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This book surveys medieval Catalan historiography, the emergence and evolution of historical writing and autobiography in the Middle Ages, on questions of authority and authorship, and on the links between history and politics during the period. The author examines texts from the late twelfth to the late fourteenth century—including the Latin Gesta comitum Barcinonensium and four texts in medieval Catalan: James I's Llibre dels fets, the Crònica of Bernat Desclot, the Crònica of Ramon Muntaner, and the Crònica of Peter the Ceremonious—and outlines the different motivations for the writing of each. For the author, these chronicles are not mere archaeological artifacts but rather documents that speak to their writers' specific contemporary social and political purposes. He argues that these Catalonian counts and Aragonese kings were attempting to use their role as authors to legitimize their monarchical status, their growing political and economic power, and their aggressive expansionist policies in the Mediterranean. By analyzing these texts alongside one another, the book demonstrates the shifting contexts in which chronicles were conceived, written, and read throughout the Middle Ages.

All groups tell stories about their beginnings. Such tales are oft-repeated, finely wrought, and usually much beloved. Among those institutions most in need of an impressive creation account is the state: it’s one of the primary ways states attempt to legitimate themselves. But such founding narratives invite revisionist retellings that modify details of the story in ways that undercut, ironize, and even ridicule the state’s ideal self-representation. Medieval accounts of how Norway was unified by its first king provide a lively, revealing, and wonderfully entertaining example of this process. Taking the story of how Harald Fairhair unified Norway in the ninth century as its central example, this book illuminates the way a state’s foundation story blurs the distinction between history and myth and how variant tellings of origin stories provide opportunities for dissidence and subversion as subtle—or not so subtle—modifications are introduced through details of character, incident, and plot structure. The book reveals a pattern whereby texts written in Iceland were more critical and infinitely more subtle than those produced in Norway, reflecting the fact that the former had a dual audience: not just the Norwegian court, but also Icelanders of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, whose ancestors had fled from Harald and founded the only non-monarchic, indeed anti-monarchic, state in medieval Europe.

Even centuries later, to read accounts of late medieval banquets is to enter a fantastic world where gilded stags burst into song, the Holy Church may suddenly appear to beg aid from the assembled nobles, and four and twenty musicians play within a pie. This book brings together the understudied array of surviving artworks, archival documents, chroniclers accounts and cookbooks to retrace these events and reassess the late medieval visual culture in which they were so highly prized. Patronized by trend-setting rulers such as the Valois Dukes of Burgundy and drawing on the talents of the leading artists of their day, feasts challenge current understanding of the pivotal artistic changes that took place as the late medieval world gave way to the early modern. This book therefore not only offers the first synthetic art historical study of banqueting, but also considers how the insights yielded from it might cast new light on the work in other media, particularly the paintings of the Flemish Primitives. It argues that late medieval feast participants developed sophisticated ways of both appreciating artistic skill and attending to their own processes of perception, forging a court culture in which the exercise of judgment could be a source of delight as well as a practical necessity. Late medieval feasts are simultaneously examined to rethink numerous theoretical categories commonly used in art history more broadly, yielding fresh insight into the longer history of multimedia, collaborative production, wonder, magnificence and the complex relationships possible between spectacle and spectators.

This new transdisciplinary history of temporality argues for a full understanding time’s diversity in the fifteenth-century Low Countries. Traditionally, the fifteenth century has been cast as bathed in the devout haze of a waning Middle Ages, or as a golden Renaissance where an expanding historical horizon was accompanied by the discovery of a new ‘medieval’ past. In both narratives, the period signals the birth pangs of a new ‘modern’, often secular, temporal order. The book instead shows that dominant medieval understandings of the ‘old’ prophetic time fulfilled in the ‘new’ time of Christ generated a variety of innovative cultural products and practices across the region. It illuminates how eternity was imagined as ‘full’ of time, and time shot through with eternity, in academic debate and artistic production. It investigates the ways that music and liturgy help understand how time was inflected by narratives of emotional change in civic and ecclesiastical ritual and politics. It shows how synchronic and diachronic understandings of vision interacted to generate new forms of manuscript and early print culture, and in the new visual style of artists such as van Eyck and Dieric Bouts. It examines how debates over calendar reform and new chronologies testify to an interest in the paradoxes of eternity in time, providing new forms for reflecting on the discursive nature of human knowledge and experience. Finally, it traces the fullness of time, the plurality and diversity of temporalities, in social and cultural life in the flourishing towns and monasteries of the region.

