The Languages Of Gift In The Early Middle Ages

This book is a collection of original essays on gift in the early Middle Ages, from Anglo-Saxon England to the Islamic world. Focusing on the languages of gift, the essays reveal how early medieval people visualized and thought about gift, and how they distinguished between the giving of gifts and other forms of social, economic, political and religious exchange. The same team, largely, that produced the widely cited The Settlement of Disputes in Early Medieval Europe (Cambridge University Press, 1986) has again collaborated in a collective effort that harnesses individual expertise in order to draw from the sources a deeper understanding of the early Middle Ages by looking at real cases, that is at real people, whether peasant or emperor. The culture of medieval gift has often been treated as archaic and exotic; in this book, by contrast, we see people going about their lives in individual, down-to-earth and sometimes familiar ways.

This is the first major study of the interplay between Latin and Germanic vernaculars in early medieval records, examining the role of language choice in the documentary cultures of the Anglo-Saxon and eastern Frankish worlds.

This volume deals with shifts and changes that took place during the Middle Ages when things, or ideas, or writings, were transferred from time to time, place to place, or one ideological realm to another. The same objects, ideas, or texts changed their meaning, impact, or symbolic value according to different contexts. The twelve papers, written by leading experts, investigate the authority attributed to texts and their canonization in different contexts; the shifting uses and meanings of gifts, from honorable instruments in the settlement of disputes to corruption and bribery; and the transition of violence and power from relationships between equals to a tool for the maintenance of hierarchies. Contributors include: Gadi Algazi, Monique Bernards, Arnoud-Jan Bijsterveld, Esther Cohen, Valentin Groebner, Yitzhak Hen, Mayke de Jong, Rob Meens, Marco Mostert, Thomas F.X. Noble, Timothy Reuter, Hendrik Teunis, and Stephen D. White.

A collection of papers in English by one of the foremost historians of the social and economic structure of medieval rural communities, who here examines local societies in rural northern Spain and Portugal in the early middle ages. Principal themes are scribal practice and the analysis of charter texts; gift, sale and wealth; justice and judicial procedures. Always with a concern for personal relationships and interactions, for mobility, for decision-making and for practice, a sense of land and landscape runs throughout. The Spanish and Portuguese experience has seemed irrelevant to the great debates of early medieval European history that occupy historians. But Spain and Portugal shared the late Roman heritage which influenced much of western Europe in the early middle ages, and by the tenth century records and practice in Christian Iberia still shared features with the Carolingian world. This book offers a substantial corpus of Iberian evidence to set beside Frankish, Italian, English and Scandinavian material and thereby makes it possible for northern Iberia to play a part in these great debates of medieval European history. (CS1084).

This revealing study explores how people at all social levels, whether laity or clergy, needed, used and kept documents.

"[The book's] subject matter is the changing interpretation within Europe of the end of the Roman Empire and the early Middle Ages from the eighteenth century to the present and how individual interpretations influenced and were influenced by the circumstances in which they were written."--Preface.

Demonstrates how food-growing gardens in early medieval cities transformed Roman ideas and economic structures into new, medieval values.

A comprehensive survey of recent work in Medieval Italian history and archaeology by an international cast of contributors, arranged within a broader context of studies on other regions and major historical transitions in Europe, c.400 to c.1400CE. Each of the contributors reflect on the contribution made to the field by Chris Wickham, whose own work spans studies based on close archival work, to broad and ambitious statements on economic and social change in the transition from Roman to medieval Europe, and the value of comparing this across time and space.