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This book is a new cultural and intellectual history of the natural world in the early medieval Latin West. It examines the complex relationships between language, texts, and the physical world they describe, focusing on the manuscripts of the 'Physiologus'—the foundation of the medieval bestiary. The 'Physiologus' helped to shape the post-Roman worldview about the role and place of human beings in Creation. This process drew on classical ideas, but in its emphasis on allegory, etymology, and a plurality of readings, it was original and distinctive. This study demonstrates precisely how the early medieval re-contextualization of existing knowledge, together with a substantial amount of new writing, set the course of ideas about faith and nature for centuries to come. In doing so, it establishes the importance of multi-text miscellanies for early medieval written culture.
How did legal, literary, and scientific discourses intersect to define sexual non-consent in the Middle Ages? How did popular cultural assumptions about sexuality and gender influence actual medieval criminal proceedings? And how far have we really come today? This book explores medieval English understandings of rape, consent, and the assumed mind-body dichotomy of rapists and rape victims. It demonstrates how laws, trial records, popular romance, and ecclesiastic and medical texts defined sexual consent and non-consent, and the consequences of such ideologies. By comparing episodes of rape and consent across diverse primary sources, it considers important medieval English rape myths and victim-blaming stereotypes. Significantly, it also highlights the cultural trepidation associated with believing women’s accusations of rape and questions how much “progress” we have made since then.
This book explores shared religious practices among Jews, Christians, and Muslims, focusing primarily on the medieval Mediterranean. It examines the meanings members of each community ascribed to the presence of the religious other at "their" festivals or holy sites during pilgrimage. Communal boundaries were often redefined or dissolved during pilgrimage and religious festivals. Yet, paradoxically, shared practices served to enforce communal boundaries, since many of the religious elite devised polemical interpretations of these phenomena which highlighted the superiority of their own faith. Such interpretations became integral to each group’s theological understanding of self and other to such a degree that in some regions, religious minorities were required to participate in the festivals of the ruling community. In all formulations, “otherness” remained an essential component of both polemic and prayer.
Building on the field of modern archival practice, Transmediation and the Archive explores the possibilities of archival objects. Investigating material as diverse as early modern printed books, death masks, a spirit photograph, and a manuscript choir book, this study interrogates not only what the objects are now, but also asks what they were before taking material form, and what they can become as their format is transferred to other media. Blending insights from museum, library, archives, and media studies with experiential research, Astrid J. Smith examines the activities that shape the making of heritage objects, and asks how an awareness of digitization practices can inform our knowledge of both their digital and physical form. She proposes a new methodological framework for evaluating the way materiality and media can affect our relationship with historical artefacts and book culture and demonstrates its fascinating application.
This book is a collection of essays offering a wide range of approaches to teaching with commonplace books. In the medieval period and beyond, commonplace books promoted a blend of excerpting, memorization, creative writing, and journaling, making them the analogue equivalent to modern-day digital journaling, bookmarking, and note-taking tools. Covering a variety of methods for introducing students to the medieval and Renaissance reading practice known as commonplacing, this volume provides instructors with concrete guidelines for using commonplace books as a teaching and learning tool. The enclosed essays provide a point of reference for best practices as well as concrete models for teaching and learning with commonplace books, helping instructors develop more student-centred, inclusive curricula.
This book examines how the military orders and the ideology of crusading gave rise to a new sacred landscape in the medieval Baltic region, an outpost of Latin Christianity. Drawing on a wide variety of sources and international scholarship, the book discusses the paganism of the landscape in written sources pre-dating the crusades, in addition to the narrative, legal, and visual evidence of the crusade period. It draws out the key sacralizing elements as expressed in those sources, which structure the definition of sacred landscape, particularly martyrdom, the manifestation of the sacred, and use of relics in battle. By analyzing these aspects with Geographical Information Systems (GIS), a map of the Baltic campaigns emerges that provides a fresh approach to studying contemporary views of holy war in a region with no initial links to the loca sancta of Jerusalem or Europe.