Replete with shady merchants, scoundrels, hungry mercenaries, scheming nobles, and maneuvering cardinals, this book proves the adage that truth is often stranger than fiction. The setting of this improbable tale is 1354, when the Hundred Years' War was being waged for control of France. Seeing an opportunity for political and material gain, the demagogic dictator of Rome tells Giannino di Guccio that he is in fact the lost heir to Louis X, allegedly switched at birth with the son of a Tuscan merchant. Once convinced of his birthright, Giannino claims for himself the name Jean I, king of France, and sets out on a brave—if ultimately ruinous—quest that leads him across Europe to prove his identity. This book digs up evidence in the historical record to follow the story of a life so incredible that it was long considered a literary invention of the Italian Renaissance. From Italy to Hungry, then through Germany and France, the would-be king's unique combination of guile and earnestness seems to command the aid of lords and soldiers, the indulgence of inn-keepers and merchants, and the collusion of priests and rogues along the way. The apparent absurdity of the tale allows this book to analyze late medieval society, exploring questions of essence and appearance, being and belief, at a time when the divine right of kings was confronted with the rise of mercantile culture.

The simplest purpose of a map is a rational one: to educate, to solve a problem, to point someone in the right direction. Maps shape and communicate information, for the sake of improved orientation, but they exist for states as well as individuals, and need to be interpreted as expressions of power and knowledge. This book takes the familiar problems of state and nation building in eastern Europe and presents them through the prism of cartography and cartographers. Drawing from sources in eleven languages, including military, historical-pedagogical, and ethnographic maps, as well as geographic texts and related cartographic literature, the author explores the role of maps and mapmakers in the East Central European borderlands from the Enlightenment to the Treaty of Versailles. For example, he explains how Russia used cartography in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars and, later, formed its geography society as a cover for gathering intelligence. The author also explains the importance of maps to the formation of identities and institutions in Poland, Ukraine, and Lithuania, as well as in Russia. The book concludes with a consideration of the impact of cartographers' regional and socioeconomic backgrounds, educations, families, career options, and available language choices.

In the aftermath of sixth-century barbarian invasions, the legal profession that had grown and flourished during the Roman Empire vanished. Nonetheless, professional lawyers suddenly reappeared in Western Europe 700 years later during the 1230s, when church councils and public authorities began to impose a body of ethical obligations on those who practiced law. This book traces the history of legal practice from its genesis in ancient Rome to its rebirth in the early Middle Ages and eventual resurgence in the courts of the medieval church. By the end of the eleventh century, the book argues, renewed interest in Roman law combined with the rise of canon law of the Western church to trigger a series of consolidations in the profession. New legal procedures emerged, and formal training for proctors and advocates became necessary in order to practice law in the reorganized church courts. The book demonstrates that many features that characterize legal advocacy today were already in place by 1250, as lawyers trained in Roman and canon law became professionals in every sense of the term. It also examines the centuries-long power struggle between local courts and the Christian church, secular rule and religious edict.

Over the course of the late-thirteenth and fourteenth centuries–as they subdued, expelled, and enslaved Muslim populations–the kings of the Crown of Aragon recruited thousands of North African cavalry soldiers, whom they called jenets, to serve in their armies as well as in their courts as their personal protectors, members of their entourage, and even, on occasion, their entertainment. Grounded in Latin, Romance, and Arabic archival sources from Spain and North Africa, this work seeks to explain this alliance of the Christian Aragonese kings with foreign Muslim soldiers. It details not only how and why the Aragonese kings recruited and relied upon Muslim soldiers but also the origins and motivations of these soldiers. This book argues that far from marking the triumph of secular tolerance over religious intolerance, the alliance between the Aragonese kings and the jenets both depended upon and reproduced ideas of religious difference. More precisely, it argues that this history of interaction should be understood within evolving and intertwined Christian and Islamic ideas about sovereignty, religion, and violence. In recruiting Muslim soldiers, the kings of the Crown of Aragon invoked a deep and shared imperial tradition that bound rulers and religious others in the medieval Mediterranean.

Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are often treated as autonomous, stable and independent of each other. In fact, across the long course of their histories, the three religions have developed in interaction with, and thinking about, each other. This book shows how, from their beginnings to the present day, the three religions were and continue to be “co-produced,” shaping and reshaping themselves through processes of simultaneous identification and dis-identification with their rival “siblings”/neighbors. It uncovers a world in which the three religions are interdependent, constantly transformed by a fundamentally ambivalent form of “neighborliness.” Beginning with the emergence of this neighborliness in the scriptures of the three religions and ending in the present day, the book traces the constant transformation of religious communities through this co-production, at times purely in the cultural imagination. The vast majority of medieval Christians, for example, never met a living Muslim or Jew, but they thought about them a great deal. In certain times and places (e.g., medieval Spain), Muslims, Jews, and Christians did live in close proximity, and this book shows how these neighbors loved, tolerated, massacred, expelled, and thought about each other—all in the name of God. No matter how wrong-headed or bizarre these ways of a distant past may seem, they have something to teach us about how we think and act today. Teach, not by way of example, whether positive or negative, but as a stimulus to critical awareness about the workings of our own assumptions, hopes, and habits of thought.

