Kingship And Justice In The Ottonian Empire

What makes a successful government?

The vast majority of studies on rulership in medieval Europe focus on one kingdom; one type of rule; or one type of ruler. This volume attempts to break that mold and demonstrate the breadth of medieval Europe and the various kinds of rulership within it. How Medieval Europe was Ruled aims to demonstrate the multiplicity of types of rulers and polities that existed in medieval Europe. The contributors discuss not just kings or queens, but countesses, dukes, and town leadership. We see that rulers worked collaboratively with one another both across political boundaries and within their own borders in ways that are not evident in most current studies of kingship, inhibited by too narrow a focus. The volume also covers the breadth of medieval Europe from Scandinavia in the north to the Italian peninsula in the south, Iberia and the Anglo-Normans in the west to Rus, Byzantium and the Khazars in the east. This book is geared towards a wide audience and thus provides a broad base of understanding via a clear explanation of concepts of rule in each of the areas that is covered. The book can be utilized in the classroom, to enhance the presentation of a medieval Europe survey or to discuss rulership more specifically for a region or all of Europe. Beyond the classroom, the book is accessible to all scholars who are interested in continuing to learn and expand their horizons.

Commemorating Power looks at how the past was evoked for political purposes under a new Saxon dynasty, the Ottonians, who came to dominate post-Carolingian Europe after 888 as the rulers of a new empire in Germany and Italy, focusing on two convents of monastic women who played a significant role in Ottonian politics.

"A series which is a model of its kind" Edmund King This year's volume is made up of articles that were presented at the conference in Bonn, held under the auspices of the University. In this volume, Alheydis Plassmann, the Allen Brown Memorial lecturer, analyses how two contemporary commentators reported the events of their day, the contest between two grandchildren of William the Conqueror as they struggled for supremacy in England and Normandy during the 1140s. The Marjorie Chibnall Essay prize winner, Laura Bailey, examines the geographical spaces occupied by the exile in The Gesta Herewardi and Fouke le Fitz Waryn. Andrea Stieldorf compares the seals and the coins of Germany/Lotharingia in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries with those made in England, exploring the ideas embedded in the iconography of the two connected visual sources. Domesday Book forms the focus of two important new studies, one by Rory Naismith looking at the moneyers to be found in Domesday, adding substantially to the information gained on this important group of artisans, and one by Chelsea Shields-Más on the sheriffs of Edward the Confessor, giving us new insights into the key officials in the royal administration. Elisabeth van Houts examines the life of Empress Matilda before she returned to her father's court in 1125 throwing new light on Matilda's "German" years, while Laura Wangerin looks at how tenth-century Ottonian women used communication to further their political goals. Steven Vanderputten takes the challenge of thinking about religious change at the turn of the Millennium through the lens of the Life of John, Abbot of Gorze Abbey, by John of Saint-Arnoul. Benjamin Pohl looks at the role of the abbot in prompting monk-historians to embark on their historiographical tasks through the work of one individual chronicler, Andreas of Marchiennes, responsible for writing, at his abbot's behest, the Chronicon Marchianense. And Megan Welton explores the implications of honorific titles through an examination of the title dux as it was attached to two tenth-century women rulers. The volume offers a wide range of insightful essays which add considerably to our understanding of the central middle ages.

Introduction to Medieval Europe 300–1500 provides a comprehensive survey of this complex and varied formative period of European history within a global context, covering themes as diverse as barbarian migrations, the impact of Christianisation, the formation of nations and states, the emergence of an expansionist commercial economy, the growth of cities, the Crusades, the effects of plague and the intellectual and cultural dynamism of the Middle Ages. The book explores the driving forces behind the formation of medieval society and the directions in which it developed and changed. In doing this, the authors cover a wide geographic expanse, including Western interactions with the Byzantine Empire, the Islamic World, North Africa and Asia. This fourth edition has been fully updated to reflect moves toward teaching the Middle Ages in a global context and contains a wealth of new features and topics that help to bring this fascinating era to life, including: West Europe’s catching up through intensive exchange with the Mediterranean Islamic world growth of autonomous cities and civic liberties emergence of an empirical and rational worldview climate change and intercontinental pandemics European exchange with Africa and Asia chapter introductions to support students’ understanding of the topics a fully updated glossary to give modern students the confidence and language to discuss medieval history Clear and stimulating, the fourth edition of Introduction to Medieval Europe is the ideal companion to studying the entirety of medieval history at undergraduate level.

This is the first major study in English of the queens of the Ottonian dynasty (919-1024). The Ottonians were a family from Saxony who are often regarded as the founders of the medieval German kingdom. They were the most successful of all the dynasties to emerge from the wreckage of the pan-European Carolingian Empire after it disintegrated in 888, ruling as kings and emperors in Germany and Italy and exerting indirect hegemony in France and in Eastern Europe. It has long been noted by historians that Ottonian queens were peculiarly powerful - indeed, among the most powerful of the entire Middle Ages. Their reputations, particularly those of the empresses Theophanu (d.991) and Adelheid (d.999) have been commemorated for a thousand years in art, literature, and opera. But while the exceptional status of the Ottonian queens is well appreciated, it has not been fully explained. Ottonian Queenship offers an original interpretation of Ottonian queenship through a study of the sources for the dynasty's six queens, and seeks to explain it as a phenomenon with a beginning, middle, and end. The argument is that Ottonian queenship has to be understood as a feature in a broader historical landscape, and that its history is intimately connected with the unfolding story of the royal dynasty as a whole. Simon MacLean therefore interprets the spectacular status of Ottonian royal women not as a matter of extraordinary individual personalities, but as a distinctive product of the post-Carolingian era in which the certainties of the ninth century were breaking down amidst overlapping struggles for elite family power, royal legitimacy, and territory. Queenship provides a thread which takes us through the complicated story of a crucial century in Europe's creation, and helps explain how new ideas of order were constructed from the debris of the past.

Provocative interrogation of how the Ottonian kingdom grew and flourished, focussing on the resources required.

The Norman conquerors of Anglo-Saxon England have traditionally been seen both as rapacious colonizers and as the harbingers of a more civilized culture, replacing a tribal Germanic society and its customs with more refined Continental practices. Many of the scholarly arguments about the Normans and their influence overlook the impact of the past on the Normans themselves. The Continuity of the Conquest corrects these oversights. Wendy Marie Hoofnagle explores the Carolingian aspects of Norman influence in England after the Norman Conquest, arguing that the Normans’ literature of kingship envisioned government as a form of imperial rule modeled in many ways on the glories of Charlemagne and his reign. She argues that the aggregate of historical and literary ideals that developed about Charlemagne after his death influenced certain aspects of the Normans’ approach to ruling, including a program of conversion through “allurement,” political domination through symbolic architecture and propaganda, and the creation of a sense of the royal forest as an extension of the royal court. An engaging new approach to understanding the nature of Norman identity and the culture of writing and problems of succession in Anglo-Norman England, this volume will enlighten and enrich scholarship on medieval, early modern, and English history.