Beyond Medieval Europe – serie
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25 produkter
25 produkter
Medieval Bosnia and South-East European Relations
Political, Religious, and Cultural Life at the Adriatic Crossroads
Inbunden, Engelska, 2019
1 815 kr
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The Dalmatian coast of the Adriatic and its vast Balkan hinterland were an integral part of medieval Europe, both in a geographical and historical sense. However, due to issues of language and a scarcity of sources, the whole region has largely remained out of sight and overlooked by western historiography. This volume features contributions from an exciting new generation of medievalists who are working to rectify this gap in the narrative.As a small, landlocked country, medieval Bosnia managed to preserve its individuality, characterized by religious plurality and by the persistence of its own ancient customs. But its central position in the region, situated between east and west, and where boundaries between Catholic and Orthodox Christianity were demarcated deep into the Middle Ages, meant it was heavily influenced by both sides of this civilizational divide and politically and culturally shaped by the Venetian Republic, the Hungarian Kingdom, and the Byzantine Empire.
Coloman, King of Galicia and Duke of Slavonia (1208-1241)
Medieval Central Europe and Hungarian Power
Inbunden, Engelska, 2019
1 869 kr
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A figure of crucial importance to scholarship on western and eastern Europe alike, King Coloman (1208–1241) here receives long-overdue scholarly treatment as a key figure of the thirteenth century. The Árpád prince ruled over a vast area in Central Europe which remained largely affiliated to the Western Church. Renowned for fighting the Mongol Empire, he had close relations with Pope Gregory IX, and he was a contemporary of Emperor Friedrich II, Philippe Auguste of France, and Henry III of England. Coloman controlled territories that comprise modern-day Hungary, Slovakia, Croatia, and Bosnia and, as a result, he has long featured in various competing national historiographies. This study draws on Hungarian and other research that is inaccessible outside the region and places Coloman at the crossroads of Latin Christendom, Eastern Orthodoxy, and the Mongol Empire. It moves beyond previous national and religious narratives and foregrounds Central Europe in the history of early thirteenth-century Europe.
2 389 kr
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Based on the material of the Old Norse Icelandic sources written down in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, this book demonstrates how medieval Scandinavians imagined Eastern Europe. It reconstructs the system of medieval Scandinavian perception of space in general, and the eastern part of the oecumene in particular. It also examines the unique information of these sources, of which the Russian chronicles were unaware: namely, the saga and skaldic poetry data concerning the visits of the four Norwegian kings to Old Rus in the late-tenth and mid-eleventh centuries.
2 004 kr
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This study explores the role and function of the Byzantine aristocratic family group, or genos, as a distinct social entity, particularly its political and cultural role, as it appears in a variety of sources in the tenth through twelfth centuries. While the genos has served as a central component of many historical arguments attempting to explain the changes occurring in this period, no scholar has yet produced a study focused on the genos as a social unit, and even the concept’s basic definition remains unclear. At the same time, historians of Late Antiquity, Medieval Europe, and Byzantium have all struggled to find meaningful ways to analyze and interpret kinship structures beyond the household or nuclear family. This work seeks to ameliorate these shortcomings and, in so doing, addresses aspects of cultural, social, and political change in Byzantium through the lens of kinship.
European Expansion and the Contested Borderlands of Late Medieval Podillya, Ukraine
Inbunden, Engelska, 2019
2 004 kr
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This book focuses on a key zone within the eastern frontier of medieval Europe: Podillya in modern-day Ukraine. Vitaliy Mykhaylovskiy offers a definitive guide to the region, which experienced great cultural and religious diversity, together with a continuous influx of newcomers. This is where Christian farmers met Muslim nomads. This is where German town residents and Polish nobles met urban Armenians and Tatars serving in the military. The territory emerged in historical narrative when Lithuanian and Polish rulers divided the legacy of the Ruthenian Kingdom and pushed Tatars back to the steppe. For one hundred and fifty years, this territory passed through many dominions – a western part of the Golden Horde, a principality under the Koriatovych brothers, a turf partitioned among the Polish kingdom and the duchy of Lithuania. Podillya offers a unique opportunity to see interaction of so many peoples, principalities, and cultures – the eastern frontier of Europe at its most dynamic.
2 140 kr
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This book explores the "Byzantine" islands of the late antique Mediterranean through different methodologies and a wide array of sources in comparative perspective. It deals with transversal themes centered on the peculiar political and economic structures of insular societies (such as the episcopate and the archontate or, in the case of Sicily, the theme). Reassessing the exaggerated space that the historiography on Byzantine islands has traditionally granted to literary and documentary sources, this book draws upon archaeological evidence that points instead to a less violent and disruptive phase in the islands' history as Late Antiquity passed into the early Middle Ages. The islands are also considered as hubs of connectivity where the Islamic and the Byzantine cultures encountered and heavily influenced the local "insular" political, economic, and social structures across the centuries.
