scholarly journals Medieval Empires and the Culture of Competition

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel England
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Groups ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Demographic Change ◽  
The Political ◽  
Its Analysis ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
The Face ◽  
To Come ◽  
Classical Arabic

Medieval Empires and the Culture of Competition shows how the interactive, confrontational practice of courtly arts helped shape imperial thought in the Middle Ages. Its analysis covers Classical Arabic poetry and official prose, Spanish court documents, Galician Portuguese lyric, and Italian narrative works. The historical span is 950-1350 CE. Scholars of premodern cultures have struggled to reconcile the political violence of the late Middle Ages with the cosmopolitanism of that era’s Islamic and Christian empires. This book argues that medieval thinkers’ most pressing cultural challenge was neither to demonize the foreign, “heathen” other, nor to reverse that trend with an ethos of tolerance. Instead it was to make the court appear as robust as possible in the face of major demographic change and regional war. The ritual of artistic contest allowed elites to come to terms with religious and ethnic groups’ rival claims to legitimacy, and to subsume those claims into an overarching courtly ideal.

scholarly journals “Making the face beautiful”(feature on medieval beauty products)

2020 ◽  
pp. 73-79
Author(s):  
Radivoj Radic
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Medical Texts ◽  
Medieval Medicine ◽  
15Th Century ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
The Face ◽  
Bad Breath ◽  
Ambivalent Relationship ◽  
The Church ◽  
Beauty Products

In the Middle Ages, people had an ambivalent relationship to the beauty products: some were fully supportive of the attempts to beautify oneself, while the others, first and foremost the representatives of the church, frowned upon this notion. This feature represents a show?case of the advice and recipes for beautification from two medical collections created in the late Middle Ages. These are the Byzantine medical treatise (dating from 11th to 14th century) and the collection of Serbian medieval medicine, the so-called Hodoch Code (dating from the end of the 14th or beginning of the 15th century). The treatise is focusing more on the practical advice than theoretical knowledge, and its greatest part is dedicated to pharmacology. Hodoch Code (Hodoski zbornik) is in fact a therapeutic collection, and it consists of diverse medical texts. These collections contain the advice how to make one?s face white, hair black or blond, but most certainly rich in volume, as well as recipes for treating facial lines, warts, freckles, cracked lips or bad breath.

Legal Rights in Scotland

2020 ◽  
pp. 417-449
Author(s):  
Kenneth G C Reid
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Weak Form ◽  
Legal Rights ◽  
Property A ◽  
Dependent Children ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
The Face ◽  
Avoidance Measures ◽  
The Law ◽  
Scottish Government

The rules of mandatory family protection in Scotland date from the late Middle Ages and were a close copy of the rules then (but no longer) in force in England. Originally they comprised two distinct ‘legal rights’ (as they came much later to be known). In the first place, the surviving spouse had a usufruct in the immovable property of the deceased, known as ‘terce’ (for widows) and ‘courtesy’ (for widowers). Courtesy extended to the whole immovable property, terce only to one-third. In the second place, the movable property of the deceased was divided into three equal parts. The surviving spouse had a claim (the ‘relict’s right’ or jus relictae) to one part, and the surviving children to another (‘legitim’). The final one-third (‘dead’s part’) was the testator’s to dispose of in his will. Terce and courtesy were abolished, rather unthinkingly, in 1964. Today, therefore, the surviving spouse and children are protected against disinheritance only in respect of movable property – a weak form of protection made weaker still by the absence of anti-avoidance measures that would prevent testators giving property away during their lifetimes. The law is widely acknowledged to be unsatisfactory, but there is less agreement as to how it should be changed. One view is that legal rights should be extended to immovable property. Another view is that legitim should be replaced by a maintenance claim for dependent children (only). In the face of these competing views, the Scottish Government has recently decided to leave the law unchanged.

scholarly journals The concept “people” in the modern European political thought: Hobbes, Spinoza, Pufendorf

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 8-24
Author(s):  
А. V. Marey
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Natural State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Civil State ◽  
Power Politics ◽  
Political Subject ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Active Subject

