scholarly journals Power and Place in Europe in the Early Middle Ages

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-34
Author(s):  
Jayne Carroll ◽  
Andrew Reynolds ◽  
Barbara Yorke
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Social Organisation ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
European Area ◽  
Current State ◽  
Classical World ◽  
Future Work ◽  
Topical Area ◽  
Written Sources

This chapter provides an interdisciplinary, scene-setting review of the current state of knowledge in the field of early medieval social complexity and sets out an agenda for future work in this topical area. While much previous work in this field tends to focus on comparisons with the classical world, this contribution emphasises the uniqueness of early medieval modes of social organisation. Introductions are provided to the study of geographies of power through archaeological analyses, vocabularies of power drawing on place-name evidence and notions of law and its enactment at assembly sites from written sources. It is argued that places where power was enacted in a period of non-urban social and administrative complexity must be understood on their own terms. The robusticity and flexibility of early medieval networks of power is also emphasised in the context of a comparative discussion ranging across the European area.

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.

Living Near the Sea: The Organisation of Frisia in Early Medieval Times

2019 ◽  
pp. 369-391
Author(s):  
Egge Knol
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
North Sea ◽  
Social Organisation ◽  
Medieval England ◽  
Archaeological Record ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
General Picture ◽  
The North ◽  
The North Sea

Across the North Sea from England was a land that was known in the early Middle Ages, as part of it is today, as Frisia. This largely marshy land was a good place to live for those who managed to adjust to its potentially extreme but fertile habitat. Despite many archaeological observations and finds, our view of their social organisation is not very clear, and in part derived from better-documented parallels elsewhere. This chapter will first briefly describe the former landscape and its archaeological record, before dealing with the organisation of Frisia. Its focus will be on the northern part of Frisia. The aim of the chapter is to offer a general picture, based on recent research, of this country oriented towards the North Sea and its maintaining of close links to early medieval England.

scholarly journals Power and Place in Europe in the Early Middle Ages

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Current State ◽  
Local Case ◽  
Mediterranean World ◽  
Formation Function ◽  
Spatial Configurations ◽  
Future Work

This volume brings together a series of case studies of spatial configurations of power among the early medieval societies of Europe. The geographical range extends from Ireland to Kosovo and from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean world and brings together quite different scholarly traditions in a focused enquiry into the character of places of power from the end of the Roman period into the central Middle Ages. The book's strength lies in the basis that it provides for a comparative analysis of the formation, function and range of power relations in early medieval societies. The editors' introductory chapter provides an extended scene setting review of the current state of knowledge in the field of early medieval social complexity and sets out an agenda for future work in this topical area. The regional and local case studies found in the volume, most of them interdisciplinary, showcase detailed studies of particular situations at a range of scales. While much previous work tends to focus on comparisons with the classical world, this volume emphasises the uniqueness of early medieval modes of social organisation and the need to assess these societies on their own terms.

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.

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 The daily life of franks according to written sources at the time of Gregory of Tours: clothing, military affairs, urban life and customs

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 165-171
Author(s):  
Igor Valentinovich Kazakov
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Complete Picture ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Population Groups ◽  
Urban Character ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
History Book ◽  
Written Sources

This paper is a logical continuation of our paper The daily life of Franks according to written sources at the time of Gregory of Tours, I: diseases, medicine, hygiene and food. This paper is an attempt to collect and systematize information about the material conditions of life in the Frankish state of the Merovingians in the 6th century in the descriptions of contemporary authors. The choice of the topic is due to the need to compose a complete picture of a persons life from the beginning of the early Middle Ages, which until now has remained poorly researched, unlike the Carolingian period. The sources used are the writings of Gregory of Tours, Venantius Fortunatus, Apollinaris Sidonius, The Chronicle of Fredegar, The History Book of the Franks and others. The paper collects data on the clothes of various population groups, on the weapons and armor of the Franks and the level of military affairs development, on cities and urban life, and some features of the mentality of so far half barbaric society. The collected material allows us to state that: a) the sources of the early Merovingian period, in contrast to the Carolingian era, are distinguished by the extreme scarcity of data in the field of genesis; b) despite a rather primitive look of clothing, it possessed considerable material value, as well as it had a significant essence, c) Roman cities continued to exist on the territory of Gallia, but largely lost their urban character, turning into fortified centers, and c) Christianization had very little influence on the moral character of the Franks; society remained largely barbaric, although some features indicate the beginning of the formation of a new civilization.

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.

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