Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans Hummer
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Alternative Approach ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
Anthropological Critique ◽  
The Middle Ages

The Introduction sets out the epistemology of studying kinship in the Middle Ages. It proposes that investigations of medieval kinship have been frustrated because researchers have assumed that kinship is a human universal which can be retroactively and safely applied to the analysis of different times and places. It sketches David Schneider’s anthropological critique that kinship studies have been based on biogenetic and genealogical assumptions of the modern West that are fundamentally alien to the societies they seek to understand. It puts forth an alternative approach by proposing a method for identifying indigenous conceptions of kinship which can help illuminate the place of kinship within the societal cosmologies of early medieval Europe.

Visions of Kinship in Medieval Europe

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans Hummer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Social Mechanisms ◽  
Divine Love ◽  
Ethnographic Approach ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
High Middle Ages ◽  
The Middle Ages ◽  
Late Roman

What meaning did human kinship possess in a world regulated by biblical time, committed to the primacy of spiritual relationships, and bound by the sinews of divine love? In the process of exploring that question, this book offers a searching re-examination of kinship in Europe between late Roman times and the high Middle Ages, the period bridging Europe’s primitive past and its modern present. It critiques the modernist and Western bio-genealogical and functionalist assumptions that have shaped kinship studies since their inception in the nineteenth century, when biblical time collapsed and kinship became a signifier of the essential secularity of history and a method for conceptualizing a deeper prehistory guided by autogenous human impulses. It argues that this understanding of kinship is fundamentally antagonistic to medieval sentiments and is responsible for the frustrations researchers have encountered as they have tried to identify the famously elusive kin groups of medieval Europe. It delineates an alternative ethnographic approach inspired by recent anthropological work that privileges indigenous expressions of kinship and the interpretive potential of native ontologies. The book reveals that kinship in the Middle Ages was not biological, primitive, or a regulator of social mechanisms; nor is it traceable by bio-genealogical connections. In the Middle Ages kinship signified a sociality that flowed from convictions about the divine source of all things and wove together families, institutions, and divinities into an expansive eschatological vision animated by “the most righteous principle of love.”

Ritual and reality in the early medieval ordines

1975 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 41-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janet L. Nelson
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Know How ◽  
Full Picture ◽  
The Middle Ages ◽  
The Way

To know what was generally believed in all ages, the way is to consult the liturgies, not any private man’s writings.’ John Selden’s maxim, which surely owed much to his own pioneering work as a liturgist, shows a shrewd appreciation of the significance of the medieval ordines for the consecration of kings. Thanks to the more recent efforts of Waitz, Eichmann, Schramm and others, this material now forms part of the medievalist’s stock in trade; and much has been written on the evidence which the ordines provide concerning the nature of kingship, and the interaction of church and state, in the middle ages. The usefulness of the ordines to the historian might therefore seem to need no further demonstration or qualification. But there is another side to the coin. The value of the early medieval ordines can be, not perhaps overestimated, but misconstrued. ‘The liturgies’ may indeed tell us ‘what was generally believed’—but we must first be sure that we know how they were perceived and understood by their participants, as well as by their designers. They need to be correlated with other sources, and as often as possible with ‘private writings’ too, before the full picture becomes intelligible.

The Rise of the Dutch Spice Trade in the Middle Ages

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-12
Author(s):  
Wei Zheng ◽  
Keyword(s):  
The Netherlands ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
Spice Trade ◽  
The Middle Ages ◽  
The Way

For medieval Europe, spices have always been of great significance, so the spice trade has become the object of competition for various countries in Western Europe. With the improvement of navigation technology, countries obsessed with spices have opened up the way to explore the origin of spices and monopolize the spices trade. Among them, the most typical country is the Netherlands. From the perspective of the spice trade, this paper discusses how the beneficiary of the spice trade, the Netherlands, has become a generation of marine hegemons by transferring spice to monopolizing the spice trade.

Segregation or Choice?

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maristella Botticini ◽  
Zvi Eckstein
Keyword(s):  
Economic Theory ◽  
Iberian Peninsula ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Alternative Explanation ◽  
Historical Information ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
History Of ◽  
Salient Features ◽  
The Middle Ages

This chapter assesses the argument that both their exclusion from craft and merchant guilds and usury bans on Christians segregated European Jews into moneylending during the Middle Ages. Already during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, moneylending was the occupation par excellence of the Jews in England, France, and Germany and one of the main professions of the Jews in the Iberian Peninsula, Italy, and other locations in western Europe. Based on the historical information and the economic theory presented in earlier chapters, the chapter advances an alternative explanation that is consistent with the salient features that mark the history of the Jews: the Jews in medieval Europe voluntarily entered and later specialized in moneylending because they had the key assets for being successful players in credit markets—capital, networking, literacy and numeracy, and contract-enforcement institutions.

Invoking the Authority of the Middle Ages in Nineteenth-Century Ireland: The ‘Irish Crosses’ of Earley & Powells

2020 ◽  
pp. 185-206
Author(s):  
Colleen M. Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Networks ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Culturally Diverse ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
The Middle Ages

This essay challenges the claim of the antiquarian artist Henry O’Neill that the publication of his 1857 book on early medieval crosses in Ireland sparked the nineteenth-century Celtic cross industry. While acknowledging O’Neill’s contribution as a founding researcher of medieval high cross scholarship, it argues that the design and significance of Celtic crosses developed in Victorian Ireland through social networks of antiquarians, monument makers and their culturally diverse, elite clients. Highlighted is the Irish ecclesiastical decorating firm, Earley & Powells, which began producing Celtic cross monuments in the 1860s. The significance of the Celtic cross silhouette which featured in landscape paintings alongside medieval ruins is considered in view of the conflicted relationship between landscape and Irish aristocracy. The essay concludes with a discussion about two of Earley & Powells’ clients and the monumental Celtic crosses they commissioned.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document