Rhetoric and Politics

2014 ◽  
pp. 328-340
Author(s):  
Virginia Cox
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Political Rhetoric ◽  
Northern Italy ◽  
Religious Language ◽  
Practical Application ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
New Methodologies ◽  
Political Intent ◽  
The City

It has often been asserted that medieval culture was little concerned with politics as a practical application for rhetoric, at least outside the city republics of central and northern Italy. This chapter argues that robust and self-conscious traditions of political eloquence were more widespread in late medieval Europe than is generally thought, especially following the development of parliaments from the thirteenth century onward. The point is illustrated through a discussion of the speech cultures of the parliaments of Catalonia-Aragon and England. More broadly, the chapter argues that new methodologies are needed to make medieval political rhetoric more historically visible. Nonverbal eloquence must be studied alongside verbal, and it must be recognized that medieval political eloquence is often profoundly nonclassical in form and frequently deploys religious language that may disguise its political intent to the modern eye.

Contesting the City

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian D. Liddy
Keyword(s):  
Urban Politics ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Urban Citizenship ◽  
Town Government ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
Political Narrative ◽  
Classical Models ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The City

The political narrative of late medieval English towns is often reduced to the story of the gradual intensification of oligarchy, in which power was exercised and projected by an ever smaller ruling group over an increasingly subservient urban population. This book takes its inspiration not from English historiography, but from a more dynamic continental scholarship on towns in the southern Low Countries, Germany, and France. Its premise is that scholarly debate about urban oligarchy has obscured contemporary debate about urban citizenship. It identifies from the records of English towns a tradition of urban citizenship, which did not draw upon the intellectual legacy of classical models of the ‘citizen’. This was a vernacular citizenship, which was not peculiar to England, but which was present elsewhere in late medieval Europe. It was a citizenship that was defined and created through action. There were multiple, and divergent, ideas about citizenship, which encouraged townspeople to make demands, to assert rights, and to resist authority. This book exploits the rich archival sources of the five major towns in England—Bristol, Coventry, London, Norwich, and York—in order to present a new picture of town government and urban politics over three centuries. The power of urban governors was much more precarious than historians have imagined. Urban oligarchy could never prevail—whether ideologically or in practice—when there was never a single, fixed meaning of the citizen.

Communes and Despots: The City State In Late-Medieval Italy

1965 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 71-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. J. Jones
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Political History ◽  
Central Italy ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Medieval Italy ◽  
City States ◽  
City State ◽  
The City

It is a commonplace of political history that in the later Middle Ages the city states of north and central Italy were the scene of a conflict in the theory and practice of government between two contrasted systems: republican and despotic (or in contemporary terminology, government ‘a comune’, ‘in liberta’ etc., and government ‘a tiranno’, signoria or principato). The conflict began about the mid-thirteenth century, and in most places, sooner or later, was settled in favour of despotism.

scholarly journals LIVING LIKE THE LAITY? THE NEGOTIATION OF RELIGIOUS STATUS IN THE CITIES OF LATE MEDIEVAL ITALY

2010 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 27-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frances Andrews
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Northern Italy ◽  
The Other ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Medieval Italy ◽  
Important Object

ABSTRACTFramed by consideration of images of treasurers on the books of the treasury in thirteenth-century Siena, this article uses evidence for the employment of men of religion in city offices in central and northern Italy to show how religious status (treated as a subset of ‘clerical culture’) could become an important object of negotiation between city and churchmen, a tool in the repertoire of power relations. It focuses on the employment of men of religion as urban treasurers and takes Florence in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries as a principal case study, but also touches on the other tasks assigned to men of religion and, very briefly, on evidence from other cities (Bologna, Brescia, Como, Milan, Padua, Perugia and Siena). It outlines some of the possible arguments deployed for this use of men of religion in order to demonstrate that religious status was, like gender, more contingent and fluid than the norm-based models often relied on as a shorthand by historians. Despite the powerful rhetoric of lay–clerical separation in this period, the engagement of men of religion in paid, term-bound urban offices inevitably brought them closer to living like the laity.

