, Australasia, and the Americas—an approach that both engages with and contributes to the emerging field of scholarly inquiry known as the Global Middle Ages. Featuring more than 160 color illustrations, this wide-ranging and provocative collection is intended for all who are interested in engaging in a dialogue about how books and other textual objects contributed to world-making strategies from about 400 to 1600.
Download or read book Church Building and Society in the Later Middle Ages written by Gabriel Byng and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-12-14 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first systematic study of the financing and management of parish church construction in England in the Middle Ages.
Download or read book The Circle of War in the Middle Ages written by Donald J. Kagay and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 1999 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Medieval warfare on both land and sea examined by leading scholars in the field. Different aspects of medieval warfare form the focus for this collection of essays by both established and new scholars. They range from a reconsideration of several problems of military historiography to explorations of the medieval view of divine influence on the battlefield, and the emergence of complex strategic and tactical norms of naval warfare in the medieval Mediterranean. Other topics examined include the role of mercenaries; crusader warfare; and Anglo-Norman women at war.Contributors: BERNARD S. BACHRACH, THERESA M. VANN, PAUL E. CHEVEDDEN, STEPHEN MORILLO, EDWARD G. SCHOENFELD, KENT G. HARE, KELLY DEVRIES, STEVEN ISAAC, JEAN A. TRUAX, STEVEN G. LANE, DOUGLAS C. HALDANE, LAWRENCE V. MOTT
Download or read book The Bronze Object in the Middle Ages written by Ittai Weinryb and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-18 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents the first full length study in English of monumental bronzes in the Middle Ages. Taking as its point of departure the common medieval reception of bronze sculpture as living or animated, the study closely analyzes the practice of lost wax casting (cire perdue) in western Europe and explores the cultural responses to large scale bronzes in the Middle Ages. Starting with mining, smelting, and the production of alloys, and ending with automata, water clocks and fountains, the book uncovers networks of meaning around which bronze sculptures were produced and consumed. The book is a path-breaking contribution to the study of metalwork in the Middle Ages and to the re-evaluation of medieval art more broadly, presenting an understudied body of work to reconsider what the materials and techniques embodied in public monuments meant to the medieval spectator.
Download or read book The Meditationes Vitae Christi Reconsidered written by Holly Flora and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on diverse literary traditions, the author of the fourteenth-century Meditationes Vitae Christi transformed the Gospel accounts into an emotionally charged and vivid narrative that became one of the most popular texts of the late Middle Ages. Over the past few years, new theories about the authorship, date, and original language of the text have emerged, raising new questions about this text and its impact on late medieval art and spirituality. The essays in this interdisciplinary volume examine multiple aspects of the Meditationes history, from its possible authorship to its manuscript traditions to its reflections in art.
Download or read book A Cultural History of Women in the Middle Ages written by Kim M. Phillips and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-04-02 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The medieval era has been described as 'the Age of Chivalry' and 'the Age of Faith' but also as 'the Dark Ages'. Medieval women have often been viewed as subject to a punishing misogyny which limited their legal rights and economic activities, but some scholars have claimed they enjoyed a 'rough and ready equality' with men. The contrasting figures of Eve and the Virgin Mary loom over historians' interpretations of the period 1000-1500. Yet a wealth of recent historiography goes behind these conventional motifs, showing how medieval women's lives were shaped by status, age, life-stage, geography and religion as well as by gender. A Cultural History of Women in the Middle Ages presents essays on medieval women's life cycle, bodies and sexuality, religion and popular beliefs, medicine and disease, public and private realms, education and work, power, and artistic representation to illustrate the diversity of medieval women's lives and constructions of femininity.
