Imagined Communities: Constructing Collective Identities in Medieval Europe

Imagined Communities: Constructing Collective Identities in Medieval Europe
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 405
Release: 2018-04-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004363793

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Imagined Communities: Constructing Collective Identities in Medieval Europe offers a series of studies focusing on the problems of conceptualisation of social group identities, including national, royal, aristocratic, regional, urban, religious, and gendered communities. The geographical focus of the case studies presented in this volume range from Wales and Scotland, to Hungary and Ruthenia, while both narrative and other types of evidence, such as legal texts, are drawn upon. What emerges is how the characteristics and aspirations of communities are exemplified and legitimised through the presentation of the past and an imagined picture of present. By means of its multiple perspectives, this volume offers significant insight into the medieval dynamics of collective mentality and group consciousness. Contributors are Dániel Bagi, Mariusz Bartnicki, Zbigniew Dalewski, Georg Jostkleigrewe, Bartosz Klusek, Paweł Kras, Wojciech Michalski, Martin Nodl, Andrzej Pleszczyński, Euryn Rhys Roberts, Stanisław Rosik, Joanna Sobiesiak, Karol Szejgiec, Michał Tomaszek, Tomasz Tarczyński, Przemysław Tyszka, Tatiana Vilkul, and Przemysław Wiszewski.

The Origin Legends of Early Medieval Britain and Ireland

The Origin Legends of Early Medieval Britain and Ireland
Author: Lindy Brady
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 283
Release: 2022-08-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 1009225618

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This holistic study demonstrates the interconnected nature of early medieval origin legends and traces their growth over time.

Origin Legends in Early Medieval Western Europe

Origin Legends in Early Medieval Western Europe
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 477
Release: 2022-07-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 900452066X

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This volume contains work by scholars actively publishing on origin legends across early medieval western Europe, from the fall of Rome to the high Middle Ages. Its thematic structure creates dialogue between texts and regions traditionally studied in isolation.

Propaganda and (un)covered identities in treatises and sermons: Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the premodern Mediterranean

Propaganda and (un)covered identities in treatises and sermons: Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the premodern Mediterranean
Author: Ferrero Hernández, Cándida
Publisher: Servei de Publicacions de la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2020-05-21
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 8449089182

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The eleven essays included in this collective volume examine a range of textual genres produced by Christians and Muslims throughout the Mediterranean, including materials from the Corpus Islamolatinum, Christian propaganda and polemical works targeting Muslims and Jews, Inquisition records, and Christian and Muslim sermons. Despite the diversity of the works under consideration and the variety of methodological and disciplinary approaches employed in their analysis, the volume is bound together by the common goals of exploring the propaganda strategies premodern authors deployed for specific aims, be it the unification of religious, cultural, and political groups through discourses of self-representation, or the invention of the political, cultural, religious, or gendered other. Many of the essays offer critical re-readings of works that are obscure or have never been studied, while others shed new light on the cultural and textual interactions between Christians, Muslims and Jews. The volume is divided into four sections, the first of which is comprised of three chapters on the Corpus Islamolatinum that furnish new evidence showing the important role this “encyclopedia” played in spreading knowledge about Islam and contributing to the creation of propaganda and polemics against Islam among European intellectual circles. The chapters in section two offer novel interpretations of the hermeneutical strategies underlying the composition of polemical works such as the lives of Muhammad and Pedro de la Cavalleria’s Zelus Christi. The essays in section three identify some common hermeneutical strategies in the use of anti-Jewish and anti-Islamic arguments to polemicize against religious others or edify Christians and illuminate intertextual relations between authors and genres (disputatio and praedicatio). Finally, section four introduces the gender perspective: the genered nature of the accusations of Judaizing in the analysis of the transcripts of the inquisitorial court of three sisters who were tried in Barcelona in 1496, on the one hand, and two studies that explore the constructions of identities and gender relations reflected in various Islamic sources from opposite ends of the Mediterranean. They offer glimpses of women as subject (s) and as object (s) of preaching and show how such texts can reify or subvert traditional binary gender roles.

Writing Regional Identities in Medieval England

Writing Regional Identities in Medieval England
Author: Emily Dolmans
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2020
Genre: English literature
ISBN: 1843845687

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An examination of how regional identities are reflected in texts from medieval England.

