{"title":"Conjunctions Of Religion And Power In The Medieval Past","description":"\u003cp\u003eExplore the fascinating intersection of religious belief and political authority in medieval history. Uncover the power dynamics and social forces that shaped the era. A captivating series for history enthusiasts.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"divorce-of-lothar-ii-book-karl-j-heidecker-9780801439292","title":"The Divorce of Lothar II","description":"\"She declares, so the bishops will write in their report on the council, that she is unworthy to continue as a married woman. 'Before God and his angels' she bares her heart and confesses to them 'every secret relating to the rumor that had arisen.' The 'rumor'—as will become apparent—concerns her sexual relations with her brother. True, the 'inner wound' which she 'confesses' to God and the bishops was not dealt her of her own volition but under duress, but it is in any event so terrible that she no longer feels herself worthy to share a royal or a marital bed or to marry anyone at all. The bishops and abbots allow her, as she had supposedly requested, to enter a convent.\"—from The Divorce of Lothar II   The Divorce of Lothar II illuminates the origin and development of Western notions of marriage and divorce and the separation of church and state in the context of a notorious royal divorce in late Carolingian Europe. In 857, Lothar II, king of Lotharingia, decided to divorce Theutberga—either because she had allegedly engaged in an incestuous liaison with her brother or simply because Lothar had wished to marry his concubine Waldrada. Karl Heidecker's dramatic and engaging narrative untangles the chaos that resulted: two popes, a host of often quarreling bishops, and Lothar's conniving uncles soon became involved in an epic struggle that did not end even with the death of Lothar. The extraordinary series of events sheds light on the fact that the laws on marriage and divorce were still uncertain. The Church itself was hardly unified in its approach, and its efforts to formulate and impose rules repeatedly foundered against the political machinations characteristic of the Carolingian world.   In The Divorce of Lothar II, Heidecker not only discusses the legal aspects of the case but also pays much attention to the often heavy-handed ways in which the players of the story achieved their goals. This ninth-century scandal becomes a study of family dynamics, changing values, and the tenuous relationships between kings, nobles, and bishops around the topic of royal marriage. Though the drama ended with no clear resolution of the Church's position, Lothar's quest is revealed as an early chapter in the emergence of the belief that marriage rests on the personal will of the partners, is monogamous, and should not be dissolved.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49729654685969,"sku":"NGR9780801439292","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50302089101585,"sku":"GOR013918378","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53102095368465,"sku":"GOR010245414","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0801439299.jpg?v=1757412976"},{"product_id":"medieval-cruelty-book-daniel-baraz-9780801438172","title":"Medieval Cruelty","description":"The Middle Ages are often thought of as an era during which cruelty was a major aspect of life, a view that stems from the anti-Catholic polemics of the Reformation. Daniel Baraz makes the striking discovery that the concept of cruelty, which had been an important issue in late antiquity, received little attention in the medieval period before the thirteenth century. From that point on, interest in cruelty increased until it reached a peak late in the sixteenth century.Medieval Cruelty's extraordinary scope ranges from the writings of Seneca to those of Montaigne and draws from sources that include the views of Western Christians, Eastern Christians, and Muslims. Baraz examines the development of the concept of cruelty in legal texts, philosophical treatises, and other works that attempt to discuss the nature of cruelty. He then considers histories, martyrdom accounts, and literary works in which cruelty is represented rather than discussed directly. In the wake of the intellectual transformations of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, an increasing focus on the intentions motivating an individual's acts rekindled the discussion of cruelty. Baraz shows how ethical thought and practice about cruelty, which initially focused on external forces, became a tool to differentiate internal groups and justify violence against them. This process is evident in attacks on the Jews, in the peasant rebellions of the later Middle Ages, and in the Wars of Religion.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49754829062417,"sku":"GOR013775302","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50366923571473,"sku":"CIN0801438179VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0801438179.jpg?v=1758968084"},{"product_id":"ermengard-of-narbonne-and-the-world-of-the-troubadours-book-fredric-l-cheyette-9780801489259","title":"Ermengard of Narbonne and the World of the Troubadours","description":"Before France became France its territories included Occitania, roughly the present-day province of Languedoc. The city of Narbonne was a center of Occitanian commerce and culture during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. 