High Middle Ages Archive
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Bernard of Morlaix: the literature of complaint, the Latin tradition and the twelfth-century “Renaissance”
Posted on March 9, 2013 | No CommentsBernard of Morlaix was a monk of the order of Cluny who flourished around 1140. Excerpts from one of his poems appear in some anthologies of medieval Latin verse1 and he is briefly noticed in some works on the twelfth-century renaissance, but he has received little critical attention and only one of his poems has been translated from the Latin. -
Myths and mandrakes
Posted on March 4, 2013 | No CommentsOthers, however, began to wonder whether the possession of roots might not bring them success in other areas as well—wealth, popularity, or the power to control their own and other people's destinies, and took to wearing them as good luck charms. -
Novgorod the Great in Baltic Trade before 1300
Posted on March 3, 2013 | No CommentsThe information on trade contacts between Novgorod and Scandinavian countries preserved in the works of Old Norse -
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 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. -
Strangers in Icelandic Society, 1100-1400
Posted on February 11, 2013 | No CommentsThe term ‘stranger’ (der Fremde) was defined by Georg Simmel (1858-1918) in a brief excursus (1908, 685–91). Scholars following in the footsteps of Simmel have distinguished at least two different types of stranger. One is the sojourner, who clings to the culture of his own ethnic group. The other is the immigrant, a newly-arrived outsider who has come to stay (see Siu 1952; Wood 1934, 43–44). The merchant Örn is close to the first type... -
Making the martyr: the liturgical persona of Saint Thomas Becket in visual imagery
Posted on February 10, 2013 | No CommentsHow was the historical figure of the worldly chancellor reconciled to the saintly archbishop who was martyred for his faith on the floor of Canterbury Cathedral? One of the most important vehicles of expression in the Middle Ages was the liturgy. -
Picturing Gregory: The Evolving Imagery of Canon Law
Posted on February 4, 2013 | No CommentsThis paper surveys images created for the opening of the Liber extra between around 1240 and 1350, from a variety of standpoints: iconography, page layout, patrons and readers - and also suggests possible ideological agendas that might be embedded in the illustrations. -
Musical Characteristics of the Songs Attributed to Peter of Blois (c. 1135-1211)
Posted on January 15, 2013 | No CommentsToward the end of the twelfth century, moral conflict was rampant in the Catholic Church regarding the conduct (and misconduct) of all levels of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, though especially at the two extremes on the scale of power. Music and literature from the period have immortalized the mischievous and impious escapades of certain members of the lower orders of clergy, termed satirically the ordo vagorum. -
The patronage of the Templars and of the Order of St. Lazarus in England in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries
Posted on January 15, 2013 | No CommentsThe religious revival of the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries saw the rise of a host of new orders ranging from the Cistercians and Carthusians to the Augustinian and Premonstratensian canons. In addition, it also saw the development of the Military Orders which originated in the Holy Land after the capture of Jerusalem in 1099, and fulfilled a mixture of military, hospitaller, religious and political functions. -
Transitional Holiness in the Twelfth Century: The Social and Spiritual Identity of Domina Christina of Markyate
Posted on January 13, 2013 | No CommentsVisions flourish within particular domestic contexts and disciplines, and Christina enables us to glimpse a sub-culture of visionary experience in twelfth-century England, which rarely shows up in sources and is given little authority in the dominant narratives. -
The Papal Bulls for the Invasions of England and Ireland
Posted on January 13, 2013 | No CommentsJohn has represented his master's enterprise in the very best light, making him out as an enthusiast for the reformation of the lax moral and ecclesiastical condition of Ireland. -
Lay Writers and the Politics of Theology in Medieval England From the Twelfth to Fifteenth Centuries
Posted on January 3, 2013 | No CommentsMy intention is not to continue the discourse on such practices but to analyze narrative content in relation to the politics of theology that had an impact on lay writers and their artistic creativity concerning the search for selfhood from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. -
Dark ages and dark areas: global deforestation in the deep past
Posted on January 1, 2013 | No CommentsThe ‘darkness’ that envelopes the ages and areas of the forest of the past consists broadly of two elements. First, there are the problems intrinsic to forests as living ecosystems or entities. Many of these are still more or less uncertain and murky. Second, there are the difficulties of knowing what human activity took place. -
Matrimonial politics and core-periphery interactions in twelfth- and early thirteenth-century Scotland
Posted on December 31, 2012 | No CommentsThe medieval kingdom of Scotland was a rich amalgam of diverse ethnic elements which reflected the turbulent history of the first millennium of its development. -
Women in Troubadour Song: Of the Comtessa and the Vilana
Posted on December 30, 2012 | No CommentsSince we have melodies for both songs, the question of what “feminine” voices we are hearing is a musi- cal as well as a poetic issue. -
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. -
The Cross as Tree: The Wood-of-the-Cross Legends in Middle English and Latin Texts in Medieval England
Posted on December 28, 2012 | No CommentsThe wood-of-the-cross legend is actually a group of narratives that trace the pre- history of the wood used to make Christ's cross back to Old Testament figures, or in some cases back to paradise itself. -
England: One Country, Two Courts
Posted on December 26, 2012 | No CommentsThe tension created by the two-court system is an integral part of England’s administrative and constitutional history. Exactly how integral has generated a considerable amount of scholarly work, from explanations of the sources of the conflict, to how the disagreement over jurisdiction was addressed throughout the Middle Ages, to what impact the issue had in shaping England’s overall political development. -
Looking Back: Medieval French Romance and the Dynamics of Seeing
Posted on December 24, 2012 | No CommentsThis dissertation builds upon the work of feminist medievalists and other literary and cultural scholars to argue that sight, and objects that are seen, articulate love relationships between characters in medieval romances, and that seeing is frequently a locus of resistance to gender norms the texts both establish and refuse to accept. -
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. -
Querimonia desolacionis terre sancte – The fall of Acre and the Holy Land in 1291 as an emotional element in the Teutonic Order tradition
Posted on December 24, 2012 | No CommentsThose Military Orders − the Templars, Hospitallers and Teutonic Knights, along with other Military Orders, had shed their blood across the Latin Kingdom and suffered many casualties in the final siege which took place in Acre between March and May 1291. -
Property Rights in Celtic Irish Law
Posted on December 16, 2012 | No CommentsUnfortunately, many historians not specializing in the study of the ancient Irish law tracts have been unaware of the textual inaccuracies of the O'Curry - O'Donovan translations and have continued to incorporate their older unscientific work, and that of their editors, into their own work. -
Neither ill nor healthy: The intermediate state between health and disease in medieval medicine
Posted on December 16, 2012 | No CommentsParadoxically, however, the notion of an intermediate state between health and disease also has a long history, harking back, at least, to the times of Galen. The question of the existence of such a state and the utility and necessity for physicians to acknowledge it, was particularly hotly debated in the Middle Ages...
