Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
G.E.M. Lippiatt
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Political Development ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Contemporary Politics ◽  
High Middle Ages ◽  
Governing Institutions

Historians of political development in the High Middle Ages often focus on the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries as the generations in which monarchy finally triumphed over aristocracy to create a monopoly on governing institutions in Western Europe. However, it was precisely in this period that Simon of Montfort emerged from his modest forest lordship in France to conquer a principality stretching from the Pyrenees to the Rhône. A remarkable ascendancy in any period, it is perhaps especially so in its contrast with the accepted historiographical narrative. Despite the supposed triumph of monarchy during his lifetime, Simon’s meteoric career took place largely outside of royal auspices. Simon’s experience provides a challenge to an uncomplicated or teleological understanding of contemporary politics as effectively national affairs directed by kings.

Simon V of Montfort and Baronial Government, 1195-1218

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
G.E.M. Lippiatt
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Political Development ◽  
Public Order ◽  
Violent Death ◽  
Documentary Evidence ◽  
Southern France ◽  
Archival Material ◽  
Fourth Crusade ◽  
High Middle Ages ◽  
Biographical Study

Dissenter from the Fourth Crusade, disseised earl of Leicester, leader of the Albigensian Crusade, prince of southern France: Simon of Montfort led a remarkable career of ascent from mid-level French baron to semi-independent count before his violent death before the walls of Toulouse in 1218. Through the vehicle of the crusade, Simon cultivated autonomous power in the liminal space between competing royal lordships in southern France in order to build his own principality. This first English biographical study of his life examines the ways in which Simon succeeded and failed in developing this independence in France, England, the Midi, and on campaign to Jerusalem. Simon’s familial, social, and intellectual connexions shaped his conceptions of political order, which he then implemented in his conquests. By analysing contemporary narrative, scholastic, and documentary evidence—including a wealth of archival material—this book argues that Simon’s career demonstrates the vitality of baronial independence in the High Middle Ages, despite the emergence of centralised royal bureaucracies. More importantly, Simon’s experience shows that barons themselves adopted methods of government that reflected a concern for accountability, public order, and contemporary reform ideals. This study therefore marks an important entry in the debate about baronial responsibility in medieval political development, as well as providing the most complete modern account of the life of this important but oft-overlooked crusader.

The Middle Ages

2020 ◽  
pp. 14-26
Author(s):  
Kati Ihnat
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The Arts ◽  
High Middle Ages ◽  
Large Churches ◽  
North Western ◽  
The Middle Ages

The High Middle Ages witnessed Christmas emerge as a major Christian feast in western Europe, a time of merriment and miracles. Always intended to celebrate the Incarnation, Christmas became a time to honour the little baby in the manger and his loving mother, as part of a spiritual shift towards remembering the human Jesus. Although Kalends traditions continued on from Antiquity, which engaged the lay population in carnivalesque revelries that included mumming, games, and feasting, clerics developed new practices that infused ecclesiastical celebrations with the same sense of inversion and fun. Feasts of Fools, Boy Bishops, and extravagant liturgical dramas allowed reformers to channel festive energy in ways that showcased developments in the arts, especially in the large churches of north-western Europe, without losing the joyful character that came with honouring the paradox of God made man.

Popular Violence and Popular Heresy in Western Europe, c1000-1179

1984 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 43-50
Author(s):  
R. I. Moore
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Defensive Reaction ◽  
Religious Persecution ◽  
Ecclesiastical Authority ◽  
The People ◽  
Spiritual Authority ◽  
High Middle Ages ◽  
The Church

In general modern writers on popular heresy in the high middle ages have shared the opinion of contemporary observers that the capacity of dissident preachers to attract a popular following, stimulate sentiments of intense devotion and loyalty, and canalise resentment of clerical exaction and abuse, constituted a significant threat to the authority of the Church. Hence, more or less explicitly, the extension of the theory and practice of coercion in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries has been seen as a defensive reaction designed (with the emphasis according to the preference of the historian) to protect clerical privilege and spiritual authority. There are, however, distinguished exceptions. In one of the few passages in his writings where religious persecution is discussed, Southern accounts for it thus: … those who bore authority in the church were agents with very limited powers of initiative. They were not free agents. Doubtless they were responsible for some terrible acts of violence and cruelty, among which the Albigensian Crusade holds a particular horror. But on the whole the holders of ecclesiastical authority were less prone to violence, even against unbelievers, than the people whom they ruled.

