Suchergebnisse

"As Europe began to grow rich during the Middle Ages, its wealth materialized in the well-made clothes, linens, and wares of ordinary households. Such items were indicators of one's station in life in a society accustomed to reading visible signs of rank. In a world without banking, household goods became valuable commodities that often substituted for hard currency. Pawnbrokers and resellers sprang up, helping to push these goods into circulation. Simultaneously, a harshly coercive legal system developed to ensure that debtors paid their due. Focusing on the Mediterranean cities of Marseille and Lucca, Legal Plunder explores how the newfound wealth embodied in household goods shaped the beginnings of a modern consumer economy in late medieval Europe. The vigorous trade in goods that grew up in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries entangled households in complex relationships of credit and debt, and one of the most common activities of law courts during the period was debt recovery. Sergeants of the law were empowered to march into debtors' homes and seize belongings equal in value to the debt owed. These officials were agents of a predatory economy, cogs in a political machinery of state-sponsored plunder. As Daniel Small shows, the records of medieval European law courts offer some of the most vivid descriptions of material culture in this period, providing insights into the lives of men and women on the cusp of modern capitalism. Then as now, money and value were implicated in questions of power and patterns of violence--Book jacket.

Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Preface -- Money, Units of Measurement, and Calendars -- Introduction -- Chapter 1. The Values of Things -- Chapter 2. Credit and Coin -- Chapter 3. The Pursuit of Debt -- Chapter 4. The Plunder -- Chapter 5. Violence and Resistance -- Epilogue -- Notes -- Acknowledgments -- Index.

In the full-text databases of Latin sources from Europe from the period between 400 and 1500, the Latin word for violence crops up around two thousand times, about as often as "justice" (2,400) though not as often as other interesting words like "envy" (6,000) or "vengeance" (3,800). The frequency of use of the word, adjusted for the vagaries of survival, reveals an interesting trend. From the tenth to the eleventh centuries, an age of predatory castellans and violent territorial expansion, the frequency nearly doubles in the extant literature, and remains high for several centuries to come. The word often appears in texts alongside nauseating tales of violence, of hands lopped off and eyes plucked out and intestines dragged from their hidden recesses. There is the story told by Guibert of Nogent about the predatory castellan Thomas de Marle, who hung his captives by their testicles until the weight of their own bodies tore them off. These were exempla. They painted verbal pictures of the behavior of those who were surely doomed to hell. In the hands of clerical authors like Guibert, they served as a goad to kings and princes who, in their indolence, might allow this stuff to go unavenged.

Au début de l'année 1349, peu après la grande peste, le juriste noble Blacier de Montoliu de Marseille arrangeait le mariage de sa jeune fille Biatriseta avec le marchand aristocrate Bertran Candole. La famille de Montoliu avait une position prééminente dans la ville phocéenne. Outre les nombreux chevaliers et damoiseaux, la famille étendue comprenait trois juges, un avocat, des conseillers municipaux et, pendant un an, un syndic. Les membres de la famille étaient liés par mariage à plusieurs autres familles nobles de la ville et sa région. La famille Candole, bien qu'aussi noble que les Montoliu, était moins en vue et moins nombreuse, même si le futur époux, fils d'un damoiseau nommé Uguo, devait faire partie du conseil de Marseille de 1359 à 1361.

Les riches archives notariales et judiciaires de Marseille nous indiquent avec quelle souplesse et imagination les habitants qui survécurent à la peste noire de 1348 s'adaptèrent à ses conséquences. Les institutions municipales, surtout les tribunaux et les études de notaires, firent face remarquablement à l'augmentation considérable du nombre de leurs dossiers. Hommes et femmes surent liquider les biens dévalués dont ils héritaient et dont ils ne voulaient pas; les rapports entre personnes se renouvelèrent: le nombre des mariages doubla ou tripla et des immigrants s'insérènt dans le tissu urbain. C'est pourquoi ceux qui survécurent à la peste furent à même de recréer les réseaux sociaux dont ils dépendaient, tant pour leurs relations d'amitié, que pour s'assurer crédit et assistance. C'est la crise elle-même qui révèle des processus d'adaptation caractéristiques d'une société ouverte et souple.

How did medieval society deal with private justice, with grudges, and with violent emotions? This ground-breaking reader collects for the first time a number of unpublished or difficult-to-find texts that address violence and emotion in the Middle Ages.The sources collected here illustrate the power and reach of the language of vengeance in medieval European society. They span the early, high, and later middle ages, and capture a range of perspectives including legal sources, learned commentaries, narratives, and documents of practice. Though social elites necessarily figure prominently in all medieval sources, sources concerning relatively low-status individuals and sources pertaining to women are included. The sources range from saints' lives that illustrate the idea of vengeance to later medieval court records concerning vengeful practices. A secondary goal of the collection is to illustrate the prominence of mechanisms for peacemaking in medieval European society. The introduction traces recent scholarly developments in the study of vengeance and discusses the significance of these concepts for medieval political and social history