Occitania, Court, and Cloister

Author(s):  
Rachel May Golden

While medieval Occitania lacked national or governmental cohesiveness, its language and culture constructed a distinctive collective identity. Meanwhile, the sociopolitical volatility of twelfth-century Occitania imbued local lands with seeds of disquiet, yielding ambiguities regarding the region’s boundaries, territory, and sovereignty. Song culture centrally established Occitanian-ness during the Crusade era, revealing how the song creators experienced devotional practices, power structures, and identifications with home. Versus and troubadour repertories crystallized Occitania’s positions on linguistic distinctiveness, spatial perceptions, and cultural identity. The versus genre became an expression of resistance and creativity, while troubadour poet-composers blended their religious-political positions into the context of courtly love composition. Later, during the thirteenth century, the Albigensian Crusade radically challenged Occitania’s political independence and cultural vitality, causing displacement and senses of nostalgia. Analysis of Bel m’es q’ieu chant by Raimon de Miraval reveals the troubadour’s concern with Occitanian territory and homeland during the time of the Albigensian Crusade.

2009 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Muhammad Aziz

This paper analyzes the historical conditions of Yemen’s Sufi movement from the beginning of Islam up to the rise of the Rasulid dynasty in the thirteenth century. This is a very difficult task, given the lack of adequate sources and sufficient academic attention in both the East and theWest. Certainly, a few sentences about the subject can be found scattered in Sufi literature at large, but a respectable study of the period’s mysticism can hardly be found.1 Thus, I will focus on the major authorities who first contributed to the ascetic movement’s development, discuss why a major decline of intellectual activities occurred in many metropolises, and if the existing ascetic conditions were transformed into mystical tendencies during the ninth century due to the alleged impact ofDhu’n-Nun al-Misri (d. 860). This is followed by a brief discussion ofwhat contributed to the revival of the country’s intellectual and economic activities. After that, I will attempt to portray the status of the major ascetics and prominent mystics credited with spreading and diffusing the so-called Islamic saintly miracles (karamat). The trademark of both ascetics and mystics across the centuries, this feature became more prevalent fromthe beginning of the twelfth century onward. I will conclude with a brief note on the most three celebrated figures of Yemen’s religious and cultural history: Abu al-Ghayth ibn Jamil (d. 1253) and his rival Ahmad ibn `Alwan (d. 1266) from the mountainous area, andMuhammad ibn `Ali al-`Alawi, known as al-Faqih al-Muqaddam (d. 1256), from Hadramawt.


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.


2021 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
JILL ROSS

This article examines the role of French language and culture in the fourteenth-century Arthurian text, La Faula, by the Mallorcan, Guillem de Torroella. Reading the appropriation of French language and literary models through the lens of earlier thirteenth-century Occitan resistance to French political and cultural hegemony, La Faula’s use of French dialogue becomes significant in light of the political tensions in the third quarter of the fourteenth century that saw the conquest of the Kingdom of Mallorca by that of Catalonia-Aragon and the subsequent imposition of Catalano-Aragonese political and cultural power. La Faula’s clear intertextual debt to French literary models and its simultaneous ambivalence about the authority and reliability of those models makes French language into a space for the exploration of the dynamics of cultural appropriation and political accommodation that were constitutive of late fourteenth-century Mallorca.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-69
Author(s):  
Ibrahima Sarr

Senegal is a melting pot of several civilizations mainly originated from the West (Europe) and the East (the Arab world). Assuming that language and culture are intrinsically related, the settlement of those people and their status as dominant minority sparked and strengthened the use of their languages in formal domains. In the long ran, as they became domesticated, thus now considered African languages because they have contributed to mold the cultural identity of younger generation, they involve in all linguistic interaction. Arab, in its classical form, remains a symbol of Islam which earns it a certain degree of sacredness. Nevertheless the contact situation with the other languages forced it to crossbreed in special ways like borrowings and interferences. As for the other foreign languages, namely French, English, Spanish, and German at a least extent, they are made to carry the weight of local cultures.


1961 ◽  
Vol 56 ◽  
pp. 42-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. M. Metcalf

The Byzantine coinage in the twelfth century was of three kinds. There were gold nomismata, with a purchasing power which must have been a good deal greater than that of a present-day five-pound note, and also nomismata of ‘pale gold’—gold alloyed with silver—of lower value; at the other extreme there were bronze coins, smaller than a modern farthing, which were the coinage of the market-place; intermediate, but still of low value, there were coins about the size of a halfpenny, normally made of copper lightly washed with silver. The silvered bronze and the gold were not flat, as are most coins, but saucer-shaped. The reason for their unusual form is not known. Numismatists describe them as scyphate, and refer to the middle denomination in the later Byzantine system of coinage as Scyphate Bronze, to distinguish it from the petty bronze coinage. Scyphate Bronze was first struck under Alexius I (1081–1118). Substantive issues were made by John II (1118–43), and such coinage became extremely plentiful under Manuel I (1143–80) and his successors Isaac II (1185–95) and Alexius III (1195–1203). After the capture of Constantinople in the course of the Fourth Crusade, the successor-states to the Byzantine Empire at Nicaea, Salonica, and in Epirus continued to issue scyphate bronze coinage, although in much smaller quantities, until after the middle of the thirteenth century.


