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"This book analyses the role of women in the Polish Piast dynasty from c. 965 to c.1144. It discusses gender expectations and the literary topoi employed to describe rulers' wives and daughters as well as showing their importance in religious donations, the creation of dynastic memory, and naming patterns, as well as examining Piast women's involvement in female monasticism. Pac takes a comparative approach to these themes, analysing Polish sources alongside sources from other areas of early and high medieval Europe"--
The Routledge Handbook of East Central and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 500–1300 is the first of its kind to provide a point of reference for the history of the whole of Eastern Europe during the Middle Ages. While historians have recognized the importance of integrating the eastern part of the European continent into surveys of the Middle Ages, few have actually paid attention to the region, its specific features, problems of chronology and historiography. This vast region represents more than two-thirds of the European continent, but its history in general—and its medieval history in particular—is poorly known. This book covers the history of the whole region, from the Balkans ...
Name Unknown: The Life of a Rusian Queen offers an example of an eastern European queen as a corrective to the western European focus of medieval queenship studies. Through a chronological approach, this book looks beyond the popular biographies of royal women such as Eleanor of Aquitaine and Berengaria of Castile and gathers material from sources throughout Europe. It engages with modern queenship studies literature to create a collective biography of a Rusian queen through the various cycles of her life from the marriage of eight-year-old Verkhuslava to the death of the ruler of Minsk whose generosity is recorded, but not her name. For medievalists interested in women and queens, Name Unkn...
A broad discussion about how history and religion contribute to identity politics in contemporary Europe, this book provides case studies exemplifying how public intellectuals and academics have taken an active part in the construction of recent and traditional pasts. Instead of repeating the simplistic explanation as a return of religion, this volume focuses on public platforms and agents and their use of religion as a political and cultural argument. Filled with previously unpublished data gathered from texts, interviews, field observations, artifacts, and material culture, this record challenges stereotypical images of East and Southeast Europe.
A study of an exceptionally interesting primary source - the Henrykow Book - and of the local and regional world which that source reflected and helped shape. This volume mines the Henrykow Book for the information it provides about the social, political, religious, and literary contexts of medieval Europe.
The best new research on medieval clothing and textiles, drawing from a range of disciplines. The studies collected here range through art, artifacts, documentary text, and poetry, addressing both real and symbolic functions of dress and textiles. John Block Friedman breaks new ground with his article on clothing for pets and other animals, while Grzegorz Pac compares depictions of sacred and royal female dress and evaluates attempts to link them together. Jonathan C. Cooper describes the clothing of scholars in Scotland's three pre-Reformation universities and the effects of the Reformation upon it. Camilla Luise Dahl examines references to women's garments in probates and what they reveal about early modern fashions. Megan Cavell focuses on the treatment of textiles associated with the Holy of Holies in Old English biblical poetry. Frances Pritchard examines the iconography, heraldry, and inscriptions on a worn and repaired set of embroidered fifteenth-century orphreys to determine their origin.Finally, Thomas M. Izbicki summarizes evidence for the choice of white linen for the altar and the responsibilities of priests for keeping it clean and in good repair.
The memory of the living and the dead was part of the functioning of monastic and secular communities, dynasties and aristocratic families. The relationship of debitores and fundatores is key to understanding the “mentality” of the era of the formation of Imperium Christianum. The donations made “pro remedio animae nostre et genitoris nostris” indicate the memorial function of transferring the prayer duties of the power elites (or whole groups and communities) to the clergy and illustrate the belief of medieval people in the importance of intercessory prayer. This volume is a memoir of the Piasts and Boleslaw the Brave on the 1000th anniversary of his coronation. It symbolically closes the study of the millennium of the baptism of Poland (966–1966) and opens the study of the early Middle Ages in Poland and Central Europe.
"Everything looked perfect. Sand - unique Baltic sand, the best in the world - and the calm sea. But wait. Something was amiss. Something was wrong" It starts with a day at the beach. A single white sock that somehow spoils everything. It's enough to send writer and ornithologist Stanislaw Lubienski on a quest to understand what we throw away, where it goes and whether it will be our legacy. By analysing items he unearths on his trips into nature - a plastic bottle, a tube of Russian penis-enlargement cream, a cigarette butt, an empty aerosol can - tracing their origins and explaining the harm they can do, he shows how consumer society has developed out of control, to the point of environmen...
This book investigates how minorities contributed to medieval society, comparing these contributions to majority society’s perceptions of the minority. In this volume the contributors define ‘minority’ status as based on a group’s relative position in power relations, that is, a group with less power than the dominant group(s). The chapters cover both what modern historians call ‘religious’ and ‘ethnic’ minorities (including, for example, Muslims in Latin Europe, German-speakers in Central Europe, Dutch in England, Jews and Christians in Egypt), but also address contemporary medieval definitions; medieval writers distinguished between ‘believers’ and ‘infidels’, betwe...
This book explores the practical and symbolic resources of legitimacy which the elites of medieval Scandinavia employed to establish, justify, and reproduce their social and political standing between the end of the Viking Age and the rise of kingdoms in the thirteenth century. Geographically the chapters cover the Scandinavian realms and Free State Iceland. Thematically the authors cover a wide palette of cultural practices and historical sources: hagiography, historiography, spaces and palaces, literature, and international connections, which rulers, magnates or ecclesiastics used to compete for status and to reserve haloing glory for themselves. The volume is divided in three sections. Th...