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The relationship between rulers and their subjects is always channelled by emotion. This volume explores the specific tones this relationship took on in the Middle Ages, as well as their accordance with a concept of power based ultimately on agreement, an inclination to visualise emotions, a social pedagogy based on fear, and a religious ideology which placed humanity between divine order and divine wrath. It also examines the emotive models used to rule society and deal with conflicts. Together, the contributions in this book demonstrate how our understanding of late medieval society can be enhanced by recognising the emotional strategies present in the game of power and how they were used to build authority. Contributors are: Alexandru Stefan Anca, Attila Bárány, Ulrike Becker, Luciano Gallinari, Sari Katajala-Peltomaa, Vinni Lucherini, Esther Martí Sentañés, Francesc Massip, Rob Meens, Tamás Olbei, Bernard Ribémont, Flocel Sabaté, and Hans-Joachim Schmidt.

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.

In this volume, the authors bring fresh approaches to the subject of royal and noble households in medieval and early modern Europe. The essays focus on the people of the highest social rank: the nuclear and extended royal family, their household attendants, noblemen and noblewomen as courtiers, and physicians. Themes include financial and administrative management, itinerant households, the household of an imprisoned noblewoman, blended households, and cultural influence. The essays are grounded in sources such as records of court ceremonial, economic records, letters, legal records, wills, and inventories. The authors employ a variety of methods, including prosopography, economic history, visual analysis, network analysis, and gift exchange, and the collection is engaged with current political, sociological, anthropological, gender, and feminist theories.

Richard Kaeuper's career has examined three salient concerns of medieval society - knightly prowess and violence, lay and religious piety, and public order and government - most directly in three of his monographs: War, Justice, and Public Order (Oxford, 1988), Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe (Oxford, 1999), and Holy Warriors (Penn, 2009). Kaeuper approaches historical questions with an eye towards illuminating the inherent complexities in human ideas and ideals, and he has worked to untangle the various threads holding together cultural constructs such as chivalry, licit violence, and lay piety. The present festschrift in his honor brings together scholars from across disciplines to engage with those same concerns in medieval society from a variety of perspectives.Contributors are: Bernard S. Bachrach, Elizabeth A.R. Brown, Samuel A. Claussen, David Crouch, Thomas Devaney, Paul Dingman, Daniel P. Franke, Richard Firth Green, Christopher Guyol, John D. Hosler, William Chester Jordan, Craig M. Nakashian, W. Mark Ormrod, Russell A. Peck, Anthony J. Pollard, Michael Prestwich, Sebastian Rider-Bezerra, Leah Shopkow, and Peter W. Sposato.

Originally published in French in 2004, Matei Cazacu's Dracula remains the most authoritative scholarly biography of the Wallachian prince Vlad III the Impaler (1448, 1456-1462, 1476). Its core is an exhaustively researched reconstruction of Dracula's life and political career, using original sources in more than nine languages. In addition Cazacu traces Dracula's metamorphosis, at the hands of contemporary propagandists, into variously a bloodthirsty tyrant, and an early modern “great sovereign.” Beyond this Cazacu explores Dracula's transformation into “the vampire prince” in literature, film and folklore, with surprising new discoveries on Bram Stoker's sources for his novel. In this first English translation, the text and bibliography are updated, and readers are provided with an appendix of the key sources for Dracula's life, in fresh and accurate English translations.

Winner of the 2019 Brigadier General James L. Collins Jr. Prize In To Win and Lose a Medieval Battle: Nájera (April 3, 1367). A Pyrrhic Victory for the Black Prince, L.J. Andrew Villalon and Donald J. Kagay provide a full treatment of one of the major battles of the Hundred Years War, which, perhaps because it was fought in Spain, is lesser known to scholars and general readers. Drawing information from contemporary European chronicles and the massive documentary collections of Spanish and French archives, the authors have painstakingly investigated the Iberian and European background events to Nájera and have in minute detail laid out how the army of Enrique II of Castile (assisted by Bertand de Guesclin) and that of his half-brother, Pedro I of Castile (assisted by Edward, the Black Prince), clashed at Nájera on April 3, 1367. Winner of the 2019 Brigadier General James L. Collins Jr. Prize, awarded by the U.S. Commission on Military History for the best book on military history published in 2017 or 2018. The awarding committee praised the volume as ‘a genuinely original scholarly contribution... comprehensive, balanced, and insightful... this 600-page magnum opus will significantly enhance our understanding of military history during a seminal period of human development.'See inside the book.

