scholarly journals Tackling Early Medieval Dietary Transitions Using a Hierarchical and Multi-isotope Approach

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sam Leggett
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Resource Use ◽  
Human Ecology ◽  
Cultural Interaction ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Human Environment ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
Environmental Transitions ◽  
First Millennium

Socio-environmental transitions during the first millennium AD had wide-ranging impacts across Europe which have interesting archaeological and palaeoecological implications. This paper uses published and new multi-tissue, multi-isotope data from across Europe to look at changing resource use from c. 350-1200 AD. It highlights cross-cultural interaction at a broad scale as well as focussing on these patterns with Early Medieval England as a regional case study. By using a hierarchical approach, it teases apart human-environment interactions with significant implications for changing foodways in Early Medieval Europe. It highlights how more integrated methodologies allow for better models of human ecology in the Early Middle Ages.

The Julian Calendar and the Problem of the Equinoxes in the Early Middle Ages

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Philipp E. Nothaft
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Medieval Literature ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Observational Methods ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Julian Calendar ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
Solar Astronomy

This chapter familiarizes readers with the ancient back-story of the Julian calendar and describes how one of the central problems inherent in this calendar—the drift of the equinoxes and solstices caused by an overestimation of the length of the tropical year—manifested itself in medieval literature until the end of the eleventh century. It also explores how the development of the computus genre in seventh-century Ireland was instrumental in preserving knowledge of the Western calendar’s Roman-pagan roots. The final two sections show how the existence of diverging traditions for the dates of the equinoxes and solstices in the Julian calendar created an important context for the practice of solar astronomy in early medieval Europe, which included the use of observational methods.

Educated Wandering Jews, 800–1250

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maristella Botticini ◽  
Zvi Eckstein
Keyword(s):  
Iberian Peninsula ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Byzantine Empire ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Jewish Diaspora ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
Business Opportunities ◽  
Vast Territory

This chapter shows that once the Jews became literate, urban, and engaged in skilled occupations, they began migrating within the vast territory under Muslim rule—stretching from the Iberian Peninsula to India during the eighth through the twelfth centuries, and from the Byzantine Empire to western Europe via Italy and within western Europe in the ninth through the thirteenth centuries. In early medieval Europe, the revival of trade concomitant with the Commercial Revolution and the growth of an urban and commercial economy paralleled the vast urbanization and the growth of trade that had occurred in the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates four to five centuries earlier. The Jewish diaspora during the early Middle Ages was mainly the outcome of literate Jewish craftsmen, shopkeepers, traders, scholars, teachers, physicians, and moneylenders migrating in search of business opportunities to reap returns on their investment in literacy and education.

“Let Them Make Him Duke to Rule that People”: TheLaw of the Bavariansand Regime Change in Early Medieval Europe

2012 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 865-899
Author(s):  
Jonathan Couser
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Regime Change ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Law

The early Middle Ages produced a series of law codes for the new “barbarian” kingdoms of Europe, which succeeded the western Roman Empire. These law codes were often inspired by the precedent and sometimes the content of Roman vulgar law as well as the customs of the respective peoples for whom they were written and the interests of their rulers. The making of law could often play a vital role in the stabilization of kingdoms, especially under new rulers. Early medieval secular lawmaking falls into three broad periods: the early royal laws of the Frankish, Burgundian, and Visigothic peoples in the fifth and sixth centuries; the interrelated composition of Lombard, south German, and perhaps also early Anglo-Saxon law in the seventh and eighth centuries; and the writing up of the last “ethnic” laws for peoples subject to Charlemagne's empire, such as Frisians and Saxons, in order to accommodate them into a multiethnic empire committed to the principle of personality of the law. The subject of this article, the law of the Bavarians (Lex Baiuvariorum, hereafter abbreviated “Lb”), belongs to the second of these stages. However, scholars have never reached consensus as to the date of its composition nor where it was created. This has inhibited the use of the Lb for any but they most general discussion of Bavarian society. This article will review the evidence for the Lb's date and place of composition, to suggest that we can plausibly identify them more precisely than has been done, and therefore argue that the distinctive features of this text can be tied to specific political needs.

scholarly journals ‘Conversion’ to Islam in Early Medieval Europe: Historical and Archaeological Perspectives on Arab and Northern Eurasian Interactions

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (7) ◽  
pp. 544
Author(s):  
Sara Ann Knutson ◽  
Caitlin Ellis
Keyword(s):  
General Public ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
Northern Eurasia ◽  
Religious Change ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Conversion To Islam ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
Economic Exchanges ◽  
Lines Of Evidence

In recent years, the influence of Muslims and Islam on developments in medieval Europe has captured the attention of scholars and the general public alike. Nevertheless, ‘conversion’ to Islam remains a challenging subject for historical research and demands more transdisciplinary collaborations. This article examines early medieval interactions between Muslim Arabs and Northern and Eastern Europeans as a case study for whether some individuals in Northern Eurasia ‘converted’ to Islam. More importantly, we address some key examples and lines of evidence that demonstrate why the process of ‘conversion’ to Islam is not more visible in the historical and archaeological records of Northern Eurasia. We find that, despite the well-established evidence for economic exchanges between the Islamic World and Northern Eurasia, the historical and material records are much more complex, but not entirely silent, on the issue of religious change. We also conclude that religious connectivity and exchanges, including with Islam, were common in early medieval Northern Eurasia, even if it is difficult in most cases to identify conclusive instances of ‘conversion’ to Islam.

