Children and Confession in the Early Middle Ages

1994 ◽  
Vol 31 ◽  
pp. 53-65 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rob Meens
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Early Middle Ages

The handbooks for confessors known as penitentials are, I shall argue, an important source for our knowledge of early medieval attitudes on the part of churchmen and others towards children. These texts, basically lists of sins with the prescription of an appropriate penance for each iniquity, can be said to reflect widespread practices and ideas. They originated in the Irish and British Churches in the sixth century and spread from there over all of Western Europe, where they remained in use until the twelfth century.

Educated Wandering Jews, 800–1250

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maristella Botticini ◽  
Zvi Eckstein
Keyword(s):  
Iberian Peninsula ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Byzantine Empire ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Jewish Diaspora ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
Business Opportunities ◽  
Vast Territory

This chapter shows that once the Jews became literate, urban, and engaged in skilled occupations, they began migrating within the vast territory under Muslim rule—stretching from the Iberian Peninsula to India during the eighth through the twelfth centuries, and from the Byzantine Empire to western Europe via Italy and within western Europe in the ninth through the thirteenth centuries. In early medieval Europe, the revival of trade concomitant with the Commercial Revolution and the growth of an urban and commercial economy paralleled the vast urbanization and the growth of trade that had occurred in the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates four to five centuries earlier. The Jewish diaspora during the early Middle Ages was mainly the outcome of literate Jewish craftsmen, shopkeepers, traders, scholars, teachers, physicians, and moneylenders migrating in search of business opportunities to reap returns on their investment in literacy and education.

Charlemagne, the Carolingian Empire, and Its Successors

2021 ◽  
pp. 468-498
Author(s):  
Rosamond McKitterick
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Western World ◽  
Administrative System ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Christian Culture ◽  
Carolingian Empire ◽  
Political Units

Both the Christian empire of Charlemagne and the subsequently hugely influential imperial ideology of the early Middle Ages were rooted in the Roman past. This chapter addresses the reality of the early medieval empire and the ways in which it was represented by contemporaries for posterity. It examines the career of Pippin III, the first king of the Carolingian dynasty, and the expansion of the Carolingian Empire under his illustrious son Charlemagne, by both design and chance, to embrace most of western Europe. This vast realm was governed by an elaborate and efficient political and administrative system in which both lay and ecclesiastical magnates played a crucial role. This system of governance was maintained even within the smaller political units of the later ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries. The Latin Christian culture initially promoted by Charlemagne, moreover, is the most enduring legacy of the medieval empire to the Western world.

Bearing the Stigmata

2020 ◽  
pp. 23-59
Author(s):  
Carolyn Muessig
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Francis Of Assisi

Chapter 1 traces the patristic and early medieval exegesis of Galatians 6:17. It assesses how language and imagery were appropriated and developed by eleventh- and twelfth-century monastic theologians (especially Peter Damian) into a soteriological system of penance and redemption that focused on Christ’s wounds. Significantly, it looks at examples of stigmatization before Francis of Assisi. These cases vary in their form; they gradually move from stigmata being almost exclusively associated with the sacerdotal order in the early Middle Ages to being linked to the laity by the early thirteenth century as with the cases of Peter the Conversus and Mary of Oignies.

The Emergence of Professional Law in the Long Twelfth Century

2003 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 347-366 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Reynolds
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Customary Law ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
American Tradition ◽  
Professional Law ◽  
Anglo American

The object of this article is to draw attention to an area of European legal history that I think deserves more investigation. It is the change in legal practice caused by the transition from the diffused, undifferentiated, customary law of the earlier middle ages to the various forms of expert, esoteric, professional law that dominated the higher courts of the later middle ages. The suggestion that this has not been much studied may seem odd but, though much has been written on the new study of Roman law, those who work on it have tended to concentrate on the intellectual achievements of the glossators and post-glossators, rather than on practice. Practice in canon law has received more attention, notably from legal historians trained in the Anglo-American tradition, but this has not focused closely on twelfth-century origins. The beginnings of English common law have also been much studied and, since it started off as largely a matter of procedures, that has indeed meant looking at practice. The traditional teleology of legal history has, however, prevented much cross-fertilization with the history of other legal systems. One example of the consequent detachment of English legal history is the assumption of some English legal historians that Roman law procedures were followed in what they often characterize simply as “the Continent” more generally and earlier than seems to have been the case in most areas north of the Alps. Both in England and elsewhere many legal historians concentrate on the period from the thirteenth century on, when sources become more plentiful. Meanwhile, social historians of early medieval western Europe, including England, have argued—to my mind successfully, though I am hardly unprejudiced—that early medieval law was not just a weak, ritualized, and irrational response to feuds and violence, but their investigations tend to stop before the professionals took over. The result is that, apart from recent pioneering work on twelfth-century Tuscany by Chris Wickham, the transition in court practice outside England has been neglected.

