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This comprehensive biography of John Vitez, an instrumental figure of the Early Renaissance, presents a complex picture of cultural, political, and religious developments in Central Europe through one man’s life. Drawing on close study of Vitez’s writings and his various political and artistic networks of influence, Tomislav Matić demonstrates the wide scope of this church leader’s involvement in late medieval Central Europe. Not only were Vitez’s writings a catalyst for the introduction of humanism across the region, he was a patron of the arts, an avid astrologer, a master diplomat, and even a kingmaker, thus central to both political and cultural developments.
With the increasing influence of digital technologies on society, this timely book examines the ways modern technologies can adversely influence human perception and behaviour.
In the years surrounding the Iranian Constitutional Revolution, major non-Muslim communities of Zoroastrians, Christians, Jews, and Bahaʾis negotiated identities, rights, and power structures. Using primary documents from Iranian, British, and French archives, Saghar Sadeghian sheds light on an underexplored aspect of Iranian and Middle Eastern history and offers a comparative view of these communities during the late Qajar era. This study draws on theories from Foucault, Agamben, and Lefebvre, providing an interdisciplinary analysis that connects history and sociology. The position of non-Muslims in Iranian society created heterotopias for the Muslim majority, yet the fluid identities blurred boundaries and bent regulations. Sadeghian explores the roles of non-Muslims in the revolution, demonstrating the impacts on these groups at the intersection of religion, economy, and politics.
Migration management aid has increased exponentially since 2016, often funding repression in the process. Drawing on global datasets and in-depth country case studies of Kenya, Ethiopia, Egypt, and Sudan, Kelsey P. Norman and Nicholas R. Micinski present a theoretical framework for this form of foreign assistance. This study traces the historical roots and evolution of migration management aid, explaining its politics, its impact on governance, and its long-lasting, deleterious effects on migrants, refugees, and citizens alike. While wealthy countries tout migration management aid as a way of increasing development and stopping emigration from the Global South, Aiding Autocrats exposes how this type of assistance funds authoritarianism by perpetuating colonial systems of extraction and repression and allowing local elites to leverage aid for their own purposes. Aiding Autocrats is an essential contribution to scholarship on migration management, foreign aid, development, and democratization as well as Middle Eastern, African, and European politics.
Translates the medieval land records of Canonsleigh Abbey in East Devon, offering a window into agriculture and daily life in medieval England.
This book publishes the fourteenth-century survey of the lands of a medieval nunnery. The records describe the landscape, crops, tenants, and labour services performed by ordinary men and women that supported the abbey, across its lands in Devon, Essex (including the town of Manningtree) and Suffolk. With a substantial introduction by the editor, it offers a window into the abbey's finances, agriculture, and daily life in the late Middle Ages, showing how the abbey withstood a period of agricultural and climatic crisis.
The book makes these vivid Latin records accessible to readers interested in the history of medieval peasants, farming, and religious houses, as well as the local history and landscape of Devon and of the abbey's Essex and Suffolk manors.
Examines common themes and connections in Gaelic storytelling from the Middle Ages to present day.
From the great medieval saga Táin Bó Cúailnge to cautionary folk tales in contemporary Gaeltacht areas, storytelling has remained a cornerstone of Gaelic culture for over a thousand years. Pre-Christian motifs and ecclesiastical influences, with nods to classical literature and poetic devices, provide the framework for many stories that remain familiar today (such as St Patrick's journey across Ireland and the exploits of Finn mac Cumhaill). However, despite this rich tradition, scholarship on Gaelic storytelling that crosses both medieval and modern fields is a rarity; as a result, there is a question mark over what of the early tradition remains in the modern, and what this can tell us about the ecology and the survival of Gaelic storytelling.
This volume presents ground-breaking research from scholars in both areas, providing a dynamic insight into the refractions of Gaelic storytelling across a broad chronological period. Contributors address matters such as composition, style, narrative techniques, audience, and the importance of physical and social landscapes, drawing on a variety of methodologies, including philological, narratological, comparative literature, folkloristic, and translation studies. From seminal research on notions of scél "story" and truth to an exploration of the issues facing a Gaelic translator today, these essays work together to widen and deepen our understanding of how and why stories were so fundamental - and remain so fundamental - to Gaelic culture.
