Lay Sanctity in the Central Middle Ages, 970–1120

2020 ◽  
Vol 71 (4) ◽  
pp. 738-754
Author(s):  
ADRIAN CORNELL DU HOUX

This article surveys a collection of lay saints who were neither martyrs nor born into a royal family to show that, despite previous assumptions, this type of sainthood was possible before developments of the twelfth century. Two main themes emerge from their cults, namely an attempt to promote pious role models for the lay aristocracy and the growth of pilgrimage as an expression of wider devotion. The cults are also situated in the context of the Gregorian reform movement, showing that they contribute to a picture of clergy and laity working symbiotically rather than in opposition.

Author(s):  
Peter Coss

In the introduction to his great work of 2005, Framing the Early Middle Ages, Chris Wickham urged not only the necessity of carefully framing our studies at the outset but also the importance of closely defining the words and concepts that we employ, the avoidance ‘cultural sollipsism’ wherever possible and the need to pay particular attention to continuities and discontinuities. Chris has, of course, followed these precepts on a vast scale. My aim in this chapter is a modest one. I aim to review the framing of thirteenth-century England in terms of two only of Chris’s themes: the aristocracy and the state—and even then primarily in terms of the relationship between the two. By the thirteenth century I mean a long thirteenth century stretching from the period of the Angevin reforms of the later twelfth century on the one hand to the early to mid-fourteenth on the other; the reasons for taking this span will, I hope, become clearer during the course of the chapter, but few would doubt that it has a validity.


Archaeologia ◽  
1847 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 183-244 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Phillipps

The manuscript entitled Mappæ Clavicula, signifying the Little Key of Drawing, or Painting, is a small duodecimo volume of sixty-seven leaves of vellum, written in the twelfth century. It appears to be perfect, except a leaf torn out between pp. 64 and 65 of the modern paging, and a little cropping in two leaves.


2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-31
Author(s):  
Anna McKay

Over the past two decades, medieval feminist scholarship has increasingly turned to the literary representation of textiles as a means of exploring the oftensilenced experiences of women in the Middle Ages. This article uses fabric as a lens through which to consider the world of the female recluse, exploring the ways in which clothing operates as a tether to patriarchal, secular values in Paul the Deacon’s eighthcentury Life of Mary of Egypt and the twelfth-century Life of Christina of Markyate. In rejecting worldly garb as recluses, these holy women seek out and achieve lives of spiritual autonomy and independence.


Author(s):  
Teofilo F. Ruiz

This chapter examines tournaments. The origins of tournaments in Western Europe can be traced back to classical sources and to a sparse number of references to events that looked like tournaments in the Central Middle Ages. While these early mentions provide interesting glimpses of the genealogy of fictitious combat, it was the twelfth century that truly saw the formal beginnings of these traditions of artificial warfare that would hold such a powerful grip on the European imagination for many centuries to come. Closely tied to courtly culture and in a symbiotic relationship with the great outburst of courtly literature that took place in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, the tournament sank deep roots in England, France, the Low Countries, and parts of Germany during the twelfth century, and then developed elaborate rules of engagement and pageantry in succeeding centuries.


PMLA ◽  
1901 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 375-387
Author(s):  
F. M. Warren

The French poems Troie, Thèbes, and Énéas, contemporaneous with one another in the sixth and seventh decades of the twelfth century, have many characteristics in common. They each repeat in a modernized form, and with incidents and details suited to their own age, the story of one of the great epics of classical antiquity, the Iliad, the Thebaid, and the Aeneid. They also combine with this traditional outline of adventure and conquest the narrative of romantic love and courtship, as conceived by Western Europe in the Middle Ages. And finally they each and all show an effort to attain some degree of excellence in style and composition. Thus they form a class by themselves, animated, as they are, by the same spirit and having the same purpose in view, and are the first exponents in the modern tongues of the ideals of chivalry. The sources of these poems, therefore, are an object of unusual interest to the student of mediaeval literature.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Christopher Paolella

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] This study focuses on human trafficking patterns from Late Antiquity to the Early Modern Era. I argue that while slavery, as a means of compelling agricultural labor, disappeared across much of Western Europe by the middle of the twelfth century, the commercial sex industry grew. As slavery died out, the slave trade withered across Western Europe and gradually reoriented itself around the Mediterranean basin. Yet, human trafficking networks remained in Western Europe, if in attenuated form. They continued to supply a smaller, but no less persistent, labor demand that was now fueled by brothels and prostitution rings instead of agriculture. I argue further that the experiences of women link the sex trade and the slave trade, and that twelfth-century socio-economic development linked the earlier long-distance slave trade and the local and regional trafficking networks of the later Middle Ages.


Author(s):  
Kevin C. O'Connor

This chapter is an origin story that introduces the watery and sandy landscape of early Riga and the pagans who lived in or near it at the close of the twelfth century. Riga's relationship with the waters that run past, through, and under it has given rise to many legends and sayings. The chapter considers the efforts of German merchants and Catholic missionaries to trade with and establish Christian communities among the Livish tribes. These tribes lived along the banks of the Düna River (which Latvians know as the Daugava). In doing so, the chapter provides readers with a broader context for understanding these early encounters by examining western Europe's commercial and religious expansion during the Middle Ages.


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