An Age of Saints? Power, Conflict and Dissent in Early Medieval Christianity. Edited by PeterSarris, MatthewDal Santo and PhilBooth. Brill's Series on the Early Middle Ages 20. Leiden: Brill. 2011. xv + 223 pp. €99.00. ISSN 1878 4879.

2013 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 108-111
Author(s):  
Edward M. Schoolman
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Medieval Christianity

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathan J. Ristuccia
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Medieval Christianity ◽  
As If ◽  
Res Publica

The concept of Christianization dominates scholarship on the early Middle Ages. Yet, “Christianization” is a vague, anachronistic term, applied haphazardly to group an assortment of diverse changes as if all had the same cause. Moreover, the concept treats Christianity as a “religion”: a transhistorical system of fixed doctrines and institutions separate from other spheres of life. Early medieval Christianity, however, was an evolving conglomeration of rituals, ideas, practices, and institutions. Medieval people thought that someone became a Christian not by accepting a religion, but rather by joining the Christian commonwealth (res publica christiana) through certain universal rituals—Rogationtide among them. By studying the development of Rogationtide, this book formulates a paradigm for Christianization without the need for “religion.”

The Meaning of Presbytera in Byzantine and Early Medieval Christianity

2021 ◽  
pp. 261-289
Author(s):  
Kevin J. Madigan
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Elderly Woman ◽  
Local Communities ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Medieval Christianity

This chapter examines the title of ‘presbyter’ attached to women in antiquity and the early Middle Ages. It is argued that this is always subject to difficult interpretation and, if capable of interpretation at all, highly dependent upon contemporary, contextual evidence. As noted in Chapter 8, this term presbytera can refer to an elderly woman and, often, it refers to the wives of male presbyters. Yet there are a number of instances in which neither is the case. Using inscriptional evidence, canonical decrees, episcopal letters and one papal letter, this chapter demonstrates that, in this third category of cases, presbyterae seem to have had authority in local communities, or performed quasi-diaconal service at the altar, assisted itinerant priests and, possibly, engaged in other, routine unspecified presbyteral activities. It is these actions that the ecclesiastical letters and decrees are intended to stop.

Poet of the Medieval Modern

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesca Brooks
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Far Right ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
History Of ◽  
Catholic History ◽  
In Parenthesis ◽  
Stone Sculpture

The early Middle Ages provided twentieth-century poets with the material to reimagine and rework local, religious, and national identities in their writing. Poet of the Medieval Modern focuses on a key figure within this tradition, the Anglo-Welsh poet and artist David Jones (1895–1974), and represents the first extended study of the influence of early medieval culture and history from England on Jones and his novel-length late modernist poem The Anathemata (1952). The Anathemata, the second major poetic project after In Parenthesis (1937), fuses Jones’s visual and verbal arts to write a Catholic history of Britain as told through the history of man-as-artist. Drawing on unpublished archival material including manuscripts, sketches, correspondence, and, most significantly, the marginalia from David Jones’s Library, Poet of the Medieval Modern reads with Jones in order to trouble the distinction we make between poetry and scholarship. Placing this underappreciated figure firmly at the centre of new developments in modernist and medieval studies, Poet of the Medieval Modern brings the two fields into dialogue and argues that Jones uses the textual and material culture of the early Middle Ages—including Old English prose and poetry, Anglo-Latin hagiography, early medieval stone sculpture, manuscripts, and historiography—to re-envision British Catholic identity in the twentieth-century long poem. In The Anathemata Jones returned to the English record to seek out those moments where the histories of the Welsh had been elided or erased. At a time when the Middle Ages are increasingly weaponized in far-right and nationalist political discourse, the book offers a timely discussion of how the early medieval past has been resourced to both shore up and challenge English hegemonies across modern British culture.

Human–Bovine Plagues in the Early Middle Ages

2015 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy P. Newfield
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Molecular Clock ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Early Middle Ages

Two independent molecular clock analyses (mcas) reveal that measles (mv) diverged from rinderpest (rpv) c. 1000 c.e. This evidence, when conjoined with written accounts of non-Justinianic plagues in 569–570 and 986–988 and zoo-archaeological discoveries regarding early medieval mass bovine mortalities, suggests that a now-extinct morbillivirus, ancestral to mv and rpv, broke out episodically in the early Middle Ages, causing large mortalities in both species. Tentative diagnoses of an mv–rpv ancestor help to untangle early medieval accounts of human–bovine disease and facilitate an assessment of the consequences of the 569–570 and 986–988 plagues.

scholarly journals On the Serbian-Bulgarian border in the 9th and the 10th centuries

2015 ◽  
pp. 31-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Predrag Komatina
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
The Political ◽  
Ethnic Communities ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
The People

The paper analyzes the information concerning the border between the Serbs and the Bulgarians in the 9th and the 10th centuries found in the work De administrando imperio by the emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus. It is made clear that there were no clearly established borderlines between the political entities in the Early Middle Ages, and that those political entities during that period functioned not on the basis of territorialy organized states, but of ethnic communities, whose authority rested upon the people, not the territory. The functioning of the early medieval Bulgarian Khanate is one of the best examples for that. Therefore, it is necessary that the information on the Serbian-Bulgarian border in the Porphyrogenitus? work be analyzed in a new and different light.

Archaeological Evidence of Migration from the Southern Taiga of Western Siberia to the Urals in the Early Middle Ages: The Vodennikovo-1 Cemetery

2022 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 91-99
Author(s):  
N. P. Matveeva ◽  
E. A. Tretyakov ◽  
A. S. Zelenkov
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Western Siberia ◽  
Solid Wood ◽  
Southern Taiga ◽  
The Urals ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Archaeological Evidence

We describe 15 burials at the Vodennikovo-1 group of mounds in the northern Kurgan Region, on the Middle Iset River, relevant to migration processes during the Early Middle Ages. On the basis of numerous parallels from contemporaneous sites in the Urals and Western Siberia, the cemetery is dated to the late 7th and 8th centuries. Most of single and collective burials are inhumations in rectangular pits with a northwestern orientation, with vessels, decorated by carved or pricked designs, placed near the heads. These features, typical of the Early Medieval Bakalskaya culture of the Tobol and Ishim basins, are also observed at the Pereyma and Ust-Suerskoye-1 cemeteries in the same area. However, there are innovations such as inlet burials, those in blocks of solid wood and plank coffi ns, western orientation of the deceased, and placing vessels next to the burial pits. These features attest to a different tradition, evidenced by cemeteries of the Potchevash culture in the Tobol and Ishim basins (Okunevo III, Likhacheva, and Vikulovskoye). Also, Potchevash and Bakalskaya vessels co-occur at Vodennikovo-1, and some of them (jugs with comb and grooved designs) are typologically syncretic. To date, this is the westernmost cemetery of the Potchevash culture, suggestive of a migration of part of the southern taiga population from the Ishim and Tobol area to the Urals.

Rome’s orbit

2018 ◽  
pp. 59-87
Author(s):  
Kriston R. Rennie
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Gravitational Pull

A monastery’s relationship with Rome raises fundamental questions about its origins and nature. Exemption privileges form an important part of this story – a connecting link between the centre in Rome and the Christian periphery. This chapter questions the monastery’s impetus for seeking special exemption from Rome by examining the practice’s development from the papal perspective. It seeks to understand the gravitational pull of ‘Rome’s orbit’, which reveals the precedent, pragmatism, and vision of early medieval popes in the organization and governance of religious life. Formulating the popes’ attitude towards, and involvement in, western monasteries, this chapter explains why the granting of monastic exemptions became so pronounced a feature of papal government in the early Middle Ages.

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