1 - The court: outlining the problem
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 December 2009
Summary
THE MEDIEVAL CONCEPT
The Middle Ages used a diverse group of words when speaking of the court of the kings. From the point of view of the history of concepts, it is of interest to distinguish carefully the span of social and political meanings and experiences that can be expressed by these words, paying particular attention to the rise of new meanings in old words or of neologisms. With a valid and historically coherent definition of the subject of this book in mind, these are, in general, valuable indicators of important changes. As Koselleck states, we can interpret human history in a restricted sense through the concepts of the past, even if the words that are related to these concepts are still in use today. This task requires a work of critical distancing which accompanies both the fundamental historicity and the sedimentation, which is evident in the vocabulary of a given society, of successive uses of a constellation of words. For such, the author reminds us, past uses of a concept should in some way be redefined by the historian.
While Latin predominated as the written language in the medieval west, texts resorted to several names for the court — curia, aula, palatium, schola — at the same time as the binominal of words was to emerge that was to take precedence over all these: cors/curtis. The formation of a synonym between ‘curia’ and ‘court’ is a first aspect deserving our attention.
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- Information
- The Making of a Court SocietyKings and Nobles in Late Medieval Portugal, pp. 9 - 55Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003