Medieval Texts (medieval + text)

Distribution by Scientific Domains


Selected Abstracts


Review article: The dangers of polemic: Is ritual still an interesting topic of historical study?

EARLY MEDIEVAL EUROPE, Issue 4 2002
Geoffrey Koziol
Philippe Buc, The Dangers of Ritual: Between Early Medieval Texts and Social Scientific Theory. Gerd Althoff, Spielregeln der Politik im Mittelalter: Kommunikation in Frieden und Fehde. Frans Theuws and Janet L. Nelson (eds). Rituals of Power from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages. Joëlle Rollo-Koster (ed), Medieval and Early Modern Rituals: Formalized Behavior in Europe, China and Japan. [source]


Somatic Styles of the Early Middle Ages

GENDER & HISTORY, Issue 3 2008
Lynda L. Coon
,Somatic Styles' examines how classical modes of gender played significant roles in carving out competitive arenas between clerical and lay elites, c.600,900 CE. The paper explores the hermeneutical obstacles standing between the contemporary theorist of gender and the complex nature of the early medieval texts under scrutiny. The analysis reconstructs classicising techniques of gender deployed by early medieval churchmen, and it does so in a way that both challenges the stranglehold of the ,one-sex' model on pre-modern understandings of gender and heals the ,rupture' between the ,Ancient' and the ,Dark Age'. Finally, the essay maps early medieval somatic and gendered styles onto an architectural space where lay and consecrated bodies met , a ninth-century monastic basilica. [source]


The Vikings on the Continent in Myth and History

HISTORY, Issue 290 2003
Simon Coupland
The Vikings have a bad reputation, and it was no different on the Continent in the middle ages where they were regularly portrayed as brutally cruel, devilishly cunning and of superhuman stature. This article examines the evidence for the Vikings' supposed cruelty, cunning and remarkable height and investigates how true the stereotypes were. What emerges is that all three contained a grain of truth, but led to exaggeration and distortion in later medieval texts and even some ninth-century sources. There were, for example, tall individuals among the invaders, but little difference overall between the height of the average Frank and the average Dane. There were likewise instances of Scandinavian brutality, but not on a large scale, and they were no worse than acts carried out by the Franks in the same period. Nor, surprisingly, is there clear evidence of Viking rape: certainly they were not known for ,rape and pillage' in the ninth century. Finally, though the invaders were capable of duplicity, Carolingian parallels are once again not hard to find. In sum, tales of tall, treacherous and brutal Northmen can be shown to have grown in the telling, and there is an evident gap between the Vikings of myth and the Vikings of history. [source]


Blood in Medieval Cultures

HISTORY COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 6 2006
Bettina Bildhauer
Blood was central to medieval medicine, literature, theology and devotion. This article traces some of the characteristic features of blood in medieval texts in these areas, primarily in German from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries: the invocation of blood as proof; the prohibitions against bloodshed; the misogynist and anti-Semitic concepts of blood; and the importance of blood in social bodies. [source]