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  3. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought: Fourth Series

The series Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought was inaugurated by G. G. Coulton in 1921; Professor John H. Arnold now acts as General Editor of the Fourth Series, with Dr Christopher Briggs, Dr Helen Gittos, Professor Adam J. Kosto, and Dr Magnus Ryan as Advisory Editors. The series brings together outstanding work by medieval scholars over a wide range of human endeavour extending from political economy to the history of ideas.

  • General Editors: John H. Arnold, University of Cambridge
  • Advisory Editors: Christopher Briggs, University of Cambridge, Helen Gittos, University of Oxford, Adam J. Kosto, Columbia University, New York, Magnus Ryan, University of Cambridge

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109 results in Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought: Fourth Series

Page 1 of 6

Making the Holy Roman Empire Holy
  • Frederick Barbarossa, Saint Charlemagne and the sacrum imperium
  • Vedran Sulovsky
  • Published online:
    16 May 2024
    Print publication:
    23 May 2024
  • How did the Holy Roman Empire (sacrum imperium) become Holy? In this innovative book, Vedran Sulovsky explores the reign of Frederick Barbarossa (1152–1190), offering a new analysis of the key documents, artworks, and contemporary scholarship used to celebrate and commemorate the imperial regime, especially in the imperial coronation site and Charlemagne's mausoleum, the Marienkirche in Aachen. By dismantling the Kulturkampf-inspired view of the history of the Holy Roman Empire – which was supposedly desacralised in the Investiture Controversy, and then resacralised by Barbarossa and the Reichskanzler Rainald of Dassel – Sulovsky, using new evidence, reveals the personal relations between various courtiers which led to the rise of the new, holy name of the Empire. Annals, chronicles, charters, forgeries, letters, liturgical texts and objects, relics, insignia, seals, architecture and rituals have all been exploited by Sulovsky to piece together a mosaic that shows the true roots of sacrum imperium.

Frankish Jerusalem
  • The Transformation of a Medieval City in the Latin East
  • Anna Gutgarts
  • Published online:
    15 February 2024
    Print publication:
    22 February 2024
  • Focusing on Jerusalem under Frankish rule following the Crusader conquest of 1099, this book sheds light on the dynamic socio-economic factors that shaped Jerusalem's gradual urban transformation. In exploring the extensive corpus of medieval property records, it reveals that the growth of Jerusalem's monumental and symbolic landscape, as befitted its new status as the capital of the Latin Kingdom, was in tandem with more mundane facets of life in the city, such as growing residential settlement patterns, and the expansion of its rural hinterland. This places the history of Frankish Jerusalem in a broader theoretical framework by analyzing the socio-economic and institutional mechanisms – such as immigration and the formation of medieval trust – that shaped the cityscape during a particularly tumultuous period in its history, and places it against the backdrop of medieval urbanisation processes in other regions.

Flemish Textile Workers in England, 1331–1400
  • Immigration, Integration and Economic Development
  • Milan Pajic
  • Published online:
    16 November 2023
    Print publication:
    30 November 2023
  • In the fourteenth century, with the encouragement of King Edward III, textile workers from the Low Countries – predominantly Flanders but also Brabant – settled in England. Using extensive and original resources from both sides of the English Channel, Milan Pajic argues that the exponential growth of the English textile industry was due to the skill and influence of Flemish immigrants, challenging interpretations from a section of economic historians in the latter half of the twentieth century who concluded that immigrants did not contribute to the economic development of England. The book explores the geography of immigration, the reasons behind the movement of people, and the varied social encounters with local populations. In so doing it uncovers an important and vibrant history which provides essential historical context for contemporary debates on the free movement of people.

Warfare in the Latin East, 1192–1291
  • Christopher Marshall
  • Published online:
    07 September 2023
    Print publication:
    27 February 1992
  • This book offers a detailed examination of warfare in the Latin East from the end of the Third Crusade, to the demise of the Latin Kingdom in 1291. It considers both the crusades and the long periods of truce during which warfare was restricted to raiding expeditions and conflict among the Christians themselves. A study of the organisation of the Latin armies is followed by an examination of the structures and functions of the strongpoints, with differentiation between armed conflict, battles, raids and sieges. Marshall depicts raiding expeditions as a vital factor in the Muslims' efforts to remove Latins from the East, and concludes with a brief study of the work of scouts, spies and traitors in the Muslim and Latin armies.