Peasant Houses

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Suggett
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Social Identity ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
High Status ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
England And Wales ◽  
Central Aspect ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
Late Medieval England

Archaeology (excavation, building survey, scientific dating) has established that peasant houses in much of Britain had a durability that was probably exceptional in late medieval Europe. Peasant houses in late medieval England and Wales (Scotland and Ireland were more complex) were not self-built homes but professionally made by craftsmen, and a central aspect of material culture. Building the late medieval peasant house was an aspect of consumption that entailed important choices relating to expenditure, construction, and, above all, the plan that structured household life. The widespread adoption by peasants of the hierarchical hall-house plan was in part an appropriation of high-status housing culture and inseparable from the construction and maintenance of free peasant social identity. The eventual rejection of the hall-house in the sixteenth century ended a peasant building tradition that had begun in the thirteenth century and matured during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Republican and Monarchical Religion

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maurizio Viroli
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
The State ◽  
Church Community ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Political Body ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The Church

This chapter focuses on republican and monarchical religion in late medieval Europe. Republican religion spread in a late medieval Europe dominated by monarchies that, from the thirteenth century on, had endowed themselves with a sacred dimension similar to that of the church. Jurists and political philosophers transferred the concept of corpus mysticum—intended to designate the church community as a body that cannot be seen by the eyes but can only be grasped by the intellect—to the state. Applied to the state, the concept of a mystical body referred mainly, but not exclusively, to the monarchy, where the king is at the head of the mystical-political body, just as Christ or his vicar on earth is at the head of the mystical body of the church. Thus, the main difference between the royal and the republican religion is that the former celebrates an individual mystical body—the king; the latter celebrates a collective mystical body—the republic.

Banks and Bankers

1996 ◽  
pp. 234-254
Author(s):  
Ariel Toaff
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Northern Italy ◽  
Money Market ◽  
Local Economy ◽  
Economic Interests ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Medieval Italy ◽  
The Alps ◽  
Official Status

This chapter assesses the Jewish banks and bankers in late medieval Italy, particularly in Umbria. From the end of the thirteenth century, the communes of central and northern Italy held a powerful attraction for Jewish financiers from Rome and beyond the Alps, and the origins of many Italian Jewish communities are linked to the migrations of these first Jewish merchants and bankers. Umbria received one of the earliest, and largest, waves of migrating Jewish bankers from Rome: here, introduced and supported by the circles of the Roman Curia, whose political and economic interests they often represented, these bankers were invited by the communes to invest their capital in the local economy. The priors gave them official status in the money-market, binding them to the strict observance of charters laying down permitted charges and other regulations protecting prospective borrowers, but also granting them the rights of citizenship and numerous privileges of a legal and religious kind. The chapter then studies the structure and functioning of the great Jewish banking and trading companies. It also looks at the major banking families in Umbria, as well as the bankers' servants.

scholarly journals Cities in late medieval Europe: the promise and the curse of modernity

Urban History ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 329-349 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARC BOONE
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Max Weber ◽  
World War ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Positive View ◽  
Negative View ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
The Great War ◽  
The City

ABSTRACT:This article examines how modern historiography has developed quite differentiated views on the way medieval cities have given expression to renewal and to creativity. ‘National’ traditions have played a highly influential role in modifying the general views articulated in the major syntheses produced by scholars such as Max Weber and Henri Pirenne at the beginning of the twentieth century. An almost jubilant way of looking at the city as the hotbed of modernity gave room, in the decades after the Great War, to pessimism and a negative view on urbanity, before a more nuanced and positive view has been re-established after World War II and in the course of recent paradigmatic changes.