2 472 kr
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This collaborative collection provides fresh perspectives on Christianity and the conduct of war in medieval East Central Europe and Scandinavia, investigating the intersection between religion, culture, and warfare in territories that were only integrated into Christendom in the Central Middle Ages. The contributors analyze cultures that lay outside Charlemagne's limes and the frontiers of the Byzantine Empire, to consider a region stretching from the Balkans to the Baltic and Scandinavia.The volume considers clerics as military leaders and propagandists, the role of Christian ritual and doctrine in warfare, and the adaptation and transformation of indigenous military cultures. It uncovers new information on perceptions of war and analyzes how local practices were incorporated into clerical narratives, enabling the reader to achieve a complete understanding of the period.
1 514 kr
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The book presents the panorama of social, cultural, and religious changes in the states of the Piast, Přemyslid, and Arpad dynasties. Major change occurred in the tenth century and again at the turn of the eleventh century. Given the scarcity of written sources, the author employs an analysis of architectural forms which she applies to buildings founded by dukes, kings, and nobles at this period.Architecture serves as a reliable source of knowledge and can be successfully read as a text using comparative analysis, iconology, and semiotics. No piece of art appeared without an historical context: forms, functions, and styles are all documents created by its founders and creators. The conclusions of this research help us to understand the era that shaped the foundations of the Polish, Czech, and the Hungarian states.
Rituals in Slavic Pre-Christian Religion
Festivals, Banqueting, and Divination
Inbunden, Engelska, 2023
1 470 kr
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The authors comprehensively analyze all the available information regarding the ritual practices of Slavic pre-Christian religion that can be found in written medieval texts. After investigating every kind of reference to such practices, they offer a reconstruction of Slavic pre-Christian religion on the basis of these medieval testimonies. In doing so, they overcome the challenges presented by the fact that all of these sources are indirect, since the Slavs did not acquire literacy until they became Christians. Thus the writers of these texts mostly professed a monotheistic religion, being Christians and in some cases Muslims. The picture that they offer is biased and determined by their own faith. The present analysis innovatively combines testimonies from every Slavic area (Eastern, Western, and Southern), showing their mutual correspondences and emphasizing the relationship between the Slavic pre-Christian religion and its Indo-European roots.
Christianization of Scandinavia in the Viking Era
Religious Change in Adam of Bremen's Historical Work
Inbunden, Engelska, 2021
1 879 kr
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This book discusses Adam of Bremen's perceptions and interpretation of the Christianization of Scandinavia in the Early Middle Ages. The views the chronicler presents in the Gesta Hammaburgensis constitute the central element of this analysis. By departing from the historiography—both the older view of the Gesta as trustworthy, and the recent view of the work as unreliable and biased—this book focuses instead on the Christianization of Scandinavia as an authorial concept. What follows is a reevaluation of the Gesta’s significance both to its medieval audience and the modern historian.
2 411 kr
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In the Viking Age and medieval Scandinavia, social values such as reputation, honour, and friendship, were integral to the development of rituals, customs, religion, literature, and language. Everyday norms are mainly conveyed orally or ritually, and rarely in a written or material shape. Despite this, the Old Norse-Icelandic literary corpus remains the most important source of our present-day knowledge of social development in the medieval North. New research methods allow us to explore how relics of the material culture of the medieval north can confront, corroborate, or disprove the depiction of social norms in medieval Scandinavian literature. This volume considers in depth how social norms affected the creation and functioning of societies in the medieval North, approaching the topic from a range of disciplinary angles including law-making, politics, religion, and literacy.
Bishop John Vitez and Early Renaissance Central Europe
The Humanist Kingmaker
Inbunden, Engelska, 2022
2 389 kr
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This comprehensive biography of John Vitez, an instrumental figure of the Early Renaissance, presents a complex picture of cultural, political, and religious developments in Central Europe through one man’s life. Drawing on close study of Vitez’s writings and his various political and artistic networks of influence, Tomislav Matić demonstrates the wide scope of this church leader’s involvement in late medieval Central Europe. Not only were Vitez’s writings a catalyst for the introduction of humanism across the region, he was a patron of the arts, an avid astrologer, a master diplomat, and even a kingmaker, thus central to both political and cultural developments.