Lordship, State Formation and Local Authority in Late Medieval and Early Modern England
  • Spike Gibbs
  • Published online:
    13 July 2023
    Print publication:
    27 July 2023
  • Providing a new narrative of how local authority and social structures adapted in response to the decline of lordship and the process of state formation, Spike Gibbs uses manorial officeholding – where officials were chosen from among tenants to help run the lord's manorial estate – as a prism through which to examine political and social change in the late medieval and early modern English village. Drawing on micro-studies of previously untapped archival records, the book spans the medieval/early modern divide to examine changes between 1300 and 1650. In doing so, Gibbs demonstrates the vitality of manorial structures across the medieval and early modern era, the active and willing participation of tenants in these frameworks, and the way this created inequalities within communities. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

Royal Childhood and Child Kingship
  • Boy Kings in England, Scotland, France and Germany, c. 1050–1262
  • Emily Joan Ward
  • Published online:
    04 August 2022
    Print publication:
    04 August 2022
  • Refining adult-focused perspectives on medieval rulership, Emily Joan Ward exposes the problematic nature of working from the assumption that kingship equated to adult power. Children's participation and political assent could be important facets of the day-to-day activities of rule, as this study shows through an examination of royal charters, oaths to young boys, cross-kingdom diplomacy and coronation. The first comparative and thematic study of child rulership in this period, Ward analyses eight case studies across northwestern Europe from c.1050 to c.1250. The book stresses innovations and adaptations in royal government, questions the exaggeration of political disorder under a boy king, and suggests a ruler's childhood posed far less of a challenge than their adolescence and youth. Uniting social, cultural and political historical methodologies, Ward unveils how wider societal changes between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries altered children's lived experiences of royal rule and modified how people thought about child kingship.

Community, Urban Health and Environment in the Late Medieval Low Countries
  • Janna Coomans
  • Published online:
    17 August 2021
    Print publication:
    26 August 2021
  • By exploring the uniquely dense urban network of the Low Countries, Janna Coomans debunks the myth of medieval cities as apathetic towards filth and disease. Based on new archival research and adopting a bio-political and spatial-material approach, Coomans traces how cities developed a broad range of practices to protect themselves and fight disease. Urban societies negotiated challenges to their collective health in the face of social, political and environmental change, transforming ideas on civic duties and the common good. Tasks were divided among different groups, including town governments, neighbours and guilds, and affected a wide range of areas, from water, fire and food, to pigs, prostitutes and plague. By studying these efforts in the round, Coomans offers new comparative insights and bolsters our understanding of the importance of population health and the physical world - infrastructures, flora and fauna - in governing medieval cities.

England's Northern Frontier
  • Conflict and Local Society in the Fifteenth-Century Scottish Marches
  • Jackson W. Armstrong
  • Published online:
    30 October 2020
    Print publication:
    12 November 2020
  • The three counties of England's northern borderlands have long had a reputation as an exceptional and peripheral region within the medieval kingdom, preoccupied with local turbulence as a result of the proximity of a hostile frontier with Scotland. Yet, in the fifteenth century, open war was an infrequent occurrence in a region which is much better understood by historians of fourteenth-century Anglo-Scottish conflict, or of Tudor responses to the so-called 'border reivers'. This first book-length study of England's far north in the fifteenth century addresses conflict, kinship, lordship, law, justice, and governance in this dynamic region. It traces the norms and behaviours by which local society sought to manage conflict, arguing that common law and march law were only parts of a mixed framework which included aspects of 'feud' as it is understood in a wider European context. Addressing the counties of Northumberland, Cumberland and Westmorland together, Jackson W. Armstrong transcends an east-west division in the region's historiography and challenges the prevailing understanding of conflict in late medieval England, setting the region within a wider comparative framework.

Princely Power in Late Medieval France
  • Jeanne de Penthièvre and the War for Brittany
  • Erika Graham-Goering
  • Published online:
    31 March 2020
    Print publication:
    16 April 2020
  • Jeanne de Penthièvre (c.1326–1384), duchess of Brittany, was an active and determined ruler who maintained her claim to the duchy throughout a war of succession and even after her eventual defeat. This in-depth study examines Jeanne's administrative and legal records to explore her co-rule with her husband, the social implications of ducal authority, and her strategies of legitimization in the face of conflict. While studies of medieval political authority often privilege royal, male, and exclusive models of power, Erika Graham-Goering reveals how there were multiple coexisting standards of princely action, and it was the navigation of these expectations that was more important to the successful exercise of power than adhering to any single approach. Cutting across categories of hierarchy, gender, and collaborative rule, this perspective sheds light on women's rulership as a crucial component in the power structures of the early Hundred Years' War, and demonstrates that lordship retained salience as a political category even in a period of growing monarchical authority.

