scholarly journals Earthquakes, Religion, and Transition to Self-Government in Italian Cities*

2016 ◽  
Vol 131 (4) ◽  
pp. 1875-1926 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marianna Belloc ◽  
Francesco Drago ◽  
Roberto Galbiati
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Differential Effect ◽  
Religious Leaders ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Religious Buildings ◽  
The Will ◽  
Communal Institutions ◽  
The Middle Ages

Abstract This article presents a unique historical experiment to explore the dynamics of institutional change in the Middle Ages. We have assembled a novel data set, where information on political institutions for northern central Italian cities between 1000 and 1300 is matched with detailed information on the earthquakes that occurred in the area and period of interest. Exploiting the panel structure of the data, we document that the occurrence of an earthquake retarded institutional transition from autocratic regimes to self-government (the commune) in cities where the political and the religious leaders were the same person (episcopal see cities), but not in cities where political and religious powers were distinct (non–episcopal see cities). Such differential effect holds for destructive seismic episodes and for events that were felt by the population but did not cause any material damage to persons or objects. Ancillary results show that seismic events provoked a positive and statistically significant differential effect on the construction and further ornamentation of religious buildings between episcopal and non–episcopal see cities. Our findings are consistent with the idea that earthquakes, interpreted in the Middle Ages as manifestation of the will and outrage of God, represented a shock to people’s religious beliefs and, as a consequence, enhanced the ability of political-religious leaders to restore social order after a crisis relative to the emerging communal institutions. This interpretation is supported by historical evidence.

Democratic Myths in Victorian Medievalism

1980 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 129-149 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosemary Jann
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Spiritual Health ◽  
The Political ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
The Past ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Central Characteristic ◽  
Liberal Individualism ◽  
The Middle Ages

Critical attention to the dominant tradition of Victorian medievalism has stressed its essentially conservative tendencies. For representative proponents of this tradition – Carlyle, Ruskin, Young England – the imaginative value of the Middle Ages lay in their contrast with the political and social disorder of the present. The antidote to those modern poisons – laissez faire capitalism, Utilitarian ethics, Liberal individualism – lay in a resuscitation of medieval hierarchy, one which called on the Captains of Industry to form a new aristocracy, and the state to assume control over the economy and social welfare. For such thinkers, the spiritual health and organic order of medieval society depended upon its essentially undemocratic structure. The prominence of this analysis has unfortunately overshadowed the importance of two alternative treatments of Victorian medievalism, the Whig and the Socialist. While opposed in fundamental ways to one another, these interpretations are opposed in more significant ways to that dominant conservative tradition in that they created alternative myths of the Middle Ages to justify a more – not less – democratic society in the present and future. Such myths assisted the development of class consciousness by using the authority of history to sanction a social order which drew its moral and political strengths not from the ideals of the aristocracy, but from those of the middle and working classes, respectively. However, the following demonstration of the way similar historical points of departure can lead investigators to radically different conclusions ultimately reinforces the central characteristic of Victorian medievalism: that it represented less an attempt to recapture the past “as it really was” than a projection of current ideals back into time.

Small-town conflict in the later Middle Ages: events at Shipston-on-Stour

Urban History ◽  
1992 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 183-210 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Dyer
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Small Town ◽  
The Social ◽  
Urban Conflict ◽  
The Middle Ages

The seventeenth-century Worcestershire antiquarian Thomas Habington knew of great agitations around 1400 at Shipston-on-Stour, a manor of Worcester Cathedral Priory. He reported that after an arbitration of 1405–6 ‘the discontented tenants not satisfied broke out against their lord again, but all these being long since buried, shall not be revived by my pen, which shall never prejudice or blot any with infamy’. This article will rescue the rebels from the oblivion to which Habington sought to condemn them. This is not just to correct his bias (as a recusant he sympathized with Benedictine monks; as a member of the gentry he disliked disturbance of the social order), but more to use the Shipston story to investigate general problems of urban conflict in the Middle Ages.

Jill Pellew and Lawrence Goldman (eds), Dethroning Historical Reputations, Universities, Museums and the Commemoration of Benefactors (Institute of Historical Research, School of Advanced Study: London, University of London, 2018). ISBN: 9781909646827 (Open-access e-book available at: http://humanities-digital-library.org/index.php/hdl/catalog/book/pellewgoldman

2020 ◽  
pp. 237-244
Author(s):  
Sheldon Rothblatt
Keyword(s):  
Open Access ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
Religious Leaders ◽  
Art Galleries ◽  
Ancestor Worship ◽  
Research School ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Advanced Study ◽  
The Middle Ages

This chapter studies Dethroning Historical Reputations, Universities, Museums and the Commemoration of Benefactors (2018), edited by Jill Pellew and Lawrence Goldman. In this very appealing publication, twelve contributors offer pithy remarks on what David Cannadine calls ‘institutionalized ancestor worship’, the occasions specifically reserved for those worthy individuals who lavish gifts and endowments on universities. For centuries, universities or museums and art galleries happily accepted donations with no questions asked. So have the trustees of other kinds of institutions, or religious leaders. The sale of indulgences in the middle ages to protect the souls of sinners carried on until reformers were alarmed by their misuse. Whereas in more recent times eyebrows might occasionally be raised concerning the source of a generous benefaction, or the views of the donor on a range of dicey matters, ways were found to smooth over any improprieties. The remarks by contributors overlap as they should, since the publication is the outcome of a conference held in the spring of 2017. The spirit of the Cambridge University historian Herbert Butterfield hovers over the sessions. His discussion of whiggish history-making is always relevant and always worth revisiting.