Penitents and Their Proxies: Penance for Others in Early Medieval Europe

2017 ◽  
Vol 86 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gavin Fort
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
Liturgical Texts

This article investigates the religious practice of suffering for others in the early Middle Ages. In proxy penance, one person completed a penitential work for another, who received the spiritual benefit. This practice was based on the idea that one person could stand in for another to bear his burden. Using penitential, conciliar, liturgical, and epistolary sources, I uncover two types of proxy penance. First, priests shared in the penance of those who confessed to them. Liturgical texts include Masses in which the priest completes the penance for someone who could not complete it himself. Penitential texts admonish the priest to “share in the foulness” with the sinner in order to bring about the remission of his sin. Second, there was both a promotion and a criticism of proxy fasting among the laity. Thissic et nonrhythm shows that early medieval penitential culture could not control the demand for proxy penance. Some attention is also paid to the practice of proxy penance in the eleventh-century monastic milieu of Peter Damian. This article broadens the scope of current scholarship on penance by focusing on its substitutionary ability. Also, this article explores the changing notions of and metaphors about sin in this period—from medical to economic—that fueled proxy activity.

Sanctity and secularity in the early Irish church

1973 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 21-37
Author(s):  
Kathleen Hughes
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Outer Edge ◽  
Social Organisation ◽  
Early Church ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
The West ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
The World

Ireland was odd in the early middle ages. She lay on the outer edge of the world, the survivor of that Celtic civilisation which had once covered much of the west. She had never immediately known the pervading influence of Rome, which continued in so many ways for so long after the Roman empire collapsed. Christianity had reached her rather early (there were enough christians to make it worth while to send a continental bishop, Palladius, in 431) and it came before many of the developments which determined the nature of monasticism in early medieval Europe. Ireland’s political and social organisation were somewhat different from those of the Germanic peoples of the west; and though the early church in Ireland had an episcopal, diocesan structure, within two hundred years or so of its inception it had been fundamentally modified by native Irish laws and institutions. It is therefore not surprising to find that both Ireland’s sanctity and her secularity had peculiar features.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans Hummer
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Alternative Approach ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
Anthropological Critique ◽  
The Middle Ages

The Introduction sets out the epistemology of studying kinship in the Middle Ages. It proposes that investigations of medieval kinship have been frustrated because researchers have assumed that kinship is a human universal which can be retroactively and safely applied to the analysis of different times and places. It sketches David Schneider’s anthropological critique that kinship studies have been based on biogenetic and genealogical assumptions of the modern West that are fundamentally alien to the societies they seek to understand. It puts forth an alternative approach by proposing a method for identifying indigenous conceptions of kinship which can help illuminate the place of kinship within the societal cosmologies of early medieval Europe.

Graphic Signs of Authority in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, 300-900

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ildar Garipzanov
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Political Communication ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Visual Spatial ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Medieval Europe

This book presents a cultural history of graphic signs such as the sign of the cross, christograms, monograms, and other graphic devices, examining how they were employed to relate to and interact with the supernatural world, and to represent and communicate secular and divine authority in the late antique Mediterranean and early medieval Europe. It analyses its graphic visual material with reference to specific historical contexts and to relevant late antique and early medieval texts as a complementary way of looking at the cultural, religious, and socio-political transition from the late Graeco-Roman world to that of medieval Europe. This monograph treats such graphic signs as typologically similar forms of visual communication, reliant on the visual-spatial ability of human cognition to process object-like graphic forms as proxies for concepts and abstract notions—an ability that is commonly discussed in modern visual studies with reference to categories such as visual thinking, graphic visualization, and graphicacy. Thanks to this human ability, the aforementioned graphic signs were actively employed in religious and socio-political communication in the first millennium ad. This approach allows for a synthetic study of graphic visual evidence from a wide range of material media that have rarely been studied collectively, including various mass-produced items and unique objects of art, architectural monuments, and epigraphic inscriptions, as well as manuscripts and charters. As such, this book will serve as a timely reference tool for historians, art historians, archaeologists, epigraphists, manuscript scholars, and numismatists as well as the informed general public.

scholarly journals THE CITY SPEAKS: CITIES, CITIZENS, AND CIVIC DISCOURSE IN LATE ANTIQUITY AND THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES

Traditio ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 75 ◽  
pp. 1-37
Author(s):  
MEGAN WELTON
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
Civic Discourse ◽  
Ultimate Fate ◽  
The City

This article investigates how civic discourse connects the virtue of citizens and the fortunes of cities in a variety of late antique and early medieval sources in the post-Roman west. It reveals how cities assume human qualities through the rhetorical technique of personification and, crucially, the ways in which individuals and communities likewise are described with civic terminology. It also analyzes the ways in which the city and the civic community are made to speak to one another at times of crisis and celebration. By examining a diverse range of sources including epideictic poetry, chronicles, hagiographies, and epigraphic inscriptions, this article addresses multiple modes of late antique and early medieval thought that utilize civic discourse. It first explores how late antique and early medieval authors employed civic discourse in non-urban contexts, including how they conceptualized the interior construction of an individual's mind and soul as a fortified citadel, how they praised ecclesiastical and secular leaders as city structures, and how they extended civic terminology to the preeminently non-urban space of the monastery. The article then examines how personified cities spoke to their citizens and how citizens could join their cities in song through urban procession. Civic encomia and invective further illustrate how medieval authors sought to unify the virtuous conduct of citizens with the ultimate fate of the city's security. The article concludes with a historical and epigraphic case study of two programs of mural construction in ninth-century Rome. Ultimately, this article argues that the repeated and emphatic exhortations to civic virtue provide access to how late antique and early medieval authors sought to intertwine the fate of the city with the conduct of her citizens, in order to persuade their audiences to act in accordance with the precepts of virtue.

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