On the History of the Jews in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Poland

1997 ◽  
pp. 287-318
Author(s):  
Israel M. Ta-Shma
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Community ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Direct Descendant ◽  
Religious Learning ◽  
History Of ◽  
Hasidei Ashkenaz

This chapter traces the history of the Jews in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Poland. Jewish traders of Ashkenazi origin passed through Poland on their way to Russia on business as early as the first half of the eleventh century. The Jewish traders who passed through Poland in the twelfth century included scholars and other individuals versed in religious learning. By the last quarter of the twelfth century, there was a well-established Jewish community in Cracow, probably a direct descendant of the community whose existence was recorded some 150 years earlier. The chapter then considers a variety of Hebrew sources that reveal more about the existence of an admittedly sparse Jewish presence, including Jews well versed in Torah, in thirteenth-century Poland; about the continuous existence of this presence throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; and, above all, about its Ashkenazi origins and its special, ongoing contacts with the circles of ḥasidei Ashkenaz in Germany. The extent of the links between Russia–Poland and Ashkenaz, particularly eastern Ashkenaz, was much greater than believed up to the present. Moreover, these links were essentially persistent and permanent, rather than a series of random occurrences.

The Conquest in Historical Writing from the Late Thirteenth Century

2020 ◽  
pp. 173-208
Author(s):  
George Garnett
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Old English ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
The Third ◽  
History Of

Chapter 5 analyses three genres of historical writing about England in the later middle ages: histories of individual churches, universal histories, and histories of the kingdom. It confirms the provisional judgement reached in Chapter 4: that with respect to the Conquest and earlier England, historical writing fossilized. There were, however, exceptions, most of which could be categorized in the first genre. These are examined in great detail, and follow on from the treatment of the unusual episodes recorded during the thirteenth century at St Augustine’s, Canterbury and Burton Abbey which were considered in Chapter 4. The first is the problematic, neglected Historia Croylandensis attributed to (Pseudo-)Ingulf, which is for the most part a fabrication of the fourteenth or fifteenth century, but which masquerades as the work of the abbot at Crowland at the end of the eleventh century, and therefore as contemporaneous with the great post-Conquest histories of England. The second is the early fourteenth-century Lichfield Chronicle, written by Alan of Ashbourn. The third is a general history of England conventionally attributed to John Brompton, abbot of Jervaulx in the early fifteenth century, and perhaps written at the abbey. All three pay a great deal of attention to (different) twelfth-century compilations of Old English and immediately post-Conquest law. This unusual characteristic accounts for their exceptional interest in the Conquest. The chapter also includes a briefer discussion of the more conventional histories into which condensed earlier discussions of the Conquest were inserted.

The Social and Cultural Background of Rashi’s Work

Rashi ◽  
2012 ◽  
pp. 3-11
Author(s):  
Avraham Grossman
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Community ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Central Government ◽  
Cultural Background ◽  
First Century ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Political Status ◽  
The Social ◽  
Religious Polemics

This chapter discusses the social and cultural background of Rashi's work. According to evidence preserved in the literary accounts and archaeological findings, Jews began to settle in what is now France during Roman times, in the first century CE. That settlement continued uninterrupted until Rashi's time. In general, Jews continued to do well in France. Nevertheless, the weakness of the central government and the ascendancy of local fiefdoms meant that their social and political status differed in each of the feudal states that made up eleventh-century France, depending upon the good will of the local rulers. Two developments during the eleventh and twelfth centuries influenced Jewish economic and intellectual life and the internal organization of the Jewish community: the growth of cities and the European intellectual renaissance. The chapter then looks at the Jewish community in Troyes and the Jewish centre in Champagne; the twelfth-century renaissance; and the Jewish–Christian religious polemics.

