Methodological pursuits of the Soviet historians: “Marxist structuralism of A. Y. Gurevich (in the works of 1960s)

This article is dedicated to the problem of seeking new ways in interpretation of the empirical material through the prism of the methodology of “structuralism” undertaken by a range of Soviet historians in the 1960s. The object of this research is the works of the medieval historian A. Y. Gurevich, who created a series of methodological articles on the “Soviet structuralism”. His opinion is most vividly reflected in the articles “General Law and Specific Pattern in History” (1965) and “The discussion on pre-Capitalistic Social Formations: Development and Structure” (1968), which marked the “methodological turn” in his works, and currently serve the object of this analysis. The conclusion is made that that the works of A. Y. Gurevich methodologically correspond to the concept of “structuralism”, although with peculiar orientation towards Marxism. The author demonstrates that the key parameters of methodological work of the historian were determined not by the influence of Western historiography, but by the revision of Marxist dogmas. The system of structures, described in his works, required a different theoretical field, which later found reflection in a number of other works of the historian of rather applied nature. The author believes that an unsuccessful attempt to “renew” the Marxist theoretical thesaurus leads A. Y. Gurevich to the methodology of sociocultural history.

Old Buildings, Building Material, and the Death of Recycling in Post-Roman Britain

This chapter sketches out two long-standing and ubiquitous material practices in Roman Britain: the reuse and refurbishment of old masonry buildings, walls, and foundations; and the repurposing of stone, brick, and tile. Both the reuse of buildings and building material, so I argue, were standard practices in Britain from the second century on, but both disappeared within a few generations of the Roman state’s withdrawal from Britain. So it is the process of the decline and fall of these practices and the reasons that stand behind their ending that are the focus of my chapter. Its emphasis reflects the fact that although I am very interested in ancient recycling practices, as an early medieval historian, I am more engaged by the story of their demise. This chapter is more focused upon the demise of such practices.

Liber Romani. Studia ofiarowane Romanowi Michałowskiemu w siedemdziesiątą rocznicę urodzin

An anniversary publication for the renowned medieval historian Professor Roman Michałowski. The articles collected in the volume address the widely understood issues of medieval political and religious culture as well as the history of the Church in that period. Their authors, experts on the Middle Ages, come from Poland and from abroad and are not only historians but also archaeologists.

Book Review:Leonora NEVILLE, Anna Komnene: The Life and Work of a Medieval Historian, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016

Book Review:Leonora Neville, Anna Komnene: The Life and Work of a Medieval Historian, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016

Constructing the persona of a Professional Historian. On Eileen Power's early career persona formation and her year in Paris, 1910-1911

The medieval historian Eileen Power (1889-1940) was one of Britain’s most eminent female historians of the first half of the twentieth century. Becoming Professor of Economic History at the London School of Economics in 1931, Power gained academic recognition to a degree that was difficult for women to obtain in this period. Numerous writings on Power discuss the period 1920-1921, when she travelled around the world as an Albert Kahn Fellow, considering it a formative year in her career and indicating the importance of travel for achieving scholarly success. In contrast, little attention has been paid to the significance of Power’s first academic journey in 1910-1911, when she spent a year in Paris. This stay abroad would however be equally important since it was then that she decided to pursue a career in medieval history.At the time, even if women had an academic degree, they were not self-evident, professional scholars. Therefore, the main question in this article is whether and how Power started to build her scholarly persona while in Paris, attempting to construct an identity for herself as a credible and reliable academic. This will be addressed by analysing her personal writings; specifically, her diary and her letters to her close friend, Margery Garrett.

Thomas W. Barton et al., eds. Boundaries in the Medieval and Wider World: Essays in Honour of Paul Freedman. Europa Sacra 22. Turnhout: Brepols, 2017, 346 pp., 7 figs., 3 tables.

Paul Freedman is an outstanding medieval historian with wide-ranging interests. I first encountered his work through Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination (2008), and was surprised to realize later that he was also the author of Images of the Medieval Peasant (1999). These two works by no means exhaust the full range of Freedman’s erudition: Over the past forty years he has published on topics ranging from papal privileges in Catalonia to medieval historiography—and as this book’s co-editors observe, not only have his interests ramified over the years, he has continued to publish in each of his many areas of expertise, gaining new interests while retaining old ones.