This study of the twelfth-century German abbess Hildegard of Bingen examines her understanding of the womb through her medical work Cause et cure and visionary work Scivias. Medieval tradition viewed female bodies negatively, seeing their porous nature as easily polluted. Women were considered weaker and more vulnerable to spiritual invasion. This volume shows how Hildegard’s revolutionary understanding of the female reproductive body reversed these assumptions. She connected female bodily flows not to pollution but to purification, presenting menstruation and reproductive fluids as vital components in natural cleansing and healing processes. The book concludes with a chapter showing how Hildegard's concept of beneficial bodily flow remains relevant in modern Western and non-Western alternative medicine, in which female bodily porosity and fluid exchange continue to be understood as sources of regenerative power.
This volume presents new perspectives on the sources, transmission, and reception of Anglo-Latin poetry, ca. 650–1100. In the wake of recent seminal studies on Aldhelm, these essays collectively explore the wider poetic tradition, spanning the Late Antique inheritance through to the eleventh century. By encompassing select studies of both major and lesser-known authors, sources, and works, the volume can present new understandings of the multifaceted intellectual culture that gave rise to this unique and vibrant literary period. It engages with the medium of poetry, including manuscript culture, historical and intellectual backgrounds, and the epigraphic traditions; and highlights idiosyncratic style, metre, poetic diction, and formulas. The Anglo-Latin poetic tradition is notoriously and deliberately challenging, but this accessible collection yields rich new insights from emerging and established Anglo-Latin scholars.
Power in the Chosŏn dynasty of Korea (1392–1910) was shared amongst various political actors, often including female heads of royal households, namely queen dowagers. Following a diachronic approach, several case studies are examined to illustrate the extent and limits of the queen dowagers’ authority. Evidence shows that queen dowagers grew more confident and more influential over the course of the dynasty, especially as more precedents concerning their exercise of power were added to the dynasty’s Veritable Records. While queen dowagers usually refrained from getting involved in day-to-day politics, some had the power to order the dethronement of not one, but two Korean kings and, by the nineteenth century, often ruled themselves during extensive periods of regency.
This volume uncovers the ways in which trust and mistrust affected people’s lives in premodern Europe and the Mediterranean. Trust is a fundamental part of human relationships. It forms the basis of our connections with people and institutions in a variety of ways. But without reference to the great variety of meanings and experiences of trust in history, particularly the premodern past, we fail to grasp both the subtleties and the true significance of the topic. Through exploration of the nuances of the construction, maintenance, and breakdown of trust and trusting relationships, this volume demonstrates that trust functions in different ways in different contexts. It illuminates how the study of trust today points to new interpretations of life in the past, and how study of the past can offer valuable perspectives on life in the present.
French Lessons in Late-Medieval England presents two fifteenth-century manuals designed to support facility in French among the English, the Liber donati and Commune parlance. These texts treat the grammar, lexis, and orthography of French as well as compiling a selection of entertaining dialogues that model the language in action. Together, they paint a vivid picture of the kinds of French that English learners might desire to wield and of the high levels of fluency that they could achieve. Critten's comprehensive introduction discusses his materials' relevance both for histories of language education and for recent reassessments of the longevity of French in medieval England. His pairing of first-time modern-English translations with facing-page original text makes these fascinating works newly available for a twenty-first-century audience.
This book explores ways in which the medieval narrative past has been re-imagined in contemporary Austria. Focusing on the Styrian Literature Pathways of the Middle Ages, the Nibelung monuments in the cities of Tulln and Pöchlarn on the Danube River, and the Siegfriedskopf at the University of Vienna, it argues that each installation constructively applies medievalism to the process of working through the twentieth-century past. Sterling-Hellenbrand uncovers how medieval texts have been re-created in the Austrian landscape and how public installations make visible the values of the communities that build them. The author demonstrates how these modern installations facilitate an innovative process of engaged remembering: they prompt us to initiate challenging conversations about the past to tell different stories for the future.
