Medieval Societies, Religions, and Cultures
In Shrines, Relics, and Saints,the eminent medievalist André Vauchez explores the evolution of spaces in Christianity—chapels, monasteries, holy wells, grottos, and other holy places—that are considered sacred because they house the relics of a saint or because they preserve the memory of an appearance by a saint, angel, or the Virgin Mary.
From famous sanctuaries that still attract multitudes of pilgrims—in Jerusalem, Rome, Tours, Assisi, and Compostela—to local shrines in villages, towns and wild places across the continent, these sanctuaries were frequented by pilgrims in search of miraculous healings of body and soul. Together, they formed a network comprising new forms of sacredness and spiritual practice. A masterwork in the history of Christianity, Shrines, Relics, and Saints traces pilgrimage routes to major sanctuaries, follows saints' relics as they were transferred from East to West, and examines the Church's ambiguous and sometimes antagonistic relationship to sites of popular worship.
Cultures of the Medieval Kingdom of Jerusalem is a revelatory portrait of the Frankish Levant at the time of the Crusades. Following victory in the First Crusade in 1099, the newcomers from Europe, or Franks, ruled a Christian kingdom in Jerusalem, then Acre, until 1291. Historians have written off this kingdom as a derivative cultural backwater. In this new social and cultural history, however, Benjamin Z. Kedar uncovers the striking inventiveness of the Frankish clerics and knights who settled in the kingdom and lived in it.
Across an array of languages and archives, from textual and artistic to material and archaeological, Kedar maps the contours of the kingdom's cultureor, more accurately, its cultures. The Kingdom of Jerusalem was small, but the diversity of its population had no counterpart anywhere in the medieval West. Kedar explores how Franks, eastern Christians, Muslims, Jews, and Samaritans lived side by side in contentious times, each group developing or preserving its specific culture.
Through stories of the lives of the kingdom's inhabitants, Kedar presents the remarkable creativity of the Franks in various fields as they faced challenges in new surroundings thousands of miles from their countries of origin. Cultures of the Medieval Kingdom of Jerusalem, the culmination of Kedar's half century of scholarship on the Crusades and the medieval Levant, is an innovative history of the Kingdom of Jerusalem.
Microliteratures is an innovative examination of writings done in the margins of medieval manuscripts and early modern books. Not always as formal as glosses, sometimes feverish and abbreviated, these marginal writings or, "microliteratures," are the product of readers thinking with the text at the center of the page. Jesús R. Velasco argues that microliteratures are not private annotations but, rather, a humanistic activity performed in the public sphere. These marginal engagements with texts are made public to future readers of the same book.
Surveying the microliteratures of a wide range of medieval and early modern Iberian genres—legal, religious, chivalric, and political texts—Velasco finds that in the shared space and time of reading, microliterary actions and artifacts are also models of public humanities work that connects texts to contemporary issues. Microliteratures emerge from this ambitious book as a way of understanding the self as a reflective and politically engaged reader in conversation with past, present, and future readers as contemporaries.
Radiances gathers previously unpublished essays by one of the greatest historians of the twentieth century. Although best known for The King's Two Bodies (1957), Ernst Kantorowicz's scholarly expertise ranged from classical antiquity to early modernity and from political pageantry to numismatics. These essays traverse the breadth of his expertise, exploring "radiations" of the themes that were central to his published work: sovereignty, theology, law, and iconography.
The radiations in these engaging essays include the imagery of throne-sharing from the Hellenistic era and Pharaonic Egypt to early Christianity, coronation ceremonies in Byzantium and the West, the Carolingian and Burgundian Renaissances, the relationship between Rome and Christianity, the importance of history as a humanistic pursuit, and the significance of postage stamps in political myth-building. Robert E. Lerner discusses each essay's composition, themes, and place in Kantorowicz's oeuvre. Combining vast knowledge with intellectual delight, Radiances teems with the profound historical insights that distinguished Kantorowicz's scholarship.
