The Cambridge History of Fifteenth-Century Music

Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Tom Johnson

There were tens of thousands of different local law-courts in late-medieval England, providing the most common forums for the working out of disputes and the making of decisions about local governance. While historians have long studied these institutions, there have been very few attempts to understand this complex institutional form of ‘legal pluralism’. Law in Common provides a way of apprehending this complexity by drawing out broader patterns of legal engagement. The first half of the book explores four ‘local legal cultures’ – in the countryside, towns and cities, the maritime world, and Forests – that grew up around legal institutions, landscapes, and forms of socio-economic practice in these places, and produced distinctive senses of law. The second half of the book turns to examine ‘common legalities’, widespread forms of social practice that emerge across these different localities, through which people aimed to invoke the power of law. Through studies of the physical landscape, the production of legitimate knowledge, the emergence of English as a legal vernacular, and the proliferation of legal documents, it offers a new way to understand how common people engaged with law in the course of their everyday lives. Drawing on a huge body of archival research from the plenitude of different local institutions, Law in Common offers a new social history of law that aims to explain how common people negotiated the transformational changes of the long fifteenth century through legality.


1978 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mercedes García-Arenal

If our present knowledge of the history of the Muslim Maghrib is in general unsatisfactory, few periods remain as obscure as the fifteenth century.The extant sources are very scarce. Contemporary Maghribī historical writings are practically non-existent and, with few exceptions, this is still an epoch for which Christian chronicles are not yet really relevant. Only fragmentary and partial information can be extracted from the contemporary Spanish and Portuguese documents. Therefore, we have to rely for our knowledge on the so-called manāqib literature or hagiographic dictionaries which proliferated in Morocco during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These volumes—many of which were lithographed in Fās during the nineteenth century—cannot be considered a first-rate source. They are posterior to the period dealt with and appear as versions of a traditional history composed over the years by agglomeration, repetition, and revision from a series of original stories which may be doubtful, even though they are hallowed by time and usage, and fortified by the weight of respectability. Committed to writing, they have acquired the seal of authority and have seldom been challenged.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chiara E. Scappini ◽  
David Boffa

The Fonte Gaia from Renaissance to Modern Times examines the history of Siena's famous public fountain, from its fifteenth-century origins to its eventual replacement by a copy in the nineteenth century (and the modern fate of both). The book explores how both the Risorgimento and the Symbolist movements have shaped our perceptions of the Italian Renaissance, as the Quattrocento was filtered through the lens of contemporary art and politics.


1984 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 57-67
Author(s):  
H.O. Danmole

Before the advent of colonialism, Arabic was widely used in northern Nigeria where Islam had penetrated before the fifteenth century. The jihād of the early nineteenth century in Hausaland led to the establishment of the Sokoto Caliphate, the revitalization of Islamic learning, and scholars who kept records in Arabic. Indeed, some local languages such as Hausa and Fulfulde were reduced to writing in Arabic scripts. Consequently, knowledge of Arabic is a crucial tool for the historian working on the history of the caliphate.For Ilorin, a frontier emirate between Hausa and Yorubaland, a few Arabic materials are available as well for the reconstruction of the history of the emirate. One such document is the Ta'līf akhbār al-qurūn min umarā' bilad Ilūrin (“The History of the Emirs of Ilorin”). In 1965 Martin translated, edited, and published the Ta'līf in the Research Bulletin of the Centre for Arabic Documentation at the University of Ibadan as a “New Arabic History of Ilorin.” Since then many scholars have used the Ta'līf in their studies of Ilorin and Yoruba history. Recently Smith has affirmed that the Ta'līf has been relatively neglected. He attempts successfully to reconstruct the chronology of events in Yorubaland, using the Ta'līf along with the Ta'nis al-ahibba' fi dhikr unara' Gwandu mawa al-asfiya', an unpublished work of Dr. Junaid al-Bukhari, Wazīr of Sokoto, and works in English. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the information in the Ta'līf by comparing its evidence with that of other primary sources which deal with the history of Ilorin and Yorubaland.


Traditio ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 51 ◽  
pp. 257-286 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher S. Celenza

There are many still unstudied aspects of the cultural history of early Quattrocento Rome, especially if we consider the years before 1443, the date of the more or less permanent re-entry into the civitas aeterna of Pope Eugenius IV. The nexus between the still ephemeral papacy and the emerging intellectual movement of Italian Renaissance humanism is one of these aspects. It is hoped that this study will shed some light on this problem by presenting a document that has hitherto not been completely edited: the original will of Cardinal Giordano Orsini. As we shall see, this important witness to the fifteenth century provides valuable information on many fronts, even on the structure of the old basilica of Saint Peter. The short introduction is in three parts. The first has a discussion of the cardinal's cultural milieu with a focus on the only contemporary treatise specifically about curial culture, Lapo da Castiglionchio's De curiae commodis. The second part addresses the textual history of the will as well as some misconceptions which have surrounded it. The third part contains a discussion of the will itself, along with some preliminary observations about what can be learned from the critical edition of the text here presented for the first time.


