Transforming Landscapes Of Belief In The Early Medieval Insular World And Beyond

Volume II : "This volume analyses the effects of religious conversion on landscapes of cult and on religious practice in Europe, focusing in particular on Britain and Ireland. Adopting an interdisciplinary and comparative approach, the volume investigates the interaction between different forms of belief, their coexistence and competition. It discusses the coming of writing, the power of the word, landscapes of ritual, and converting communities. The contributors include leading historians, archaeologists, linguists, and literary scholars. This is the second volume to emerge from research undertaken by contributors to the Converting the Isles Research Network and forms a companion volume to The Introduction of Christianity into the Early Medieval Insular World."--

Conversion to Christianity is arguably the most revolutionary social and cultural change that Europe experienced throughout Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. Christianization affected all strata of society and transformed not only religious beliefs and practices, but also the nature of government, the priorities of the economy, the character of kinship, and gender relations. It is against this backdrop that an international array of leading medievalists gathered under the auspices of the Converting the Isles Research Network (funded by the Leverhulme Trust) to investigate social, economic, and cultural aspects of conversion in the early medieval Insular world, covering different parts of Britain, Ireland, Scandinavia, and Iceland. This volume analyses the effects of religious conversion on landscapes of cult and on religious practice in Europe, focusing in particular on Britain and Ireland. Adopting an interdisciplinary and comparative approach, the volume investigates the interaction between different forms of belief, their coexistence and competition. It discusses the coming of writing, the power of the word, landscapes of ritual, and converting communities. The contributors include leading historians, archaeologists, linguists, and literary scholars. This is the second volume to emerge from research undertaken by contributors to the Converting the Isles Research Network and forms a companion volume to The Introduction of Christianity into the Early Medieval Insular World.

Research for and the writing of this book was funded by the award of a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship. The period c. AD300—1050, spanning the collapse of Roman rule to the coming of the Normans, was formative in the development of Wales. Life in Early Medieval Wales considers how people lived in late Roman and early medieval Wales, and how their lives and communities changed over the course of this period. It uses a multidisciplinary approach, focusing on the growing body of archaeological evidence set alongside the early medieval written sources together with place-names and personal names. It begins by analysing earlier research and the range of sources, the significance of the environment and climate change, and ways of calculating time. Discussion of the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries focuses on the disintegration of the Roman market economy, fragmentation of power, and the emergence of new kingdoms and elites alongside evidence for changing identities, as well as important threads of continuity, notably Latin literacy, Christianity, and the continuation of small-scale farming communities. Early medieval Wales was an entirely rural society. Analysis of the settlement archaeology includes key sites such as hillforts, including Dinas Powys, the royal crannog at Llangorse, and the Viking Age and earlier estate centre at Llanbedrgoch alongside the development, from the seventh century onwards, of new farming and other rural settlements. Consideration is given to changes in the mixed farming economy reflecting climate deterioration and a need for food security, as well as craft working and the roles of exchange, display, and trade reflecting changing outside contacts. At the same time cemeteries and inscribed stones, stone sculpture and early church sites chart the course of conversion to Christianity, the rise of monasticism, and the increasing power of the Church. Finally, discussion of power and authority analyses emerging evidence for sites of assembly, the rise of Mercia, and increasing English infiltration, together with the significance of Offa's and Wat's Dykes, and the Viking impact. Throughout the evidence is placed within a wider context enabling comparison with other parts of Britain and Ireland and, where appropriate, with other parts of Europe to see broader trends, including the impacts of climate, economic, and religious change.

In the early Middle Ages, the conversion of the early English kingdoms acted as a catalyst for significant social and cultural change. One of the most visible of these changes was the introduction of a new type of household: the monastic household. These reproduced through education and training, rather than biological means; their inhabitants practised celibacy as a lifelong state, rather than as a stage in the life course. Because monastic households depended on secular households to produce the next generation of recruits, previous studies have tended to view them as more mutable than their secular counterparts, which are implicitly regarded as natural and ahistorical. Katharine Sykes charts some of the significant changes to the structure of households between the seventh to eleventh centuries, as ideas of spiritual, non-biological reproduction first fostered in monastic households were adopted in royal households in the tenth and eleventh centuries, and as ideas about kinship that were generated in secular households, such as the relationship between genealogy and inheritance, were picked up and applied by their monastic counterparts. In place of binary divisions between secular and monastic, biological and spiritual, real and imagined, Sykes demonstrates that different forms of kinship and reproduction in this period were intimately linked.

By presenting case studies from across Eastern and Western Medieval Europe, this volume aims to open up a Europe-wide debate on the variety of relations and contexts between ecclesiastical buildings and their surrounding landscapes between the 5th and 15th centuries AD.

The century between c. 650 and 750 was one of major religious, social and political transformations in northwest Europe. In the Frankish kingdom, clerics from Ireland and Britain played an important role in these processes. One of the most prominent figures to emerge from this period was Willibrord – a Northumbrian educated in Ireland who became the first bishop of Utrecht and founded the monastery of Echternach in modern Luxembourg. Through his involvement in the Christianisation of Frisia, his cooperation with the eastern Frankish elite, including the ancestors of Charlemagne, and his connection with the pope, Willibrord was at the centre of the developments which led to the formation of a new ecclesiastical and political landscape between the North Sea and Thuringia on the eve of the Carolingian period. This book, which represents the first extensive study of the topic in English, extends its analysis of Willibrord’s career beyond the mission to Frisia and examines the political dimension of his activity in Merovingian Francia and its border regions. By offering a fresh look at the main sources for Willibrord’s life, the book explores how Insular clerics shaped their Frankish environment through the creation of networks between Ireland, Britain and the continent and their ability to take on a variety of different roles within Merovingian society.