Later Medieval Europe

This volume offers the first comprehensive analysis of wills in late medieval Krakow. It presents the origins of testamentary acts in the Kingdom of Poland and its centre, Krakow, and their subsequent transformation from so called ‘canonical wills’ to ‘communal wills’. Wysmułek discusses the socio-cultural role of wills and sets them in their contemporary legal, social, and economic context. In doing so, he uncovers their influence on property ownership and family relations in the city, as well as on the religious practices of the burghers. Ultimately, this work seeks to change the perception of wills by treating the testamentary act itself as an important agent of historical social change – a ‘tool of power’.

Time in the Eternal City: Perceiving and Controlling Time in Late Medieval and Renaissance Rome is a major contribution to the study of time and its numerous aspects in late medieval and Renaissance Rome. The authors offer a versatile view on the variety of ways time could be perceived. Individual chapters concentrate on the grass-root levels of everyday life, on various uses of the past in the present, as well as on the control of time by the ecclesiastical authorities. These studies reveal a wealth of new information that demonstrates the almost endlessly fluid manner in which time could be perceived, as well as the innovative ways in which time could be used by individuals and authorities alike.

Contributors are members of Tuomas Heikkilä’s research group at the Finnish Institute in Rome: Holger Kaasik, Urpo Kantola, Marko Halonen, Jasmin Lukkari and Saku Pihko.

A set of essays intended to recognize the scholarship of Professor Cynthia Neville, the papers gathered here explore borders and boundaries in medieval and early modern Britain. Over her career, Cynthia has excavated the history of border law and social life on the frontier between England and Scotland and has written extensively of the relationships between natives and newcomers in Scotland’s Middle Ages. Her work repeatedly invokes jurisdiction as both a legal and territorial expression of power. The essays in this volume return to themes and topics touched upon in her corpus of work, all in one way or another examining borders and boundaries as either (or both) spatial and legal constructs that grow from and shape social interaction.
Contributors are Douglas Biggs, Amy Blakeway, Steve Boardman, Sara M. Butler, Anne DeWindt, Kenneth F. Duggan, Elizabeth Ewan, Chelsea D.M. Hartlen, K.J. Kesselring, Tom Lambert, Shannon McSheffrey, and Cathryn R. Spence.

Richard Kaeuper’s career has examined three salient concerns of medieval society - knightly prowess and violence, lay and religious piety, and public order and government - most directly in three of his monographs: War, Justice, and Public Order (Oxford, 1988), Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe (Oxford, 1999), and Holy Warriors (Penn, 2009). Kaeuper approaches historical questions with an eye towards illuminating the inherent complexities in human ideas and ideals, and he has worked to untangle the various threads holding together cultural constructs such as chivalry, licit violence, and lay piety. The present festschrift in his honor brings together scholars from across disciplines to engage with those same concerns in medieval society from a variety of perspectives.
Contributors are: Bernard S. Bachrach, Elizabeth A.R. Brown, Samuel A. Claussen, David Crouch, Thomas Devaney, Paul Dingman, Daniel P. Franke, Richard Firth Green, Christopher Guyol, John D. Hosler, William Chester Jordan, Craig M. Nakashian, W. Mark Ormrod, Russell A. Peck, Anthony J. Pollard, Michael Prestwich, Sebastian Rider-Bezerra, Leah Shopkow, and Peter W. Sposato.

In Kings, Knights, and Bankers, Richard Kaeuper presents a lifetime of medieval research on Italian financiers, English kingship, chivalric violence, and knightly piety. His foundational work on public finance connects Italian merchant banking with the growth of state power at the turn of the fourteenth century. Subsequent articles on law and order offer measured contributions to the continuing debate over the growth of governance and its relationship with contemporary disorder. He also convincingly proves that knights, the foremost military professionals of the medieval world, considered their prowess as both a source of honor and of sanctification. All interested in the history of medieval chivalry, governance, piety, and public finance can learn from this impressive collection of articles.

