Examine the creative, profound dialogue between medieval women and biblical traditions
The latest volume in the Bible and Women series examines the relationship between women and the Bible’s reception during the early Middle Ages (500–1100 CE) in both the Greek East and the Latin West. Essays focus on interactions between women and the Bible through biblical precepts on women and for women, biblical women as the subjects of action or objects of discussion, and writings by women that refer to the Bible as a moral authority. The women discussed in the volume range from the well-known—including the nuns Kassia in Byzantium and Hrosvita in the West; the aristocrat Dhuoda, author of a moral guide for her son; Gisela, the sister of Charlemagne and abbess of Chelles; and her niece Rotrude—to those who remain anonymous. Contributions also explore how the Old and New Testaments exercised influence on emerging Islam.
Features:
The first book in English to blend history and archaeology for a period of history currently receiving much scholarly attention, East Central and Eastern Europe in the Early Middle Ages examines key problems of the early medieval history of Eastern Europe, with particular reference to society, state, and the conversion to Christianity, and the diverse ways in which these aspects have been approached in the historiography of the region. The included essays examine the documentary and archaeological evidence of early medieval Europe in an attempt to assess its importance in understanding the construction of cultural identity and the process of political mobilization for the rise of the states. The book addresses an audience of historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, and linguists with an interest in the history of Eastern Europe.
The twenty papers included in this volume were presented at an international symposium held in Baltimore and Washington in May, 1986. Planned to coincide with the exhibition of the two largest treasures of Early Byzantine church silver to survive from antiquity, the Kaper Koraon Treasure (found in Syria) and the Sion Treasure (found in Turkey), the symposium sought to place these and other church treasures in their broader contexts examining them from the point of view of economy, history, society, and manufacture.
While a number of the papers focus on specific aspects of these two treasures—including six articles devoted to the Sion Treasure—others examine more general questions regarding silver mining, the manufacture of silver vessels, the state control of silver in Byzantium and the Sasanian Empire, the economic and cultural role of silver objects, and the financial power of the institutional church through its vast holdings of silver plate. The precedent offered by pagan cult treasures is also examined.
To ensure a broad interdisciplinary approach, the eighteen authors are authorities in the fields of government administration, economic history, cultural history, art history, archaeology, epigraphy, science and conservation.
Eleanor of Aquitaine was the wife of two kings, Louis VII of France and Henry II Plantagenet of England, and the mother of two others, Richard the Lionhearted and John Lackland. In her eventful, often stormy life, she not only influenced the course of events in the twelfth century but also encouraged remarkable advances in the literary and fine arts. In this book, experts in five disciplines—history, art history, music, French and English literature—evaluate the influence of Eleanor and her court on history and the arts.
Elizabeth A. R. Brown views Eleanor as having played a significant role as parent and politician, but not as patron. Rebecca A. Baltzer takes a new look at the music of the period that was written by and for Eleanor, her court, and her family. Moshé Lazar reexamines her relationship to the courtly-love literature of the period. Eleanor S. Greenhill and Larry M. Ayres reassess her influence in the realm of art history. Rossell Hope Robbins traces the lines extending from the French courtly literature of Eleanor's period down into fourteenth-century Chaucerian England. The essays reflect divergent but generally complementary assessments of this remarkable woman's influence on her own era and on future times as well.
This volume is the result of a symposium held at the University of Texas in 1973.
The eastern Roman Empire was the largest state in western Eurasia in the sixth century. Only a century later, it was a fraction of its former size. Surrounded by enemies, ravaged by warfare and disease, the empire seemed destined to collapse. Yet it did not die. In this holistic analysis, John Haldon elucidates the factors that allowed the eastern Roman Empire to survive against all odds into the eighth century.
By 700 CE the empire had lost three-quarters of its territory to the Islamic caliphate. But the rugged geography of its remaining territories in Anatolia and the Aegean was strategically advantageous, preventing enemies from permanently occupying imperial towns and cities while leaving them vulnerable to Roman counterattacks. The more the empire shrank, the more it became centered around the capital of Constantinople, whose ability to withstand siege after siege proved decisive. Changes in climate also played a role, permitting shifts in agricultural production that benefitted the imperial economy.
At the same time, the crisis confronting the empire forced the imperial court, the provincial ruling classes, and the church closer together. State and church together embodied a sacralized empire that held the emperor, not the patriarch, as Christendom’s symbolic head. Despite its territorial losses, the empire suffered no serious political rupture. What remained became the heartland of a medieval Christian Roman state, with a powerful political theology that predicted the emperor would eventually prevail against God’s enemies and establish Orthodox Christianity’s world dominion.
Between 1350 and 1750—a time of empires, exploration, and exposure to radically different lands and cultures—the world reached a tipping point of global connectedness. In this volume of the acclaimed series A History of the World, noted international scholars examine five critical geographical areas during this pivotal period: Eurasia between Russia and Japan; the Muslim world of the Ottoman and Persian empires; Mughal India and the Indian Ocean trading world; maritime Southeast Asia and Oceania; and a newly configured transatlantic rim. While people in many places remained unaware of anything beyond their own village, an intense period of empire building led to expanding political, economic, and cultural interaction on every continent—early signals of a shrinking globe.
