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The first systematic study of the financing and management of parish church construction in England in the Middle Ages.
How did medieval builders manage to construct the towering cathedrals of Europe and other great civic buildings, not to mention the tens of thousands of parish churches? By combing through thousands of medieval illuminated manuscripts, early printed works, sculptures and carvings, Gunther Binding has assembled hundreds of drawings that clearly show the tools and techniques used by the masons and builders of the Middle Ages."
A study of the chief personalities and forces that brought Western Europe to pre-eminence as a centre for political experimentation, economic expansion, and intellectual discovery.
This volume provides a complex discussion of the variety of social efforts which were undertaken to create meaningful communities in the process of the formation of the early medieval gentes and kingdoms in the post-Roman west.
In recent political and constitutional history, scholars seldom specify how and why they use the concept of territory. In research on state formation processes and nation building, for instance, the term mostly designates an enclosed geographical area ruled by a central government. Inspired by ideas from political geographers, this book explores the layered and constantly changing meanings of territory in late medieval and early modern Europe before cartography and state formation turned boundaries and territories into more fixed (but still changeable) geographical entities. Its central thesis is that analysing the notion of territory in a premodern setting involves analysing territorial practices: practices that relate people and power to space(s). The book not only examines the construction and spatial structure of premodern territories but also explores their perception and representation through the use of a broad range of sources: from administrative texts to maps, from stained glass windows to chronicles.
To what extent are the dead truly dead? In medieval society, corpses were assigned special functions and meanings in several different ways. They were still present in the daily life of the family of the deceased, and could even play active roles in the life of the community. Taking the materiality of death as a point of departure, this book comprehensively examines the conservation, burial and destruction of the corpse in its specific historical context. A complex and ambivalent treatment of the dead body emerges, one which necessarily confronts established modern perspectives on death. New scientific methods have enabled archaeologists to understand the remains of the dead as valuable source material. This book contextualizes the resulting insights for the first time in an interdisciplinary framework, considering their place in the broader picture drawn by the written sources of this period, ranging from canon law and hagiography to medieval literature and historiography. It soon becomes obvious that the dead body is more than a physical object, since its existence only becomes relevant in the cultural setting it is perceived in. In analogy to the findings for the living body in gender studies, the corpse too, can best be understood as constructed. Ultimately, the dead body is shaped by society, i.e. the living. This book examines the mechanisms by which this cultural construction of the body took place in medieval Europe. The result is a fascinating story that leads deep into medieval theories and social practices, into the discourses of the time and the daily life experiences during this epoch.
Recognising the importance of the Middle Ages as a vital point of reference in the construction of national identities, this challenging book examines the remarkable role played by the period in the grand duchy of Luxembourg. This country is representative of the close relationship between historicism and nation-building in modern Europe. Tracing the fortunes of four pivotal figures from their own lifetimes to the present, this book uncovers how they each entered collective memory and came to play a key role in a national narrative of history. The analysis includes the foundation myth of Sigefroid and Melusine, the posthumous career of Countess Ermesinde and King John of Bohemia’s transformation into a national hero. Borrowing some of its theoretical framework from the study of lieux de mémoire, this wide-ranging book crosses disciplinary boundaries and addresses not only historical writing, but also literature, the visual arts, and popular culture.