Bernhard Jussen - Böcker

What intellectual and practical tools did medieval peoples employ in situations of disorder? How did they attempt to maintain cultural stability? Arguing against the common notion of a static medieval society organized along kinship and feudal lines, the contributors to Ordering Medieval Society-among them some of Germany's most influential medieval historians-reveal the diverse egalitarian and hierarchical forms of organization that medieval societies used to forge group structure.In the book's first section, "Conceiving," the authors examine intellectual modes of ordering society. They study the different patterns of social classification in the Middle Ages, including the tripartite division between clergy, knights, and peasants. The medieval system of "counting piety" through quantifiable modes of penance provided another way to define social relations. The second part, "Transforming," focuses on times of disorder when social relations were reordered at once intellectually and practically. This section analyzes the transformation of political institutions in fifth-century Gaul in a shift from a Roman to a medieval ideology. Charting a much later institutional transformation, the book provocatively argues that the concept of "the nobility" is a fourteenth-century invention. The final section, "Stabilizing," considers mechanisms for the constitution of egalitarian groups and highly developed systems for conflict resolution in medieval group culture.Contributors: Gerd Althoff, Arnold Angenendt, Thomas Braucks, Rolf Busch, Bernhard Jussen, Thomas Lentes, Hubertus Lutterbach, Joseph Morsel, Otto Gerhard Oexle.

Blood awakens associations with ancient ideas. But we know very little about the historical representations of blood in Western cultures. The contributors attempt to follow the use of blood in mapping family and kinship relations in European culture from the ancient world to the present. The project is "reflexive" in that it takes as its point of departure the questions that anthropologists are now asking about how different societies think about the substances that connect people, that are understood to produce either "kinship" - where that is still considered to be a relevant category - or "relatedness." What has been the development of European understandings of how kinship and blood are connected? "Blood" has come and gone in European culture, just as kinship has constantly been reconfigured. Both have been moving, sometimes in parallel and sometimes in divergent directions. And both have taken on quite different meanings over time.

The word “blood” awakens ancient ideas, but we know little about its historical representation in Western cultures. Anthropologists have customarily studied how societies think about the bodily substances that unite them, and the contributors to this volume develop those questions in new directions. Taking a radically historical perspective that complements traditional cultural analyses, they demonstrate how blood and kinship have constantly been reconfigured in European culture. This volume challenges the idea that blood can be understood as a stable entity, and shows how concepts of blood and kinship moved in both parallel and divergent directions over the course of European history.