By the early fourteenth century Eurasia’s Mongol empires were disintegrating. Concurrently, followers of both Islam and Christianity increased exponentially, with Islam exerting a powerful cultural influence in the spreading Ottoman and Safavid empires. India came under Mughal rule, experiencing a significant growth in trade along the Indian Ocean and East African coastlines. In Southeast Asia, Muslims engaged in expansion on the Malay Peninsula, Sumatra, Java, and the Philippines. And both sides of the Atlantic responded to the pressure of European commerce, which sowed the seeds of a world economy based on the resources of the Americas but made possible by the subjugation of Native Americans and the enslavement of Africans.
Renaissance humanists believed that the origins of peoples could reveal crucial facts about their modern political character. Margaret Meserve explores what happened when European historians turned to study the political history of a faith other than their own.
Meserve investigates the methods and illuminates the motives of scholars negotiating shifting boundaries—between scholarly research and political propaganda, between a commitment to critical historical inquiry and the pressure of centuries of classical and Christian prejudice, between the academic ideals of humanism and the everyday demands of political patronage. Drawing on political oratory, diplomatic correspondence, crusade propaganda, and historical treatises, Meserve shows how research into the origins of Islamic empires sprang from—and contributed to—contemporary debates over the threat of Islamic expansion in the Mediterranean. Humanist histories of the Turks were sharply polemical, portraying the Ottomans as a rogue power. But writings on other Muslim polities include some of the first positive appraisals of Muslim statecraft in the European tradition.
This groundbreaking book offers new insights into Renaissance humanist scholarship and the longstanding European debates over the relationship between Christianity and Islam.
Lucrezia Marinella (1571–1653) is, by all accounts, a phenomenon in early modernity: a woman who wrote and published in many genres, whose fame shone brightly within and outside her native Venice, and whose voice is simultaneously original and reflective of her time and culture. In Enrico; or, Byzantium Conquered, one of the most ambitious and rewarding of her numerous narrative works, Marinella demonstrates her skill as an epic poet.
Now available for the first time in English translation, Enrico retells the story of the conquest of Byzantium in the Fourth Crusade (1202–04). Marinella intersperses historical events in her account of the invasion with numerous invented episodes, drawing on the rich imaginative legacy of the chivalric romance. Fast-moving, colorful, and narrated with the zest that characterizes Marinella’s other works, this poem is a great example of a woman engaging critically with a quintessentially masculine form and subject matter, writing in a genre in which the work of women poets was typically shunned.
This first detailed study of the bishops of Florence tells the story of a dynamic Italian lordship during the most prosperous period of the Middle Ages. Drawing upon a rich base of primary sources, George Dameron demonstrates that the nature of the Florentine episcopal lordship results from the tension between seigneurial pressure and peasant resistance. Implicit throughout is the assumption that episcopal lordship relied upon both the bishop’s jurisdictional power and his spiritual or sacramental power.
The story of the Florentine bishops illuminates important moments in Italian history. The development of the Florentine elite, for example, is closely tied to the political and economic privileges they derived from their access to ecclesiastical property. A study of the bishopric’s vast holdings in the major river valleys surrounding Florence also provides valuable insight into the nature of the interrelation between city and countryside. Comparisons with lordships in other Italian cities contrast with and define the nature of medieval lordship.
This economic, social, and political history addresses issues of concern to a wide audience of historians: the emergence of the commune, the social development of the nobility, the nature of economic change before the Black Death, and the transition from feudalism to capitalism.
The origins of the Ottomans, whose enterprise ruled much of the Near East for more than half a millennium, have long tantalized and eluded scholars, many of whom have thrown up their hands in exasperation. While the later fourteenth- and fifteenth-century history of the Ottomans has become better known, the earlier years have proved an alluring and recalcitrant puzzle. A reconsideration of the sources and a canvass of new ones has long been overdue. Rudi Paul Lindner’s Explorations in Ottoman Prehistory is the first book in over sixty years to reassess the overture to Ottoman history.
In addition to conducting a critical examination of the Ottoman chronicles and the Byzantine annals, Lindner develops hitherto unutilized geographic data and previously unknown numismatic evidence and also draws on travelers’ descriptions of the Anatolian landscape in an earlier epoch. By investigating who the Ottomans were, where they came from, and where they settled and why, as well as what sort of relationships they had with their neighbors in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, Lindner makes an engaging and lucid contribution to an otherwise very small store of knowledge of Ottoman history in the early stages of the empire.
Rudi Paul Lindner is Professor of History at the University of Michigan and author of Nomads and Ottomans in Medieval Anatolia,part of Indiana University’s Uralic and Altaic Series.
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