Chapter 5 investigates the impact of prohibitions against fighting on clerical masculinity. It examines two clerical groups: those who acted violently but wished to remain clerics and those who abandoned their religious status. Both Western and Eastern canon law forbade clerical fighting, with an important difference: the Western Church put emphasis on bloodshed; the Eastern was more concerned with the clerics’ state of mind and the avoidance of anger. This meant that, in Romanía, outside of strict prohibitions against killing, there was more of an overlap in the exercise of moderate force. The situation was different for clerics who abandoned religious life. Eastern canon law insisted on strict religious/secular distinctions through a focus on vestments, but authors of histories accepted such shifts with little comment. In Romanía, religious status – and, as a result, one’s gender – could prove to be rather fluid throughout one’s life. The chapter ends with a case study focusing on Michael Chōniatēs’ Life of Niketas, the eunuch bishop of Chonai, who fought visible and invisible enemies. His example offers a limit case for how an ecclesiastic could show his masculinity while maintaining an attitude that was considered acceptable, and even ideal, for a clerical man within religious circles.

Canon law rules of marriage became the legal means for policing forbidden sex in Iceland during the Middle Ages. These rules were adapted to various needs: enforcing morality, encouraging adherence to Christian sexual norms, and managing inheritance practices and property rights. This chapter explores sex in Iceland in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by focusing on legal regulation, the archbishops’ and bishops’ statutes, and selected court cases. In all the Nordic countries the regulation of sexuality was highly influenced by canon law, but a study of sex in Iceland needs to be understood in relation to the special character of the society. It was highly literate, because of Christianity, but decentralized, with no towns and a distant royal administration. There had never been a strong executive authority in Iceland, and its absence seems to have encouraged widespread interest in documenting personal disputes and property rights. This makes Iceland special. Written documents and historical writing were mostly kept at the farms of leading families, for use in disputes over property rights in the local courts. This differs from more urbanized societies elsewhere in Europe.

The history of Egypt during the first centuries of Islam comes with a striking paradox. While Upper Egypt, from Fusṭāṭ to Aswan, has received much attention due to the numerous papyri from the region, the Delta is rarely attested in these documents. This is most probably linked to the region’s humid soil, which contributed to the progressive degradation of papyri. Indeed, other than a few private letters written in Alexandria, no papyri from this period have been found in the Delta. Despite this, the Delta occupied a central place in the imperial construction of Islam, especially during the Umayyad period (40/661–132/750): it linked the new capital, Fusṭāṭ, to the Mediterranean and its main cities, was the prime locus of Arab settlement from the second/eighth centuries and was a choice transit space to Syria-Palestine and Cyrenaica. Based on narratives by Egyptian Muslim writers and papyrological documents mentioning the Delta, we can sketch the history of the administrative and fiscal management of this space, to follow the process of tribal settlement in relationship with imperial policies and to analyse the latter’s consequences on the social situation in the Delta at the end of the Umayyad period and in the early Abbasid period.

This chapter looks at what the Geniza archives tell us about Cairo’s community’s relationship with the Nile. Since its discovery by scholars in the late nineteenth century, this large and unique corpus of medieval and early modern manuscripts has allowed scholars to access part of the quotidian experience of Cairo’s – and to a wider degree Egypt’s – Jewish communities over centuries. It also documents their integration within transnational and diasporic webs that, just like Egypt’s agricultural surpluses, extended to Palestine and the wider Mediterranean. As is shown, the letters preserved in the Geniza complement, and at times disrupt, literary evidence. They notably do so by evoking a medieval world in which real disaster was perhaps never far away, and where the Nile, its waters, floods and promises or denial of sustenance, were always in view.

For millennia, Egyptian rulers dedicated vast resources to managing the annual inundation of the Nile, with the mandate to govern Egypt contingent upon the critical responsibility of channelling and gauging the river. These responsibilities encompassed critical administrative, engineering and hydraulic undertakings, from dam construction and canal dredging to precise monitoring of water levels to predict harvests and levy taxes. Yet, this mandate was also contingent upon the veneration of the Nile as both guarantor of Egypt’s prosperity and the conduit of divine grace and God’s agent of reward and punishment. Nile veneration in medieval Islam addressed these symbolic and spiritual aspects, through ceremonies enacted throughout the year centred on the nilometer (al-miqyās) at the island of al-Rawda, which served as supplications to God for a precise level of rising flood waters. Striking a delicate balance between the pragmatic and symbolic necessitated a nuanced response to the ancient practice of Nile veneration, one which had no precedent in Islam. My intention is to examine the interplay and balance between these considerations by analysing the phenomenon of nilometer construction in medieval Islamic Egypt through the lens of Nile veneration between the 7th and 11th centuries CE.

