European Medieval History

This book provides a detailed analysis of medieval brutality, focusing upon Paris and Artois, a thriving region of northern France in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. It examines how violence was conceptualised in this period, and uses this framework to investigate street violence, tavern brawls, urban uprisings, student misbehaviour and domestic violence. The interactions between these various forms of violence are examined in order to demonstrate the complex and communicative nature of medieval brutality. What is often dismissed as dysfunctional behaviour is shown to have been highly strategic and socially integral. Violence was a performance, and one dependent upon the spaces in which it took place; indeed, brutality is shown to have been contingent upon social and cultural structures. At the same time, the common stereotype of the thoughtlessly brutal Middle Ages is challenged, as attitudes towards violence are revealed to have been complex, troubled and ambivalent. Whether violence could function effectively as a form of communication which could order and harmonise society, or whether it inevitably degenerated into chaotic disorder where meaning was multivalent and incomprehensible, remained a matter of ongoing debate in a variety of contexts. Using a variety of source material, including legal records, popular literature, and sermons, the book explores experiences of, and attitudes towards, violence, and highlights profound contemporary ambiguity concerning its nature and legitimacy.

Most of what has been written on the economy of the Middle Ages is deeply influenced by abstract concepts and theories. The most powerful and popular of these guiding beliefs are derived from intellectual foundations laid down in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by Adam Smith, Johan von Thünen, Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo, and Karl Marx. In the hands of twentieth-century historians and social scientists these venerable ideas have been moulded into three grand explanatory ideas that continue to dominate interpretations of economic development. These trumpet in turn the claims of ‘commercialisation’, ‘population and resources’, or ‘class power and property relations’ as the prime movers of historical change. This book examines the structure and tests the validity of these conflicting models from a variety of perspectives. In the course of their investigations the authors provide not only detailed reconstructions of the economic history of England in the Middle Ages and sustained critical commentaries on the work of leading historians, but also discussions of the philosophy and methods of history and the social sciences. The result is an introduction to medieval economic history, a critique of established models, and a treatise on historiographical method.

This book explores the prominent role of monasteries in the early medieval period and their relationship to the nobility in Lotharingia throughout the 9th and 10th centuries. It focuses on the evidence from three of the region's greatest abbeys — Gorze, Saint-Maximin, and Saint-Evre — which played a central role in the monastic reform movement. This swept through the region in the 930s and is commonly named after Gorze. Set within the context of the whole social structure and exercise of regional power in the early middle ages, this book demonstrates the vitality and importance of monasteries, focusing on their land transaction as well as their religious roles. Accepted notions of monastic lordship are challenged and the complexity of the two-way relationships between monasteries and their patrons, relationships which ensured the former a central place in the early medieval landscape, is discussed.

With the opening of sea routes in the 15th century, groups of men and women left Portugal to establish themselves across the ports and cities of the Atlantic or Ocean Sea. They were refugees and migrants, traders and mariners, Jews, Catholics, and the Marranos of mixed Judaic-Catholic culture. They formed a diasporic community known by contemporaries as the Portuguese Nation. By the early 17th century, this nation without a state had created a remarkable trading network that spanned the Atlantic, reached into the Indian Ocean and Asia, and generated millions of pesos that were used to bankroll the Spanish Empire. This book traces the story of the Portuguese Nation from its emergence in the late 15th century to its fragmentation in the middle of the 17th, and situates it in relation to the parallel expansion and crisis of Spanish imperial dominion in the Atlantic. Against the backdrop of this relationship, the book reconstitutes the rich inner life of a community based on movement, maritime trade, and cultural hybridity. We are introduced to mariners and traders in such disparate places as Lima, Seville and Amsterdam, their day-to-day interactions and understandings, their houses and domestic relations, private reflections and public arguments. This account reveals how the Portuguese Nation created a cohesive and meaningful community despite the mobility and dispersion of its members; how its forms of sociability fed into the development of robust transatlantic commercial networks; and how the day-to-day experience of trade was translated into the sphere of Spanish imperial politics as merchants of the Portuguese Nation took up the pen to advocate a program of commercial reform based on religious-ethnic toleration and the liberalization of trade.

