Atypical Burials in Early Medieval Poland

2020 ◽  
pp. 246-275
Author(s):  
Leszek Gardeła
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Prone Position ◽  
Comparative Perspective ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Scientific Institutions ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Archival Documentation ◽  
Critical Overview

Excavations at early medieval cemeteries in Poland often reveal traces of mortuary behavior which deviate considerably from the normative treatment of the dead. Most of these atypical practices involved interring the corpses in prone position, laying or throwing stones on them, or cutting their heads off, but other variants have also been recorded, e.g., covering the bodies with clay or piercing them with stakes and other sharp objects. Graves of this kind have always been difficult to interpret. In the early twentieth century, Polish scholars only mentioned them briefly in their publications, without offering any detailed commentary about their possible meanings, while in the 1970s, the problematic term “anti-vampire burials” was coined, implying that these were burials of vampires. This article provides a critical overview of past and present studies on atypical burials in Poland by drawing on the results of a research project entitled Bad Death in the Early Middle Ages: Atypical Burials from Poland in a Comparative Perspective. The discussion incorporates new and previously unpublished evidence and a reassessment of archival documentation kept in a range of Polish museums and scientific institutions, which challenges the previously accepted “vampire” interpretation and sophisticates our understanding of unusual funerary phenomena.

Poet of the Medieval Modern

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesca Brooks
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Far Right ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
History Of ◽  
Catholic History ◽  
In Parenthesis ◽  
Stone Sculpture

The early Middle Ages provided twentieth-century poets with the material to reimagine and rework local, religious, and national identities in their writing. Poet of the Medieval Modern focuses on a key figure within this tradition, the Anglo-Welsh poet and artist David Jones (1895–1974), and represents the first extended study of the influence of early medieval culture and history from England on Jones and his novel-length late modernist poem The Anathemata (1952). The Anathemata, the second major poetic project after In Parenthesis (1937), fuses Jones’s visual and verbal arts to write a Catholic history of Britain as told through the history of man-as-artist. Drawing on unpublished archival material including manuscripts, sketches, correspondence, and, most significantly, the marginalia from David Jones’s Library, Poet of the Medieval Modern reads with Jones in order to trouble the distinction we make between poetry and scholarship. Placing this underappreciated figure firmly at the centre of new developments in modernist and medieval studies, Poet of the Medieval Modern brings the two fields into dialogue and argues that Jones uses the textual and material culture of the early Middle Ages—including Old English prose and poetry, Anglo-Latin hagiography, early medieval stone sculpture, manuscripts, and historiography—to re-envision British Catholic identity in the twentieth-century long poem. In The Anathemata Jones returned to the English record to seek out those moments where the histories of the Welsh had been elided or erased. At a time when the Middle Ages are increasingly weaponized in far-right and nationalist political discourse, the book offers a timely discussion of how the early medieval past has been resourced to both shore up and challenge English hegemonies across modern British culture.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-34
Author(s):  
Francesca Brooks
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Late Modernism ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
History Of ◽  
Central Argument ◽  
Century Poetry ◽  
Changing Attitudes

The Introduction situates David Jones’s work as a poet–artist within the broader currents of high and late modernism, particularly within the context of a tradition of medievalism in twentieth-century poetry. It draws on Alexander Nagel’s conception of the medieval modern to show how Jones approaches the culture and history of the early Middle Ages as a form of live material open to play and adaptation. The Introduction also reframes our understanding of David Jones’s perception of himself as Anglo-Welsh in relation to changing attitudes to early medieval Welsh (Celtic) and English (Anglo-Saxon/Teutonic) history over the course of his lifetime. This discussion introduces the monograph’s central argument: as a poet of the medieval modern, Jones plays with and reworks early medieval English histories, narratives, and artefacts in order to challenge the singularity and exceptionalism of an ‘Anglo-Saxon’ canon.

Human–Bovine Plagues in the Early Middle Ages

2015 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy P. Newfield
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Molecular Clock ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Early Middle Ages

Two independent molecular clock analyses (mcas) reveal that measles (mv) diverged from rinderpest (rpv) c. 1000 c.e. This evidence, when conjoined with written accounts of non-Justinianic plagues in 569–570 and 986–988 and zoo-archaeological discoveries regarding early medieval mass bovine mortalities, suggests that a now-extinct morbillivirus, ancestral to mv and rpv, broke out episodically in the early Middle Ages, causing large mortalities in both species. Tentative diagnoses of an mv–rpv ancestor help to untangle early medieval accounts of human–bovine disease and facilitate an assessment of the consequences of the 569–570 and 986–988 plagues.

scholarly journals On the Serbian-Bulgarian border in the 9th and the 10th centuries

2015 ◽  
pp. 31-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Predrag Komatina
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
The Political ◽  
Ethnic Communities ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
The People

The paper analyzes the information concerning the border between the Serbs and the Bulgarians in the 9th and the 10th centuries found in the work De administrando imperio by the emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus. It is made clear that there were no clearly established borderlines between the political entities in the Early Middle Ages, and that those political entities during that period functioned not on the basis of territorialy organized states, but of ethnic communities, whose authority rested upon the people, not the territory. The functioning of the early medieval Bulgarian Khanate is one of the best examples for that. Therefore, it is necessary that the information on the Serbian-Bulgarian border in the Porphyrogenitus? work be analyzed in a new and different light.

Archaeological Evidence of Migration from the Southern Taiga of Western Siberia to the Urals in the Early Middle Ages: The Vodennikovo-1 Cemetery

2022 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 91-99
Author(s):  
N. P. Matveeva ◽  
E. A. Tretyakov ◽  
A. S. Zelenkov
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Western Siberia ◽  
Solid Wood ◽  
Southern Taiga ◽  
The Urals ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Archaeological Evidence

We describe 15 burials at the Vodennikovo-1 group of mounds in the northern Kurgan Region, on the Middle Iset River, relevant to migration processes during the Early Middle Ages. On the basis of numerous parallels from contemporaneous sites in the Urals and Western Siberia, the cemetery is dated to the late 7th and 8th centuries. Most of single and collective burials are inhumations in rectangular pits with a northwestern orientation, with vessels, decorated by carved or pricked designs, placed near the heads. These features, typical of the Early Medieval Bakalskaya culture of the Tobol and Ishim basins, are also observed at the Pereyma and Ust-Suerskoye-1 cemeteries in the same area. However, there are innovations such as inlet burials, those in blocks of solid wood and plank coffi ns, western orientation of the deceased, and placing vessels next to the burial pits. These features attest to a different tradition, evidenced by cemeteries of the Potchevash culture in the Tobol and Ishim basins (Okunevo III, Likhacheva, and Vikulovskoye). Also, Potchevash and Bakalskaya vessels co-occur at Vodennikovo-1, and some of them (jugs with comb and grooved designs) are typologically syncretic. To date, this is the westernmost cemetery of the Potchevash culture, suggestive of a migration of part of the southern taiga population from the Ishim and Tobol area to the Urals.

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