The Canons of the Third Lateran Council of 1179
  • Their Origins and Reception
  • Danica Summerlin
  • Published online:
    08 November 2019
    Print publication:
    28 November 2019
  • Alexander III's 1179 Lateran Council, was, for medieval contemporaries, the first of the great papal councils of the central Middle Ages. Gathered to demonstrate the renewed unity of the Latin Church, it brought together hundreds of bishops and other ecclesiastical dignitaries to discuss and debate the laws and problems that faced that church. In this evaluation of the 1179 conciliar decrees, Danica Summerlin demonstrates how these decrees, often characterised as widespread and effective ecclesiastical legislation, emerged from local disputes which were then subjected to a period of sifting and gradual integration into the local and scholarly consciousness, in exactly the same way as other contemporary legal texts. Rather than papal mandates that were automatically observed as a result of their inherent papal authority, therefore, Summerlin reveals how conciliar decrees should be viewed as representative of contemporary discussions between the papacy, their representatives and local bishops, clerics, and scholars.

The Rhetoric of Free Speech in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages
  • Irene van Renswoude
  • Published online:
    23 September 2019
    Print publication:
    26 September 2019
  • The early Middle Ages is not a period traditionally associated with free speech. It is still widely held that free speech declined towards the end of Antiquity, disappearing completely at the beginning of the Middle Ages, and only re-emerging in the Renaissance, when people finally learned to think and speak for themselves again. Challenging this tenacious image, Irene van Renswoude reveals that there was room for political criticism and dissent in this period, as long as critics employed the right rhetoric and adhered to scripted roles. This study of the rhetoric of free speech from c.200 to c.900 AD explores the cultural rules and rhetorical performances that shaped practices of delivering criticism from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, examining the rhetorical strategies of letters and narratives in the late antique and early medieval men, and a few women, who ventured to speak the truth to the powerful.

Flodoard of Rheims and the Writing of History in the Tenth Century
  • Edward Roberts
  • Published online:
    05 September 2019
    Print publication:
    05 September 2019
  • Flodoard of Rheims (893/4–966) is one of the tenth century's most intriguing but neglected historians. His works are essential sources for the emergence of the West Frankish and Ottonian kingdoms in the tumultuous decades following the collapse of the Carolingian empire in 888. Yet although Flodoard is a crucial narrative voice from this period, his works have seldom been considered in the context of the evolving circumstances of his turbulent career or his literary aims. This important new study is the first to analyse and synthesise Flodoard's entire output, suggesting that his writings about Rheims, contemporary politics and the Christian past have until now been taken at face value without regard for his own intentions or priorities, and therefore have been misunderstood. Edward Roberts' re-evaluation of the relationship between political participation, historical understanding and authorial individuality casts important new light on the political and cultural history of tenth-century Europe.

The Medieval Gift and the Classical Tradition
  • Ideals and the Performance of Generosity in Medieval England, 1100–1300
  • Lars Kjær
  • Published online:
    10 August 2019
    Print publication:
    29 August 2019
  • This interdisciplinary study explores how classical ideals of generosity influenced the writing and practice of gift giving in medieval Europe. In assuming that medieval gift giving was shaped by oral 'folk models', historians have traditionally followed in the footsteps of social anthropologists and sociologists such as Marcel Mauss and Pierre Bourdieu. This first in-depth investigation into the influence of the classical ideals of generosity and gift giving in medieval Europe reveals to the contrary how historians have underestimated the impact of classical literature and philosophy on medieval culture and ritual. Focusing on the idea of the gift expounded in the classical texts read most widely in the Middle Ages, including Seneca the Younger's De beneficiis and Cicero's De officiis, Lars Kjær investigates how these ideas were received, adapted and utilised by medieval writers across a range of genres, and how they influenced the practice of generosity.

The Liturgical Past in Byzantium and Early Rus
  • Sean Griffin
  • Published online:
    09 August 2019
    Print publication:
    15 August 2019
  • The chroniclers of medieval Rus were monks, who celebrated the divine services of the Byzantine church throughout every day. This study is the first to analyze how these rituals shaped their writing of the Rus Primary Chronicle, the first written history of the East Slavs. During the eleventh century, chroniclers in Kiev learned about the conversion of the Roman Empire by celebrating a series of distinctively Byzantine liturgical feasts. When the services concluded, and the clerics sought to compose a native history for their own people, they instinctively drew on the sacred stories that they sang at church. The result was a myth of Christian origins for Rus - a myth promulgated even today by the Russian government - which reproduced the Christian origins myth of the Byzantine Empire. The book uncovers this ritual subtext and reconstructs the intricate web of liturgical narratives that underlie this foundational text of pre-modern Slavic civilization.

Carolingian Catalonia
  • Politics, Culture, and Identity in an Imperial Province, 778–987
  • Cullen J. Chandler
  • Published online:
    28 December 2018
    Print publication:
    10 January 2019
  • Drawing on a range of evidence related to royal authority, political events and literate culture, this study traces how kings and emperors involved themselves in the affairs of the Spanish March, and examines how actively people in Catalonia participated in politics centred on the royal court. Rather than setting the political development of the region in terms of Catalonia's future independence as a medieval principality, Cullen J. Chandler addresses it as part of the Carolingian 'experiment'. In doing so, he incorporates an analysis of political events alongside an examination of such cultural issues as the spread of the Rule of Benedict, the Adoptionist controversy, and the educational programme of the Carolingian reforms. This new history of the region offers a robust and absorbing analysis of the nature of the Carolingian legacy in the March, while also revising traditional interpretations of ethnic motivations for political acts and earlier attempts to pinpoint the constitutional birth of Catalonia.