Slavery and family were deeply linked in Byzantine society. When Byzantine writers and theologians envisioned and contextualized both the realities and the idea of the household, they universally assumed the presence of enslaved people within it. Slavery was foundational in Byzantine conceptions of the family, as was the role of kinship and the family in their thinking about slavery. This study explores how the language, ideals, stereotypes, and literary tropes associated with enslaved people were deeply linked to Byzantine thought about the family and the household as a social unit. Drawing on a wide range of sources and modern theories like intersectionality and social death, this monograph seeks to demonstrate the numerous ways in which the long-term, widespread presence of enslaved people in Byzantine society influenced and even defined medieval Byzantine thought regarding the domestic space and its dynamics.
An insightful and engaging biography of Czech composer Bedřich Smetana, originally written in the 1940s and meticulously reconstructed and updated for twenty-first-century readers.
Czech-Jewish lawyer and music historian Jan Löwenbach (1880 - 1972) wrote this biography of nineteenth-century Czech composer Bedřich Smetana (1824 - 1884) while living in New York in the 1940s, after fleeing the Nazi occupation of his homeland. Intended to highlight Czech cultural achievements and promote national independence, the book remained unpublished following the 1948 Communist coup in Czechoslovakia. Unlike later English-language biographies of Smetana, Löwenbach's work explicitly engages major early twentieth-century Czech scholarship on the composer and offers a uniquely informed perspective. As a "native informant," Löwenbach dispels long-standing nationalistic myths, while providing insightful commentary on Smetana's complete oeuvre, an engaging narrative of his life, and a thoughtful account of the broader social and cultural context. This edition, based on several Czech and English typescripts preserved at San Diego State University, presents a meticulous reconstruction and new translation of Löwenbach's text. With added references to recent scholarship, it stands as both an essential primary document and a rich resource for anyone interested in Czech music - scholars and general readers alike.
Considers the reception of legatine missions to England during a significant period in the development of Anglo-Papal relations.
Papal legates, as the most powerful representatives of the pope, wielded significant influence in establishing and upholding papal authority throughout Christendom. The adventus - the elaborate ceremony of lordship on their arrival - provided a reception to mark their status. While the ceremony was ostensibly a straightforward display of power, communicating the lordship and authority of the papal legate, and a tool for establishing, negotiating, and gauging the relationship between the pope and other European powers, it was also susceptible to manipulation and distortion.
This book investigates how four chroniclers - Roger of Howden, Gervase of Canterbury, Roger of Wendover, and Matthew Paris - observed and interpreted such legatine adventus ceremonies in England in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. These writers, aware of the curia's view that the reception of a papal legate signified acquiescence to papal authority and hegemony, offer a range of responses, from ridicule to praise. Drawing on chronicles, customaries, decretals, and other sources, it sheds new light on the intricate interplay between the expectations of both the papacy and the legates, and the diverse viewpoints found in the response of English writers.
The first full-scale scholarly treatment of Mathilda of Flanders (d. 1083), duchess of Normandy and post-Conquest queen of England.
In Norman England, Mathilda's unique practice of queenship was robustly public. It was characterized by an unapologetic embrace of both new and traditional institutions: military lordship, royal justice, monastic foundation and ecclesiastical reform, documentary initiatives and cultural networks. Although she may appear only glancingly in the chronicle "story sources" of her day, she is everywhere else: governing in documents and charters, articulating her identity in architecture, expressing her authority through innovative custom-made liturgies, handing down juridical sentences and participating in the most fundamental theological issues of her day. However, unlike her husband William "the Conqueror", her impact and influence have not ensured her a place of centrality in modern memory. This book redresses that imbalance. Moving away from the traditional chronological approach to a woman's life, its thematic chapters use the metaphor of Mathilda's body to center her actions, creations and speech, showing how Mathilda embodied power in a world often construed as primarily masculine. It thus brings back into focus the policies she championed, the strategies she pursued and the shape of her authority.
