European Medieval History

This volume celebrates the work of the late Rees Davies. Reflecting Davies' interest in identities, political culture, and the workings of power in medieval Britain, the chapters range across ten centuries, looking at a variety of key topics. Issues explored range from the historical representations of peoples and the changing patterns of power and authority, to the notions of ‘core’ and ‘periphery’ and the relationship between local conditions and international movements. The political impact of words and ideas, and the parallels between developments in Wales and those elsewhere in Britain, Ireland, and Europe are also discussed.

This book takes a fresh look at the problems posed by power and property in a medieval society, in this case the German kingdom. In a series of interrelated studies covering the period 700–1500, but concentrating on the 10th to 13th centuries, it explores the social and economic changes that influenced the real lives of people living in Germany. A number of themes are examined, including the kind of society that emerged along the Rhine and to the east of it in a period when it was hard to identify a Germany; the complex relationship between peasant and lord; the finances and resources of the German crown, the largest single landowner; the social and economic impact of the urban milieu with its towns large and small; and the entanglement of Church and aristocracy. While medieval people did not share mercantilist or post-Adam Smith concepts of economic forces at work in society, this book fruitfully applies the ideas and rationalisations of modern economics to medieval evidence, leading, at times, to unexpected conclusions.

This book studies the proprietary church with coverage of most of Western Europe, from the end of the Roman Empire in the West to about 1200. The book provides a broad survey in varying degrees of intensity and with a shifting geographical focus; and it asks questions that are as much social and religious as legal or administrative. The book vindicates, for village and estate churches, Ulrich Stutz's basic concept of a church with its possessions, revenues, and priestly office as an object of what we can reasonably call property. However, it largely rejects his and his followers' application of this to great churches, and sees the position of intermediate churches (such as small or middling monasteries) as various, changeable, and ambivalent. Above all, it turns away from Stutz's view of the property relationship as a distinct institution or system of ‘Germanic church law’, presenting it rather as a fluid set of assumptions and practices taking shape as customary law.

This book describes and analyzes warfare that sprang from and was driven by religious belief, in the period from the Hussite wars to the first generation of the Reformation. The focus is on a number of key theatres. At times warfare between national communities was shaped by convictions of ‘sacred patriotism’, either in defending God-given land or in the pursuit of messianic programmes abroad. Insurrectionary activity, especially when fuelled by apocalyptic expectations, was a second important type of religious war. In the 1420s and early 1430s the Hussites waged war successfully in defence of what they believed to be ‘God's Law’. And some frontier communities depicted their struggle against non-believers as religious war by reference to crusading ideas and habits of thought. The book explores what these conflicts had in common in the ways the combatants perceived their own role, their demonization of their opponents, and the ongoing critique of religious war in all its forms. The author assesses the interaction between crusade and religious war in the broader sense, and argues that the religious violence of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was organic, to the extent that it sprang from deeply-rooted proclivities within European society.

From the early Middle Ages to the 20th century, capital punishment in France, as in many other countries, was staged before large crowds of spectators. This book traces the theory and practice of public executions over time from the perspective of the executioners and government officials who staged them, as well as from the vantage point of the many thousands who came to “see justice done.” While penal theorists often stressed that the fundamental purpose of public punishment was to strike fear in the hearts of spectators, the eagerness with which crowds flocked to executions and the extent to which spectators actually enjoyed the spectacle of suffering suggests that there was a wide gulf between theoretical intentions and actual experiences. Moreover, animal executions and the execution of effigies and corpses point to an enduring ritual function that had little to do with exemplary deterrence. In the eighteenth century, when a revolution in sensibilities made it unseemly for individuals to take pleasure in or even witness the suffering of others, capital punishment became the target of penal reform. From the invention of the guillotine, which reduced the moment of death to the blink of an eye, to the 1939 decree which moved executions behind prison walls, the death penalty in France was systematically stripped of its spectacular elements.

A group of men dig a tunnel under the threshold of a house. Then they go and fetch a heavy, sagging object from inside the house, pull it out through the tunnel, and put it on a cow-hide to be dragged off and thrown into the offal-pit. Why should the corpse of a suicide—for that is what it is—have earned this unusual treatment? This book explores the origin of the condemnation of suicide, in a quest which leads along the most unexpected byways of medieval theology, law, mythology, and folklore—and, indeed, in some instances beyond them. In an epoch when there might be plenty of ostensible reasons for not wanting to live, the ways used to block the suicidal escape route give a unique perspective on medieval religion.

The luxurious spending habits of Italians in the Renaissance are well known. The new luxury, however, was not greeted with universal approval, and chroniclers, poets, churchmen, and statesmen were often critical of, and preoccupied by, its effects. The most voluminous and telling evidence of this preoccupation is the body of laws enacted to restrict and regulate all aspects of luxury consumption — the so-called sumptuary laws. This book offers the first comprehensive study of Italian sumptuary laws through a chronological, geographical, and thematic survey of more than three hundred laws enacted in over forty cities throughout the peninsula. It examines the nature of these laws up to 1500 and relates them to the circumstances, the framework of ideas and the habits of mind that gave rise to them.

This book examines the fate that overtook the principality of Catalonia in the 15th century, reducing it from dominance within the state of Aragon to a marginal role in the Iberian power created by the union of Aragon and Castile. Part one studies the tensions destabilizing Catalonia: unrest among a peasantry resentful of outdated burdens; merchants and artisans struggling to wrest control of the towns from entrenched oligarchies; an aristocracy devoted to endless feuding; and a monarchy thrown into disarray by the extinction of the Catalan line and its replacement by a Castilian dynasty. In 1462, Catalonia degenerated into a civil war that lasted ten years. Part two seeks to explain how and why the king, Juan II, emerged victorious. The economic and military resources of the two camps, their tactics, and the lines along which Catalan society divided are examined. The book looks at the crucial part played by foreign powers in the conflict, who intervened on both sides until Juan turned the tables with his gamble on a Castilian crown for his heir, Fernando. The surrender of the insurgents in 1472 left Catalonia chaotic, devastated, and mired in many more years of war with France as Juan struggled to recover the territories he had surrendered in return for French aid. Catalonia was then helpless before Fernando, the Catholic King of Castile, who became ruler of Catalonia in 1479. The measures he imposed to restore order and subject the principality to the new ‘Spanish’ state are the theme of the final chapter. The events discussed have a continuing resonance in Spain today.