The Language of Heresy in Late Medieval English Literature

The Language of Heresy in Late Medieval English Literature
Author: Erin K. Wagner
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2024-04-22
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1501512099

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Vernacular writers of late medieval England were engaged in global conversations about orthodoxy and heresy. Entering these conversations with a developing vernacular required lexical innovation. The Language of Heresy in Late Medieval English Literature examines the way in which these writers complemented seemingly straightforward terms, like heretic, with a range of synonyms that complicated the definitions of both those words and orthodoxy itself. This text proposes four specific terms that become collated with heretic in the parlance of medieval English writers of the 14th and 15th centuries: jangler, Jew, Saracen, and witch. These four labels are especially important insofar as they represent the way in which medieval Christianity appropriated and subverted marginalized or vulnerable identities to promote a false image of unassailable authority.

Common Culture and the Ideology of Difference in Medieval and Contemporary Poland

Common Culture and the Ideology of Difference in Medieval and Contemporary Poland
Author: Teresa Pac
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 347
Release: 2022-02-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 1793626928

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Teresa Pac provides a much-needed contribution to the discussion on shared culture as foundational to societal survival. Through the examination of common culture as a process in medieval Kraków, Poznań, and Lublin, Pac challenges the ideology of difference—institutional, religious, ethnic, and nationalistic. Similarly, Pac maintains, twenty-first century Polish leaders utilize anachronistic approaches in the invention of Polish Catholic identity to counteract the country’s increasing ethnic and religious diversity. As in the medieval period, contemporary Polish political and social elites subscribe to the European Union’s ideology of difference, legitimized by a European Christian heritage, and its intended basis for discrimination against non-Christians and non-white individuals under the auspices of democratic values and minority rights, among which Muslims are a significant target.

History and Identity in Early Medieval Wales

History and Identity in Early Medieval Wales
Author: Rebecca Thomas
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2022
Genre: Book of Taliesin
ISBN: 1843846276

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Crucial texts from ninth- and tenth-century Wales analysed to show their key role in identify formation. WINNER OF THE FRANCIS JONES PRIZE 2022 Early medieval writers viewed the world as divided into gentes ("peoples"). These were groups that could be differentiated from each other according to certain characteristics - by the language they spoke or the territory they inhabited, for example. The same writers played a key role in deciding which characteristics were important and using these to construct ethnic identities. This book explores this process of identity construction in texts from early medieval Wales, focusing primarily on the early ninth-century Latin history of the Britons (Historia Brittonum), the biography of Alfred the Great composed by the Welsh scholar Asser in 893, and the tenth-century vernacular poem Armes Prydein Vawr ("The Great Prophecy of Britain"). It examines how these writers set about distinguishing between the Welsh and the other gentes inhabiting the island of Britain through the use of names, attention to linguistic difference, and the writing of history and origin legends. Crucially important was the identity of the Welsh as Britons, the rightful inhabitants of the entirety of Britain; its significance and durability are investigated, alongside its interaction with the emergence of an identity focused on the geographical unit of Wales.

Germans and Poles in the Middle Ages

Germans and Poles in the Middle Ages
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 459
Release: 2021-08-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 900446655X

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This volume examines mutual ethnic and national perceptions and stereotypes in the Middle Ages by analysing a range of historical sources, with a particular focus on the mutual history of Germany and Poland.

Religious Rites of War beyond the Medieval West

Religious Rites of War beyond the Medieval West
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 331
Release: 2023-11-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004686363

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This is Volume One of a two-volume collection that brings together contributions from cultural and military history to offer an examination of religious rites employed in connection with warfare as well as their transformative and power- and identity-building potential across political communities of medieval Northern, Central, and Eastern Europe. Covering the period ca. 900 and 1500, the work takes theoretical, textual and practical approaches to the research on religious warfare, and investigates the connections between, and significance and function of crucial war rituals such as pre-, intra- and postbellum rites, as well as various activities surrounding the military life of individuals, polities, and corporates. Contributors are Robert Antonín, Robert Bubczyk, Dariusz Dąbrowski, Jesse Harrington, Carsten Selch Jensen, Sini Kangas, Radosław Kotecki, Gregory Leighton, Kyle C. Lincoln, Jacek Maciejewski, Yulia Mikhailova, Max Naderer, László Veszprémy, and Dušan Zupka.