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Early Middle Ages Archive
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Totila: Theoderic Reborn or Barbarian Belisarius?
Posted on June 18, 2013 | No CommentsThis essay examines the sixth-century Byzantine historian Procopius’ depiction of the Gothic king Totila. -
Queen-making and Queenship in early medieval England and Francia
Posted on June 6, 2013 | No CommentsThe present work is not simply a discussion of early medieval queen-making rites, for this would only have necessitated a study of the ninth to the eleventh centuries, but queen-making reciprocated with ideas of queenship just as king-making was inextricably bound up with ideas of kingship. -
Reading between the lines: Old Germanic and early Christian views on abortion
Posted on May 24, 2013 | No CommentsThe object of my studies was to determine whether women in the early medieval Germanic West (could have) committed abortion, when confronted with an unwanted or inconvenient pregnancy. -
Infant Burials and Christianization: The View from East Central Europe
Posted on May 19, 2013 | No CommentsThis was the second paper in the Early Medieval Europe I series given at KZOO and another fabulous archaeology paper. It contrasted infant grave sites in early converted medieval Poland and Anglo Saxon England. -
Louis the Pious and the Conversion of the Danes
Posted on May 17, 2013 | No CommentsThis paper was part of a very interesting session on the Early Middle Ages. The papers covered Eastern European Infant Burial, the archaeology of medieval feasting and conversion. This paper contrasted the conversion policies of Charlemagne versus those of Louis the Pious. -
Human Monstrosity in Terminator II: Judgement Day, Beowulf and The Passion of St Christopher
Posted on May 6, 2013 | No CommentsThe idea of a humanoid monster that can be reluctantly empathized with can be traced back to various source texts. For example, Grendel in the Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf is a bloodthirsty savage, however upon a close reading of the poem he appears more human. -
Signs and Senses: Diagnosis and Prognosis in Early Medieval Pulse and Urine Texts
Posted on April 28, 2013 | No Commentsin which they were made. These early medieval anthologies are quite different from Scholastic anthologies such as the Artkella, which were compiled as curriculum texts for the new, formalized medical instruction of the nascent universities. -
Lincolnshire and the Arthurian Legend
Posted on April 28, 2013 | No CommentsThis article is intended to rectify this, proceeding from the widely-held assumption of the existence of a genuinely ‘historical Arthur’, before going on to consider the even more fundamental question of whether we ought to believe in Arthur’s existence at all. -
“Becoming Mary of the Gael”
Posted on April 19, 2013 | No CommentsThis paper focused on the comparison of St. Brigit and the Virgin Mary in early Irish texts. -
Rune Stones and Magnate Farms: The Viking Age in Vadsbo Hundred
Posted on April 16, 2013 | No CommentsWhat is the relationship between the Viking Age magnate farms and local place names? What of the numerous Rune stones, burial mounds, surface finds, and ancient monuments? Are they also tied to subsequent names? Can they help us place farms and other sites? -
Climate in Medieval Ireland: AD 500-1600
Posted on April 14, 2013 | No CommentsThe aim of the dissertation is to reconstruct climate in Medieval Ireland using documentary and dendrochronological proxy data from Ireland and Northern Europe. -
Wonders and Wisdom: Anglo-Saxons and the East
Posted on April 11, 2013 | No CommentsWhat the Anglo-Saxons ‘‘knew’’ about Moslems and Jews, and about Babylon and Egypt and India, depended upon Biblical exegesis, saints’ lives, and other texts derived from Latin sources. Numerous Old English texts, as well as Latin versions that circulated and were copied in Anglo-Saxon England, concern Asia; these are quite varied in genre and in content. -
When the Dark Ages Were Lit Up: The Sutton Hoo discovery 70 years on
Posted on April 11, 2013 | No CommentsAlex Burghart looks back 70 years to the discovery of the fabulous Anglo-Saxon burial at Sutton Hoo, and ponders how far we've come in our knowledge of the period since 1939. -