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sally Mayall Brasher
Keyword(s):  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Urban Society ◽  
Northern Italy ◽  
Religious Culture ◽  
Small Community ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Ecclesiastical Reform ◽  
Grass Roots ◽  
City States ◽  
The City

The conclusions chapter summarizes the findings of the earlier chapters and reiterates the claim that throughout northern Italy, beginning as early as the twelfth century, as result of the pious impulse of an emerging class of cittadini, the focus of religious charitable activity was targeted on specific localized communities resulting in the founding of small, community-cantered hospitals. Over the following three centuries management of these hospitals evolved from grass-roots initiative of the community, through ecclesiastical reform and finally was appropriated by the civic government of the city-states. This evolution mirrored changes in urban society during the period and provides and excellent lens through which to view late medieval Italian society and religious culture.

Arezzo as a Center of Learning and Letters in the Thirteenth Century

Traditio ◽  
1953 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 321-391 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helene Wieruszowski
Keyword(s):  
Economic Development ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Central Italy ◽  
Northern Italy ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cultural Patterns ◽  
Economic Problems ◽  
Historical Phenomenon ◽  
The City ◽  
Selection Of

The variety of cultural patterns that marks the Italian scene in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is a historical phenomenon as familiar to the general historian as to the student of all the special fields to which Italy made its contributions at that time. Inquiry into the conditions determining the characteristics of some of the cities will point in different directions : to leading artists and scholars and their ‘schools’; to the taste and interest of individual or collective patrons; to outside influences, and so forth. Very often such an inquiry will uncover strands that lead back deep into the medieval past of the city. Yet medievalists, in writing monographs on one or another city, have found themselves mostly involved in the political and economic problems of the Italian scene, and indeed in the diversity that marked each city, but have paid little attention to local culture. Still, as shown by one brilliant example — the analysis by Robert Davidsohn of Florentine culture in the time of Dante — the task is an extremely rewarding one. For not only medieval Florence — thirteenth-century Florence which gave birth to Dante and the art of Giotto and Arnolfo da Cambio—but many other cities of northern and central Italy, great and small, wove the general influences and ideas of the age into their own pattern of culture, each with a design of its own. To be sure, many cities show similarities in their cultural growth just as they do in their political and economic development, but a more thorough analysis will reveal differences in the pace of their development as well as in the ‘selection’ of trends that determine their character. Potentialities and dispositions for leadership were apparent in several centers of Tuscany and northern Italy, and it would have been difficult at that time to predict which among them was to achieve a leadership that would last longer and extend over larger areas than that of one of its rivals.

The Illuminations of Mukhlis ibn ʿAbdallah al-Hindi: Identifying Manuscripts from Late Medieval Konya

2019 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-60
Author(s):  
Cailah Jackson
Keyword(s):  
Active Center ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Islamic Art ◽  
Additional Material ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Art Historians ◽  
Central Turkey ◽  
The City ◽  
Initial Focus

Abstract The arts of the book of late medieval Rum (Anatolia) constitute a rich resource for Islamic art historians that remains relatively unknown in the wider scholarship. This complex period saw the disintegration of Seljuk rule and the partial absorption of the region into the Ilkhanid realm. Konya (present-day central Turkey), the former Seljuk capital, was hardly isolated from its better-known neighbors and was evidently an active center for the patronage of the arts of the book. This article contributes to ongoing discussions concerning late medieval Islamic manuscripts by discussing illuminations that were produced by Mukhlis ibn ʿAbdallah al-Hindi in thirteenth-century Konya. One of the two named illuminators active in the city, Mukhlis extensively decorated two manuscripts, both in 677h (1278): a small Qurʾan and a monumental copy of Jalal al-Din Rumi’s Mas̱navī. Both are the initial focus of the article. Following an analysis of these manuscripts, the article presents additional material as possible products of Mukhlis’s hand or of Konya generally, demonstrating both the relative visual distinctiveness of Konya illumination and the need to potentially re-examine works previously attributed to Egypt or Persia.

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