This volume by Arc Humanities Press, doubling as a special issue of the journal Early Middle English, honours the long and prolific career of scholar and poet Carter Revard (1931–2022). The volume includes contributions by Keith Busby, Susanna Fein, Thomas Goodmann, Richard Firth Green, Steven Justice, Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Nancy P. Pope, and Suzanne M. Yeager, along with Revard's unpublished edition and translation of a thirteenth-century Anglo-French parlour game (edited by Susanna Fein and David Raybin). In recognition of Revard's deep interest in early Middle English and Anglo-French literature, these essays offer new research that reflects his “sleuthing” for the scribe of Harley 2253 as well as topics in medieval social history and literary codicology. Taken together, the essays deepen our understanding of the intricate social and political contexts of literary transmission, and of manuscript production and reception.
This volume argues that the rise of the far right in Latin America represents a reactionary response to the partial success of democratic regimes in incorporating historically marginalized groups. Despite persistent inequalities, Latin American democracies have gradually weakened the dominance of traditional elites over majority–minority relations, creating fertile ground for a backlash against political, social and cultural change. Like their counterparts in Europe and the United States, far-right actors in the region resist adapting to ongoing transformations, instead invoking an idealized national past and mobilizing exclusionary ethnic, cultural, and political appeals to construct a radically homogeneous community. This volume employs a theoretical framework informed by contemporary debates on the far right in Europe and the United States and brings together leading scholars to examine key country cases across Latin America. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
The concept of the Rus’ Land (russkaia zemlia) became and remained an historical myth of modern Russian nationalism as the equivalent of “Russia,” but it was actually a political myth, manipulated to provide legitimacy. Its meaning was dynastic—territories ruled by a member of the Riurikid/Volodimerovich princely clan. This book traces the history of its use from the tenth to the seventeenth century, outlining its changing religious (pagan to Christian) and geographic elements (from the Dnieper River valley in Ukraine in Kievan Rus’ to Muscovy in Russia) and considers alternative “land” concepts which failed to rise to the ideological heights of the Rus’ Land. Although the Rus’ Land was never an ethnic or national concept, and never expanded its appeal beyond an elite lay and clerical audience, understanding its evolution sheds light upon the cultural and intellectual history of the medieval and early modern East Slavs.
The twelfth century witnessed the birth of modern Western European literary tradition: major narrative works appeared in both French and in German, founding a literary culture independent of the Latin tradition of the Church and Roman Antiquity. But what gave rise to the sudden interest in and legitimization of literature in these “vulgar tongues"? Until now, the answer has centred on the somewhat nebulous role of new female vernacular readers. Powell argues that a different appraisal of the same evidence offers a window onto something more momentous: not “women readers” but instead a reading act conceived of as female lies behind the polysemic identification of women as the audience of new media in the twelfth century. This woman is at the centre of a re-conception of Christian knowing, a veritable revolution in the mediation of knowledge and truth. By following this figure through detailed readings of key early works, Powell unveils a surprise, a new poetics of the body meant to embrace the capacities of new audiences and viewers of medieval literature and visual art.
Fresh perspectives on one of the largest and most complex crusades ever launched, covering all aspects of the expeditions - from preparation and commencement to results and consequences.
Saladin's victory at the Battle of Hattin in 1187 produced three profound results: a shattered Jerusalem army, a pope falling dead from the news, and the launching of the Third Crusade in response. Under the banners of renowned rulers like Richard the Lionheart, Philip Augustus, and Frederick Barbarossa, men and women from across Latin Christendom took the Cross and joined in the largest western military expedition since Urban II's call to arms in 1095 for the First Crusade.
Long dormant in the renewal of crusade studies in the twenty-first century, the Third Crusade has in recent years begun to attract increased scholarly attention. Adopting a cross-cultural focus that examines both western and eastern societies, this book offers a substantial and timely reappraisal. Chapters shed light on the crusade's causes, context, organization, participants, preparations, commencement, military progress, and short and long-term consequences, and scrutinise well-known sources through new lenses. They also engage with communication theory, the history of emotions, textual criticism and textuality, historiography, archaeology, and topography. Together, they provide both a fresh view of this complex and multifaceted war and a useful survey of its major contours.
This book explores the creation of saintly spheres surrounding Sufi masters who functioned as embodiments of Islamic sainthood and imprinted their tangible mark on the land. Situated in the Syrian milieu of the counter-crusader period that was marked by intense religious excitement and re-sanctification of the landscape, the study centres on the role of Sufi saints as revivers of the prophetic legacy and as patrons of fellow believers, and their association with the glorious history of ancient Syrian cities and the expanding sacred landscape. Based upon a variety of literary sources, including hitherto unexplored saintly vitas, the investigation aims to contribute to an understanding of the process through which the religious and charismatic leadership of the venerated shaykhs was sustained and diffused, and their holiness emplaced and commemorated. This book is available as Open Access.