2002 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 409-427
Author(s):  
Emily McCaffrey

This article describes the recent resurgence of the popular memory of the thirteenth-century Cathar, or Albigensian, heresy and its bloody repression in Languedoc, south-western France. After centuries of having been relegated to the realms of elite historical theological and political writing, today the memory of the Cathars dominates local history, culture, literature and tourism. Indeed, the popular memory of the Cathars has become central to collective identity and its expressions. The article explores how local professional historians have mediated, sometimes awkwardly, between academic history and popular history.


Author(s):  
Ranus R. Sadikov

Introduction. One of the regions of compact settlement of the Mordovian people is the Republic of Bashkortostan. The Mordovian population of the region was formed during the resettlement migration process of the ethnic groups to the Bashkir lands in the 17th and early 20th centuries. There is a small stand-out group of Mordva-Erzya in Bashkiria. They call themselves Murza and they have their own identity. They live in the village of Kozhay-Andreevo in the Tuimazinskiy district and in the village of Kozhay-Maximovo in the Ermekeevskiy district. Materials and Methods. This work attempts to reconstruct the history of formation of the class community of Mordva-Murza and to identify its ethno-cultural features. The study is based on the principle of historicism; the main methods are historical-genetic, comparative-historical, and problematic-chronological. Results. Based on the study of published sources and literature, it is shown the chronology and the main stages of the formation of the Mordva-Murza community in Bashkiria. It was revealed, this community was formed on the basis of a resettlement group of the Mordovian sluzhilye-served people in the 18th century. Field ethnographic materials testify to their ethno-cultural identity. Discussion and Conclusion. Mordva living in the villages under consideration can be defined as a separate ethnic-class community, which has its own identity, self-name, specific linguistic and ethno-cultural characteristics. In their language and culture, it is interweaved both Erzya and Moksha traits. Almost disintegrated in the 1980s the community of the “Kazhay Murzas” began to revive in the year of 2000. The observations show the desire of the inhabitants and natives from these villages to preserve and develop their “Murza language” and traditions.


2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 86-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
T.A. Pavlishak

The article is devoted to consideration of the metaphor from the perspective of cultural linguistics as a new area of knowledge that studies the interaction between language and culture. It demonstrates some metaphor characteristics as one of the figurative - expressive means. The article emphasizes the importance of metaphors to reflect national-cultural specificity of a language.


1977 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ralph V. Turner

The latter part of the twentieth century may not find many of us wishing to pay tribute to bureaucrats, but as Helen Cam reminded us, the civil servant “deserves more credit than he has yet had for building up and maintaining our precious tradition of law and order.” In the late twelfth century and the thirteenth century the process of “bureaucratization” first got underway in England. An early professional civil servant, one specializing in judicial activity, was Simon of Pattishall. His name surfaces in the records in 1190, and it disappears after 1216. His time of activity, then, coincides with an important period for English common law: the years between “Glanvill” and Magna Carta.Simon was one of that group of royal judges who might be termed the first “professionals,” a group that took shape by the middle years of Richard I's reign. By the time of John, about ninety men acted at various times as royal judges, either at the Bench at Westminster, with the court following the king, or as itinerant justices. Many of these had only temporary appointments, making circuits in the counties; but a core of fifteen, who concentrated on the work of the courts, can be regarded as early members of a professional judiciary. Simon of PattishalPs is perhaps the most respected name among the fifteen. He had the longest career on the bench, from 1190 until 1216. He founded a judicial dynasty, for his clerk, Martin of Pattishall, became a judge, as did his clerk, William Raleigh, who had as his clerk Henry of Bracton, author of the great treatise on English law.


1978 ◽  

The Montpellier Codex is the largest and most sumptuous extant manuscript of thirteenth-century polyphonic music. The works it contains represent the music of the entire thirteenth century, and perhaps that of the late twelfth century as well. Inspired by Yvonne Rokseth's earlier transcriptions, the present edition draws on nearly four decades of subsequent research to offer improved readings of many motets, and comprehensive collation and analysis of all concordances. The musical transcriptions are included in parts I–III; part IV provides text commentary and translations, an index of first lines, and guides to pronunciation.


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