The author considers the evolution of the concept “people” in the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, Samuel Pufendorf and Benedict Spinoza. The political thought of Europe in the 17th century demonstrates a conscious turn from the medieval scholastic tradition of thinking about people and power. Politics begins to be thought of as a complex of human ac­tions aimed at achieving certain human goals. This, in turn, leads to the rationalisation of politics and, as a consequence, to the rejection of one of the most powerful mystical and theo­logical abstractions of the late Middle Ages — the concept “people” as a kind of mystical body. Protestant science makes a clear choice in favour of interpreting the concept as an “arti­ficial person”. The author emphasizes that the introduction of the concept “natural state” led to changes in the ontological status of people in political theory. The concept “people” becomes “a flickering subject” that appears during the transition from a natural state to a civil one and disappears when the transition goes in the opposite direction. In a civil state, people become an active subject when they perform the function of the legislator. In other cases, people as a political subject transform into a certain multitude, consisting of separate individuals.

scholarly journals La disuguaglianza economica in area marchigiana: uno studio di lungo periodo (1400-1800)

2020 ◽  
pp. 37-63
Author(s):  
Francesco Ammannati
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Economic Inequality ◽  
The Political ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Fiscal Capacity ◽  
Distribution Of Wealth ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
Long Run ◽  
History Of

The research aimed at bringing new data to the study of inequality in the distribution of wealth in the long run using the fiscal documentation available to many communities of the Marches region over a period covering the late Middle Ages and the full modern age. The political-administrative history of this territory, progressively incorporated into the Papal State, was reflected in an evolution of the methodologies for assessing wealth for tax purposes. Their characteristics have been carefully taken into account and criticized in order to ensure compatibility in time and space. Land registers, “estimi”, "libre", as well as books of “collette”, will be used to describe the fiscal capacity of taxpayers enrolled in these registers and to estimate the dynamics of economic inequality.

scholarly journals Signorie e relazioni interstatali. Pratiche, legittimazione e contestazione del potere locale lungo la frontiera alpina dello stato di Milano (XV secolo)

2021 ◽  
pp. 67-87
Author(s):  
Massimo Della Misericordia
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Political Competition ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cultural Minority ◽  
15Th Century ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Local Actors ◽  
Individual Protection ◽  
The Relationship

This essay analyzes the ways in which rural lordship was legitimized, maintained and sometimes contested in the late Middle Ages. The focus is not on the local societies and the political competition within the regional state, but rather on the position of seigneurial power in the interstices of international relations. Specifically, the dynamics of the frontier allowed the lords to enforce their power, but produced situations that put their authority in risk, providing opportunities for their subjects to contrast it. Political brokerage is the key to exploring the competition and the relationship between a variety of local actors and the state authorities. The source I selected is the Carteggio sforzesco, consisting of the written correspondence between these protagonists. From this viewpoint and thanks to records rich in narrative and descriptive contents, I will try to reconstruct economic tensions, military instability, the need for diplomatic agreements and for individual protection, that define the relationship between the Duchy of Milan, Valais, Switzerland and Grisons. Finally I will go into depth in the case-study of Val Formazza, where the domination of the lords family was in decline during the 15th Century, while local protagonists of this diversified local world – highlanders of lower social conditions settled in a peripheral valley forming an ethno-cultural minority of German speakers – were capable.

scholarly journals 'A Thing of Beauty is a Joy Forever’

2018 ◽  
Vol 66 (3) ◽  
pp. 254-269
Author(s):  
Frits Scholten
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Central Image ◽  
Private Devotion ◽  
To Come ◽  
Late Fifteenth

A somewhat neglected late fifteenth-century panel from the collection of the Amsterdam-Swiss surgeon and art collector Otto Lanz, which he cherished, is investigated here. This article argues persuasively that the panel is a devotional tabernacle, intended for private devotion, of a kind that often hung on the wall of a bedchamber in the late Middle Ages. The missing central image may have been a Virgin and Child or a Pietà. Lanz attributed the carving to the woodcarver Antonio di Neri Barili or Barile (1453-1516). Barile was the most important woodcarver in Siena, who worked for distinguished clients, among them the Piccolomini family, which was responsible for introducing the Roman all’antica style to Siena shortly after 1500. The tabernacle contains the family’s coat of arms and various motifs that correspond to documented work by Barili, and was carved in his characteristic crisp, open style. If this panel is indeed by Barili, it would be the smallest surviving object in its own right to come out of his workshop.