This collection assembles work by some of the foremost English-speaking scholars of pre-modern thought and culture and is the fruit of the Australian Research Council's ground-breaking Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotion. The impact of war, a human activity that is both public and politically charged, is examined as it affects private human lives caught up in public and political situations. The essays, many of them influenced by the burgeoning field of study in the history of emotions, examine the often unconsidered effects of war—on the individual and on the commune—as revealed in the study of well-known texts such as Beowulf, Piers Plowman, Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, and Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, as well as other lesser-known works that mirror the concerns of the society in which they were conceived. These latter range from the twelfth-century chansons of the Crusades, through the fifteenth-century French and English political works of Alain Chartier, to the twentieth-century anti-war satirical films of Mario Monicelli.
Alfred the Great's early English kingdom was the only one to resist Viking conquest. His reform program strengthened the kingdom and enabled it to hold fast against the Vikings. But texts are largely silent on the process of reform. There has been a tendency to assume that these reforms would obviously be beneficial, but Alfred’s elites were not to know that in advance. What motivated them to do as their king bid them? This book analyzes how objects and behaviours shaped aristocratic response to the reform program, using assemblage theory and social practice theory. The Alfred Jewel (as shown on the cover) exercised a powerful persuasive agency in Alfredian reform. Broadening the frame of inquiry beyond textual evidence, giving objects and behaviours their due, permits a richer and more nuanced understanding.
Jerome’s Abbreviated Psalter was one of the most important collections of psalm verses in the Middle Ages. Commonly found in primers and books of hours, it was the primary medium for lay people to imitate the monastic divine office, even as it offered concessions to harsh personal circumstances. This edition presents the Middle English versions in parallel, followed by the Latin version in the Lincoln Thornton manuscript. An introductory review considers the psalter in general and the origins of abbreviated psalters in particular. Jerome’s Abbreviated Psalter is the most widespread text in the abbreviated psalter tradition and it illustrates an important aspect of lay devotional life from the eighth to the sixteenth century. The English versions contribute both to the history of English prose and to the history of biblical translation in English.
This collection brings together newly commissioned and cutting-edge essays on oral text and tradition ranging from the ancient and medieval world to the present day by a leading group of European and North American oral theorists. Using a range of materials including the Bible, Greek epic, Beowulf, Old Norse and Old English riddles, and medieval music, the contributors collectively work to refine, challenge, and further advance contemporary Oral Theory, an interdisciplinary school of thought heavily influenced by John Miles Foley, whose work provides the jumping-off point for this volume. The book includes a useful introduction to the history of oral theory and Foley’s ground-breaking and influential work. This book is available as Open Access.
This book examines how Anglo-Caribbean scholars navigate global inequalities and colonial legacies in their research and career-making. Drawing on interviews and fieldwork, it offers an empirical and practice-based approach to global asymmetries in academia.
This book delves into the inadequately explored, liberative side of Humanism during the late Renaissance. While some long-sixteenth-century thinking anticipates twentieth-century Liberation Theology, a broader description is simply “liberation thinking,” which embraces its diverse, timeless, and sometimes nontheological aspects.Two moments frame the treatment of American colonialism’s physical and mental pathways and the liberative response to them, known as liberation thinking. These are St. Thomas More’s Utopia, published in 1516, and Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s thousand-page Nueva crónica y buen gobierno, completed one hundred years later. These works and others by Erasmus and Bartolomé de las Casas trace the development of the idea of human liberation in the face of degrading chattel and encomienda slavery as well as the peonage that gave rise to the hacienda system in the Americas. Catholic humanists such as More, Erasmus, Las Casas, and Guaman Poma developed arguments, theories, and even theology that attempted to deconstruct those subordinating structures.
This groundbreaking book provides an account of how Traveller and other minoritized women understand, assess and experience local politics in Ireland. Drawing from a comparative analysis of minoritised women and politics from the USA, UK, and beyond, the book offers valuable lessons for fostering political inclusion.
This book presents a comparative approach to the role of women in religious and monastic life in Europe and the Americas during the medieval and early modern periods. The contributors inquire into differences and similarities, continuities and discontinuities of women’s agency inside and outside the convent. The volume challenges traditional chronological and regional limitations such as those between the Middle Ages and the Modern era and stresses the transatlantic exchange of models between Europe and the Americas.