The Death Toll of Justinian’s Plague and Its Effects on the Byzantine Empire
Posted on April 4, 2013 | No CommentsIn 541 a plague arrived in Egypt and rapidly began to spread. The following account of the beginning of the plague, while clearly an exaggeration still shows the impact of the disease. -
The Image of Early Medieval Barbaroi in Contemporary Written Sources and Modern Scholarship: the Balkan Perspective
Posted on April 3, 2013 | No CommentsThis article gives a review on the accounts of the contemporary authors held as authorities on the history of the barbarian tribes, which combined with the survey of the material evidence, retrieved with archaeological excavations. -
Vikings – Review of Episode 5: Raid
Posted on April 1, 2013 | No Comments'Let the man who thinks that he is descended from the Gods learn that he is human after all' -
Relics and Reliquaries in the Vita Germani Auctore Constantio : the Capsula
Posted on March 24, 2013 | No CommentsIt is the sporadic presence of the term capsula in the Vita Germani, and in other texts contemporary to it, which indicates its importance in the history of Christian costume as described by Constantius. In what follows, I shall demonstrate through literary comparisons and historical linguistics how such an affirmation is not, in fact, a contradiction at all. -
Tenebrae Refulgeant: Celestial Signa in Gregory of Tours
Posted on March 24, 2013 | No CommentsCelestial portents appear frequently in the Historiae of Bishop Gregory of Tours (ca. 539–94). Gregory carefully distinguished between the interpretation of celestial signs and horoscopic astrology by describing signs as natural, albeit miraculous, elements of God's Creation. -
Barbarians to the Balkans
Posted on March 17, 2013 | No CommentsIn the High Middle Ages, in a now clearly articulated opposition between the West and the East, Europe and the Balkans began to emerge and be fixed as distinct and hostile entities. In Crusading chronicles, the Balkan lands lay on the way from Europe to the Holy Land. In the late twelfth and in the thirteenth centuries, the conventional separation line between the civilized and barbarian world, identical with the river Danube, began to break down and the barbarians came to be located in the Balkans. -
BOOKS: Happy St. Patrick Day! New reads to celebrate Medieval Ireland!
Posted on March 17, 2013 | No CommentsBOOKS: Happy St. Patrick Day! New reads to celebrate Medieval Ireland! -
What remains: Improper burials tell a story of social change in medieval Britain
Posted on March 16, 2013 | No CommentsStonehenge, by the 11th century, lay on the border of two administrative districts known as hundreds, and many scholars have argued that it marked an important territorial boundary even earlier. It would have been a site known to everyone in the region but inhabited by no one. -
Contemplating the Evolution of Medieval Double-Entendre Literature
Posted on March 10, 2013 | No CommentsThe linguistic composition of the Exeter Book Riddles supports this, and in fact, the genre became a refuge for contemporary colloquial speech which was seen as coarse and lower class within the ideologies of Christianity and Germanic heroism. -
The Price of Alfonso’s Wisdom. Nationalist Translation Policy in Thirteenth-Century Castile
Posted on March 10, 2013 | No CommentsFirst, how can we say where and when translation began in any country? The origins of translation are surely to be associated with the first evidence of trade, and trade was certainly carried out in the Spain of the Romans, the Visigoths, and of course the centuries of Islamic domination. -
Celtic Search Talk III: Irish Classical Studies and the Irish History of Troy
Posted on March 8, 2013 | No CommentsThis was part of a series of papers given at the University of Toronto in competition for a position in the Celtic Studies department. This paper focused on the reception of literature and the reception of the classics in medieval Ireland. -
Brigit: Goddess, Saint, ‘Holy Woman,’ and Bone of Contention
Posted on March 4, 2013 | No CommentsBrigit1 and Patrick, two saints from the beginnings of Christianity in Ireland in the fifth century CE, retain their popularity with Catholic Christians to this day.