The boundaries between mental, social and physical order and various states of disorder – unexpected mood swings, fury, melancholy, stress, insomnia, and demonic influence – form the core of this compilation. For medieval men and women, religious rituals, magic, herbs, dietary requirements as well as to scholastic medicine were a way to cope with the vagaries of mental wellbeing; the focus of the articles is on the interaction and osmosis between lay and elite cultures as well as medical, theological and political theories and practical experiences of daily life.
Time span of the volume is the later Middle Ages, c. 1300-1500. Geographically it covers Western Europe and the comparison between Mediterranean world and Northern Europe is an important constituent.
Contributors are Jussi Hanska, Gerhard Jaritz, Timo Joutsivuo, Kirsi Kanerva, Sari Katajala-Peltomaa, Marko Lamberg, Iona McCleery, Susanna Niiranen, Sophie Oosterwijk, and Catherine Rider.

William Chester Jordan’s scholarship has demonstrated the complexity of negotiating power at both the center and margins of medieval society, taking us into the inner chambers of medieval power structures where kings, churchmen and courtiers dwell to the margins of society inhabited by disenfranchised peoples such as Jews, women and the poor. Center and Periphery: Studies on Power in the Medieval World in Honor of William Chester Jordan, edited by Katherine L. Jansen, G. Geltner and Anne E. Lester, honors Professor Jordan by taking up these themes and expanding them from France into Spain, Italy, the Lowlands, and the Mediterranean. The volume highlights how Jordan’s work inspired and influenced a generation of medievalists working in North America and Europe today.
Contributors are John W. Baldwin, Adam J. Davis, Jonathan Elukin, Hussein Fancy, Michelle Garceau, G. Geltner, Erica Gilles, Holly J. Grieco, Maya Soifer Irish, Katherine L. Jansen, Emily Kadens, Richard Landes, Jacques Le Goff, Anne E. Lester, Christopher MacEvitt, David Nirenberg, Mark Gregory Pegg , Jarbel Rodriguez, E.M. Rose and Teofilo Ruiz.

In Municipal Officials, Their Public, and the Negotiation of Justice in Medieval Languedoc, Turning examines the public’s role in shaping municipal policies through demonstrations in the city streets or through their contact with local administrators in fourteenth-century Toulouse. The text explores police brutality, town and gown rows, explosive neighborhood disputes, and communal demands for public punishments, all of which were a way residents could engage and participate in their local judicial system. The book contextualizes this interaction to the era after the French king conquered the city, and began his efforts to integrate the region into the royal domain. Turning argues that this process of assimilation was only complete after officials and the urban public tested and negotiated the transition in everyday life.

In historical records, women appear as widows, sometimes as wives or singlewomen, but one thing they had in common was they all were daughters. Through an examination of the Husting wills, Kate Staples focuses on daughters in the late medieval capital and their chances to own, rent, and manage property. These daughters were provided opportunities to be active economic agents in a world often described as hostile to women. Daughters of London also considers parents’ influence through their bequests to daughters and the visualization of daughters’ household spaces that these bequests allow. By focusing on daughterhood, and particularly urban daughters’ experiences of inheritance, we can refocus the lens through which we see and understand women’s lives in the medieval past

The late medieval period in Iberia saw an explosion in the writing of narrative histories. In examining eighteen different, if related, accounts of the reign of the Visigothic king Wamba (r. 671-680) this book aims to analyse the nature of the discourse of the late medieval Iberian chronicle. By means of a detailed analysis of the content and narrative techniques of the chronicles concerned, the book seeks to address the question: to what extent is it possible to speak of a genre of late medieval Iberian chronicles?

This collection of essays opens a new discussion about the mind, body, and spirit of the mad in medieval Europe. The authors examine a broad spectrum of mental and emotional issues, which medieval authors point out as ‘unusual’ behavior. With the emerging field of medieval disability studies in mind, the authors have carefully considered legal and cultural descriptions for insight into the perception and understanding of mental impairment. These essays on madness in the Middle Ages elucidate how medieval society conceptualized mental afflictions. Individually, the essays cover aspects of mental impairment from a variety of angles to unearth collectively medieval perspectives on mental affliction.
Contributors are James R. King, Kate McGrath, Irina Metzler, Aleksandra Pfau, Cory James Rushton, Margaret Trenchard-Smith, and Wendy J. Turner.