Gender and Authority in the Late Medieval Church asks a deceptively simple question: How did the governance of the medieval institutional church remain exclusively male, despite plentiful evidence of women being as capable and devout as men? The remarkable endurance of an all-male clergy is an important element of medieval church government—one that is frequently taken for granted in the historiography—and is connected to another overlooked feature of episcopal authority: the strategies that bishops used to secure the compliance of a relatively autonomous clergy. As Ian Forrest shows, bishops kept their clergy in check through normative standards of masculinity that necessarily disqualified women from leadership roles.
Everywhere in the medieval church were women who had the capacity, the resources, and often the ambition to take part in governance, from abbesses to priests' servants, mothers, sisters, and unofficial wives. Bringing together evidence of female activity at the margins of the institutional church, Forrest argues that the male monopoly on formal power was haunted by female capability and aspiration at every turn. Drawing on case studies from the English diocesan clergy between the mid-thirteenth and early sixteenth centuries, he explores how women's involvement in governance was rendered unthinkable through the very discursive strategies that bishops used to control their male clergy. In doing so, Gender and Authority in the Late Medieval Church tells an integrated history that explains how both the exclusion of women and the inclusion of men underpin a rigidly gendered system of religious governance.
A Crusader's Death and Life in Acre uses five parchment rolls that inventoried the possessions of Eudes of Nevers, son of the duke of Burgundy, at his death in Acre in 1266 to open out a panorama of Christian crusader life. The contents of the rolls, or rouleaux, span from the pay rendered to knights and servants to the numerous possessions of a crusading nobleman. The inventory provides insight into the medieval Outremer even as it provokes questions about trade, diplomacy, remembrance, and the methodological challenges of evoking material objects in texts.
Anne E. Lester and Laura K. Morreale present the first complete modern French edition and English translation of the rouleaux along with seven crusade poems by Rutebeuf. In addition, A Crusader's Death and Life in Acre contains a wealth of scholarly commentary that addresses the composition of the rouleaux, the life and relationships of Eudes, and the culture of crusading in its material, written, devotional, and poetic forms.
Contributors: Sharon Farmer, Andrew Jotischky, Anne Latowsky, Richard A. Leson, Maureen C. Miller, Jonathan Rubin, Uri Zvi Shachar, and Caroline Smith
The Mongol Archive in Late Medieval France is the first comprehensive study of contact between France and the Mongols in the late Middle Ages. As these realms expanded across Eurasia—the French through crusade and settlement, the Mongols through conquest—their encounters altered each other's understanding of the world and their place in it.
The Mongol influence on French culture is visible in what Mark Cruse calls the Mongol archive—a wide range of materials including chronicles, crusade treatises, encyclopedias, manuscript illuminations, maps, romances, and travel accounts—revealing how the French court made sense of a people previously unknown to the European intellectual tradition. Cruse mines this archive of Franco-Mongol contact to reassess France's place in the continental history of medieval Eurasia.
By comparing the French and Mongol courts, Cruse shows how their similarities allowed meaningful communication between them and highlights the surprising connections—diplomatic, intellectual, and genealogical—across vast distances. The library of King Charles V (r. 1364–1380), one of the largest in medieval Europe, is a monument to the richness of these encounters, which anticipate the global interconnectedness of the modern world. Ultimately, the innovative approach in The Mongol Archive in Late Medieval France toward French conceptions of and relations with the Mongols demonstrates how a global perspective transforms our understanding of the medieval world.
The Hungry City is the story of medieval Barcelona, retold through the lens of food and famine. Between the summer of 1333 and the spring of 1334, severe weather-related grain shortages spread throughout the Mediterranean, and Barcelona's leaders struggled to bring food to the city as its residents grew increasingly desperate. Employing the perspectives of historical actors whose stories are drawn from the records of that catastrophic year, Marie A. Kelleher uses Barcelonans' varied responses to crisis in the food system to present multiple ways of understanding the city—as a physical space, as the center of a network of Mediterranean commerce, as one powerful entity within a broader monarchy, as a site of religious encounter, and as a complex social body. Even as the central figure in each chapter offers their own version of the city, the separate strands of these multiple Barcelonas intertwine to reveal the fabric of the city as a whole.