The Peace of God

2021 ◽  
pp. 104346312110657
Author(s):  
Andrew Young
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Property Rights ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Rule Of Law ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
High Middle Ages ◽  
Clear Delineation ◽  
Residual Claimants

Scholars have argued that the politically fractured landscape of medieval Western Europe was foundational to the evolution of constitutionalism and rule of law. In making this argument, Salter and Young (2019) have recently emphasized that the constellation of political property rights in the High Middle Ages was polycentric and hierarchical; holders of those rights were residual claimants to the returns on their governance and sovereign. The latter characteristics—residual claimancy and sovereignty—imply a clear delineation of jurisdictional boundaries and their integrity. However, historians’ description of the “feudal anarchy” that followed the tenth-century disintegration of the Carolingian Empire does not suggest clearly delineated and stable boundaries. In this paper, I highlight the role of the Peace of God movement in the 11th and 12th centuries in delineating and stabilizing the structure of political property rights. In terms of historical political economy, the Peace of God movement provides an important link between the early medieval era and the constitutional arrangements of the High Middle Ages.

scholarly journals The Medieval Blood Sanction and the Divine Beneficence of Pain: 1100-1450

2006 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-129 ◽  
Author(s):  
Trisha Olson
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Chest Cavity ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
High Middle Ages ◽  
The Common

Here the worldling now all bound in fetters liesstarts to fear his God, his tears flow from his eyesJustice comes along, with gallows, wheel and sword:God tells the pious man to enter Heaven's door.Across medieval Western Europe, those who committed serious wrongs, such as homicide, arson, treason, and rape were subject to a wide range of capital punishments that were seemingly brutal, frequently bloody, and at times spectacular. Grisly images of an executioner dismembering a condemned's limbs from his torso, smashing his chest cavity, gouging his eyes, or piercing his body with hot pokers are the common stuff of scaffold art in the high Middle Ages. Such images attest to the critical role of pain in medieval capital punishment. Whereas in our day all attempts are made to render penal death painless, in the high and late Middle Ages, the tie between pain and death is not only tolerated but, at times, purposefully exacerbated.

The Stigmata in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carolyn Muessig
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Introductory Overview ◽  
Devotional Practices ◽  
The Face ◽  
Biblical Commentaries

Francis of Assisi’s reported reception of the stigmata on Mount La Verna in 1224 is often considered to be the first account of an individual receiving the five wounds of Christ. The thirteenth-century appearance of this miracle, however, is not as unexpected as it first seems. Interpretations of Galatians 6:17—I bear the stigmata of the Lord Jesus Christ in my body—had been circulating in biblical commentaries since late antiquity. These works explained stigmata as wounds that martyrs received, like the apostle Paul, in their attempt to spread Christianity in the face of resistance. By the seventh century, stigmata were described as marks of Christ that priests received invisibly at their ordination. In the eleventh century, monks and nuns were perceived as bearing the stigmata in so far as they lived a life of renunciation out of love for Christ. By the later Middle Ages holy women like Catherine of Siena (d. 1380) were more frequently described as having stigmata than their male counterparts. With the religious upheavals of the sixteenth century, the way stigmata were defined reflected the diverse perceptions of Christianity held by Catholics and Protestants. This study traces the birth and evolution of religious stigmata as expressed in theological discussions and devotional practices in Western Europe from the early Middle Ages to the early seventeenth century. It also contains an introductory overview of the historiography of religious stigmata beginning in the second half of the seventeenth century to its treatment and assessment in the twenty-first century.

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.”

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