CARMEN Monographs and Studies – serie

This book explores how one early medieval poet survived and thrived amidst the political turbulence of sixth century Gaul—with a little help from his friends. Born in northern Italy, Venantius Fortunatus made his career writing for and about members of the Merovingian elite. Although he is no longer dismissed as an opportunistic poetaster who wrote undistinguished flattery for undeserving kings and aristocrats, his work remains unduly neglected. This book reframes Fortunatus as a writer uniquely suited to his times, a professional poet who addressed his contemporaries’ needs and wishes for the prestige and sophistication of Classical culture. His poems and letters enabled his aristocratic patrons to situate themselves in networks, which they made and maintained in order to navigate a post-imperial but not post-Roman world. It makes an important contribution to our understanding of friendship in the Middle Ages and offers a fresh look at the Frankish kingdoms of Merovingian Gaul.

This book places identity at the centre of a project to better understand medieval society. By exploring the multiplicity of personal identities, the ways in which these were expressed within particular social structures (such as feudalism), and their evolution into formal expressions of collective identity (municipalities, guilds, nations, and so on) we can shed new light on the Middle Ages. A specific legacy of such developments was that by the end of the Middle Ages, a sense of national identity, supported by the late medieval socio-economic structure, backed in law and by theological, philosophical, and political thought, defined society. What is more, social structures coalesced across diverse elements, including language, group solidarities, and a set of assumed values.

Part of a trilogy involving research on identity and memory also, this substantial volume sets out to illuminate medieval thought through an in-depth and highly interdisciplinary study of ideology, interrogating the underlying values that inform the interpretive framework through which we might better understand men and women of the Middle Ages.An introductory chapter situates the Christian Church in the West as a framing ideology of the Middle Ages, analysing Christianity as a coherent narrative providing people with security through its integrated explanation of physical surroundings, social order, and spiritual hope. The book then goes on to consider ideology from four angles: as a means of defining power; as a way of managing power; ideology in the mind as an influence on daily living and how we understand societies; and finally, the ways in which ideology associated with the Middle Ages has exerted influence centuries later, conditioning understandings of past and present. The individual chapters focus on concrete cases, giving preference to exemplars from southern Europe, a region with a large amount of documentation but which to date has occupied a relatively minor position in research into the Middle Ages. It is this emphasis that is acknowledged in the title of this book, Ideology in the Middle Ages: Approaches from Southwestern Europe, which is offered as a means of enriching and complicating study of the Middle Ages.This book has two companion volumes, dealing with the allied concepts of memory and identity as part of a larger project that seeks to map and interrogate the significance of all three concepts in the Middle Ages in the West.

Memory was vital to the functioning of the medieval world. People in medieval societies shared an identity based on commonly held memories. Religions, rulers, and even cities and nations justified their existence and their status through stories that guaranteed their deep and unbroken historical roots.The studies in this interdisciplinary collection explore how manifestations of memory can be used by historians as a prism through which to illuminate European medieval thought and value systems. The contributors draw the link between memory and medieval science, management of power, and remembrance of the dead ancestors through examples from southern Europe as a means of enriching and complicating our study of the Middle Ages; this is a region with a large amount of documentation but which to date has not been widely studied.

New Readings on Women and Early Medieval English Literature and Culture showcases current and original scholarship relating to women in Early Medieval English culture and in Early Medieval English studies and promises to stimulate new work in those areas. Honouring the eminent scholar Helen Damico as well as the seminal volume she edited almost thirty years ago with Alexandra Hennessy Olsen, the essays in this volume remind us that feminist inquiry is as vital and robust as it was then. Recognizing the plasticity of gender structures, roles, and relations in Early Medieval English literature and culture as well as within the modern discipline of Early Medieval English Studies, the essays reveal pluralities of gender bequeathed to us and encourage us to rethink power/gender dynamics in our present moment. As the Introduction explains, the essays in this collection offer new paths into an increasingly rich area of study. Their diversity and freshness, along with their archival and methodological range, reveal a robust commitment to feminist interdisciplinarity, while their refusal of any grand master narrative takes seriously the complexity of Anglo-Saxon women’s lives, as well as the elusive relationship between history, literary symbols, textual representations, and social and cultural practices.