The medieval city was defined by its network of human relationships—between its rulers and ruled; its merchants, artisans, and laborers; its religious and secular authorities; its insider and outsider groups—and by its overlapping local and regional geographies. Barcelona in the fourteenth century was no different, and The Hungry City draws together multiple lives and narrative strands to focus on a single point in time, what one Catalan chronicler referred to as "the first bad year," providing a dynamic new perspective on the history of Barcelona and the medieval Mediterranean.
In Bounded Wilderness, Kathryn Jasper focuses on the innovations undertaken at the hermitage of Fonte Avellana in central Italy during the eleventh century by its prior, Peter Damian (d. 1072). The congregation of Fonte Avellana experimented with reforming practices that led to new ways of managing property and relations among clergy, nobles, and the laity.
Jasper charts how Damian's notion of monastic reform took advantage of the surrounding topography and geography to amplify the sensory aspects of ascetic experiences. By focusing on monastic landscapes and land ownership, Jasper demonstrates that reform extended beyond abstract ideas. Rather, reform circulated locally through monastic networks and addressed practical concerns such as property boundaries and rights over water, orchards, pastures, and mills. Putting new sources, both documentary and archaeological, into conversation with monastic charters and Damian's letters, Bounded Wilderness reveals the interrelationship of economic practices, religious traditions, and the natural environment in the idea and implementation of reform.
Queen of Sorrows takes an original approach to both late-medieval Italian history and the history of Christianity, using quantitative and qualitative analyses of a remarkable archive of 1,904 testaments to determine patterns in giving to the Virgin of Loreto shrine in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Bianca M. Lopez argues that in central Italy, as elsewhere, the cult of the Virgin Mary gained new prominence at this time of unprecedented mortality. Individuals gave to Santa Maria di Loreto, which houses the structure in which Mary is believed to have lived, as an expression of their grief in the hope of strengthening family lineages beyond death and to care for loved ones believed to be languishing in purgatory.
Lopez establishes statistical correlations between different social groups and their donations to Loreto over time, uncovering informative new historical patterns such as the prominence of widow and migrant donors in the notarial record. The testaments also provide a social history of Recanati, revealing how its denizens venerated Mary as a saint with unrivaled spiritual power and uniquely sympathetic to grief, having lost her own son, Jesus. In the fourteenth century, plague survivors transformed their anguish into Marian devotion. The devastation of the plague brought the Virgin out of noble courts and monasteries and onto city streets. As Queen of Sorrows details, however, the popularity and growing wealth of Loreto's Marian shrine attracted the attention of the papacy and peninsular seigneurial lords, who eventually brought Santa Maria di Loreto under the control of the Church.
Byzantine Media Subjects invites readers into a world replete with images—icons, frescoes, and mosaics filling places of worship, politics, and community. Glenn Peers asks readers to think themselves into a world where representation reigned and humans followed, and indeed were formed. Interrogating the fundamental role of representation in the making of the Byzantine human, Peers argues that Byzantine culture was (already) posthuman.
The Byzantine experience reveals the extent to which media like icons, manuscripts, music, animals, and mirrors fundamentally determine humans. In the Byzantine world, representation as such was deeply persuasive, even coercive; it had the power to affect human relationships, produce conflict, and form self-perception. Media studies has made its subject the modern world, but this book argues for media having made historical subjects. Here, it is shown that media long ago also made Byzantine humans, defining them, molding them, mediating their relationship to time, to nature, to God, and to themselves.
In The Last Ta'ifa, Anthony H. Minnema shows how the Banu Hud, an Arab dynasty from Zaragoza, created and recreated their vision of an autonomous city-state (ta'ifa) in ways that reveal changes to legitimating strategies in al-Andalus and across the Mediterranean. In 1110, the Banu Hud lost control of their emirate in the north of Iberia and entered exile, ending their century-long rule. But far from accepting their fate, the dynasty adapted by serving Christian kings, nurturing rebellions, and carving out a new state in Murcia to recover, maintain, and grow their power. By tracing the Banu Hud across chronicles, charters, and coinage, Minnema shows how dynastic leaders borrowed their rivals' claims and symbols and engaged in similar types of military campaigns and complex alliances in an effort to cultivate authority.