1 514 kr
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The concept of the Rus’ Land (russkaia zemlia) became and remained an historical myth of modern Russian nationalism as the equivalent of “Russia,” but it was actually a political myth, manipulated to provide legitimacy. Its meaning was dynastic—territories ruled by a member of the Riurikid/Volodimerovich princely clan. This book traces the history of its use from the tenth to the seventeenth century, outlining its changing religious (pagan to Christian) and geographic elements (from the Dnieper River valley in Ukraine in Kievan Rus’ to Muscovy in Russia) and considers alternative “land” concepts which failed to rise to the ideological heights of the Rus’ Land. Although the Rus’ Land was never an ethnic or national concept, and never expanded its appeal beyond an elite lay and clerical audience, understanding its evolution sheds light upon the cultural and intellectual history of the medieval and early modern East Slavs.
451 kr
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The concept of the Rus’ Land (russkaia zemlia) became and remained an historical myth of modern Russian nationalism as the equivalent of “Russia,” but it was actually a political myth, manipulated to provide legitimacy. Its meaning was dynastic—territories ruled by a member of the Riurikid/Volodimerovich princely clan. This book traces the history of its use from the tenth to the seventeenth century, outlining its changing religious (pagan to Christian) and geographic elements (from the Dnieper River valley in Ukraine in Kievan Rus’ to Muscovy in Russia) and considers alternative “land” concepts which failed to rise to the ideological heights of the Rus’ Land. Although the Rus’ Land was never an ethnic or national concept, and never expanded its appeal beyond an elite lay and clerical audience, understanding its evolution sheds light upon the cultural and intellectual history of the medieval and early modern East Slavs.
2 275 kr
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The problem of fraternal relations in the early Middle Ages has not been hitherto studied in detail, especially in comparison with the multitude of studies dealing with the models of marriage, gender-based social roles, or the relations between generations. Historians have been often prone to assume that relations between siblings in European culture were naturally constant, based on loyalty, solidarity, and readiness to act in the common interest, stemming from blood ties. However, this conviction equates the category of brotherhood/fraternitas used by medieval authors with concepts associated with sources from later periods. This study does not concern narrowly defined family history, but is an attempt to examine fraternal relations in the early Middle Ages as a multidimensional cultural phenomenon. As the author seeks to demonstrate, it is difficult to speak of kinship in the ninth century and later without being aware of the religious and ideological implications of the transformations taking place at the time, even if direct traces of the impact of moralizing and theological teachings on the conduct of individuals are hard to capture in the sources.
438 kr
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The authors comprehensively analyze all the available information regarding the ritual practices of Slavic pre-Christian religion that can be found in written medieval texts. After investigating every kind of reference to such practices, they offer a reconstruction of Slavic pre-Christian religion on the basis of these medieval testimonies. In doing so, they overcome the challenges presented by the fact that all of these sources are indirect, since the Slavs did not acquire literacy until they became Christians. Thus the writers of these texts mostly professed a monotheistic religion, being Christians and in some cases Muslims. The picture that they offer is biased and determined by their own faith. The present analysis innovatively combines testimonies from every Slavic area (Eastern, Western, and Southern), showing their mutual correspondences and emphasizing the relationship between the Slavic pre-Christian religion and its Indo-European roots.
2 275 kr
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Slavery and family were deeply linked in Byzantine society. When Byzantine writers and theologians envisioned and contextualized both the realities and the idea of the household, they universally assumed the presence of enslaved people within it. Slavery was foundational in Byzantine conceptions of the family, as was the role of kinship and the family in their thinking about slavery. This study explores how the language, ideals, stereotypes, and literary tropes associated with enslaved people were deeply linked to Byzantine thought about the family and the household as a social unit. Drawing on a wide range of sources and modern theories like intersectionality and social death, this monograph seeks to demonstrate the numerous ways in which the long-term, widespread presence of enslaved people in Byzantine society influenced and even defined medieval Byzantine thought regarding the domestic space and its dynamics.
525 kr
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The problem of fraternal relations in the early Middle Ages has not been hitherto studied in detail, especially in comparison with the multitude of studies dealing with the models of marriage, gender-based social roles, or the relations between generations. Historians have been often prone to assume that relations between siblings in European culture were naturally constant, based on loyalty, solidarity, and readiness to act in the common interest, stemming from blood ties. However, this conviction equates the category of brotherhood/fraternitas used by medieval authors with concepts associated with sources from later periods. This study does not concern narrowly defined family history, but is an attempt to examine fraternal relations in the early Middle Ages as a multidimensional cultural phenomenon. As the author seeks to demonstrate, it is difficult to speak of kinship in the ninth century and later without being aware of the religious and ideological implications of the transformations taking place at the time, even if direct traces of the impact of moralizing and theological teachings on the conduct of individuals are hard to capture in the sources.
2 004 kr
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The seventh century was a period of radical transformation in the Balkans in terms of political, social, and economic history. The decline in Byzantine power led to the collapse of ancient urban civilization, the arrival of new populations from eastern Europe and the steppes, and, subsequently, the establishment of new political structures and modes of economic relations. Given that the written sources provide relatively little information about these events, archaeology is required to fill in the gaps and improve our knowledge and understanding of the socio-cultural and ethnic transitions that took place. New developments in archaeology in the Balkans have brought an enormous amount of information to light. The book’s eight contributors present research from different parts of the region, offering valuable new insights into the history, culture, and economy of the early medieval Balkans.