This volume reflects on modes of scholarship in Latin literature: what texts do we read? How do we read them? And why? The introductory chapter first surveys the tools of the trade in the twenty-first century, then asks how ‘classical Latin’ is defined. We reflect on the exclusion of Christian Latin texts from the Oxford Latin Dictionary, try to quantify the corpus of surviving classical Latin, and uncover striking continuities between the canon of authors prescribed by Quintilian and modern teaching and research in classical Latin; commensurately, we draw attention to the neglect suffered by most surviving classical Latin authors and still more by the pagan and Christian texts of late antiquity. In the process we set an agenda for the volume as a whole, of ‘decentring’ classical Latin, and offer some first points of orientation in the late antique, mediaeval and early modern eras. Third, we look afresh at relations between Latin and fellow sub-disciplines in Classics and beyond. How much do we have in common, and what problems stand in the way of more successful communication? We close with some reflections on ‘close reading’ and on the possibility of evolving ‘distant reading’.

Japan between 1573 and 1651 underwent massive political and social transformation. The warlord Oda Nobunaga began the process of reunifying the archipelago after nearly a century of civil war, a process that was completed by his junior ally Toyotomi Hideyoshi. More conflict, both domestic and international, led to a third warlord, Tokugawa Ieyasu, positioning himself and his family as the new dynasty of military leaders who ruled a thoroughly pacified Japan beginning in 1603. His son, the second shogun Tokugawa Hidetada, and grandson, the third shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu, successively overcame diverse barriers to Tokugawa hegemony and incrementally established the early modern system that is often anachronistically assumed to have begun with Ieyasu. Their emphasis on pageantry, political immobility, strict control of borders, persecution of independent religion, and the constant threat of violence defined Tokugawa rule and allowed a fragile peace to persist until the mid-nineteenth century.

The Introduction sets the scene for a reassessment of the transformative reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII (1485–1547). It addresses recent treatments of this period as the threshold between the late-medieval and early modern worlds, associated only with the growth of monarchical power. As this book reveals, a formalised system for dispensing royal justice emerged under the first two Tudor monarchs. The engagements between sovereign and subjects it facilitated provide insight into how a vulnerable regime was legitimised. Analysis of this point of contact in the following chapters proceeds through three frameworks. First is the administrative-history approach central to mid-twentieth-century scholarship on this period, which this study revives but also revises. Second is the emphasis on litigation to the Crown as a means of state–society cohesion in histories of the Elizabethan and Stuart ages, projected into earlier decades and given greater practical definition in this book. Third is the overlooked presence of contention within royal justice, given full assessment in the present study and crucial to understanding why this jurisdiction was dissolved in 1641.

This Conclusion resituates the book’s reconstruction of the early Tudor Court of Requests within the broader scope of late medieval and early modern history. Royal justice was a constant, and constantly controversial, element of English government across these periods. Social demand for more flexible and authoritative dispute resolution, combined with the political expediency of displaying good governance in turbulent times, led successive regimes to further routinise the existing practices of justice-giving in the royal household. Here the rise of the new royal justice system is taken to its conclusion, with the dissolution of this jurisdiction on the eve of Civil War, in 1641. This episode epitomises the complex relationship between principles and practices that has been charted across this book. Returning to the three themes raised in the Introduction, the book concludes with some reflections on the value of interweaving political, social, and legal histories together: for strengthening both institutional and socio-legal studies, and for qualifying existing narratives about litigation as a pillar of state-formation.

Since the nineteenth century, the Holy Roman Empire has occupied a central but often negative place in accounts of German nationhood. “In the beginning was the Reich,” declared Heinrich August Winkler in his monumental German history, which took as its starting point the empire’s abolition in 1806.1 It was with the empire that, in Winkler’s view fatally, “that which distinguishes German history from the history of the great western-European nations has … its origin.” Winkler’s judgment reflects a viewpoint which has been tenacious and highly influential: that at the heart of the problem of German nation-making lay the peculiar and deficient character of Germany’s premodern “state,” the empire itself. Whereas other European nations had developed within the framework of governments exercising sovereign power over firmly bounded populations, the Reich, after a promising start, had fallen prey to universalist fantasies, fragmentation, institutional atrophy, and the interference of foreign powers.

Dynastic periodization has traditionally structured the chronological ordering of China’s history. The period from 900 to 1350 encompasses two major dynasties, Song (960–1279) and Yuan (1279–1367). Historians in China and elsewhere typically saw the Song as culturally vibrant and militarily weak, and the Yuan as a conquest dynasty that briefly interrupted the narrative flow of Chinese history until the restoration of “native” rule in the following Ming (1368–1644). Twentieth-century national politics recast China’s history along a linear (ancient, medieval, modern) timeline rather than a dynastic cyclical one, placing the Song and Yuan in a medieval-to-modern transition. The high degree of commercialization and monetization of the Song economy led scholars to view the Song as experiencing an economic transformation that fostered dramatic changes in Song society. Recent interest in cultural diversity as well as political concerns with the role of minority peoples – in both the People’s Republic of China and elsewhere – have drawn new attention to the Khitan Liao, Tangut Xi Xia, and Jurchen Jin empires that rose on the Song borders, as well as the Mongol conquest and rule of China as the Yuan dynasty. Middle-period China encompasses processes of political unification, social and economic transformations, and profound cultural achievements.