Drawing on Arabic, Latin, and vernacular sources, The Last Ta'ifa uses the history of the Banu Hud to connect the pursuit of legitimacy in al-Andalus to the politics of other emerging kingdoms and emirates. The actions of Hudid leaders, Minnema shows, echoed across the region as other kings, rebels, and adventurers employed parallel methods to gain power and resist the forces of centralization, highlighting the constructed nature of legitimacy in al-Andalus and the Mediterranean.
Geoffroy of Villehardouin, Marshal of Champagne by Theodore Evergates traces the remarkable life of Geoffroy of Villehardouin (c. 1148–c. 1217) from his earliest years in Champagne through his last years in Greece after the crusade.
The fourth son of a knight, Geoffroy became marshal of Champagne, principal negotiator in organizing the Fourth Crusade, chief of staff of the expedition to and conquest of Constantinople, garrison commander of Constantinople and, in his late fifties, field commander defending the Latin settlement in the Byzantine empire against invading Bulgarian armies and revolting Greek cities. Known for his diplomatic skills and rectitude, he served as the chief military advisor to Count Thibaut III of Champagne and later to Emperor Henry of Constantinople.
Geoffroy is remarkable as well for dictating the earliest war memoir in medieval Europe, which is also the earliest prose narrative in Old French. Addressed to a home audience in Champagne, he described what he did, what he saw, and what he heard during his eight years on crusade and especially during the fraught period after the conquest of Constantinople. His memoir, The Book of the Conquest of Constantinople, furnishes a commander's retrospective account of the main events and inner workings of the crusade—the innumerable meetings and speeches, the conduct (not always commendable) of the barons, and the persistent discontent within the army—as well as a celebration of his own deeds as a diplomat and a military commander.
The Splendor and Opulence of the Past traces the career of Jaume Caresmar (1717–1791), a church historian and a key figure of the Catalan Enlightenment who transcribed tens of thousands of parchments to preserve and glorify Catalonia's medieval past in the face of its diminishing autonomy. As Paul Freedman shows, Caresmar's books, essays, and transcriptions—some only recently discovered—provide fresh insights into the Middle Ages as remembered in modern Catalonia and illustrate how a nation's past glories and humiliations can inform contemporary politics and culture.
From the ninth to the sixteenth centuries, Catalonia was a thriving, independent set of principalities within what would become modern Spain. In the wake of the dismantling of its autonomy by the eighteenth-century Spanish state, Catalan scholars looked to the region's medieval independence and wealth as a means of maintaining a distinct Catalan identity and resisting Castilian hegemony. Through their writings and archival investigations, Caresmar and the canons at Santa Maria de Bellpuig de les Avellanes, where Caresmar was abbot, laid the foundations for not only the scholarly exploration of the Middle Ages but also the development of Catalan national sentiment.
Although the eighteenth century is often regarded as a low point for the Catalan language and culture, The Splendor and Opulence of the Past emphasizes the importance of this period's antiquarians to Catalan projects of modernization and economic progress and links their historiography of the Middle Ages to struggles over Catalonia's relationship to the Spanish state over two centuries.
In A Diabolical Voice, Justine L. Trombley traces the afterlife of the Mirror of Simple Souls, which circulated anonymously for two centuries in four languages, though not without controversy or condemnation. Widely recognized as one of the most unusual and important mystical treatises of the late Middle Ages, the Mirror was condemned in Paris in 1310 as a heretical work, and its author, Marguerite Porete, was burned at the stake. Trombley identifies alongside the work's increasing positive reception a parallel trend of opposition and condemnation centered specifically around its Latin translation. She's discovered fourteenth- and fifteenth-century theologians, canon lawyers, inquisitors, and other churchmen who were entirely ignorant of the Mirror's author and its condemnation and saw in the work dangerous heresies that demanded refutation and condemnation of their own.
