Language and Linguistics in Medieval Europe

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deborah Hayden
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Liberal Arts ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
14Th Century ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
Textual Culture ◽  
Verse Form ◽  
Scholastic Philosophy

During the period from the fall of the Roman empire in the late 5th century to the beginning of the European Renaissance in the 14th century, the development of linguistic thought in Europe was characterized by the enthusiastic study of grammatical works by Classical and Late Antique authors, as well as by the adaptation of these works to suit a Christian framework. The discipline of grammatica, viewed as the cornerstone of the ideal liberal arts education and as a key to the wider realm of textual culture, was understood to encompass both the systematic principles for speaking and writing correctly and the science of interpreting the poets and other writers. The writings of Donatus and Priscian were among the most popular and well-known works of the grammatical curriculum, and were the subject of numerous commentaries throughout the medieval period. Although Latin persisted as the predominant medium of grammatical discourse, there is also evidence from as early as the 8th century for the enthusiastic study of vernacular languages and for the composition of vernacular-medium grammars, including sources pertaining to Anglo-Saxon, Irish, Old Norse, and Welsh. The study of language in the later medieval period is marked by experimentation with the form and layout of grammatical texts, including the composition of textbooks in verse form. This period also saw a renewed interest in the application of philosophical ideas to grammar, inspired in part by the availability of a wider corpus of Greek sources than had previously been unknown to western European scholars, such as Aristotle’s Physics, Metaphysics, Ethics, and De Anime. A further consequence of the renewed interest in the logical and metaphysical works of Aristotle during the later Middle Ages is the composition of so-called ‘speculative grammars’ written by scholars commonly referred to as the ‘Modistae’, in which the grammatical description of Latin formulated by Priscian and Donatus was integrated with the system of scholastic philosophy that was at its height from the beginning of the 13th to the middle of the 14th century.

The Comparative Study of “Scholasticism” in Late Antique Mesopotamia: Rabbis and East Syrians

AJS Review ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-113 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam H. Becker
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Comparative Study ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Great Distance ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Rabbinic Judaism ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Transmission Of Knowledge ◽  
History Of

Now is an appropriate time to reconsider the historiographical benefit that a comparative study of the East Syrian (“Nestorian”) schools and the Babylonian rabbinic academies may offer. This is attributable both to the recent, rapid increase in scholarship on Jewish–Christian relations in the Roman Empire and late antiquity more broadly, and to the return by some scholars of rabbinic Judaism to the issues of a scholarly exchange of the late 1970s and early 1980s about the nature of rabbinic academic institutionalization. Furthermore, over the past twenty years, scholars of classics, Greek and Roman history, and late antiquity have significantly added to the bibliography on the transmission of knowledge—in lay person's terms, education—in the Greco-Roman and early Christian worlds. Schools continue to be an intense topic of conversation, and my own recent work on the School of Nisibis and the East Syrian schools in general suggests that the transformations and innovations of late antiquity also occurred in the Sasanian Empire, at a great distance from the centers of classical learning, such as Athens, Alexandria, and Antioch. The recently reexamined East Syrian sources may help push the conversation about rabbinic academic institutionalization forward. However, the significance of this issue is not simply attributable to its bearing on the social and institutional history of rabbinic institutions. Such inquiry may also reflect on how we understand the Babylonian Talmud and on the difficult redaction history of its constituent parts. Furthermore, I hope that the discussion offered herein will contribute to the ongoing analysis of the late antique creation and formalization of cultures of learning, which were transmitted, in turn, into the Eastern (i.e., Islamic and “Oriental” Christian and Jewish) and Western Middle Ages within their corresponding communities.

1. The ‘Middle’ Ages?

2014 ◽  
pp. 4-28
Author(s):  
Miri Rubin
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
European Integration ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Middle Age ◽  
Black Death ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
Political Units ◽  
The Middle Ages

The term ‘Media aetas’ or ‘Middle age’ was first used by the poet Petrarch (1304–74), and later by intellectuals who wished to emphasize their own achievements agains a background of that ‘darker age’. In fact, the period from 500 to 1500 saw many and diverse transformations of late antique institutions. The Germanic tribes of the Ostragoths, Franks, Burgundians, and Visigoths transformed the Roman Empire through often violent interactions; the Mediterranean Empire was transformed by the spread of Islam in the 7th century; and the 12th and 13th centuries saw a remarkable consolidation of political units and increased European integration. The famine of 1314–17 and the Black Death (1347–52) resulted in a loss of half the population and the remaking of the European economy and the next century saw the effect of the Ottoman challenge as well as the beginnings of exploration in Africa and the Americas.