scholarly journals Nobility

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Violet Soen
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Methodological Problem ◽  
State Building ◽  
Religious Change ◽  
The Past ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Social Composition ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Face ◽  
Anthropological Approach

“The” nobility is a slippery fish to catch, especially for the Renaissance and Reformation era, here understood as the two centuries between 1450 and 1650. Historians inevitably face the methodological problem of whether to define “nobility” according to juridical, social or cultural criteria. Over the past decades, they have abandoned a legal and essentialist interpretation in favor of a sociological and anthropological approach. Even if legal, fiscal, and social privileges persisted in “the making of” the nobility during the ancien régime, it is now widely acknowledged that the social composition of the group constantly changed, leading to an immense diversity among its members across Europe and the colonies. Likewise, it is accepted today that both the Renaissance and Reformation profoundly changed the cultural and ideological concept of “nobility” itself. These novel insights replace the older 19th-century paradigm claiming that from the late Middle Ages onward the nobility was in long-lasting crisis, losing its power and status to a rising bourgeoisie. Instead of this linear interpretation, a new consensus emerged around a persistent rise and decline among nobilities (not of the group as such), and their remarkable resilience in the face of state-building, religious change, and economic upheaval between 1450 and 1650.

scholarly journals Modernity and the Jewish Stigma. Julian Tuwim, Alfred Döblin and Kurt Tucholsky: Biographies and Work

2017 ◽  
Vol 36 (6) ◽  
pp. 69-98
Author(s):  
Monika Bednarczuk
Keyword(s):  
Political Violence ◽  
Orthodox Jews ◽  
The Political ◽  
Heinrich Heine ◽  
German Jews ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Face ◽  
Alfred Döblin ◽  
The One ◽  
The Masses

The paper deals with biographical, ideological and artistic links between Julian Tuwim, Alfred Döblin and Kurt Tucholsky. On the one hand, the basis of comparison are biographical similarities, the Jewish origin of those three writers, their family dramas, the experience of politically opressive school, the trauma of revolution or war, and the exile to name just a few. On the other hand, the article demonstrates the ways the modernity has influenced the attitudes and texts of Döblin, Tucholsky and Tuwim. While talking about modernity, the author focuses on such phenomena as secularisation and urbanisation processes, mass political movements, and new cultural challenges.Tuwim, Döblin and Tucholsky were born into assimilated Jewish families. Their perspective on the stereotypical Jews (the orthodox Jews as well as Jewish bankers or manufacturers) is marked with antipathy, or even contempt. The writers’ ambivalence towards the diapora and towards their own origin illustrate “Jewish self-hatred”; however, all three authors change their opinion on Jewry in the face of the growing anti-Semitic and Nazi danger, and especially the Holocaust. Döblin is proud of being Jewish after his visit to Poland in 1924, Tucholsky warns German Jews against the consequences of their passivitivy, and Tuwim publishes in 1944 his agitating manifesto We, Polish Jews. Last but not least, the three authors go into exile because of their Jewish ancestry and sociocultural activities. Therefore, it is no coincidence thatone cannot help having associations with Heinrich Heine: his biography can be interpreted as a prefiguration of a Jewish artist’s biography.Furthermore, Tuwim, Döblin and Tucholsky are notably sensitive to social questions, and their sensitivity to such issues results to some extent from their difficult childhood and youth. Especially significant seem in that respect family conflicts and the moving from city to city, since such experiences increase the feeling of loneliness and the vulnerability to depression. Nevertheless, Döblin, Tucholsky and Tuwim come with impetus into the cultural life of Germany and Poland and work in the areas of literature, cabaret (satire) as well as journalism. They share sympathy for the political left and fears of the orthodox communism. They are simultaneously advocates and ardent critics of great cities. They pay attention to new phenomena (the popularity of cars, the role of the press, the new morality) and react to them. Their aim is creating a culture which appeals to the masses and educates them in a non-intrusive way. However, the awareness of their own intellectual superiority imposes distance towards lower social groups. The distance stems, firstly, from the universal ambivalence artists feel towards the masses, and secondly, from the ideological moderation characteristic of petit bourgoisie and of the political centre. In general, Döblin, Tucholsky and Tuwim are idealists who hope for a humanitarian world which is impossible in the era of extrem political violence leading to the Holocaust.

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