Author(s):  
Michael H. Gelting

One sentence in the Prologue of the Law of Jutland (1241) has caused much scholarlydiscussion since the nineteenth century. Did it say that “the law which the king givesand the land adopts, he [i.e. the king] may not change or abolish without the consentof the land, unless he [i.e. the king] is manifestly contrary to God” – or “unless it [i.e.the law] is manifestly contrary to God”? In this article it is argued that scholarly conjectures about the original sense of the text at this point have paid insufficient attentionto the textual history of the law-book.On the basis of Per Andersen’s recent study of the early manuscripts of the Lawof Jutland, it is shown that the two earliest surviving manuscripts both have a readingthat leaves little doubt that the original text stated that the king could not change thelaw without the consent of the land unless the law was manifestly contrary to God. Theequivocal reading that has caused the scholarly controversy was introduced by a conservativerevision of the law-book (known as the AB text), which is likely to have originatedin the aftermath of the great charter of 1282, which sealed the defeat of the jurisdictionalpretensions of King Erik V. A more radical reading, leaving no doubt that the kingwould be acting contrary to God in changing the law without consent, occurs in an earlyfourteenth-century manuscript and sporadically throughout the fifteenth century, butit never became the generally accepted text. On the contrary, an official revision of thelaw-book (the I text), probably from the first decade of the fourteenth century, sought toeliminate the ambiguity by adding “and he may still not do it against the will of the land”,thus making it clear that it was the law that might be contrary to God.Due to the collapse of the Danish monarchy in the second quarter of the fourteenthcentury, the I text never superseded the AB text. The two versions coexistedthroughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and soon produced a number ofhybrid versions. One of these gained particular importance, since it was the text thatwas used for the first printed editions of the Law of Jutland in 1504 and 1508. Thus itbecame the standard text of the law-book in the sixteenth century. The early printededitions also included the medieval Latin translation of the Law of Jutland and theLatin glosses to the text. The glosses are known to be the work of Knud Mikkelsen,bishop of Viborg from 1451 to 1478. Based on a close comparison of the three texts, itis argued here that Bishop Knud was also the author of the revised Danish and Latintexts of the law-book that are included in the early printed editions, and that the wholework was probably finished in or shortly after 1466. Bishop Knud included the I text’saddition to the sentence about the king’s legislative powers.An effort to distribute Bishop Knud’s work as a new authoritative text seems tohave been made in 1488, but rather than replacing the earlier versions of the Lawof Jutland, this effort appears to have triggered a spate of new versions of the medievaltext, each of them based upon critical collation of several different manuscripts.In some of these new versions, a further development in the sentence on the king’slegislative power brought the sentence in line with the political realities of the late fifteenthcentury. Instead of having “he” [i.e. the king] as the agent of legal change, theyattribute the initiative to the indefinite personal pronoun man: at the time, any suchinitiative would require the agreement of the Council of the Realm.Only the printing press brought this phase of creative confusion to an end in theearly sixteenth century.Finally, it is argued that the present article’s interpretation of the original senseof this particular passage in the Prologue is in accordance with the nature of Danishlegislation in the period from c.1170 to the 1240s, when most major legislation happenedin response to papal decretals and changes in canon law.


2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-102
Author(s):  
Walid A. Saleh

The Qur'an commentary Anwār al-tanzīl of al-Bayḍāwī (d. 719/1319) was one of the most important works of the Islamic religious tradition. As a universally adopted Sunni text for teaching tafsīr, it was ubiquitous, read even in Safavid Iran. This was a work used by all Sunni schools, and as such was beyond the legal divisions of madhāhib. The history of this work is, however, uncharted. This article follows the trajectory of this work and traces the history of its rise to predominance, when and why it was adopted, and how the new significance it gained after the ninth/fifteenth century was projected back to the period it was written. It explores how the Anwār replaced al-Zamakhsharī's (d. 538/1144) al-Kashshāf in scholarly circles in Cairo before going on to gain universalised authority in the Ottoman realms. Following this, I address the deep-rooted connections that existed between the scholars of Cairo and Istanbul, and how late Mamluk developments in Cairo came to full fruition in Istanbul. The eclipse of the Anwār by the Qur'an commentary of Ibn Kathīr (d. 774/1372) in the twentieth century is also outlined, and a list of the published glosses of Anwār is supplied in an appendix.


2018 ◽  
pp. 127-148
Author(s):  
Neguin Yavari

The focus in the fifth and final chapter is on the afterlife of Nizam al-Mulk, of his legacy as well as of his representations. By the late fifteenth century, in Timurid Iran, Nizam al-Mulk is already the stuff of legend. In one historian’s estimation, the vizier is a veritable eleventh-century avatar of the martyr par excellence of Shi’i lore Husayn b. ‘Ali (d. 680), and the progenitor of modern Iran. But the story of Nizam al-Mulk does not end with his metamorphosis into a crypto-Shi‘i and a proto-Iranian patriot. In the 2010s, it is Nizam al-Mulk who is the most regularly invoked exemplar of legitimate Islamic governance, exhorting prudence and expedience to guide the Iranian polity through the treacherous waters of nuclear negotiations with the West, and to domesticate outlier and extremist fervor. The Iranian invocation of Nizam al-Mulk differs radically from his depiction in modern Sunni—Arab or Turkish—historiography. That living legacy is the true history of the laureled vizier.


Author(s):  
Marta Celati

The final section sums up the main innovative findings of this whole study. It points out how starting from the second half of the fifteenth century the development of a ‘thematic genre’ of literature on conspiracies was influenced by, but at the same time contributed to, the phenomenon of the literary fashioning of the profile of the ideal ruler, who now corresponded to the figure of a princeps. This literature also contributed to the creation of a new language and symbology of power through the multifunctional reworking of the classical legacy. This evolution culminated in Machiavelli’s attention to the issue of political plots in this work, with an approach that proves to be partly inspired by the previous cultural horizon, but already prominently projected towards an utterly new conceptual world. This analysis, besides providing a missing chapter on the background of Machiavelli’s work, more generally, underlines the significant contribution made by the humanist tradition, through its various literary expressions, to the development of modern political theories and to the history of our culture.


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