How you can Follow Us!
Medieval News
Germany Archive
-
What did the Renaissance man wear? Historian recreates outfit from the 16th century
Posted on May 1, 2013 | No CommentsIn the sixteenth century an accountant in the German city of Augsburg named Matthäus Schwarz was busy moving up the social circles, and he did it in part by knowing the latest fashions and dressing well. By 1541 he succeeded in becoming a member of the nobility. Now his efforts are being recreated in an experimental research project at the University of Cambridge. -
Medieval Germany in America
Posted on April 15, 2013 | No CommentsDo Americans have anything to learn from the history of Germany in the Middle Ages? -
The Passions of Achilles: Herbort von Fritzlar’s “Liet von Troye” and his Description of the Passions of Achilles in light of Herbort’s Historical Concept
Posted on April 14, 2013 | No CommentsThere once lived in Greece a King named Peleas. He was noble and powerful. He lived in splendor in his castles and in his country. Food and (costly) garments were abundant at his court. -
Old English and the lexicography of Old High German
Posted on April 8, 2013 | No CommentsIn this lecture I will focus on how Old English affected the early German written record and on the difficulties of its lexicographical description. -
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. -
Why There May Have Been Contacts between Slovenes and Jews before 1000 A.D.
Posted on March 16, 2013 | No CommentsThe first documented evidence of a Jewish presence in Slovenia dates from the 13th century, when Yiddish- and Italian-speaking Jews migrated south from Austria to Maribor and Celje, and east from Italy into Ljubljana. This is a good three centuries after the first mention of Jews in the Austrian lands. -
Conquest, Contact, and Convention: Simulating the Norman Invasion’s Impact on Linguistic Usage
Posted on March 11, 2013 | No CommentsHow do conventions arise? Lewis adressed this in his work Convention via signaling games, a mathematical model of communication where a sender sends a message to a receiver who then interprets it. When we say conventions, we mean by that a system of coor- dinated behavior pairing information states with actions -
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. -
Elite and government in medieval Leiden
Posted on March 10, 2013 | No CommentsThe development of Leiden's 61ite is traced up to 1420. The siege of the city in that year and the assumption of power by Jan van Beieren resulted in important changes in the urban government: the faction of the Hoeken finally lost ascendancy and the viscount of Leiden ceased to have control over the city's administration. -
Widows in Anglo-Saxon England
Posted on March 3, 2013 | No CommentsOwing to a fairly large number of mainly vernacular codes of law that have survived, we are in a position to see at least how in legislation the position of women in general, but also of widows in particular, was defined. -
Singing the Self: the Autobiography of the fifteenth-century German singer and composer Johannes von Soest
Posted on February 24, 2013 | No CommentsJohannes von Soest (also referred to as Steinwart or Steinwert) was a German singer, composer and poet. He is the author of a vernacular autobiography in couplets which is not only one of the few examples of late medieval German autobiography but also one of the very few surviving autobiographical documents written by a musician in this period. -
What was the Investiture Controversy a Controversy About?
Posted on February 19, 2013 | No CommentsThis thesis will aim to demonstrate that the Investiture Controversy was primarily a clash originating from fifth century ideas which were put into practice and developed by an eleventh century papacy. -
Rome During Avignon: Myth, Memory, and Civic Identity in Fourteenth-Century Roman Politics
Posted on February 19, 2013 | No CommentsBroadly conceived, my dissertation examines the traditions of popular government emerging spasmodically in the roughly two hundred and fifty years between the Roman senate’s 1143 revival, and the papacy’s definitive 1377 return to Rome from roughly seven decades in Avignon. The majority of my inquiry, however, is directed toward the much-understudied fourteenth century. -
The Old English Rune Poem – Semantics, Structure, and Symmetry
Posted on February 17, 2013 | No CommentsThe later runic alphabets do, of course, follow the basic pattern of the earlier Germanic Fupark though considerably modified by the late eighth century, decreasing in the number of runes in Scandinavia whilst increasing in number in the runic alphabets of England. -
The Wendish Crusade of 1147
Posted on February 17, 2013 | No CommentsThe so-called Wendish Crusade of 1147 was actually part of the Second Crusade of the same time period. It was fought on German soil, largely by Saxon Germans (some Danes as well) against the pagan tribes of Wends -
The Church and sexuality in medieval Iceland
Posted on February 13, 2013 | No CommentsFrom its earliest days Christianity has attempted to control human sexuality. The letters of Paul and the writings of the Church Fathers praise the state of virginity above that of marriage, and within matrimony permit sex only for procreation. -
The Representation of Antichrist in Hildegard of Bingen’s Scivias
Posted on January 13, 2013 | No CommentsThe image thatis the subjectof this essay is one of thirty-five miniatures that once illuminated the lost Rupertsberg manuscript (Wiesbaden, Hessisches Landesbibl., MS 1, ca. 1165-75), a deluxe copy of Scivias. -
My kingdom in pledge : King Sigismund of Luxemburg’s town pledging policy, case studies of Segesd and Bartfa
Posted on January 13, 2013 | No CommentsThis thesis strives to present a small part of this huge and complex topic by analyzing one of the most interesting aspects of Sigismund’s pledging policy, namely, pldeges of the towns. -
Aspects of the English royal succession, 1066-1199: the death of the king
Posted on December 28, 2012 | No CommentsThe death of any ruler in the twelfth century, even if it were expected, caused a considerable amount of shock and disquiet amongst those who were left behind. -
Dancing Devils and Singing Angels: Dance Scenes in German Religious Plays
Posted on December 26, 2012 | No CommentsThe early Church had a mostly critical attitude towards the dance. It was said that those who dance cherish heathen godheads and that they allow their bodies rule over their minds. Repeatedly, the synods prohibited religious dances and/or dances within churches. -
Pilgrimage and Embodiment: Captives and the Cult of Saintsin Late Medieval Bavaria
Posted on December 24, 2012 | No CommentsChief among the stories contained in these miracle stories are tales of escapes from captivity. Almost forty percent of the reports in the two Munich Latin miracle collections deal with liberations from imprisonment and escapes from captivity of various sorts. -
Suicide in the Middle Ages
Posted on December 17, 2012 | No CommentsAll three types of source need careful interpretation. Suicide is notoriously elusive to records even in modern times, and more so for the Middle Ages. Once due allowances have been made for each genre, however, it is some reassurance that they agree on certain basics, and that these, in turn, agree with estimates from better-recorded centuries... -
Tolling the Rhine in 1254: Complementary Monopoly Revisited
Posted on December 16, 2012 | No CommentsGiven a demand for Rhine travel, an Emperor faced a classic complementary monopoly problem: how many toll stations to have, where to site them, and what toll to charge at each. -
Horses of Agency, Element, and Godliness in Tolkien and the Germanic Sagas
Posted on December 12, 2012 | No CommentsWhat is the contract between man and equine that allows a beast ten times our size and one hundred times our strength to willingly serve in our ambitions? What magnetism (and who placed it) is it that draws humanity and horses together? -
Plague, Settlement and Structural Change at the Dawn of the Middle Ages
Posted on December 5, 2012 | No CommentsCalculations on the number of inhabitants during these centuries are, however, impossible to make. The most famous attempt, by J.C. Russell, is, as will be revealed below, not satisfying. Using results from other studies, like those referred to above, Russell assumed hypothetical population figures without any real empirical evidence.