scholarly journals Elements of sociology of the Black Death (1340-1350s). Inequalities before pandemic death in the Middle Ages : “chantries”, “private” priests, lower “surgeons”, and other farces of the rich.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Camille Akmut
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Black Death ◽  
Fixed Income ◽  
Comfort Zone ◽  
The Poor ◽  
First Category ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Experimental History ◽  
The Middle Ages

Medieval scholars, in all of their expertise, often fail to see thegreater sociological rules governing their subjects in spite of having assembledall the necessary material themselves. In the following - based on their works -we remind of the great inequalities in times of pandemics, taking the events ofthe 14th+ c. Black Death as exemplary case. Not everyone was equal in frontof death : the major divisions between ”beneficed” and ”regular” priests arerecalled (they respectively received a fixed income, while the others made vowsof poverty and subsisted on offerings), as well as the institutions that emergedaround that time - ”chantry”, ”private” services, etc. : the rich sought a faster,surer way to heaven, while the first category of priests sought a faster wayaway from death - the poor, and the working-class, and their regular priestsstayed behind, joined in common death. (Experimental history : a historianand sociologist once again steps out of their comfort zone, so as to make othersuncomfortable.)

Resistance to Tithes in the Middle Ages

1962 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 172-185 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giles Constable
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Income Tax ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Medieval Church ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The Middle Ages

The system of compulsory tithes in the Middle Ages has long been used by protestant and liberal historians as a stick with which to beat the medieval Church. ‘This most harassing and oppressive form of taxation’, wrote H. C. Lea in his well-known History of the Inquisition, ‘had long been the cause of incurable trouble, aggravated by the rapacity with which it was enforced, even to the pitiful collections of the gleaner’. Von Inama-Sternegg remarked on the growing hatred of tithes in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries, especially among the small free landholders, ‘upon whom the burden of tithes must have fallen most heavily’. Gioacchino Volpe said that tithes were ‘the more hated because they oppressed the rich less than the poor, the dependents on seigneurial estates less than the small free proprietors to whose ruin they contributed…. At that time tithes were both an ecclesiastical and secular oppression, a double offence against religious sentiment and popular misery’. G. G. Coulton, writing before the introduction in England of an income tax at a rate of over ten per cent., proclaimed that before the Reformation tithes ‘constituted a land tax, income tax and death duty far more onerous than any known to modern times, and proportionately unpopular’.

Venantius Fortunatus, Poems, edited and translated by Michael Roberts. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 46. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, pp. 944.

Mediaevistik ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 390-392
Author(s):  
Raymond J. Cormier
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Harvard University ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Cultural Climate ◽  
The Middle Ages

It doesn’t pay to sing about the poor! Literary patronage in the Middle Ages is as old as poetry itself. The aristocratic context guaranteed a rich intellectual focus, whether we consider the poetry of praise or blame, and whether fulsome or just simple. Authorized compositions offered to a patron implied a hope for favorable compensation, and with his (or her) audience assured, the ceremonial promotion of the kingdom by the poet brought glory to the sponsor. Following a benefactor’s tastes within a cultural climate of liberality and magnanimity might bring unimaginable rewards to a court poet. A quick example from the life of Fortunatus: the renowned Gregory of Tours rewarded the poet with gifts, such as an estate on the Vienne River.

Regional Identities and Cultures of Medieval Jews

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Regional Identity ◽  
Asia Minor ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Rich Variety ◽  
Regional Cultures ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The Middle Ages

Though the existence of Jewish regional cultures is widely known, the origins of the most prominent groups, Ashkenaz and Sepharad, are poorly understood, and the rich variety of other regional Jewish identities is often overlooked. Yet all these subcultures emerged in the Middle Ages. Scholars contributing to the present study were invited to consider how such regional identities were fashioned, propagated, reinforced, contested, and reshaped — and to reflect on the developments, events, or encounters that made these identities manifest. They were asked to identify how subcultural identities proved to be useful, and the circumstances in which they were deployed. The resulting volume spans the ninth to sixteenth centuries, and explores Jewish cultural developments in western Europe, the Balkans, North Africa, and Asia Minor. In its own way, each chapter considers factors — demographic, geographical, historical, economic, political, institutional, legal, intellectual, theological, cultural, and even biological — that led medieval Jews to conceive of themselves, or to be perceived by others, as bearers of a discrete Jewish regional identity. Notwithstanding the singularity of each chapter, they collectively attest to the inherent dynamism of Jewish regional identities.

scholarly journals Procesy i egzekucje „żywych trupów” przed sądami miejskimi i wiejskimi w XVI–XVIII wieku – przyczynek do wierzeń w magia posthuma na Śląsku

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (4 (1)) ◽  
pp. 77-92
Author(s):  
Daniel Wojtucki
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Expert Witnesses ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Living Dead ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Middle Ages

There are references reaching back to the Middle Ages, regarding the fear of the “undead” or “living dead” who would rise from their graves in a local cemetery to haunt and harm the community. The fear of the “undead” was extremely strong, and the entailing hysteria often affected entire communities. In the 16th to the 18th century, in Silesia, effective forms of coping with the harmful deceased were developed. Analysing the preserved source material, we are able to determine that the basic actions involved finding the grave of the “undead” in the cemetery, exhuming the corpse and destroying it. However, this did not always mean the total annihilation of the poor man’s corpse. The trial and execution of the corpse of a person suspected of the harmful activity against the living took place observing almost the same rules as in the case of the living. Apart from the authorities, who usually commissioned local jurors to handle the situation, opinions and advice were also sought from the clergy as well as gravediggers and executioners. The last were considered to be experts of sorts and were often called upon to see corpses of the suspected dead. In the analysed cases of posthumous magic (magia posthuma) in Silesia, we deal with two directions of handling the corpse accused of a harmful posthumous activity. In both cases, the main decision was made to remove such corpses from the cemetery’s area. Costs of the trial and execution of the “undead” were considerable. They included expenses incurred due to rather frequent court hearings at which sometimes dozens of witnesses were heard, payments to expert witnesses, payments to guards watching graves, costs of legal instructions, services of gravediggers who would dig up suspicious graves, and, finally, the remuneration of executioners and their people. In the second half of the 18th century, despite relevant decrees issued by supreme authorities, trials and executions of the dead were not completely abandoned.