scholarly journals The context of Early Medieval barrows in western Europe

Antiquity ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 67 (254) ◽  
pp. 66-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Van De Noort
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Short Period ◽  
Burial Mounds ◽  
Distribution Of Power

In the early Middle Ages there was a short period when prehistoric burial mounds were reused and new barrows constructed over much of western Europe. This is interpreted as an expression of opposition to the new Christian ideology, in a time of social changes in the distribution of power and property.

The Walls and Aqueducts of Rome in the Early Middle Ages, A.D. 500–1000

1998 ◽  
Vol 88 ◽  
pp. 166-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Coates-Stephens
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Urban Infrastructure ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Archaeological Research ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Dark Ages ◽  
The City

Our knowledge of the city of Rome after the fall of the Western Empire is largely determined by its position as the seat of the Papacy. Historical studies are based principally upon the Liber Pontificalis and the writings of the popes themselves, while architectural and archaeological research has concentrated on the city's numerous churches, many of which for the period A.D. 500–850 are remarkably well-preserved. The best known modern syntheses in English from each field are probably Peter Llewellyn's Rome in the Dark Ages (1971) and Richard Krautheimer's Rome. Profile of a City (1980). If we look beyond the purely ecclesiastical, however, we find very little Archaeological studies of Rome's urban infrastructure—walls, roads, bridges, aqueducts, sewers, housing—tend to stop, at the latest, with the Gothic Wars of the mid-sixth century. The lack of research, and therefore lack of data, have in turn been interpreted as a sign that early medieval Rome was a city bereft of an artificial watersupply, and of the resources necessary to maintain such structures as the Aurelianic Walls. Studies of medieval urbanism have been affected by this dearth of evidence proposing, for example, settlement models with the population of the city crowded into the Tiber bend in order to obtain water.

Bastard Feudalism and the Framing of Thirteenth-Century England

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Coss
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
The State ◽  
The Other ◽  
Great Work ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
The One ◽  
The Relationship

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.

Poet of the Medieval Modern

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesca Brooks
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Far Right ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
History Of ◽  
Catholic History ◽  
In Parenthesis ◽  
Stone Sculpture

The early Middle Ages provided twentieth-century poets with the material to reimagine and rework local, religious, and national identities in their writing. Poet of the Medieval Modern focuses on a key figure within this tradition, the Anglo-Welsh poet and artist David Jones (1895–1974), and represents the first extended study of the influence of early medieval culture and history from England on Jones and his novel-length late modernist poem The Anathemata (1952). The Anathemata, the second major poetic project after In Parenthesis (1937), fuses Jones’s visual and verbal arts to write a Catholic history of Britain as told through the history of man-as-artist. Drawing on unpublished archival material including manuscripts, sketches, correspondence, and, most significantly, the marginalia from David Jones’s Library, Poet of the Medieval Modern reads with Jones in order to trouble the distinction we make between poetry and scholarship. Placing this underappreciated figure firmly at the centre of new developments in modernist and medieval studies, Poet of the Medieval Modern brings the two fields into dialogue and argues that Jones uses the textual and material culture of the early Middle Ages—including Old English prose and poetry, Anglo-Latin hagiography, early medieval stone sculpture, manuscripts, and historiography—to re-envision British Catholic identity in the twentieth-century long poem. In The Anathemata Jones returned to the English record to seek out those moments where the histories of the Welsh had been elided or erased. At a time when the Middle Ages are increasingly weaponized in far-right and nationalist political discourse, the book offers a timely discussion of how the early medieval past has been resourced to both shore up and challenge English hegemonies across modern British culture.

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