Using new evidence from the Mirror's largely overlooked Latin manuscript tradition, A Diabolical Voice charts the range of negative reactions to the Mirror, from confiscations and physical destruction to academic refutations and vicious denunciations of its supposedly fiendish doctrines. This parallel story of opposition shows how heresy remained an integral part of the Mirror's history well beyond the events of 1310, revealing how seriously churchmen took Marguerite Porete's ideas on their own terms, in contexts entirely removed from Marguerite's identity and her fate. Emphasizing the complexity of the Mirror of Simple Souls and its reception, Trombley makes clear that this influential book continues to yield new perspectives and understandings.
To Govern Is to Serve explores the practices of collective governance in medieval religious orders that turned the precepts of the Gospels—most notably that "the first will be last, the last will be first"—into practices of communal deliberation and the election of superiors. Jacques Dalarun argues that these democratic forms have profoundly influenced modern experiences of democracy, in particular the idea of government not as domination but as service.
Dalarun undertakes meticulous textual analysis and historical research into twelfth and thirteenth-century religious movements—from Fontevraud and the Paraclete of Abelard and Heloise through St. Dominic and St. Francis—that sought their superiors from among the less exalted members of their communities to chart how these experiments prefigured certain aspects of modern democracies, those allowing individuals to find their way forward as part of a collective. Wide ranging and deeply original,To Govern Is to Serve highlights the history of the reciprocal bonds of service and humility that underpin increasingly fragile democracies in the twenty-first century.
Winner of the Wallace K. Ferguson Prize
Winner of the Dionisius A. Agius Book Prize
The Wolf King explores how political power was conceptualized, constructed, and wielded in twelfth-century al-Andalus, focusing on the eventful reign of Muhammad ibn Sad ibn Ahmad ibn Mardanīsh (r. 1147–1172). Celebrated in Castilian and Latin sources as el rey lobo/rex lupus and denigrated by Almohad and later Arabic sources as irreligious and disloyal to fellow Muslims because he fought the Almohads and served as vassal to the Castilians, Ibn Mardanīsh ruled a kingdom that at its peak constituted nearly half of al-Andalus and served as an important buffer between the Almohads and the Christian kingdoms of Castile and Aragon.
Through a close examination of contemporary sources across the region, Abigail Krasner Balbale shows that Ibn Mardanīsh's short-lived dynasty was actually an attempt to integrate al-Andalus more closely with the Islamic East—particularly the Abbasid caliphate. At stake in his battles against the Almohads was the very idea of the caliphate in this period, as well as who could define righteous religious authority. The Wolf King makes effective use of chronicles, chancery documents, poetry, architecture, coinage, and artifacts to uncover how Ibn Mardanīsh adapted language and cultural forms from around the Islamic world to assert and consolidate power—and then tracks how these strategies, and the memory of Ibn Mardanīsh more generally, influenced expressions of kingship in subsequent periods.
Open access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Pastoral Care and Community in Late Medieval Germany explores how local religious culture was constructed in medieval European Christian society through close study of a set of neglected, late fourteenth-century manuscripts. The Mirror of Priests is a pastoral work written by Albert, an Augustinian canon from the Bavarian market town of Diessen, to guide local priests in their work with parishioners. Multiple versions of the text in Albert's own hand survive and, by comparing them, Deeana Copeland Klepper shows how ostensibly universal religious ideals and laws were adapted, interpreted, and repurposed by those given responsibility to implement them, thereby crafting distinctive, local expressions of Christianity.
The vision of Christian community that emerges from Albert's pastoral guide is one in which the messiness of ordinary life is evident. Albert's imagined parish was marked out by geographic and legal boundaries—property and jurisdictional rights, tithes, and sacramental responsibility—as well as symbolic realities. By situating the Mirror of Priests within Albert's physical and conceptual spaces, Klepper affirms the centrality of the parish and its community for those living under the rubric of Christianity, especially outside of large cities. Pivoting between the materiality of texts and the sociocultural contexts of an overlooked manuscript tradition, Pastoral Care and Community in Late Medieval Germany offers fresh insights into the role of parish priests, the pastoral manual genre, and late medieval religious life.
