Suchergebnisse

Volume II of The Cambridge History of War covers what in Europe is commonly called 'the Middle Ages'. It includes all of the well-known themes of European warfare, from the migrations of the Germanic peoples and the Vikings through the Reconquista, the Crusades and the age of chivalry, to the development of state-controlled gunpowder-wielding armies and the urban militias of the later middle ages; yet its scope is world-wide, ranging across Eurasia and the Americas to trace the interregional connections formed by the great Arab conquests and the expansion of Islam, the migrations of horse nomads such as the Avars and the Turks, the formation of the vast Mongol Empire, and the spread of new technologies - including gunpowder and the earliest firearms - by land and sea.

Queer medievalists deal with four major methodological questions: historical contextualization and nomenclature; the actuality of embodied erotic experience; the elision or erasure of female same-sex eroticism; and the periodization of history and the purpose of its study. Two recent works of queer medievalism explore and apply these methodologies: Glenn Burger and Steven F. Kruger, Queering the Middle Ages, and Karma Lochrie, Heterosyncrasies: Female Sexuality When Normal Wasn't. The contributors to Burger and Kruger's volume examine both medieval visual and verbal texts and also apply medievalism as an excluded middle that uncovers aspects of queer eroticism in the postmodern moment and questions periodization. Lochrie detaches the heteronormative assumptions of medieval scholars from literary and historical texts representing diverse female sexualities. The reviewer argues that queer medievalism attends to unexplored complexities of nonnormative sexuality in history but also may obscure the recovery of same-sex eroticism in the Middle Ages.

This collection of essays makes an important contribution to our knowledge of feudalism and finance in France and Spain. Divided into four sections, it covers the use rulers made of courts, parlements, and assemblies for ceremonial, political and fiscal purposes; the institutional formation of Catalonia; comparative studies of France, Catalonia and Aragon in the twelfth century; and monetary and fiscal policies of contemporary rulers

Medieval chronicles are significant sources not just for the study of history, but also for the fields of literature, linguistics and art history. These papers, with broad chronological and geographical range, represent current approaches in the study of medieval historiography

The spiritual chasm of status that exists between man and beast is daily put to the test by the very beasts kept in our homes. Human beings have a long history of keeping animals for one reason or another, but it has only been recently that the concept of animals purely maintained for companionship has taken center stage. The Middle Ages in particular served as a transformative moment in the history of the "pet," where not only was the role of the animal within man's existence re-examined, but so, too, were the specific animals preferred by different cultures more solidly defined. As the old axiom of "man's best friend" is so ubiquitous within the Christian consciousness today, so does Islam parallel this with the normalized presence of cats in urban centers like Istanbul – and the roots of this divergence can be found in the Medieval period. Pet ownership for the sake of companionship is at least demonstrated to be most common amongst the elites. Pets are far more likely to be used for their ability to aid humans, and any friendship the owner may take up with the animal is often regarded as incidental. Dogs can be utilized for their skills of hunting and tracking, something that would be more widely useful for the common man, or even for a Christian nobleman interested in hunting for sport. Cats, contrastingly, are primarily beneficial in terms of their ability to control rat populations, protecting not only food stores, but also expensive texts that may be chewed by them; furthermore, cats are notoriously independent and difficult to train.The preference for cats in the medieval Muslim world and dogs in the medieval Christian world can thus be explained not by differences in the religions or animals themselves, but rather by a complicated blend of factors ideological, political, and social in the respective environments.

This book expands on established doctrine in legal history and sets out a challenge for legal philosophers. It traces the study of the medieval village community from early historical works in the nineteenth century through to current research, revealing alternative ways of making and conceiving of law that are not dependent on state authority

Europe at the millennium -- Agriculture and rural life -- Trade 1000-1350 -- Cities, guilds, and political economy -- Economic and social thought -- The great hunger and the big death -- The calamitous fourteenth century -- Technology and consumerism -- War and social unrest -- Fifteenth century portraits

Pt. I. Military theory and practice -- Pt. II. Late Medieval armies -- Pt. III. War and late medieval society -- Pt. IV. Popular rebellions -- Pt. V. late Medieval crusading and the Ottoman threat -- Pt. VI. Changes in military technology -- Pt. VII. The future.