Where the Middle Ages Begin
Examining the conversion of the kingdom of Mercia from the perspective of that kingdom’s origins and development and its rulers’ interests and concerns will enable us to understand both resistance and conversion to Christianity in seventh-century England.
These centuries of tension and adaptation provide the evidence for the interaction of Christianity and Celtic religions, but one must use caution when examining Celtic religion because of potentially biased evidence.
For a broader modern audience today, if taken somewhat journalistically, Pusicius’ story is an example that cuts along cultural and religious lines that presumably originate in ancient, political divisions and confirm a “clash of civilizations” thesis.
Ken Pennington examines the issue of forced baptism of Jewish children in the legal literature from the Middle Ages to the early modern period.
This is the first paper from the Haskins Conference at Boston College – it focused on Bede’s narratives of Royal conversion.
Most recently, Tamer el-Leithy has made a comprehensive study of Coptic conversion during the Mamluk period. In length and depth, this still-unpublished work eclipses the preceding article-length studies. Its subject is focused on conversion among the Coptic upper class in Cairo during the fourteenth century…
The history of the converso Jews began in medieval Catholic Spain, which was constantly wracked with anti-Semitism that, many times, led to mass conversions or massacres of the Jewish population.
With the notable exception of R. I. Page, the attitude that historians and archaeologists alike have taken to Bede’s words about the religion(s) of the pre-Christian occupants of conversion-age Anglo-Saxon England has overwhelmingly been to accept what this eighth-century commentator has to tell us.
Petrarch’s letter, with its moments of meditation, its allegorical exploitation of the features in the physical ascent, and its program of classical allusions informing even the geographical descriptions, is much more than a travel narrative.
Current scholarship emphasizes that the old model of conversion—of, say, Christianity being actively forced onto passive and subordinate peoples—is no longer satisfactory, and instead prefers to frame the issue around concepts of cultural interaction or cultural transmission, and selective appropriation of the host religion.
Although both came from pagan and ethnically Slavic backgrounds, the leaders diverged in the branch of Christianity each chose, although, both conversions took place each region within a similar time frame.
Mission and conversion have long been, and continue to be a preoccupation among historians. Mission as understood in this paper refers to an individual or group traveling outside of their land to achieve a purpose, whether it be instruction, securing peace, or conversion.
Lull’s interest in the conversion of Muslims and Jews was central in his thought and the primary motivation for a number of his writings.
From the Celts to the Anglo-Saxons, nomadic tribes of Europe fostered pagan beliefs. Today, few records exist to explain these faiths because of their roots in oral tradition and a demise of animistic traditions brought about by the adaptation of a new conviction.
In this essay I seek to explain this surprisingly peaceful outcome to a potentially explosive situation, and more broadly to contribute to a new kind of history of early modern diplomacy that takes as its starting point practices of mediation in all their complexity.
The druids as members of the pagan ‘priestly class’ were an important, high-status force in Celtic society. This class of druids was one of the most formidable groups that early Christian saints and missionaries had to face and overcome in order to establish firmly the roots of Christianity in pagan Celtic Ireland.
International conference to be held at University College Cork, Ireland on 21-23 September, 2012
The most recent addition to the family of literary genres may be the booklife. Finding its origin in Roland Barthes’s Roland Barthes and now taught in English departments, the booklife proposes a union of sorts of writing and living. Whether the genre will be long-lived is an open question, that it can be fruitful is not in doubt. But medievalists already knew that the dividing line between book and life is always thin, especially if that life has been lived in and among books.
From the late eleventh century to the end of the fifteenth, significant populations of Jews and Muslims lived under Christian domination in the lands we now call Spain. Their coexistence was not easy, for each of the three religious communities felt at risk, both physically and spiritually, from the others
This study will focus on just one aspect of the transition from Muslim kingdom to medieval Christian state. In 1238, Ciudad de Valencia, the most important urban center in the Muslim kingdom of Valencia would fall to Jaime I, el conquistador, king of Christian Aragon and Catalonia, opening up a vast region to Christian influence.
In fifth-century Spain, the Visigoth conquerors – Christians and Arians – had to live with the native Hispani, who were Roman by culture and law and Catholic by faith.
In the period after the fall of Rome and before the Vikings, Scotland became a Christian society, but there are few historical documents to help understand how this happened.
There is no source quite like the Beowulf manuscript, as it is the longest poem and the only epic composed in Old English which has survived to the modern era, and thus is central to any understanding of Anglo-Saxon literature.
For a number of years the Croats of Dalmatia were subject to the Franks, as they had formerly been in their own country, but the Franks treated them with such brutality that they used to murder Croat infants at the breast and cast them to the dogs.
Examines how Christianization of the Norse in the tenth and eleventh centuries was the effect of a premeditated mission strategy borne from the experiences of converting the Anglo-Saxon English in the seventh century AD.
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