This book about the eloquence of Gothic architecture is facilitated by the intervention of the interlocutor: the one who, interposing self between monument and audience, points and talks. A critical rhetorical mechanism is found in the interaction between the three dimensions of the notion of “plot:” as spatial matrix, conspiracy and compelling storyline. In Part I three medieval witnesses testify to their engagement with Gothic architectural production. Villard de Honnecourt created a little book with explanatory texts and images of some of the great early-thirteenth-century cathedrals. Gervase, choir monk and sacristan of Canterbury, wrote the fullest account of cathedral construction in the archives of the Middle Ages, and Suger, Abbot of S-Denis, documented the creation of the western frontispiece and chevet of his abbey church, generally considered the “first” Gothic monument. Part II, Staking out the Plot, focuses upon the spatial matrix--the building plot. This mnemonic space, initially resulting from the interaction between interlocutor and monument, links the present with the past, and the materiality of the cathedral with its spiritual and other meanings. In Part III our three witnesses assume their roles as representatives of the builders of a Gothic cathedral: clerical patron, master mason and budget provider. These three agents, representing social groups historically in conflict, might entertain different agendas, yet they are conspiratorially united in their pursuit of their shared object of desire--the construction of the new church. This enterprise, with all its attendant difficulties and struggles, provides the exciting story line of our plot.

During the Middle Ages in Europe, some sexual and gendered behaviors were labeled “sodomitical” or evoked using ambiguous phrases such as the “unmentionable vice” or the “sin against nature.” How, though, did these categories enter the field of vision? How do you know a sodomite when you see one? Challenging the view that medieval ideas about sexual and gender dissidence were too confused to congeal into a coherent form, this book demonstrates that sodomy had a rich, multimedia presence in the period—and that a flexible approach to questions of terminology sheds new light on the many forms this presence took. Arguing that we need to take account of the role played by translation—whether visual, verbal, or cultural—in endowing sodomy with a pictorial or textual form, the book also considers the extent to which medieval materials can be re-visioned in light of twenty-first-century categories of thought. Also, the book advances discussion by showing how greater attention needs to be paid to motifs of gender slippage and to notions of imitation and derivation in medieval encounters with sex. Among the topics covered are depictions of the practices of sodomites in illuminated Bibles; motifs of gender transformation and sex change as envisioned by medieval artists and commentators on Ovid; sexual relations in religious houses and other enclosed spaces; and the applicability of modern categories such as “transgender,” “butch” and “femme,” “queer,” and “sexual orientation” to medieval culture.

In Strange Footing, early dance reveals the medieval experience of poetic form. For premodern audiences, poetic form did not exist exclusively in a poem’s structural attributes. Rather, the form of a poem emerged as an experience, one generated when an audience habituated to watching and participating in dance encountered poetic text. In bringing dance-based perceptual practices to bear upon the apprehension of poetry, medieval audiences experienced a poem’s form as virtual, a strange footing askew of ordinary space and time. To understand how premodern dance-based experiences shaped premodern poetic encounters, Strange Footing formulates a new method for the study of the past. It juxtaposes medieval spectacles with instances of contemporary dance to reenact the immersive spectacle of the premodern performance. Danse macabre, for instance, finds elucidation in Lucinda Childs’s multimedia choreography; premodern round dance, meanwhile, yields new experiential aspects when read alongside the work of Mark Morris. When contemporary audiences and performers engage the work of Childs and Morris, they apprehend force and energy supplementing dancing bodies: the strange and sometimes disorienting virtuality of dance. Strange Footing uses these encounters to identify where medieval representations of dance convey the premodern spectator’s awareness of such virtuality. The medieval audience's apprehension of virtual force dictated their experiences of various poetic traditions, including carols, lyrics, and “dance of death” stanzas. In configuring a new method to interpret the past, Strange Footing redefines poetic form, demonstrating how the obliquities of virtual dance led medieval audiences through experiences of poetic form.

Why did capitalism and colonialism arise in Europe and not elsewhere? Why were parliamentarian and democratic forms of government founded there? What factors led to Europe's unique position in shaping the world? This book tackles these classic questions with illuminating results, tracing the roots of Europe's singularity to the medieval era, and specifically to developments in agriculture. While most historians have located the beginning of Europe's special path in the rise of state power in the modern era, this book establishes its origins in rye and oats. These new crops, it contends, played a decisive role in remaking the European family, spurring the rise of individualism and softening the constraints of patriarchy. The author reaches these conclusions by comparing Europe with other cultures, especially China and the Islamic world, while surveying the most important characteristics of European society as they took shape from the decline of the Roman empire to the invention of the printing press.