The Merovingian monastery of St Evroul in the light of conflicting traditions

1972 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 31-40
Author(s):  
Marjorie Chibnall
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
Archaeological Evidence ◽  
Documentary Sources ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Historical Truth ◽  
Almost All ◽  
Old Men

Historians of early monasticism in Frankish Gaul either have little to say about the monastery founded by St Evroul or, like Dom Laporte, devote their attention to a discussion of the probable date of his life. The disappearance of almost all early documentary sources is one reason for this: there was certainly a break in the occupation of the site for perhaps half the century between the destruction of the monastery in the tenth century and its refoundation in 1050, and only one charter, dated 900, was rescued and copied in the eleventh century. The fact that there has been no systematic excavation of the site, so that archaeological evidence of buildings before the thirteenth-century church is lacking, is another. Early annals and reliable lives of other saints have nothing at all to say on the subject. The first historian to tackle it, Orderic Vitalis, writing in the early twelfth century, had to admit that he could discover nothing about the abbots for the four hundred years after St Evroul; and he had to draw on the memories and tales of the old men he knew, both in the monastery and in the villages round about. Needless to say he harvested a luxuriant crop of legends and traditions of all kinds. The problem of the modern historian is to winnow a few grains of historical truth out of the stories that he garnered, and the hagiographical traditions, some of which he did not know.

The Library at Monte Cassino

2020 ◽  
pp. 788-804
Author(s):  
Francis Newton
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Constantine The African ◽  
History Of

This chapter surveys the history of the library at Monte Cassino from the earliest known manuscripts beginning with the time of St. Benedict in the sixth century, continuing through the better Carolingian period and the monastery’s Golden Age in the eleventh century under Abbots Desiderius and Oderisius, and ending in the thirteenth century. Illustrious teachers and writers, including Paul the Deacon, Alberic, Alfanus, Constantine the African, Amatus, and Peter the Deacon, are discussed, as is the abbey’s production of important classical and patristic texts.

‘O Hebraic People!’

2020 ◽  
pp. 165-183
Author(s):  
Ruth Nisse
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Community ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Hebrew Text ◽  
Social Injustice ◽  
Literary Language ◽  
Literary Transmission

When Chaucer wrote his anti-Judaic Prioress’s Tale, there had been no Jews in England for roughly a century. Nevertheless, the loss of the small but vital twelfth and thirteenth-century Jewish community—and with it Hebrew as a literary language—has implications for Chaucer’s place in a polyglot England. This chapter concerns the Anglo-Hebrew grammarian and poet Berekhiah ha-Nakdan, who composed, among other works, a translation of Adelard of Bath’s Natural Questions and a collection of beast fables, translated from Latin and French sources. The Fox Fables, a Hebrew text from the Angevin cultural moment of the twelfth century, touches on many of the themes of language, literary transmission, and social injustice that later interested Chaucer.

The Liber Theoreumacie (1214) and the Early History of the Quadrans Vetus

2020 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-74
Author(s):  
C. Philipp E. Nothaft
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Critical Edition ◽  
Graphical Method ◽  
Early History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Practical Geometry

The Liber theoreumacie is a neglected work of practical geometry, written in Strasbourg in 1214, which sheds valuable light on the study and practice of astronomy in early thirteenth-century Europe. In this article, I focus on the first two chapters of Book IV, which both deal with the construction of horary instruments. The first of these chapters contains the earliest known account of the type of universal horary quadrant known as quadrans vetus, which is here given a biblical pedigree by labelling it the “sundial of Ahaz.” The second chapter describes a graphical method of inscribing hour markings on the surface of an astrolabe’s alidade, which appears to have been introduced into Latin Europe by the twelfth-century translator John of Seville. A critical edition and translation of the relevant passages will conclude the article.

Before and After the Eleventh Century AD in the Territory of Sagalassos

2020 ◽  
pp. 76-97
Author(s):  
Eva Kaptijn ◽  
Marc Waelkens
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
South West ◽  
Before And After ◽  
New Locations ◽  
History Of ◽  
Byzantine Period ◽  
Settlement Evolution ◽  
Ceramic Studies

This chapter discusses the settlement evolution in the territory of Sagalassos (south-west Turkey) from the start of the Byzantine period until the thirteenth century when Sagalassos was ultimately abandoned and habitation moved to new locations in and around the modern village of Ağlasun. Problems regarding the archaeological recognition characterize the Byzantine material culture of the region. Recent excavations at Sagalassos together with focused ceramic studies and ongoing intensive surveys are changing this and providing insights into a history of habitation that is not uniform within the territory and that is sometimes at odds with processes occurring in Anatolia at large.