1 946 kr
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This volume uncovers the ways in which trust and mistrust affected people’s lives in premodern Europe and the Mediterranean.Trust is a fundamental part of human relationships. It forms the basis of our connections with people and institutions in a variety of ways. But without reference to the great variety of meanings and experiences of trust in history, particularly the premodern past, we fail to grasp both the subtleties and the true significance of the topic. Through exploration of the nuances of the construction, maintenance, and breakdown of trust and trusting relationships, this volume demonstrates that trust functions in different ways in different contexts. It illuminates how the study of trust today points to new interpretations of life in the past, and how study of the past can offer valuable perspectives on life in the present.
1 573 kr
Kommande
This book investigates the social processes of memory formation that were at work among aristocratic groups in medieval Eastern Europe as they attempted to forge a new past that would be in conformity with the present. With an emphasis on the pioneering work of French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, it particularly explores the reciprocal relations between the production of social memory and the local environment. As such, the book tries to answer the question of why some historical events and personages, no matter whether they were real or imagined, became especially popular in specific localities, even though their connections with these places were dubious. The study focuses on how, from the sixteenth century onwards, social memories of Mindowe (Mindoŭh, Mindaugas), allegedly Lithuania’s first king, came to be associated closely with Navahrudak in the Upper Neman area rather than with Vilnius/Wilno, the Grand Duchy’s capital.
2 140 kr
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This book intertwines two themes in medieval studies, which so far have never been brought together: comparative studies of Latin and Orthodox Europe and a debate on the "feudal revolution" – the changes that occurred during the transition from Carolingian to post-Carolingian Europe. The book broadens the linguistic and geographical scope of the debate by comparing texts written in "learned" and "vulgar" Latin, Church Slavonic, Anglo-Norman, and East Slavonic, the vernacular of Kievan Rus. From this comparison, the Kingdom of the Rus' – a terra incognita for most medievalists, generally assumed to be profoundly different from the West –emerges as a regional variation of European society. In particular, the finding that contractual relations, traditionally described in scholarly literature as "feudo-vassalic," were present in the Kingdom of the Rus suggests that current explanations for the origins of such relations may overemphasize factors unique to the medieval West and overlook deeper pan-European processes.
1 470 kr
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This book sets out to answer the question of why Eastern Church writers showed no interest in analytical reasoning - the so-called "intellectual silence" of Rus' culture - while Western Church writers, by the time of the Scholastics, routinely incorporated analytical reasoning into their defences of the faith.Donald Ostrowski suggests that Western, post-Enlightenment- trained, analytical scholars miss the point, not because of an inability to comprehend cultural ideas which seem abstract and ineffable, but because the agenda is different. For the Eastern Church, faith was superior to reason. Eastern Church thinkers did not see any worth in disputation. If God is a mystery, and this world is an emanation from God, then this world is a mystery too. In the Eastern Church, they did not ask “Why” because, for them, any answer, any explanation, was merely a begging of the question. Why divide into categories what is whole and seamless? Why try to articulate what is ineffable?
2 546 kr
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This book re-examines the history of the Carpathian-Danubian region during the eighth and the ninth centuries, to provide a synthetic historical overview of the region to the north of the Lower Danube in this period. Based on a critical and comparative analysis of archaeological, narrative and numismatic sources, the study presents a reconstruction of the socio-economic, ethnic, cultural, and political history of the area at a period during which nomadic peoples from the east including the Bulgars, Avars, and Khazars migrated here. The work is based on a comprehensive analysis of narrative and archaeological sources including sites, artefacts, and goods in the basin bordered by the Tisza river in the west, the Danube in the south, and the Dniestr river in the east, covering swathes of modern-day Romania, Moldova, Ukraine, Serbia, and Hungary.
1 815 kr
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During the Middle Ages, many Europeans imagined that there existed a powerful and marvel-filled Christian realm beyond the lands of Islam ruled by a devout emperor they called “Priest John,” or “Prester John.” Spurred by a forged letter that mysteriously appeared around 1165 and quickly “went viral” in hundreds of manuscripts across Western Europe, the legend of Prester John and his exotic kingdom was not just a utopian fantasy, but a way to bring contemporary political and theological questions into sharper focus. In this new study, John Eldevik shows how the manuscripts that transmitted the story of Prester John reflect the ways contemporary audiences processed ideas about religious conflict and helped them imagine a new, global dimension of Christianity. It includes an appendix with a new translation of the B recension of The Letter of Prester John.