Presents Stifter's multi-faceted oeuvre to both a German Studies and non-specialized Anglophone audience, showing today's readers the relevance of its concerns.
The canonical nineteenth-century Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter (1805-1868), long considered a staid stylist - if not mannerist - and a conservative-bourgeois apologist, has recently become the subject of more vibrant literary-theoretical approaches. While Stifter is primarily known for his fictional prose, including two lengthy novels (Der Nachsommer [Indian Summer] and Witiko) and numerous novella-length narratives, he also wrote dozens of cultural-political and scientific essays. Moreover, his professional activity in the Austrian school system and his diverse publications in the realm of pedagogy not only shed interpretive light on his literary production but also inform enduring debates on education reform and the intellectual-historical question of Bildung. This volume covers a wide range of texts and topics within Stifter's oeuvre. With respect to literary-historical coverage, it extends from his earliest tale Der Condor (The Condor, 1840) to his posthumously published chronicle Aus dem bairischen Walde (From the Bavarian Forest, 1868); in terms of genre, it embraces his novels and novellas, his essayistic work, and even his landscape paintings; finally, it pursues a host of deeper problems and thematic strands that permeate his texts and make them relevant to readers today. These include (neo-)conservatism, social unrest, law and order, ecology, climatology, bioregionalism, and the Anthropocene.
Key documents relating to White's service in Burma, India, and South Africa as well as important background and analysis of some of Britain's most significant small wars during the Victorian period.
After graduating from the Royal Military College, George Stuart White was posted to India where he served in the Rebellion. Twenty years later, he fought in the Second Afghan War, where he was decorated with the Victoria Cross for gallantry in action. After a brief stint in the Sudan campaign, White returned to India, where he solidified his reputation, eventually rising to the position of Commander-in-Chief. During those years he commanded field forces in Burma and Baluchistan, sent expeditions to the North-West Frontier, and oversaw the end of the Presidency Armies. As war loomed on the horizon in South Africa in 1899, White was selected to command the Natal Field Force. This force was besieged for 118 days in the town of Ladysmith. Despite continuous Boer shelling, disease, and limited supplies, White managed to maintain the force and the civilian population in good order until its liberation. He was christened the "Defender of Ladysmith." In 1903, he was promoted to Field-Marshal.
Exactly a decade after the publication of the Sz.-Nagy dilation theorem, Tsuyoshi Ando proved that, just like for a single contractive operator, every commuting pair of Hilbert-space contractions can be lifted to a commuting isometric pair. Although the inspiration for Ando's proof comes from the elegant construction of Schäffer for the single-variable case, his proof did not shed much light on the explicit nature of the dilation operators and the dilation space as did the original Schäffer and Douglas constructions for a single contraction. Consequently, there has been little follow-up in the direction of a more systematic extension of the Sz.-Nagy–Foias dilation and model theory to the bivariate setting. Sixty years since the appearance of Ando's first step comes this thorough systematic treatment of a dilation and model theory for pairs of commuting contractions.
How do voters form left–right images of political parties? This Element applies the theoretical framework of ecologically rational heuristic inference to synthesize insights from the extensive literature on the meaning of left and right in politics. It proposes several hypotheses about cues that voters with varying levels of political sophistication use to infer parties' left–right positions. These expectations are tested through seven conjoint and factorial survey experiments in Germany, Denmark, Canada, and the UK. Findings show that many voters develop sensible left–right perceptions of parties by relying on small sets of highly predictive cues. However, voters differ in how they interpret these cues. Less politically sophisticated voters tend to infer party positions mainly from partisan signals, whereas more sophisticated voters rely on a broader range of indicators, including party policies, ideological values, and social group support. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.