Suchergebnisse

Cover -- Contents -- Introduction -- Land, Family, and Women in Continental Europe, 701-1200 -- Infanticide in the Early Middle Ages -- Women in Reconquest Castile: The Fueros of Sepúlveda and Cuenca -- Marriage and Divorce in the Frankish Kingdom -- The Female Felon in Fourteenth-Century England -- Mulieres Sanctae -- Widow and Ward: The Feudal Law of Child Custody in Medieval England -- Dowries and Kinsmen in Early Renaissance Venice -- Women in Charter and Statute Law: Medieval Ragusa/Dubrovnik -- Selected Bibliography -- Contributors -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y.

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

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 study is the first up-to-date comprehensive analysis of the construction of continental Saxon identity in late antique and early medieval writing. It traces this process over the course of eight centuries, from its earliest roots in Roman ethnography to its reinvention in the monasteries of ninth-century Saxony. Building on recent scholarship, this study emphasises not just the constructed and open-ended nature of barbarian identity, but also the crucial role played by texts as instruments and resources of identity-formation. Though mentioned as early as AD 150, the Saxons left no written evidence of their own before c. 840. Thus, for the first seven centuries, we can only look at Saxon identity through the eyes of their Roman enemies, Merovingian neighbours and Carolingian conquerors. What we encounter when we attempt this, is not an objective description of a people, but an ongoing literary discourse on what outside authors imagined, wanted or feared the Saxons to be: dangerous pirates, noble savages, bestial pagans or faithful subjects. Significantly, these outside views deeply influenced how ninth-century Saxons eventually came to write about themselves following their conquest and conversion by the Frankish King Charlemagne, relying on Roman and Frankish texts to reinvent themselves as members of a noble and Christian people"--

"This volume explores the specificity of the urban culture in western Europe during the period c. 1150-1550. Since the mid-twentieth century, many studies have complicated the association, traditionally made, between the medieval growth of towns and the birth of a modern, secular world; but few have given any attention to what actually made urban culture 'urban'. This volume begins by placing medieval 'urban culture' within its spatial context, to consider how urban conditions determined the perception and representation of the city-dweller. Contributors examine a variety of urban cultures, from the political to the artistic, from London and Bruges to Florence and Venice, and beyond Europe. They show how urban culture involved a process of interaction with other discourses (royal, noble, ecclesiastical) and that it was not monolithic: the relationship between urban environments and the cultures they generated were hybrid, fluid and dynamic."--Back cover

This collection is the first to be devoted entirely to medieval sexuality informed by current theories of sexuality and gender. It brings together essays from various disciplinary perspectives to consider how the Middle Ages defined, regulated, and represented sexual practices and desires