“Let Them Make Him Duke to Rule that People”: TheLaw of the Bavariansand Regime Change in Early Medieval Europe

2012 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 865-899
Author(s):  
Jonathan Couser
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Regime Change ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Law

The early Middle Ages produced a series of law codes for the new “barbarian” kingdoms of Europe, which succeeded the western Roman Empire. These law codes were often inspired by the precedent and sometimes the content of Roman vulgar law as well as the customs of the respective peoples for whom they were written and the interests of their rulers. The making of law could often play a vital role in the stabilization of kingdoms, especially under new rulers. Early medieval secular lawmaking falls into three broad periods: the early royal laws of the Frankish, Burgundian, and Visigothic peoples in the fifth and sixth centuries; the interrelated composition of Lombard, south German, and perhaps also early Anglo-Saxon law in the seventh and eighth centuries; and the writing up of the last “ethnic” laws for peoples subject to Charlemagne's empire, such as Frisians and Saxons, in order to accommodate them into a multiethnic empire committed to the principle of personality of the law. The subject of this article, the law of the Bavarians (Lex Baiuvariorum, hereafter abbreviated “Lb”), belongs to the second of these stages. However, scholars have never reached consensus as to the date of its composition nor where it was created. This has inhibited the use of the Lb for any but they most general discussion of Bavarian society. This article will review the evidence for the Lb's date and place of composition, to suggest that we can plausibly identify them more precisely than has been done, and therefore argue that the distinctive features of this text can be tied to specific political needs.

scholarly journals Local Religions in Roman North Africa on the Eve of the Middle Ages

2021 ◽  
pp. 53-68
Author(s):  
Chiara Ombretta Tommasi
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Reliable Information ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
North African ◽  
The North ◽  
Epigraphic Evidence ◽  
The Middle Ages

This paper considers how late antique Latin authors (mainly Augustine and Corippus) dealt with ancestral rites and practices of probable autochthonous (i. e. Berber) origin and provided an ideological resemantisation. Although motivated by anti-pagan pleas and also allowing for some exaggeration, they nevertheless provide reliable information, which can be compared against epigraphic evidence, and offer further contributions that enrich the knowledge of the North African local pantheon, otherwise largely documented by epigraphical evidence. It might therefore be surmised that, notwithstanding the deep Christianisation of the region, at the end of the Roman Empire, North Africa still witnessed the survival of residual and isolated pagan fringes.

The Transformation into the Early Middle Ages (Fourth to Eighth Centuries)

2015 ◽  
pp. 490-519 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hubert Fehr
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
River Rhine ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Rural Settlements ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Roman Provinces ◽  
Roman Germany ◽  
Medieval Archaeology

This chapter focuses on the transformation of Roman Germany into the early Middle Ages (fourth to eighth centuries). The final collapse of Roman rule in northern Gaul in the middle of the fifth century signalled the de facto end of the three Late Roman provinces: Germania Prima, Germania Secunda, and Maxima Sequanorum. The territories along the western bank of the River Rhine experienced quite different political destinies between the middle of the fifth and the middle of the sixth century. The chapter first looks at how migrations of peoples from Barbaricum into the Roman Empire caused the end of a Roman-style society and economy in former Roman Germany. It then discusses early medieval archaeology in Germany, with particular emphasis on cemeteries and churches. Finally, it analyses methodological developments in late antique and early medieval archaeology, along with the transformation of towns and landscape/rural settlements.

Sanctity and secularity in the early Irish church

1973 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 21-37
Author(s):  
Kathleen Hughes
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Outer Edge ◽  
Social Organisation ◽  
Early Church ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
The West ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
The World

Ireland was odd in the early middle ages. She lay on the outer edge of the world, the survivor of that Celtic civilisation which had once covered much of the west. She had never immediately known the pervading influence of Rome, which continued in so many ways for so long after the Roman empire collapsed. Christianity had reached her rather early (there were enough christians to make it worth while to send a continental bishop, Palladius, in 431) and it came before many of the developments which determined the nature of monasticism in early medieval Europe. Ireland’s political and social organisation were somewhat different from those of the Germanic peoples of the west; and though the early church in Ireland had an episcopal, diocesan structure, within two hundred years or so of its inception it had been fundamentally modified by native Irish laws and institutions. It is therefore not surprising to find that both Ireland’s sanctity and her secularity had peculiar features.

Nicopolis ad Istrum: Backward and Balkan?