Lutheran and Catholic Reunionists in the Age of Bismarck

1988 ◽  
Vol 57 (S1) ◽  
pp. 89-107
Author(s):  
Manfred Fleischer
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Final Analysis ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
National State ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
German People ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Middle Ages

Religious division has determined Germany's destiny. In the Middle Ages, it was the struggle between Emperor and Pope which doomed the Holy Roman Empire. During the Reformation, and the Thirty Years' War, it was Protestantism as well as the anti-Imperial diplomacy of the Pope and the French cardinals, which prevented the emergence of a national state and a centralized government. “From the split of the church dates all our misfortune,” complained in 1846 the Lutheran historian Johann Friedrich Böhmer, editor of a major medieval source collection. “It is a pity that the nation in the heart of Europe was drawn away from its political profession by quarrels with the church, that the development of strong political institutions was interrupted, that they eroded under the acids of religious passion and negation, so that the German people finally got into a stage of the disease where they are either seized by violent fever, or rot in apathy and despair. All our inner ferment which soon will erupt in a revolutionary outburst, all our political impotence and lethargy were, in the final analysis, caused by the split of the church, which tore us apart, and which no one can bridge. Only a new St. Boniface who would restore ecclesiastical unity could help us.”

Mega-structures of the Middle Ages: the construction of religious buildings in Europe and Asia,c.1000–1500

2011 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 381-406 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maarten Prak
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Modular Design ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Construction Work ◽  
Religious Buildings ◽  
Modern Engineering ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Fifteenth ◽  
The Middle Ages

AbstractHow did medieval builders manage to construct some of the tallest structures in the world without access to modern engineering theories? Construction drawings were limited to details and, with only a handful exceptions, manuals for builders only appeared in the late fifteenth century. By implication, the relevant knowledge had to be transferred on a personal basis. Its underlying principles must therefore have been reasonably simple. This article shows how a modular design, combined with on-site experimentation, guided much of the construction work on large projects such as European cathedrals, Middle Eastern mosques, Indian temples, and Chinese pagoda towers.

Invisible Weapons

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Cecilia Gaposchkin
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Christian Identity ◽  
Religious Leaders ◽  
Holy War ◽  
First Crusade ◽  
History Of ◽  
Religious Meaning ◽  
The City ◽  
The Middle Ages

In 1098, three years into the First Crusade and after a brutal eight-month siege, the Franks captured the city of Antioch. Two days later, Muslim forces arrived with a relief army, and the victors became the besieged. Exhausted and ravaged by illness and hunger, the Franks were exhorted by their religious leaders to supplicate God, and for three days they performed a series of liturgical exercises, beseeching God through ritual prayer to forgive their sins and grant them victory. The following day, the Christian army, accompanied by bishops and priests reciting psalms and hymns, marched out of the city to face the Muslim forces and won a resounding and improbable victory. From the very beginning and throughout the history of the Crusades, liturgical prayer, masses, and alms were all marshaled in the fight against the Muslim armies. During the Fifth Crusade, Pope Honorius III likened liturgy to “invisible weapons.” This book is about those invisible weapons; about the prayers and liturgical rituals that were part of the battle for the faith. The book tells the story of the greatest collective religious undertaking of the Middle Ages, putting front and center the ways in which Latin Christians communicated their ideas and aspirations for crusade to God through liturgy, how liturgy was deployed in crusading, and how liturgy absorbed ideals or priorities of crusading. Liturgy helped construct the devotional ideology of the crusading project, endowing war with religious meaning, placing crusading ideals at the heart of Christian identity, and embedding crusading warfare squarely into the eschatological economy. By connecting medieval liturgical books with the larger narrative of crusading, Gaposchkin allows us to understand a crucial facet in the culture of holy war.

scholarly journals An Analysis of Anglo-Saxon Kinship During the Middle Ages

2016 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joyce Hung
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
The Middle Ages

This paper explores the intricate concept of kinship in Anglo-Saxon society during the Middle Ages. At a time when bloodshed was frequent and wergilds a norm, there were few law enforcing mechanisms that maintained social order. By interpreting the role of kinship in various contexts, including relational, social and legal settings, this paper identifies kinship as a significant and highly complicated approach to resolving disputes and maintaining social peace.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document