Aron Gurevich was a towering figure of twentieth century medieval historical research. This extraordinarily rich and multifaceted volume presents provides a comprehensive introduction to this great scholar’s life and work. These thoughtful essays demonstrate not only the deep Russian roots of Aron Gurevich’s thought but how he developed his own independent vision of the past in dialogue with pre-revolutionary Russian forms of German Neo-Kantianism, the Tartu-Moscow school of semiotics, and the heritage of Mikhail Bakhtin. Much more than a traditional Gedenkschrift, the editors have provided us with a first rate document in the intellectual history of twentieth century Russia and Europe.
Patrick Geary, Andrew W. Mellon Professor, IAS, Princeton, and Distinguished Professor of History Ermeritus, UCLA

Contributors are Peter Burke, Andrew Cowell, Charles J. Halperin, Eve Levin, Eva Osterberg, Harbans Mukhia, Michael Richter, Svetlana Luchitskaya, Roger Markwick, Boris Stepanov, Thomas Izbicki, Jean Pierre Delville, Alexandra Korros, and Yelena Mazour-Matusevich.

Memory in the Middle Ages has received particular attention in recent decades; yet; the topic remains difficult to grasp and the research on it rather fragmented. This book gathers particular case studies on memory in different parts of medieval Europe and in a variety of fields including literatures, languages, manuscript studies, history, history of ideas, philosophy, social history and art history. The studies address, on the one hand, memory as means of storing and recuperating knowledge (arts of memory and memory aids), and, on the other hand, memory as remembering and constructing the past (including the subject of forgetting). It should be useful to all interested in medieval culture, literature and history.
Contributors are Milena Bartlová, Bergsveinn Birgisson, Irene Bueno, Vincent Challet, Greti Dinkova-Bruun, Lucie Doležalová, Dávid Falvay, Carmen Florea, Cédric Giraud, Laura Iseppi de Filippis, Farkas Gábor Kiss, Rüdiger Lorenz, Else Mundal, Előd Nemerkényi, William J. Purkis, Slavica Ranković, Lucia Raspe, Kimberly Rivers, Victoria Smirnova, Francesco Stella, Péter Tóth, Tamás Visi, Jon Whitman and Rafał Wójcik.

The influence of Christianity on 'the history of violence' is often exemplified by famous instances of interfaith conflict, like 'The Crusades'. However, as religions develop, they usually marginalize violence against fellow believers long before they ever, if at all, question violence against 'others'. Through an investigation of spiritual and legal sources, this book details how Christian teachings about charity, sin and purity problematized late medieval parishioners' use of violence, and how parishioners actually tried to reconcile these teachings with cultural norms that often honored violent conduct. By illuminating the impact of lessons concerning the sinfulness of violence and piety of self-restraint, this book provides a fresh perspective on the important role of religion in the 'civilizing process' of European history.

The Language of Abuse provides the first comprehensive examination of marital violence in later medieval England. Drawing from a wide variety of legal and literary sources, this book develops a nuanced perspective of the acceptability of marital violence at a time when social expectations of gender and marriage were in transition. As such, Butler’s work contributes to current debates concerning the role of the jury, levels of violence in late medieval England, the power relationship within marriage, and the position of women in medieval society.

Assembled in honour of John H. A. Munro (University of Toronto), the volume groups nineteen original studies by a diversified panel of scholars. The essays explore late medieval market mechanisms and associated institutional, fiscal and monetary, organizational, decision-making, legal and ethical issues, as well as various aspects of production, consumption and market integration. The geographical scope stretches from North-Western and Central Europe to North and West Africa, and the individual contributions deal with a variety of local, regional, and long-distance markets and networks. The mix of approaches, cutting-edge archival research, and presentations of current projects addresses the interests of scholars in diverse fields, from economic to social and institutional history. The volume offers a full bibliography of John H. A. Munro’s works.