This book approaches the subject of late Roman law from the perspective of legal practice revealed in courtroom processes, as well as more ‘informal’ types of dispute settlement. From at least the early 4th century, leading bishops, ecclesiastics, and Christian polemicists participated in a vibrant culture of forensic argument with far-reaching effects on theological debate, the development of ecclesiastical authority, and the elaboration of early ‘Canon law’. One of the most innovative aspects of late Roman law was the creation and application of new legal categories used in the prosecution of ‘heretics’. Leading Christian polemicists not only used techniques of argument learnt in the late Roman rhetorical schools to help position the Church within the structure of Empire, they also used those techniques in cases involving accusations against ‘heretics’ — thus defining and developing the concept of Christian orthodoxy itself.

In Rome on Christmas Day 800 Charlemagne, the Frankish king, was acclaimed ‘most August, crowned by God, great and peacemaking emperor’. This event transformed the nature of his rule, marked the re‐emergence of the ideas of empire in the early medieval West, and changed the history of western monarchy. But why was Charlemagne acclaimed as a peacemaking emperor? How had peace come to be seen as a central component of western European rulership? Drawing upon a wealth of contemporary sources, this study explores the image of peaceful rulership in western Europe from the earliest phase of post‐Roman polities – Vandal Africa, Gibichung Burgundy, Ostrogothic Italy – to the Carolingian and Anglo‐Saxon worlds. From poems celebrating Vandal baths that evoked Stoic concepts of cosmic order to seventh‐century Visigothic poetry and early Irish theorizing on the ideal ruler, this book offers a comprehensive vision of how the relationship between ideas of kingship and peace was explored through poetry, political thought, ritual, and the writing of history across Europe in the early Middle Ages. Peace emerges in these centuries as a concern for kings and emperors, their celebrants, critics, and advisors. It was no less an issue for those whom they ruled. From prayers for safe travel and blessings for new houses through to medieval pilgrim accounts praising the surprising security of ninth‐century Egypt's roads, this study asks what peace meant to early medieval people, and how collective expectations and royal intentions met. This is the first full scholarly exploration of the relationship between the idea of peace and rulership through Europe's formative centuries, setting the shifting terms of that relationship in their full historical, political, and cultural context. In the process it offers new insights to the reception of late antique thought and imagery in the earlier Middle Ages, the range and distinctiveness of early medieval political thought, and the intellectual vitality of the period AD 500 to 900.

This is the first full account of the Pilgrimage of Grace since 1915. In the autumn and winter of 1536, Henry VIII faced risings first in Lincolnshire, then throughout northern England. These rebellions posed the greatest threat of any encountered by a Tudor monarch. The Pilgrimage of Grace has traditionally been assumed to have been a spontaneous protest against the Dissolution of the Monasteries, but this lively and intriguing study reveals the full story. The book examines the origins of the rebellions in Louth and their spread; it offers new interpretations of the behaviour of many of the leading rebels, including Robert Aske and Thomas Darcy. It also reveals how the engine behind the uprising was the commons, and notably the artisans, of some of the smaller northern towns. Casting new light on the personality of Henry VIII himself, it shows how the gentry of the North worked to dismantle the movement and help the crown neutralise it by guile as events unfolded towards their often tragic conclusions.

The reign of Pope Gregory VII (1073–1085), who gave his name to an era of Church reform, is critically important in the history of the medieval church and papacy. Thus it is surprising that this is the first comprehensive biography to appear in any language for over fifty years. This book presents Gregory's life and work in their entirety, tracing his career from early days as a clerk of the Roman Church, through his political negotiations, ecclesiastical governance, and final exile at Salerno. Full account is taken of his turbulent relations with King Henry IV of Germany, from his first deposition and excommunication in 1076, to the absolution at Canossa and the imposition of a second sentence in 1080. Pope Gregory was also a contemporary of William the Conqueror, and, as the author shows, fully supported his conquest of England. Gregory VII is presented as an individual whose deep inner belief in iustitia (righteousness) did not waver in the face of new circumstances, although his broad outlook underwent changes. Deeply committed to the traditions of the past and especially to those of Pope Gregory the Great, his reign prepared the way for an age of strong papal monarchy in the western Church.