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Drawing on a wide range of texts and the long history of argument about these texts, Hyams shatters the myth of English exceptionalism, the notion that while feud and vengeance prevailed in the lands of the Franks, England had advanced beyond such anarchic barbarism by the time of the Conquest and forged a centralized political and legal system. This book provides support for the notion that feud and vengeance flourished in England long beyond the Conquest, and that this fact obliges us to reconsider the genealogies of both common law and the English monarchy.Moving back and forth between a broad overview of 300 years of legal history and the details of specific disputes, Hyams attends to the demands of individuals who believed that they had been aggrieved and sought remedy. He shows how individuals perceived particular acts of violence and responded to them. These reactions, in turn, sparked central efforts to manage disputes and thereby establish law and order. Respectable litigation, however, never eclipsed the danger of direct action, often violent and physical.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49809440178449,"sku":"CIN0801439965VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51551771853073,"sku":"GOR011175737","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53122196439313,"sku":"GOR014755132","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0801439965.jpg?v=1757416875"},{"product_id":"heresy-and-the-politics-of-community-book-marina-rustow-9780801456503","title":"Heresy and the Politics of Community","description":"In a book with a bold new view of medieval Jewish history, written in a style accessible to nonspecialists and students as well as to scholars in the field, Marina Rustow changes our understanding of the origins and nature of heresy itself. Scholars have long believed that the Rabbanites and Qaraites, the two major Jewish groups under Islamic rule, split decisively in the tenth century and from that time forward the minority Qaraites were deemed a heretical sect. Qaraites affirmed a right to decide matters of Jewish law free from centuries of rabbinic interpretation; the Rabbanites, in turn, claimed an unbroken chain of scholarly tradition.   Rustow draws heavily on the Cairo Geniza, a repository of papers found in a Rabbanite synagogue, to show that despite the often fierce arguments between the groups, they depended on each other for political and financial support and cooperated in both public and private life. This evidence of remarkable interchange leads Rustow to the conclusion that the accusation of heresy appeared sporadically, in specific contexts, and that the history of permanent schism was the invention of polemicists on both sides. Power shifted back and forth fluidly across what later commentators, particularly those invested in the rabbinic claim to exclusive authority, deemed to have been sharply drawn boundaries. Heresy and the Politics of Community paints a portrait of a more flexible medieval Eastern Mediterranean world than has previously been imagined and demonstrates a new understanding of the historical meanings of charges of heresy against communities of faith. Historians of premodern societies will find that, in her fresh approach to medieval Jewish and Islamic culture, Rustow illuminates a major issue in the history of religions.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50126296219921,"sku":"CIN0801456509G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0801456509.jpg?v=1757415098"},{"product_id":"consumption-of-justice-book-daniel-lord-smail-9780801478888","title":"The Consumption of Justice","description":"In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the ideas and practices of justice in Europe underwent significant change as procedures were transformed and criminal and civil caseloads grew apace. Drawing on the rich judicial records of Marseille from the years 1264 to 1423, especially records of civil litigation, this book approaches the courts of law from the perspective of the users of the courts (the consumers of justice) and explains why men and women chose to invest resources in the law.   Smail shows that the courts were quickly adopted as a public stage on which litigants could take revenge on their enemies. Even as the new legal system served the interest of royal or communal authority, it also provided the consumers of justice with a way to broadcast their hatreds and social sanctions to a wider audience and negotiate their own community standing in the process. The emotions that had driven bloodfeuds and other forms of customary vengeance thus never went away, and instead were fully incorporated into the new procedures.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50213442453777,"sku":"CIN080147888XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51007302893841,"sku":"NIN9780801478888","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/080147888X.jpg?v=1757416254"},{"product_id":"surviving-poverty-in-medieval-paris-book-sharon-farmer-9780801438363","title":"Surviving Poverty in Medieval Paris","description":"This book about poor men and women in thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century Paris reveals the other side of the \"age of cathedrals\" in the very place where gothic architecture and scholastic theology were born. In Surviving Poverty in Medieval Paris, Sharon Farmer extends and deepens the understanding of urban poverty in the High Middle Ages. She explores the ways in which cultural elites thought about the poor, and shows that their conceptions of poor men and women derived from the roles assigned to men and women in the opening chapters of the Book of Genesis—men are associated with productive labor, or labor within the public realm, and women with reproductive labor, or labor within the private realm.   Farmer proceeds to complicate this picture, showing that elite society's attitude toward an individual's social role and moral capacity depended not only on gender but also on the person's social status. Such perceptions in turn influenced the kinds of care extended or denied to the poor by charitable organizations and the informal self-help networks that arose among the poor themselves. Of particular interest are Farmer's discussions of society's responses to men and women who were disabled to the point of being incapable of any work at all.