Oxford Studies In The New Medieval History – serie

In theory, citizens of late medieval cities had a say in the functioning of their urban communities. But, in practice, many of them were deprived of political power through formal or established channels. In the late medieval Low Countries, however, people made themselves heard in a remarkable variety of ways. While it is commonplace in the historiography to focus on the (relatively rare) violent methods of dissent and protest, this book offers instead a comparative study of the more commonplace (and, often, effective) non-violent counterparts: insults, libels, songs, slogans, and petitions that citizens addressed to the urban authorities. Drawing on wide range of sources and methodological approaches, this book demonstrates that, across the late medieval Low Countries, contentious citizens continuously spread innovative political ideas in public. The group of people who participated in these dissenting activities was broad, including women, who were an integral part of the political community and fostered public discontent by using their voices in innovative ways. This is a rich history of the scintillating ideas, incendiary poetry, and outrageous language of late medieval urban men and women—and the ways in which they effected change through their main weapons: their voices.

Over the course of the early Middle Ages, Christianity changed politics and politics changed Christianity. Christianity emerged in the pagan Roman Empire and early Christians, consequently, developed a 'secular' understanding of politics, where the religious identity of their ruler was irrelevant; by the time the synthesis of early medieval Christianity was achieved in the ninth-century Carolingian Empire, however, a new model of 'Christian kingship' had emerged, linking the legitimacy of a ruler to the quality of their Christianity. Conor O'Brien traces the slow, complex, and only ever partial way in which the concept of 'Christian kingship' arose in the Latin West over the five centuries up to 840.Taking a comparative approach that is sensitive to regional variation and the interconnected nature of the post-imperial Latin West, the book presents a novel overview of the transformations of both religion and politics in the early Middle Ages. Drawing on recent anthropology and global history approaches to sacred kingship, it takes seriously both continuity and change over time to show how the relationship between early medieval Christianity and kingship was, above all, driven by people's search for good government. Christian kingship arose in societies where it proved a useful mechanism for addressing the relationship between the ruler and the ruled. In doing so, The Rise of Christian Kingship in the Early Medieval West provides not just a rich reconstruction, grounded in the primary evidence, of changes in political thought and practice in the early Middle Ages, but also contributes to wider historical discussions about secularity, sacred kingship and the relationship between politics and religion.