Learning in a Crusader City
  • Intellectual Activity and Intercultural Exchanges in Acre, 1191–1291
  • Jonathan Rubin
  • Published online:
    30 August 2018
    Print publication:
    06 September 2018
  • Did the Crusades trigger significant intellectual activity? To what extent and in what ways did the Latin residents of the Crusader States acquire knowledge from Muslims and Eastern Christians? And how were the Crusader states influenced by the intellectual developments which characterized the West in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries? This book is the first to examine these questions systematically using the complete body of evidence from one major urban centre: Acre. This reveals that Acre contained a significant number of people who engaged in learned activities, as well as the existence of study centres housed within the city. This volume also seeks to reconstruct the discourse that flowed across four major fields of learning: language and translation, jurisprudence, the study of Islam, and theological exchanges with Eastern Christians. The result is an unprecedentedly rich portrait of a hitherto neglected intellectual centre on the Eastern shores of the medieval Mediterranean.

Cultural Exchange and Identity in Late Medieval Ireland
  • The English and Irish of the Four Obedient Shires
  • Sparky Booker
  • Published online:
    12 March 2018
    Print publication:
    22 March 2018
  • Irish inhabitants of the 'four obedient shires' - a term commonly used to describe the region at the heart of the English colony in the later Middle Ages - were significantly anglicised, taking on English names, dress, and even legal status. However, the processes of cultural exchange went both ways. This study examines the nature of interactions between English and Irish neighbours in the four shires, taking into account the complex tensions between assimilation and the preservation of distinct ethnic identities and exploring how the common colonial rhetoric of the Irish as an 'enemy' coexisted with the daily reality of alliance, intermarriage, and accommodation. Placing Ireland in a broad context, Sparky Booker addresses the strategies the colonial community used to deal with the difficulties posed by extensive assimilation, and the lasting changes this made to understandings of what it meant to be 'English' or 'Irish' in the face of such challenges.

The Landscape of Pastoral Care in 13th-Century England
  • William H. Campbell
  • Published online:
    11 December 2017
    Print publication:
    21 December 2017
  • The thirteenth century was a crucial period of reform in the English church, during which the church's renewal initiatives transformed the laity. The vibrant lay religious culture of late-medieval England cannot be understood without considering the re-invigorated pastoral care that developed between 1200 and 1300. Even before Innocent III called the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, reform-minded bishops and scholars were focusing attention on the local church, emphasising better preaching and more frequent confession. This study examines the processes by which these clerical reforms moulded the lay religiosity of the thirteenth century, integrating the different aspects of church life, so often studied separately, and combining a broad investigation of the subject with a series of comparative case studies. William H. Campbell also demonstrates how differences abounded from diocese to diocese, town to country and parish to parish, shaping the landscape of pastoral care as a complex mosaic of lived religion.

Conquest and Christianization
  • Saxony and the Carolingian World, 772–888
  • Ingrid Rembold
  • Published online:
    01 December 2017
    Print publication:
    21 December 2017
  • Following its violent conquest by Charlemagne (772–804), Saxony became both a Christian and a Carolingian region. This book sets out to re-evaluate the political integration and Christianization of Saxony and to show how the success of this transformation has important implications for how we view governance, the institutional church, and Christian communities in the early Middle Ages. A burgeoning array of Carolingian regional studies are pulled together to offer a new synthesis of the history of Saxony in the Carolingian Empire and to undercut the narrative of top-down Christianization with a more grassroots model that highlights the potential for diversity within Carolingian Christianity. This book is a comprehensive and accessible account which will provide students with a fresh view of the incorporation of Saxony into the Carolingian world.

Church Building and Society in the Later Middle Ages
  • Gabriel Byng
  • Published online:
    01 December 2017
    Print publication:
    14 December 2017
  • The construction of a church was undoubtedly one of the most demanding events to take place in the life of a medieval parish. It required a huge outlay of time, money and labour, and often a new organisational structure to oversee design and management. Who took control and who provided the financing was deeply shaped by local patterns in wealth, authority and institutional development - from small villages with little formal government to settlements with highly unequal populations. This all took place during a period of great economic and social change as communities managed the impact of the Black Death, the end of serfdom and the slump of the mid-fifteenth century. This original and authoritative study provides an account of how economic change, local politics and architecture combined in late-medieval England. It will be of interest to researchers of medieval, socio-economic and art history.

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