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50292408844561,"sku":"CIN0801438365G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0801438365.jpg?v=1757415320"},{"product_id":"sephardic-frontier-book-jonathan-ray-9780801474514","title":"The Sephardic Frontier","description":"No subject looms larger over the historical landscape of medieval Spain than that of the reconquista, the rapid expansion of the power of the Christian kingdoms into the Muslim-populated lands of southern Iberia, which created a broad frontier zone that for two centuries remained a region of warfare and peril. Drawing on a large fund of unpublished material in royal, ecclesiastical, and municipal archives as well as rabbinic literature, Jonathan Ray reveals a fluid, often volatile society that transcended religious boundaries and attracted Jewish colonists from throughout the peninsula and beyond.   The result was a wave of Jewish settlements marked by a high degree of openness, mobility, and interaction with both Christians and Muslims. Ray's view challenges the traditional historiography, which holds that Sephardic communities, already fully developed, were simply reestablished on the frontier. In the early years of settlement, Iberia's crusader kings actively supported Jewish economic and political activity, and Jewish interaction with their Christian neighbors was extensive.   Only as the frontier was firmly incorporated into the political life of the peninsular states did these frontier Sephardic populations begin to forge the communal structures that resembled the older Jewish communities of the North and the interior. By the end of the thirteenth century, royal intervention had begun to restrict the amount of contact between Jewish and Christian communities, signaling the end of the open society that had marked the frontier for most of the century.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50360981127441,"sku":"CIN0801474515G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51007411683601,"sku":"NIN9780801474514","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/B007CV5G8G.jpg?v=1757414891"},{"product_id":"struggle-for-empire-book-eric-j-goldberg-9780801475290","title":"Struggle for Empire","description":"Struggle for Empire explores the contest for kingdoms and power among Charlemagne's descendants that shaped the formation of Europe through the reign of Charlemagne's grandson, Louis the German (826-876).","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50361024643345,"sku":"CIN0801475295VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":50367836979473,"sku":"CIN0801475295A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51007189090577,"sku":"NIN9780801475290","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0801475295.jpg?v=1757416819"},{"product_id":"shifting-landmarks-book-jeffrey-a-bowman-9780801439902","title":"Shifting Landmarks","description":"In a major contribution to the debate among medievalists about the nature of social and political change in Europe around the turn of the millennium, Jeffrey A. Bowman explores how people contended over property during the tenth and eleventh centuries in the province of Narbonne. He examines the system of courts and judges that weighed property disputes and shows how disputants and judges gradually adapted, modified, and reshaped legal traditions. The region (which comprised Catalonia and parts of Mediterranean France) possessed a distinctive legal culture, characterized by the prominent role of professional judges, a high level of procedural sophistication, and an intense attachment to written law, particularly the Visigothic Code. At the same time, disputants relied on a range of strategies (including custom, curses, and judicial ordeals) to resolve conflicts. Chronic tensions stemmed from conflicting understandings of property rights rather than from pervasive violence; the changes Bowman tracks are less signs of a world convulsed in struggle than of a world coursing with vitality. In Shifting Landmarks, property disputes serve as a bridge between the author's inquiry into learned ideas about justice, land, and the law and his close examination of the rough-and-tumble practice of daily life. Throughout, Bowman finds intimate connections among ink and parchment, sweat and earth.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50362774454545,"sku":"CIN0801439906G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0801439906.jpg?v=1757414501"},{"product_id":"sephardic-frontier-book-jonathan-ray-9780801444012","title":"The Sephardic Frontier","description":"No subject looms larger over the historical landscape of medieval Spain than that of the reconquista, the rapid expansion of the power of the Christian kingdoms into the Muslim-populated lands of southern Iberia, which created a broad frontier zone that for two centuries remained a region of warfare and peril. Drawing on a large fund of unpublished material in royal, ecclesiastical, and municipal archives as well as rabbinic literature, Jonathan Ray reveals a fluid, often volatile society that transcended religious boundaries and attracted Jewish colonists from throughout the peninsula and beyond.   The result was a wave of Jewish settlements marked by a high degree of openness, mobility, and interaction with both Christians and Muslims. Ray's view challenges the traditional historiography, which holds that Sephardic communities, already fully developed, were simply reestablished on the frontier. In the early years of settlement, Iberia's crusader kings actively supported Jewish economic and political activity, and Jewish interaction with their Christian neighbors was extensive.   Only as the frontier was firmly incorporated into the political life of the peninsular states did these frontier Sephardic populations begin to forge the communal structures that resembled the older Jewish communities of the North and the interior. 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By the end of the fifteenth century, black Africans comprised as much as 40 percent of the slave population of Valencia.   