The Making of the Frisian Clay Landscape 800–1600

2017 ◽  
Vol 77 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 88-116
Author(s):  
Philippus H. Breuker

The Frisian Clay area consists of a northern part, the Bouwhoek (‘arable corner’), and a southern and older part, the Greidhoek (‘grassland corner’). In both areas, the terpen are the original areas of residence, containing the farms. The terpen formed hamlets which during the Middle Ages expanded to villages. In the Greidhoek, the corresponding land stretched in all directions, whereas in the Bouwhoek, it stretched in elongated parcels on either side. The land in the Greidhoek was bordered by natural streams, slenken, whereas the Bouwhoek land was delimited by dug maren, dating from the early Middle Ages. The Greidhoek also has dug waters, the leien, mainly dating to the early and high Middle Ages. The land of a hamlet was called hemrik: some of it was the fixed property of the farms (the staten), whereas the land further afield was used commonly. Later, hemrik changed its meaning and came to indicate only the common land. The word then coincided with meenschar and fell into disuse. From 1200 the meenscharren became ever smaller in size due to their continuous assignment to farms, until they had nearly all been divided up in the sixteenth century.

Author(s):  
Hans Hummer

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.”


1990 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristian Jensen

One of the most remarkable changes to take place at German Protestant universities during the last decade of the sixteenth century and the first twenty years of the seventeenth century was the return of metaphysics after more than halfa century of absence. University metaphysics has acquired a reputation for sterile aridity which was strengthened rather than diminished by its survival in early modern times, when such disciplines are supposed deservedly to have vanished with the end of the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, this survival has attracted some attention this century. For a long urne it was assumed that German Protestants needed a metaphysical defence against the intellectual vigour of the Jesuits. Lewalter has shown, however, that this was not the case.


Author(s):  
Francesc Morales

Abstract: The palates of the nationalist authors of the 19th century found the common past exemplified by the Roman Empire to be too homogeneous a taste. Although this premise may be valid for all European nationalist movements of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the discussion here is limited to Spain’s problematic national construction during the 19th century and the group formed by Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. Spain and ‘Benelux’ were chosen because they represent complex problems in the construction of a key dynamic of European nationalism: a political contemporary diversity linked to pre-Roman and post-Roman pasts. Despite these political and historical connections, the paths taken by these nationalisms are significantly different.Key words: Rome, Netherlands, Spain, nationalism, EuropeResumen: Un pasado común ejemplificado por el Imperio Romano pasa por ser demasiado homogéneo para el gusto de los autores nacionalistas en el siglo XIX. Esta premisa puede ser válida para todos los movimientos nacionalistas europeos, pero voy a limitarme a la problemática de la construcción nacional en España durante el siglo XIX y al grupo formado por Bélgica, los Países Bajos y Luxemburgo. Ambas regiones representan similares complejidades en la construcción de un nacionalismo europeo: una diversidad política contemporánea enlazada con un pasado prerromano y post-romano. A pesar de tener conexiones políticas e históricas, el camino de estos dos nacionalismos es significativamente diferente.Palabras clave: Roma, Países Bajos, España, nacionalismo, Europa  


1991 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 125-158 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eleonore Stump

Aquinas is sometimes taken to hold a foundationalist theory of knowledge. So, for example, Nicholas Wolterstorff says, “Foundationalism has been the reigning theory of theories in the West since the high Middle Ages. It can be traced back as far as Aristotle, and since the Middle Ages vast amounts of philosophical thought have been devoted to elaborating and defending it‥ ‥ Aquinas offers one classic version of foundationalism.” And Alvin Plantinga says, “we can get a better understanding of Aquinas … if we see [him] as accepting some version of classical foundationalism. This is a picture or total way of looking at faith, knowledge, justified belief, rationality, and allied topics. This picture has been enormously popular in Western thought; and despite a substantial opposing ground-swell, I think it remains the dominant way of thinking about these topics.”


2019 ◽  
pp. 244-272
Author(s):  
Jennifer Ferriss-Hill

This epilogue traces the themes and concerns of the previous chapters throughout the Ars Poetica's considerable reception history. If the Ars Poetica's poetic qualities have not always been clear to scholars of literature, they seem to have been more evident to the practicing writers who, inspired by Horace's poem, wrote artes poeticae of their own. Indeed, practicing poets have long discerned what many literary scholars have not: that the poem's value lies not so much in its stated contents as in its fine-spun internal unity; in its interest in human nature and the onward march of time; in the importance of criticism—both giving and receiving it—to the artistic process; and in the essential sameness of writing, of making art, and of living, loving, being, and even dying. The argument made in this study for reading the Ars Poetica as a literary achievement in its own right may therefore be viewed as a return to the complex, nuanced ways in which it was already read in the Middle Ages, through the sixteenth century, and into the twenty-first. The authors of the later works examined in this chapter read the Ars Poetica as exemplifying and instantiating the sort of artistry that it opaquely commands, and they reflected this in turn through their own verses.


Author(s):  
Joel Biard

John Major was one of the last great logicians of the Middle Ages. Scottish in origin but Parisian by training, he continued the doctrines and the mode of thinking of fourteenth-century masters like John Buridan and William of Ockham. Using a resolutely nominalist approach, he developed a logic centred on the analysis of terms and their properties, and he applied this method of analysis to discourse in physics and theology. Although he came to oppose excessive dependence on logical subtlety in theology and maintained the authority of Holy Scripture, Major’s work was stubbornly independent of the growing influence of humanism in Europe. Later, he would be regarded as representative of the heavily criticized ‘scholastic spirit’, being referred to disparagingly by Rabelais as well as by later historians such as Villoslada (1938), but at the beginning of the sixteenth century, his teaching influenced an entire generation of students in the fields of logic, physics and theology.


1994 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. T. Rhodes

Martyrs were the first saints and some were among the most popular saints of the Middle Ages. Because it was the manner of theirdeaththat won them their place in heaven, martyrs were a special case; unlike other saints, evidence of heroic virtue in life and miracles were not required. Like the early martyrs, many sixteenth-century English martyrs were immediately recognized as saints by their co-religionists, without reference to judicial processes. But the status of martyr was not popularly accorded automatically to Catholics who died on account of their faith. Despite Southwell's ‘Epitaph’: ‘A Queen I liu'd, now dead I am a Saint/Once MARIE calde; my name now Martir is’, Mary, Queen of Scots, was not generally acclaimed as a martyr, even by Catholics.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document