The Theory of Natural Consequence

Vivarium ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 56 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 340-366
Author(s):  
Christopher J. Martin
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Natural Consequence ◽  
History Of ◽  
Connexive Logic ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Special Case

Abstract The history of thinking about consequences in the Middle Ages divides into three periods. During the first of these, from the eleventh to the middle of the twelfth century, and the second, from then until the beginning of the fourteenth century, the notion of natural consequence played a crucial role in logic, metaphysics, and theology. The first part of this paper traces the development of the theory of natural consequence in Abaelard’s work as the conditional of a connexive logic with an equivalent connexive disjunction and the crisis precipitated by the discovery of inconsistency in this system. The second part considers the accounts of natural consequence given in the thirteenth century as a special case of the standard modal definition of consequence, one for which the principle ex impossibili quidlibet does not hold, in logics in which disjunction is understood extensionally.

The Organisation of the Scottish Church in the Twelfth Century

1947 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 135-149 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Morgan
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Transition Period ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
North East ◽  
The North ◽  
History Of ◽  
Scottish History ◽  
Special Studies

It is well known that organisation of bishoprics and parishes came late to the greater part of Scotland, beginning probably with the gradual spread of Norman influence in the late eleventh century and becoming marked in the time of David I. Before that time the Celtic church was predominant in the region between Forth and Spey, which was the main seat of the monarchy, and there were strong Celtic influences in the Highlands, Clydesdale and Galloway. The church was mainly monastic and missionary with religious communities serving wide areas; though in addition Skene has hinted at the existence of tribal churches in the north-east lowlands. Lothian, a part of the ancient kingdom of Northumbria, was peculiar, for it resisted Celtic influences and looked, ecclesiastically, towards Durham; but any parochial organisation it may have had was rudimentary. In general it can be said with truth that ecclesiastical Scotland was completely transformed by the coming of the Normans. Owing to lack of sources twelfth-century Scottish history is obscure; but something at least may be discovered from the charters, which have been in print for over a hundred years and still remain unexplored. And it was in the hope that a reconstruction of church organisation during the transition period might help to illuminate the social history of Scotland that this paper was undertaken. I have concentrated on one subject: the structure of parishes and the relation of local lay and ecclesiastical authorities, because it is a crucial one: and one region, southern Scotland, because there Norman influence was strongest. If in the absence of special studies on the subject my conclusions must remain tentative, they may at least indicate the problems and provoke wider discussion from which the truth will emerge.

Ireland and the continent in the eleventh century

1953 ◽  
Vol 8 (31) ◽  
pp. 193-216 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aubrey Gwynn
Keyword(s):  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
Early History ◽  
Irish History ◽  
Introductory Essay ◽  
History Of ◽  
Norman Invasion ◽  
Do So

It has become a commonplace of Irish history to assume that this country lay outside the full stream of European life until the twelfth century, and to preface an account of the Norman invasion with a brief survey of the very remarkable movement for the reform of the Irish church which we associate principally with the name of St Malachy. Dean Lawlor's short introductory essay to his translation of St Bernard's Life of St Malachy appeared in 1920, and is still the most readable version of this commonly accepted view. It is the purpose of this paper to criticise this view as a whole, and I shall have a good deal to say in criticism, not only of Lawlor's essay, but also of the last chapter of Kenney's otherwise admirable Sources for the early history of Ireland. All the more reason why I should begin by stating clearly my own personal debt to both these scholars. If I criticise their conclusions and their inadequate statement of the evidence, I do so in full consciousness of all that I have learned from their useful publications.

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