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. WHITTOW
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Third Century ◽  
Asia Minor ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
The Third ◽  
History Of

The story of Nicopolis ad Istrum and its citizens exemplifies much that is common to the urban history of the whole Roman Empire. This chapter reviews the history of Nicopolis and its transition into the small fortified site of the fifth to seventh centuries and compares it with the evidence from the Near East and Asia Minor. It argues that Nicopolis may not have experienced a cataclysm as has been suggested, and that, as in the fifth and sixth century west, where landowning elites showed a striking ability to adapt and survive, there was an important element of continuity on the lower Danube, which in turn may account for the distinctive ‘Roman’ element in the early medieval Bulgar state. It also suggests that the term ‘transition to Late Antiquity’ should be applied to what happened at Nicopolis in the third century: what happened there in the fifth was the transition to the middle ages. This chapter also describes late antique urbanism in the Balkans by focusing on the Justiniana Prima site.

Graphic Signs of Authority in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, 300-900

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ildar Garipzanov
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Political Communication ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Visual Spatial ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Medieval Europe

This book presents a cultural history of graphic signs such as the sign of the cross, christograms, monograms, and other graphic devices, examining how they were employed to relate to and interact with the supernatural world, and to represent and communicate secular and divine authority in the late antique Mediterranean and early medieval Europe. It analyses its graphic visual material with reference to specific historical contexts and to relevant late antique and early medieval texts as a complementary way of looking at the cultural, religious, and socio-political transition from the late Graeco-Roman world to that of medieval Europe. This monograph treats such graphic signs as typologically similar forms of visual communication, reliant on the visual-spatial ability of human cognition to process object-like graphic forms as proxies for concepts and abstract notions—an ability that is commonly discussed in modern visual studies with reference to categories such as visual thinking, graphic visualization, and graphicacy. Thanks to this human ability, the aforementioned graphic signs were actively employed in religious and socio-political communication in the first millennium ad. This approach allows for a synthetic study of graphic visual evidence from a wide range of material media that have rarely been studied collectively, including various mass-produced items and unique objects of art, architectural monuments, and epigraphic inscriptions, as well as manuscripts and charters. As such, this book will serve as a timely reference tool for historians, art historians, archaeologists, epigraphists, manuscript scholars, and numismatists as well as the informed general public.

Slavery in Medieval Europe

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannah Barker
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Military Service ◽  
Common Knowledge ◽  
Reference Points ◽  
Social Significance ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
Production Characteristic ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
The Middle Ages

Common knowledge would have it that slavery did not exist in medieval Europe. However, there is a thriving body of scholarship which demonstrates that slavery was practiced widely in various forms in Europe during the Middle Ages, alongside captivity, serfdom, and other types of unfreedom. Where then did the common knowledge come from? In the first instance, it derives from the late-18th- and 19th-century abolitionist assumption that as Christianity spread through Europe during the Middle Ages, it must surely have driven out slavery. Among scholars, this common knowledge is sometimes reinforced by Marxist historical narratives, according to which slavery was the mode of production characteristic of the Roman period, while serfdom characterized the medieval period. Yet into the 14th and 15th centuries, medieval Europeans continued to own slaves, trade in slaves, and enslave each other as well as non-European others. They used slaves for agricultural and artisanal labor as well as domestic, sexual, reproductive, and military service. However, the composition of enslaved populations, their demographic and social significance in relation to free populations, the precise legal meaning of slave status, and the practices associated with slavery all varied significantly by region and era. Though Europe was not the only slave-holding region during the medieval period, scholarship about the history of slavery in medieval Byzantium, the Islamic world, Central Asia, East Asia, South Asia, Africa, and the Americas is substantial. Each of these regions merits a bibliography of its own. Moreover, though slavery was not the only form of unfreedom that existed in medieval Europe, captives, hostages, prisoners, and pledges have also been the subjects of much research and merit dedicated bibliographies, too. Finally, though the academic study of medieval slavery came into being in the 19th century alongside the abolitionist discourse that ignored its existence, this bibliography will highlight recent works, especially those produced within the last fifty years. Many older works remain useful as reference points and guides to the archival sources, but contemporary scholars have brought fresh analytical perspectives to bear on slavery studies, each contributing to the flourishing field that exists today.

General Introduction

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Menso Folkerts ◽  
Barnabas Hughes ◽  
Roi Wagner ◽  
J. Lennart Berggren
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Scholarly Activity ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
General Introduction ◽  
Publication History ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
Close Relationship ◽  
Islamic Civilization

This introductory chapter provides a brief background to the interchange of mathematical knowledge across three civilizations during the medieval period, as well as this volume's editing and publication history. Medieval Europe, from around 800 to 1450, was a meeting place of three civilizations: the Latin/Christian civilization that was forming on the foundation of the defunct Western Roman Empire; the Jewish/Hebrew civilization, which witnessed great scholarly activity in every location where Jews resided; and the Islamic/Arabic civilization, whose European center was in Spain, but which had a close relationship with the Islamic civilization of North Africa. The scope and diversity of these sources has, in turn, presented some challenges which led to certain editorial features prevalent in the following chapters.

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