The Jellinge Stone: from prehistoric monument to petrified ‘book’

2018 ◽  
pp. 235-251
Author(s):  
Michelle P. Brown
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
Burial Ground ◽  
Medieval Art ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Early Middle Ages

Like the previous chapter, Michelle Brown’s contribution represents an instance of the integration of Christian and pre-Christian Germanic knowledge in the early Middle Ages. Brown explores the context and meaning of the distinctive late-tenth-century rune-stone carved at the royal burial ground of Jellinge in Denmark, viewing the monument as a book in stone and a symbol of conversion and of changing political agendas in Scandinavia in the tenth century. Ranging widely across early medieval art, Brown explains that the stone (like the Auzon/Franks Casket, to which she also alludes) draws upon both Christian and pagan Norse traditions ‘to form a new, integrated iconography that formed a distinctive expression of the Scandinavian experience of cultural synthesis and conversion’.

Women in the Ottonian Church: an Iconographic Perspective

1990 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 79-100 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosamond McKitterick
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
New Testament ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Medieval Manuscript ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
Women's Role ◽  
The Church ◽  
Shed Light

Although the principal relationship observable in an early medieval manuscript illustration is that between the artist and his or her text, the interests of the reader, and in many cases the first owner or commissioner of an illustrated book, could to some degree determine the extent and the elaboration of the illustrations, and, possibly, aspects of the iconography. The incidence of women in the illustrations of Christian books of the Carolingian and Ottonian periods, therefore, is a potentially fruitful source for examining the attitudes towards women’s role in the Church in the early Middle Ages. It may be possible to see, firstly, whether the prominence of women in the New Testament, and in the Gospels in particular, is enhanced and elaborated in ninth- and tenth-century visual interpretations of these Christian texts, or, secondly, whether there are any other innovations in Carolingian or Ottonian illustrations which shed light on the religious work of women within the Church. But to what extent is this potential realized? Are omissions as significant as inclusions? Can we conclude much from the relative dearth of pictures of women in Carolingian books, as opposed to the greater number of women portrayed in Ottonian books? It is the purpose of this paper to examine this phenomenon and its context and thereby to suggest some preliminary explanations.

scholarly journals DECORATIONS FROM SHELLS IN THE ADORNMENTS OF EARLY MEDIEVAL SLAVS

2021 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 243-263
Author(s):  
Ya. V. Volodarets-Urbanovіch
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
General Trend ◽  
Donets Basin ◽  
Burial Ground ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
The Caucasus ◽  
The Third

The pendant from Luka-Kavetchyna, dwelling 25 (fig. 2: 1; 3) is the earliest find from the Slavs sites da­ting to the second quarter — the end of the 5th century. The adornment was made of a shell of the genus Murex and is the «legacy» from the Cherniakhіv culture. In the area of that culture are known the pendants made of shells of this genus (type 2 by O. Hopkalo). The pendants from shells appear in use of the Slavs since the second half of the 6th century. Their varieties were used until the first half of the 8th century, although the assemblages and finds with them are few (table 1; fig. 1; 14). In the Slavic assemblages the shells of mollusks of the following species were occurred: Cypraea moneta, C. pantherina, C. tigris, C. arabica. The items from Murex shells are also known. The height of Cypraea moneta is a little more than 2 cm. Other species of shells are larger reaching the height ca. 7—8 cm. The assemblages of the Martinіvka circle include Khatski (fig. 4: A) and Khittsі ones. The grave from Mokhnach belongs to the same antiquities (fig. 2: 2; 5—7). The jewellery by Martynivka circle are dated back to the second half of the 6th century, and the hoards were hidden in the middle — the third quarter of the 7th century. The Pastyrsky circle hoards include the assemblages from Zaitsevo (fig. 4: B) and Kharіvka (fig. 8—10). The hoards by Pastyrsky circle were hidden in the first half of 8th century. The appearance of the pendants from shells is related to the general trend of the spread of Cypraea moneta in Eastern Europe in the early Middle Ages. They are known in the Caucasus, Crimea, the Seversky Donets basin (fig. 11). Cypraea moneta shells were used as pendants in necklaces as evidenced by finds from the Luchiste burial ground from Crimea. The use of other types of shells remains unclear. However, they were probably parts of necklaces or amulets.

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 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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