New Approaches To The Archive In The Middle Ages

This volume brings together scholars of history, manuscript studies, and art and architectural history to examine in conversation the varieties of medieval archival acts, the heterogeneity of collections, and the motivations of collectors. It is united by the historically flexible concept of the archive, and contributors examine material from Seville to Prague, from the early Christian period through the Reformation. Premodern collections and archival practices are increasingly becoming the subject of academic inquiry. Chapter authors investigate how institutional, communal, and familial identity accrued to material culture, including illuminated manuscripts, ecclesiastic vestments, ancient sarcophagi, and reliquaries. Others examine the social impulses behind the documentation of such collections, namely through the creation of inventories, but also in the production, management, and use of parchment records, including cartularies, estate records, and legal documents. Finally, contributors question how medieval people evaluated historical age and outmoded artistic styles; shaped and promoted collective memory through preservation, display, and ritual; and attached value, both monetary and symbolic, to their collections. The volume is cross-disciplinary and will appeal to a variety of readers, both in and out of academia. Curators, librarians, and archivists working with medieval collections will find it valuable, as will heritage professionals and charities involved in the care of properties which presently or formerly contained medieval treasuries, libraries, and archives.

Over the last decades, a profound renovation in the way of reading and interpreting the sources of the Middle Ages led researchers to reconsider the historical value of medieval cartularies and to explore the different ways and purposes according to which medieval institutions built their own archival memory. In this collective volume we aim at approaching the topic through specific case studies, analysing models and practices in the organization of the corpora, the selection, organization and use / re-use of documents. The book focuses above all on cartularies in the strict sense of the term, mostly produced within the ecclesiastical sphere. Moreover, some of the contributions presented here regard (or also regard) documentary collections in volume form that cannot be identified with the 'libri iurium et privilegiorum' as traditionally understood but were, like them, born out of the need to organise the parchment charters forming the archives of their creators and make them concretely usable for various purposes. It is therefore our hope that, despite the diversity of the cases examined and approaches employed, this volume will be of use not only to those currently engaged in the study of cartularies but also to those undertaking broader investigation of the management of archival memory in the medieval period.

Compares the archives of European states after 1500 to reveal changes in how records supported memory, authority and power.

While globalization is a modern phenomenon, premodern people were also interconnected in early forms of globalism, sharing merchandise, technology, languages, and stories over long distances. Looking across civilizations, this volume takes a broad view of the Middle Ages in order to foster new habits of thinking and develop a multilayered, critical sense of the past. The essays in this volume reach across disciplinary lines to bring insights from music, theater, religion, ecology, museums, and the history of disease into the literature classroom. The contributors provide guidance on texts such as the Thousand and One Nights, Sunjata, Benjamin of Tudela's Book of Travels, and the Malay Annals and on topics such as hotels, maps, and camels. They propose syllabus recommendations, present numerous digital resources, and offer engaging class activities and discussion questions. Ultimately, they provide tools that will help students evaluate popular representations of the Middle Ages and engage with the dynamics of past, present, and future world relationships.

The early Middle Ages provided twentieth-century poets with the material to re-imagine and rework local, religious, and national identities in their writing. Poet of the Medieval Modern focuses on a key figure within this tradition, the Anglo-Welsh poet and artist David Jones (1895-1974): representing the first extended study of the influence of early medieval English culture and history on Jones and his novel-length late modernist poem The Anathemata (1952). Jones's second major poetic project after In Parenthesis (1937), The Anathemata fuses Jones's visual and verbal arts to write a Catholic history of Britain as told through the history of man-as-artist. Drawing on unpublished archival material including manuscripts, sketches, correspondence, and, most significantly, the marginalia from David Jones's Library, this volume reads with Jones in order to trouble the distinction between poetry and scholarship. Placing this underappreciated figure firmly at the centre of new developments in Modernist and Medieval Studies, Poet of the Medieval Modern brings the two fields into dialogue and argues that Jones uses the textual and material culture of the early Middle Ages--including Old English prose and poetry, Anglo-Latin hagiography, early medieval stone sculpture, manuscripts, and historiography--to re-envision British Catholic identity in the twentieth-century long poem. Jones returned to the English record to seek out those moments where the histories of the Welsh had been elided or erased. At a time when the Middle Ages are increasingly weaponised in far-right and nationalist political discourse, the book offers a timely discussion of how the early medieval past has been resourced to both shore-up and challenge English hegemonies across modern British culture.

In our age of unprecedented access to information, the handwritten records of the medieval era remain overwhelmingly dark - unread and unreadable - confining modern scholarship to a tiny fraction of their totality. Yet this constraint is fast disappearing as a range of new technologies transform our understanding of the Dark Archives and thus of the medieval, to an extent unseen since the invention of movable type and voyages of discovery in the fifteenth century delimited the medieval period itself. This select proceedings of the Dark Archives events of 2019-21 presents the first overview of the emergent field of Dark Archives studies, and its framing questions: just how large is the totality of medieval writing and its interrelations (or 'Graphosphere'), extant and destroyed, and what materials is it composed of? What digital technologies are emerging to scan, transcribe and order this totality, a task otherwise beyond uncountable human scholarly lifetimes? More broadly: what of the physical record can, cannot, or can only be captured digitally? What worlds of scholarship and knowledge might we build upon a fully-mapped Graphosphere? Our pioneering contributors present the wealth of approaches now being marshalled in quest of answers, from manuscript statistics, the reconstruction of lost documents, fragmentology, optical character recognition, crowdsourcing and spectrography, to the metaphysical reconsideration of knowledge and of the archive.

Sexuality is one of the most influential factors in human life. The responses to and reflections upon the manifestations of sexuality provide fascinating insights into fundamental aspects of medieval and early-modern culture. This interdisciplinary volume with articles written by social historians, literary historians, musicologists, art historians, and historians of religion and mental-ity demonstrates how fruitful collaborative efforts can be in the exploration of essential features of human society. Practically every aspect of culture both in the Middle Ages and the early modern age was influenced and determined by sexuality, which hardly ever surfaces simply characterized by prurient interests. The treatment of sexuality in literature, chronicles, music, art, legal documents, and in scientific texts illuminates central concerns, anxieties, tensions, needs, fears, and problems in human society throughout times.

The study of pre-modern anthropology requires the close examination of the relationship between nature and human society, which has been both precarious and threatening as well as productive, soothing, inviting, and pleasurable. Much depends on the specific circumstances, as the works by philosophers, theologians, poets, artists, and medical practitioners have regularly demonstrated. It would not be good enough, as previous scholarship has commonly done, to examine simply what the various writers or artists had to say about nature. While modern scientists consider just the hard-core data of the objective world, cultural historians and literary scholars endeavor to comprehend the deeper meaning of the concept of nature presented by countless writers and artists. Only when we have a good grasp of the interactions between people and their natural environment, are we in a position to identify and interpret mental structures, social and economic relationships, medical and scientific concepts of human health, and the messages about all existence as depicted in major art works. In light of the current conditions threatening to bring upon us a global crisis, it matters centrally to take into consideration pre-modern discourses on nature and its enormous powers to understand the topoi and tropes determining the concepts through which we perceive nature. Nature thus proves to be a force far beyond all human comprehensibility, being both material and spiritual depending on our critical approaches.