In Vox regis: Royal Communication in High Medieval Norway, David Brégaint examines how the Norwegian monarchy gradually managed to infiltrate Norwegian society through the development of a communicative system during the High Middle Ages, from c. 1150 to c. 1300. Drawing on sagas, didactic literature, charters, and laws, the book demonstrates how the Norwegian kings increasingly played a key -role in the promotion of royal ideology in society through rituals and the written word. In particular, the book stresses the interaction between secular and clerical culture, the role of the Church and of the Norwegian aristocracy

This book examines the social, institutional and cultural setting of medical practices in the medieval town of Montpellier which boasted one of the first universities of the middle ages and a famous school of medicine. Some of its most celebrated masters and their medical works have been thoroughly studied but few of them try to put these in context with a thriving urban community of merchants and craftsmen that were at the core of the city council. Their concurrent efforts will endow Montpellier of a rich health care system featuring not only the university masters but also the city's barber-surgeons and apothecaries. Their collective fate is revealed here in an integrated picture of health and society in the middle ages.

This book addresses a question that has been somewhat neglected in the many studies of the mercantile operations of the ‘merchant of Prato', Francesco di Marco Datini, in the years around 1400: the operations of his firm in the Maghrib, a region in which he and his colleagues had to operate through agents, rather than by means of branches or sister companies based in the region. Thanks to the voluminous material of the Datini archive in Prato, it offers a reconstruction of commercial strategies through the study of networks, of economic actors, their identity and their practices, and of the link between trade and the State, especially the Florentine one.

In Order and Disorder: The Poor Clares between Foundation and Reform, Bert Roest provides an up-to-date and comprehensive history of the Poor Clares from their early beginnings until the sixteenth century. With recourse to the available secondary literature and a wealth of primary sources, this book shows how the early history of the Poor Clares cannot be reduced to Franciscan initiatives, and that the institutionalization of the order was characterized by prolonged conflicts and a series of important papal interventions. The work also provides insight in the expansion of the order, the complexities of religious reforms, and the significant cultural production of the women involved.

Much research has been done on medieval marriage in the last decades. However, few books have a pronouncedly comparative approach. This book discusses how much was regional and universal in medieval marriage law and practices in Europe. The sources used range from secular and canon law to court practice and from images to private correspondence. Articles discuss medieval and Reformation Belgium, England, France, Germany, Italy, Lithuania, and Sweden. Both marriage formation and marital property, two intertwined aspects, are considered in the articles. The book offers fresh evidence on the scope of regional variation tolerated by the Church, regional practices, and European trends.Contributors are James A. Brundage, Cecilia Cristellon, Trevor Dean, Charles Donahue, Jr., Caroline Dunn, Mia Korpiola, Jurgita Kunsmanaitė, Anu Lahtinen, Anthony Musson, Philip L. Reynolds, Kirsi Salonen, Silvana Seidel Menchi, and Monique Vleeschouwers-Van Melkebeek.

This book deals with the different translations into Old French of Giles of Rome's De regimine principum, dedicated to Philippe le Bel around 1279, and their readership. First-hand manuscript research has permitted us to understand not only the general context of their production but also the social conditions of their transmission and circulation. This work concentrates on different aspects of the reception of Giles of Rome's pedagogical ideas by his “translators”, who are by no means passive in this process. This book provides not only a concrete idea of what Giles of Rome's educational ideas became when mediated for the consumption of a lay public but also how the translators, in their translations, supported the transmission of re-appropriated knowledge.

Philippe de Mézières (1327-1405) was the quintessential man of all seasons of the fourteenth-century Mediterranean. A scholar, a soldier, a mystic, a man of affairs, a royal adviser and an incessant traveler around the Mediterranean, a prolific writer and an associate of religious orders, a champion of the crusade and no less an ardent advocate of peace in the West, a Frenchman, a Cypriot, and a Venetian citizen, he captures the spirit of his age like no other man. This volume, the first to address Philippe and his legacy comprehensively since 1896, gathers twenty-two contributions of original research shedding new light on Philippe's literary, political, and mystical writings, and places him in the context of his age and his contemporaries.Contributors are Michel Balard, Adrian Bell, Joël Blanchard, Kevin Brownlee, Evelien Chayes, Philippe Contamine, Anne Curry, Daisy Delogu, Peter Edbury, John France, Catherine Gaullier-Bougassas, Henri Gourinard, Michael Hanly, David Jacoby, Sharon Kinoshita, Anna Loba, Angel Nicolaou-Konnari, Sylvain Piron, Andrea Tarnowski, Stefan Vander Elst, Lori Walters, and David Wrisley.