Monasteries and society in the British Isles in the later Middle Ages. Edited by Janet Burton and Karen Stöber. (Studies in the History of Medieval Religion, 35.) Pp. xiv+255 incl. 13 ills. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2008. £50. 978 1 84383 386 4; 0955 2480

2011 ◽  
Vol 62 (3) ◽  
pp. 604-607
Author(s):  
Roger Lovatt
Keyword(s):  
Traditio ◽  
1957 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 313-344 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carl Selmer

Among the medieval hagiographical writings derived from the British Isles none enjoyed greater popularity throughout the Middle Ages than the Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis (= NB). This celebrated prose work, a typical product of the Othonian period, has come down to us in more than a hundred MSS in various versions. It embodies the adventurous sea-story of the Irish Abbot St. Brendan, one of the great sixth-century founders of monasteries. In structure, the NB consists actually of three parts: a brief introduction comments on St. Brendan's descent, youth, ascetic life, and early monastic foundations; the main body reports some twenty-six adventures which he and his fourteen companions encountered in their search for the terra repromissionis or paradisum terrestre, the tír tairgirne of the ancient Celts; finally, a terse epilogue narrates his life after his return and subsequent happy death. While the main body of the NB, the sea-voyage proper, is uncompounded and has been modeled after Old Irish sea-tales, known in Celtic literature as immrama, both the introduction and epilogue, necessary to give the story the appropriate frame, represent incidents culled from the Vita Sancti Brendani (= VB), which has come down to us in various Irish and Latin recensions. These two narratives have over the centuries been combined by several medieval compilers into a single story in a more or less artistic way. Consequently, the student of the NB is ultimately confronted with that much feared and confusing type of Brendaniana, called conflated texts, which in view of the absence of clearly drawn lines between the contents of the VB and NB, have for centuries offered vexing problems to researchers. One of the minor, but nevertheless irritating, results of these fusions is the misleading caption ‘Vita’ Sancti Brendani, exhibited by a goodly number of NB-MSS, which has misled many cataloguers, medieval and modern, to list the Navigatio as a Vita. Thus, not less than half of all NB-MSS sail in the maelstrom of medieval literature under a false flag. A most peculiar Latin NB-MS, showing the same misleading caption Vita Sancti BrendaniAbbatis, is codex 256 of the Biblioteca Nacional de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal. This MS, hitherto unavailable to research, is of signal importance for the history of the Vita, the Navigatio, and above all, for the Old French translations of the Navigatio with their re-translations into Latin, so unique in medieval literature.


1959 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 51-79
Author(s):  
K. Edwards

During the last twenty or twenty-five years medieval historians have been much interested in the composition of the English episcopate. A number of studies of it have been published on periods ranging from the eleventh to the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. A further paper might well seem superfluous. My reason for offering one is that most previous writers have concentrated on analysing the professional circles from which the bishops were drawn, and suggesting the influences which their early careers as royal clerks, university masters and students, secular or regular clergy, may have had on their later work as bishops. They have shown comparatively little interest in their social background and provenance, except for those bishops who belonged to magnate families. Some years ago, when working on the political activities of Edward II's bishops, it seemed to me that social origins, family connexions and provenance might in a number of cases have had at least as much influence on a bishop's attitude to politics as his early career. I there fore collected information about the origins and provenance of these bishops. I now think that a rather more careful and complete study of this subject might throw further light not only on the political history of the reign, but on other problems connected with the character and work of the English episcopate. There is a general impression that in England in the later middle ages the bishops' ties with their dioceses were becoming less close, and that they were normally spending less time in diocesan work than their predecessors in the thirteenth century.


2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ferdinand Gregorovius ◽  
Annie Hamilton

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ferdinand Gregorovius ◽  
Annie Hamilton

2010 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 274-291 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. G. Moore

Twenty nine items of correspondence from the mid-1950s discovered recently in the archives of the University Marine Biological Station Millport, and others made available by one of the illustrators and a referee, shed unique light on the publishing history of Collins pocket guide to the sea shore. This handbook, generally regarded as a classic of its genre, marked a huge step forwards in 1958; providing generations of students with an authoritative, concise, affordable, well illustrated text with which to identify common organisms found between the tidemarks from around the coasts of the British Isles. The crucial role played by a select band of illustrators in making this publication the success it eventually became, is highlighted herein. The difficulties of accomplishing this production within commercial strictures, and generally as a sideline to the main employment of the participants, are revealed. Such stresses were not helped by changing demands on the illustrators made by the authors and by the publishers.


Author(s):  
Jack Tannous

In the second half of the first millennium CE, the Christian Middle East fractured irreparably into competing churches and Arabs conquered the region, setting in motion a process that would lead to its eventual conversion to Islam. This book argues that key to understanding these dramatic religious transformations are ordinary religious believers, often called “the simple” in late antique and medieval sources. Largely agrarian and illiterate, these Christians outnumbered Muslims well into the era of the Crusades, and yet they have typically been invisible in our understanding of the Middle East's history. What did it mean for Christian communities to break apart over theological disagreements that most people could not understand? How does our view of the rise of Islam change if we take seriously the fact that Muslims remained a demographic minority for much of the Middle Ages? In addressing these and other questions, the book provides a sweeping reinterpretation of the religious history of the medieval Middle East. The book draws on a wealth of Greek, Syriac, and Arabic sources to recast these conquered lands as largely Christian ones whose growing Muslim populations are properly understood as converting away from and in competition with the non-Muslim communities around them.


2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 24-37
Author(s):  
D.X. Sangirova ◽  

Revered since ancient times, the concept of "sacred place" in the middle ages rose to a new level. The article analyzes one of the important issues of this time - Hajj (pilgriamge associated with visiting Mecca and its surroundings at a certain time), which is one of pillars of Islam and history of rulers who went on pilgrimage


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