LITMIR.BIZ

In the mid-nineteenth century, Jacob Grimm published a collection of late medieval records of local law—called Weistümer —that was scarcely less comprehensive than his famous collection of fairy tales. As with the fairy tales, Grimm assumed that before their transcription, people had handed these down orally from time immemorial. His interest in these customary laws arose from their seemingly folkloristic notions of custom and from their poetic narratives about ritualized encounters between lords and peasants, capturing an oral tradition from an unsophisticated time. Grimm's readings are still used today as a basis for theories about oral societies in the premodern West and contemporary non-Western societies and the modernizing effects of writing. As Simon Teuscher contends, however, those aspects of legal texts that have been considered since Grimm to be vestiges of a traditional preliterate popular culture were eventually rooted in relatively advanced and learned techniques of writing, jurisprudence, and administration. Lords' Rights and Peasant Stories uses examples from German- and French-speaking Switzerland to investigate what legal order meant to individuals and to a society at the eve of the early modern period. Teuscher deals with legal documents not only as texts, but also as objects. The book takes the materiality of documents seriously and reconstructs cultural techniques of their production and social practices of their use. Lords' Rights and Peasant Stories suggests the need to rethink master narratives about transitions from oral to literate societies. It explores the local dimensions of processes of state-formation and the emergence of modern notions of law in western Europe. Students of rural society and village organization will find here a discussion of local power distribution that is inspired by social anthropology, that looks beyond simple antagonisms between lords and peasants, and that insists on the role of state servants and the unconscious effects of their writing practices.

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Negotiating the Landscape explores the question of how medieval religious identities were shaped and modified by interaction with the natural environment. Focusing on the Benedictine monastic community of Stavelot-Malmedy in the Ardennes, Ellen F. Arnold draws upon a rich archive of charters, property and tax records, correspondence, miracle collections, and saints' lives from the seventh to the mid-twelfth century to explore the contexts in which the monks' intense engagement with the natural world was generated and refined. Arnold argues for a broad cultural approach to medieval environmental history and a consideration of a medieval environmental imagination through which people perceived the nonhuman world and their own relation to it. Concerned to reassert medieval Christianity's vitality and variety, Arnold also seeks to oppose the historically influential view that the natural world was regarded in the premodern period as provided by God solely for human use and exploitation. The book argues that, rather than possessing a single unifying vision of nature, the monks drew on their ideas and experience to create and then manipulate a complex understanding of their environment. Viewing nature as both wild and domestic, they simultaneously acted out several roles, as stewards of the land and as economic agents exploiting natural resources. They saw the natural world of the Ardennes as a type of wilderness, a pastoral haven, and a source of human salvation, and actively incorporated these differing views of nature into their own attempts to build their community, understand and establish their religious identity, and relate to others who shared their landscape.

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This is the first comprehensive study in English of Czech society and politics in the High Middle Ages. It paints a vivid portrait of a flourishing Christian community in the decades between 1050 and 1200. Bohemia's social and political landscape remained remarkably cohesive, centered on a throne in Prague, the Premyslid duke who occupied it, a society of property-owning freemen, and the ascendant Catholic church. In decades fraught with political violence, these provided a focal point for Czech identity and political order. In this, the Czechs' heavenly patron, Saint Vaclav, and the German emperor beyond their borders too had a role to play. An impressive, systematic dissection of a medieval polity, Hastening Toward Prague is based on a close rereading of written and material artifacts from the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Arguing against a view that puts state or nation formation at heart, Wolverton examines interactions among dukes, emperors, freemen, and the church on their own terms, asking what powers the dukes of Bohemia possessed and how they were exercised within a broader political community. Evaluating not only the foundations and practice of ducal lordship but also the form and progress of resistance to it, she argues in particular that violence was not a sign of political instability but should be interpreted as reflecting a dynamic economy of checks and balances in a fluid, mature political system. This also reveals the values and strategies that sustained the Czech Lands as a community. The study honors the complexity and dynamism of the medieval exercise of power.

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Knighthood and chivalry are commonly associated with courtly aristocracy and military prowess. Instead of focusing on the relationship between chivalry and nobility, Jesús D. Rodríguez-Velasco asks different questions. Does chivalry have anything to do with the emergence of an urban bourgeoisie? If so, how? And in a more general sense, what is the importance of chivalry in inventing and modifying a social class? In Order and Chivalry , Rodríguez-Velasco explores the role of chivalry in the emergence of the middle class in an increasingly urbanized fourteenth-century Castile. The book considers how secular, urban knighthood organizations came to life and created their own rules, which differed from martial and religiously oriented ideas of chivalry and knighthood. It delves into the cultural and legal processes that created orders of society as well as orders of knights. The first of these chivalric orders was the exclusively noble Castilian Orden de la Banda, or Order of the Sash, established by King Alfonso XI. Soon after that order was created, others appeared that drew membership from city-dwelling, bourgeois commoners. City institutions with ties to monarchy—including the Brotherhood of Knights and the Confraternities of Santa María de Gamonal and Santiago de Burgos—produced chivalric rules and statutes that redefined the privileges and political structures of urban society. By analyzing these foundational documents, such as Libro de la Banda , Order and Chivalry reveals how the poetics of order operated within the medieval Iberian world and beyond to transform the idea of the city and the practice of citizenship.

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