The Mystical Presence of Christ investigates the connections between exceptional experiences of Christ's presence and ordinary devotion to Christ in the late medieval West. Unsettling the notion that experiences of seeing Christ's figure or hearing Christ speak are simply exceptional events that happen at singular moments, Richard Kieckhefer reveals the entanglements between these experiences and those that occur through the imagery, language, and rituals of ordinary, everyday devotional culture.
Kieckhefer begins his book by reconsidering the "who" and the "how" of Christ's mystical presence. He argues that Christ's humanity and divinity were equally important preconditions for encounters, both exceptional and ordinary, which Kieckhefer proposes as existing on a spectrum of experience that moves from presupposition to intuition and finally to perception. Kieckhefer then examines various contexts of Christ manifestations—during prayer, meditation, and liturgy, for example—with attention to gender dynamics and the relationship between saintly individuals and their hagiographers. Through penetrating discussions of a diverse set of texts and figures across the long fourteenth century (Angela of Foligno, the nuns of Helfta, Margery Kempe, Dorothea of Montau, Meister Eckhart, Henry Suso, and Walter Hilton, among others), Kieckhefer shows that seemingly exceptional manifestations of Christ were also embedded in ordinary religious experience.
Wide-ranging in scope and groundbreaking in methodology, The Mystical Presence of Christ is a magisterial work that rethinks the interplay between the exceptional and the ordinary in the workings of late medieval religion.
The Salvation of Israel investigates Christianity's eschatological Jew: the role and characteristics of the Jews at the end of days in the Christian imagination. It explores the depth of Christian ambivalence regarding these Jews, from Paul's Epistle to the Romans, through late antiquity and the Middle Ages, to the Puritans of the seventeenth century. Jeremy Cohen contends that few aspects of a religion shed as much light on the character and the self-understanding of its adherents as its expectations for the end of time. Moreover, eschatological beliefs express and mold an outlook toward nonbelievers, situating them in an overall scheme of human history and conditioning interaction with them as that history unfolds.
Cohen's close readings of biblical commentary, theological texts, and Christian iconography reveal the dual role of the Jews of the last days. For rejecting belief and salvation in Jesus Christ, they have been linked to the false messiah—the Antichrist, the agent of Satan and the exemplary embodiment of evil. Yet from its inception, Christianity has also hinged its hopes for the second coming on the enlightenment and repentance of the Jews; for then, as Paul prophesized, "all Israel will be saved."
In its vast historical scope, from the ancient Mediterranean world of early Christianity to seventeenth-century England and New England, The Salvation of Israel offers a nuanced and insightful assessment of Christian attitudes toward Jews, rife with inconsistency and complexity, thus contributing significantly to our understanding of Jewish-Christian relations.
Dynasties Intertwined traces the turbulent relationship between the Zirids of Ifriqiya and the Normans of Sicily during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. In doing so, it reveals the complex web of economic, political, cultural, and military connections that linked the two dynasties to each other and to other polities across the medieval Mediterranean. Furthermore, despite the contemporary interfaith holy wars happening around the Zirids and Normans, their relationship was never governed by an overarching ideology like jihad or crusade. Instead, both dynasties pursued policies that they thought would expand their power and wealth, either through collaboration or conflict. The relationship between the Zirids and Normans ultimately came to a violent end in the 1140s, when a devastating drought crippled Ifriqiya. The Normans seized this opportunity to conquer lands across the Ifriqiyan coast, bringing an end to the Zirid dynasty and forming the Norman kingdom of Africa, which persisted until the Almohad conquest of Mahdia in 1160.
Previous scholarship on medieval North Africa during the reign of the Zirids has depicted the region as one of instability and political anarchy that rendered local lords powerless in the face of foreign conquest. Matt King shows that, to the contrary, the Zirids and other local lords in Ifriqiya were integral parts of the far-reaching political and economic networks across the Mediterranean. Despite the eventual collapse of the Zirid dynasty at the hands of the Normans, Dynasties Intertwined makes clear that its emirs were active and consequential Mediterranean players for much of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, with political agency independent of their Christian neighbors across the Strait of Sicily.