Whereas previous historians of medieval slavery have focused their efforts on defining the legal status of slaves, documenting the vagaries of the Mediterranean slave trade, or examining slavery within the context of Muslim-Christian relations, Debra Blumenthal explores the social and human dimensions of slavery in this religiously and ethnically pluralistic society. Enemies and Familiars traces the varied experiences of Muslim, Eastern, and black African slaves from capture to freedom. After describing how men, women, and children were enslaved and brought to the Valencian marketplace, this book examines the substance of slaves' daily lives: how they were sold and who bought them; the positions ascribed to them within the household hierarchy; the sorts of labor they performed; and the ways in which some reclaimed their freedom. Scrutinizing a wide array of archival sources (including wills, contracts, as well as hundreds of civil and criminal court cases), Blumenthal investigates what it meant to be a slave and what it meant to be a master at a critical moment of transition.   Arguing that the dynamics of the master-slave relationship both reflected and determined contemporary opinions regarding religious, ethnic, and gender differences, Blumenthal's close study of the day-to-day interactions between masters and their slaves not only reveals that slavery played a central role in identity formation in late medieval Iberia but also offers clues to the development of \"racialized\" slavery in the early modern Atlantic world.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50367161270545,"sku":"CIN0801445027VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0801445027.jpg?v=1757416402"},{"product_id":"surviving-poverty-in-medieval-paris-book-sharon-farmer-9780801472695","title":"Surviving Poverty in Medieval Paris","description":"This book about poor men and women in thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century Paris reveals the other side of the \"age of cathedrals\" in the very place where gothic architecture and scholastic theology were born. 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Miller argues that the change reflects both the emergence of a distinct clerical culture and the attempts of bishops to maintain authority in public life. She relates both to the Gregorian reform movement, which set new standards for clerical deportment and at the same time undercut episcopal claims to secular power. As bishops lost temporal authority in their cities to emerging communal governments, they compensated architecturally and competed with the communes for visual and spatial dominance in the urban center. This rivalry left indelible marks on the layout and character of Italian cities.   Moreover, Miller contends, this struggle for power had highly significant, but mixed, results for western Christianity. On the one hand, as bishops lost direct governing authority in their cities, they devised ways to retain status, influence, and power through cultural practices. This response to loss was highly creative. On the other hand, their loss of secular control led bishops to emphasize their spiritual powers and to use them to obtain temporal ends. 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The land between the Rhone and the Pyrenees was a delicately balanced world in which honor, dispute, and the fragile communities of loyalty and family held a \"stateless\" society together. In Cheyette's prose there rises before us a world we had not imagined, in which women were powerful lords, moving back and forth across what we now call Spain, France, and Italy to play the harsh political games essential to the preservation of their realms. But the region was also fertile ground for religious practices deemed heretical by the Church. The attempt to eradicate them would spawn the Albigensian Crusade, which destroyed the cosmopolitan world of Ermengard and the troubadours—the world that lives again in this book.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50582496739601,"sku":"GOR003988624","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50763029938449,"sku":"CIN0801439523G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51317914796305,"sku":"CIN0801439523VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ LIKE_NEW \/ SBYB","offer_id":51865671270673,"sku":"CIN0801439523LN","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0801439523.jpg?v=1761388113"},{"product_id":"common-stage-book-carol-symes-9780801445811","title":"A Common Stage","description":"Medieval Arras was a thriving town on the frontier between the kingdom of France and the county of Flanders, and home to Europe's earliest surviving vernacular plays: The Play of St. Nicholas, The Courtly Lad of Arras, The Boy and the Blind Man, The Play of the Bower, and The Play about Robin and about Marion. In A Common Stage, Carol Symes undertakes a cultural archeology of these artifacts, analyzing the processes by which a handful of entertainments were conceived, transmitted, received, and recorded during the thirteenth century. She then places the resulting scripts alongside other documented performances with which plays shared a common space and vocabulary: the crying of news, publication of law, preaching of sermons, telling of stories, celebration of liturgies, and arrangement of civic spectacles. She thereby shows how groups and individuals gained access to various means of publicity, participated in public life, and shaped public opinion. And she reveals that the theater of the Middle Ages was not merely a mirror of society but a social and political sphere, a vital site for the exchange of information and ideas, and a vibrant medium for debate, deliberation, and dispute.   The result is a book that closes the gap between the scattered textual remnants of medieval drama and the culture of performance from which that drama emerged. 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