scholarly journals The Parish Clergy of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries: The Alexander Prize Essay, 1911–12

1912 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 89-128
Author(s):  
H. G. Richardson
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Black Death ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Economic Forces ◽  
Parish Clergy ◽  
Parish Priests ◽  
Prize Essay ◽  
The Middle Ages

Until the thirteenth century records touching the parish clergy are scanty, but thereafter they increase in bulk and, with the fourteenth century, there exist, side by side, a number of literary works which afford more than a passing glance at their lives and deeds. The parish priests and clerks of these centuries were not perhaps typical of the mediaeval period, since no century or centuries will afford a type of any class or institution which will be true for the whole of the Middle Ages; and it is possible that the tenthcentury parish and its people resembled the parish and people of the fourteenth century as little—or as much—as the Elizabethan parish resembled the parish of the present day. The changes that affected so profoundly the organisation of the manor during the course of the Middle Ages did not leave its counterpart, the parish, unaltered; and the same economic forces that helped to make the villein a copyholder and serfdom an anachronism, helped also to raise the chaplain's wages from five to eight marks within thirty years of the Black Death. But although the

scholarly journals Mobility, mortality, and the middle ages: Identification of migrant individuals in a 14th century black death cemetery population

2012 ◽  
Vol 150 (2) ◽  
pp. 210-222 ◽  
Author(s):  
E.J. Kendall ◽  
J. Montgomery ◽  
J.A. Evans ◽  
C. Stantis ◽  
V. Mueller
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Black Death ◽  
14Th Century ◽  
The Middle Ages

The crystal reveals the whole: medieval dreamscapes and cinematic space as virtual media

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-112
Author(s):  
Alison Griffiths
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Thought Experiment ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
Roman De La Rose ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
Cinematic Space ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The Middle Ages

This article examines the rich visual culture of the medieval period in order to better understand dreaming as a kind of visual thought experiment, one in which ideas associated with cinema, such as embodied viewing, narrative sequencing, projection, and sensory engagement, are palpable in a range of visual and literary works. The author explores the theoretical connections between the oneiric qualities of cinema and the visual culture of medieval dreams, dealing in turn with the following themes: (i) media and mediation; (ii) projection and premonition; (iii) virtual spatiality; and (iv) automata and other animated objects. The wide swath of medieval literary dream texts, with their mobile perspectives, sensory plentitude, and gnostic mission, resonate with the cinematic in the structuring of the gaze. Investigating the codes of medieval culture provides us with an unusually rich episteme for thinking about how the dreamscapes of the Middle Ages evoke media dispositifs. Opening up these thought lines across distinct eras can help us extrapolate similarities around ways of imagining objects, spaces, sensations of embodied viewing or immersion, reminding us that our contemporary cinematic and digital landscapes are not divorced from earlier ways of seeing and believing. Whether stoking religious fear and veneration or providing sensual pleasure as in Le Roman de la Rose, the dreamworlds of the Middle Ages have bequeathed us a number of an extraordinarily rich creative works that are the imaginative building blocks of media worlds-in-the-making, as speculative in many ways as current discourses around new media.

Paul Kersten. The Bookbinder’s Role in the Development of Decorative Paper

2017 ◽  
Vol 62 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 41-46
Author(s):  
Helma Schaefer
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Mass Production ◽  
Art Nouveau ◽  
Paper Production ◽  
Art Deco ◽  
Poor State ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
The Middle Ages

In her article, the author discusses the merits of the German craft bookbinder Paul Kersten (1865-1943) in the development of modern decorative papers as an expression of artistic individuality in the field of applied arts. From the Middle Ages, decorative paper had been used in decoration and bookbinding. Bookbinding workshops had traditionally made starched marbled paper. The interest of Paul Kersten, coming from a bookbinding family, in these papers had already dated from his youth. During his travels abroad, he was aware of the poor state of the bookbinding craft, which was affected by the mass production of books and book bindings as well as the industrialisation of paper production at the end of the 19th century. Kersten helped to introduce Art Nouveau into the design of German bookbinding and the methods of the modern production of decorative papers. At first, he worked as a manager in German paper manufactures and then as a teacher of bookbinding. His work was later oriented towards Symbolic Expressionism and he also tried to cope with the style of Art Deco.

scholarly journals Reading the Bible through the ages?Historical and hermeneutical perspectives

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dirkie Smit
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Early Church ◽  
The Bible ◽  
God's Word ◽  
History Of ◽  
Impossible Task ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Bible Reading ◽  
The Middle Ages

In this contribution the seemingly straightforward slogan espoused by Biblica, namely, “Transforming lives through God’s Word” is complicated by placing it within the context of the rich, multi-layered and complex history of Bible-reading. Fully aware that it is an impossible task to construe the history of the reading of the Bible, offers a few broad strokes describing Biblical reception and interpretation, beginning with the complex genesis of the Bible, extending through the Early Church, the Middle Ages, The Renaissance and Reformation, the time of Enlightenment and rise of Modernity, the emergence of ecumenical hermeneutics in the 20th century, and the contemporary conflicts in hermeneutic perspectives. Throughout the essay, the question is asked – in various ways and with different responses – what “Transforming lives through God’s Word” could mean.

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