Visions of Kinship in Medieval Europe PDF Download

Author: Hans J. Hummer
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780191838965
Category : SOCIAL SCIENCE
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
What meaning did human kinship possess in a world regulated by Biblical time, committed to the primacy of spiritual relationships, and bound by the sinews of divine love? In the process of exploring this question, Hans Hummer offers a searching re-examination of kinship in Europe between late Roman times and the high middle ages, the period bridging Europe's primitive past and its modern future. 'Visions of Kinship in Medieval Europe' critiques the modernist and Western bio-genealogical and functionalist assumptions that have shaped kinship studies since their inception in the nineteenth century, when Biblical time collapsed and kinship became a signifier of the essential secularity of history and a method for conceptualizing a deep prehistory guided by autogenous human impulses. Hummer argues that this understanding of kinship is fundamentally antagonistic to medieval sentiments and is responsible for the frustrations researchers have encountered as they have tried to identify the famously elusive kin groups of medieval Europe.

Author: Hans Hummer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192518305
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
What meaning did human kinship possess in a world regulated by Biblical time, committed to the primacy of spiritual relationships, and bound by the sinews of divine love? In the process of exploring this question, Hans Hummer offers a searching re-examination of kinship in Europe between late Roman times and the high middle ages, the period bridging Europe's primitive past and its modern future. Visions of Kinship in Medieval Europe critiques the modernist and Western bio-genealogical and functionalist assumptions that have shaped kinship studies since their inception in the nineteenth century, when Biblical time collapsed and kinship became a signifier of the essential secularity of history and a method for conceptualizing a deep prehistory guided by autogenous human impulses. Hummer argues that this understanding of kinship is fundamentally antagonistic to medieval sentiments and is responsible for the frustrations researchers have encountered as they have tried to identify the famously elusive kin groups of medieval Europe. He delineates an alternative ethnographic approach inspired by recent anthropological work that privileges indigenous expressions of kinship and the interpretive potential of native ontologies. This study reveals that kinship in the middle ages was not biological, primitive, or a regulator of social mechanisms; nor was it traceable by bio-genealogical connections. In the Middle Ages, kinship signified a sociality that flowed from convictions about the divine source of all things and which wove together families, institutions, and divinities into an expansive eschatological vision animated by 'the most righteous principle of love'.

Author: Hans Hummer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192518291
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
What meaning did human kinship possess in a world regulated by Biblical time, committed to the primacy of spiritual relationships, and bound by the sinews of divine love? In the process of exploring this question, Hans Hummer offers a searching re-examination of kinship in Europe between late Roman times and the high middle ages, the period bridging Europe's primitive past and its modern future. Visions of Kinship in Medieval Europe critiques the modernist and Western bio-genealogical and functionalist assumptions that have shaped kinship studies since their inception in the nineteenth century, when Biblical time collapsed and kinship became a signifier of the essential secularity of history and a method for conceptualizing a deep prehistory guided by autogenous human impulses. Hummer argues that this understanding of kinship is fundamentally antagonistic to medieval sentiments and is responsible for the frustrations researchers have encountered as they have tried to identify the famously elusive kin groups of medieval Europe. He delineates an alternative ethnographic approach inspired by recent anthropological work that privileges indigenous expressions of kinship and the interpretive potential of native ontologies. This study reveals that kinship in the middle ages was not biological, primitive, or a regulator of social mechanisms; nor was it traceable by bio-genealogical connections. In the Middle Ages, kinship signified a sociality that flowed from convictions about the divine source of all things and which wove together families, institutions, and divinities into an expansive eschatological vision animated by 'the most righteous principle of love'.

Author: Brian Donovan
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469660296
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
The stereotype of the "gold digger" has had a fascinating trajectory in twentieth-century America, from tales of greedy flapper-era chorus girls to tabloid coverage of Anna Nicole Smith and her octogenarian tycoon husband. The term entered American vernacular in the 1910s as women began to assert greater power over courtship, marriage, and finances, threatening men's control of legal and economic structures. Over the course of the century, the gold digger stereotype reappeared as women pressed for further control over love, sex, and money while laws failed to keep pace with such realignments. The gold digger can be seen in silent films, vaudeville jokes, hip hop lyrics, and reality television. Whether feared, admired, or desired, the figure of the gold digger appears almost everywhere gender, sexuality, class, and race collide. This fascinating interdisciplinary work reveals the assumptions and disputes around women's sexual agency in American life, shedding new light on the cultural and legal forces underpinning romantic, sexual, and marital relationships.

Author: Christian Raffensperger
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674065468
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Main description: An overriding assumption has long directed scholarship in both European and Slavic history: that Kievan Rus' in the tenth through twelfth centuries was part of a Byzantine commonwealth separate from Europe. Christian Raffensperger refutes this conception and offers a new frame for two hundred years of history, one in which Rus' is understood as part of medieval Europe and East is not so neatly divided from West. With the aid of Latin sources, the author brings to light the considerable political, religious, marital, and economic ties among European kingdoms, including Rus', restoring a historical record rendered blank by Rusianmonastic chroniclers as well as modern scholars ideologically motivated to build barriers between East and West. Further, Raffensperger revises the concept of a Byzantine Commonwealth that stood in opposition to Europe-and under which Rus' was subsumed-toward that of a Byzantine Ideal esteemed and emulated by all the states of Europe. In this new context, appropriation of Byzantine customs, law, coinage, art, and architecture in both Rus' and Europe can be understood as an attempt to gain legitimacy and prestige by association with the surviving remnant of the Roman Empire. Reimagining Europe initiates an expansion of history that is sure to challenge ideas of Russian exceptionalism and influence the course of European medieval studies.

Author: Alexa Sand
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107032229
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
Focuses on one of the most attractive features of late medieval manuscript illumination: the portrait of the book owner at prayer within the pages of her prayer-book.

Author: Jean-Claude Schmitt
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226738871
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
In this fascinating study, Schmitt examines the significance of the widespread belief in ghosts during the Middle Ages and traces the imaginative, political, and religious contexts of these everyday haunts. Ghosts were pitiful or terrifying, usually solitary, creatures who arose from their tombs to haunt their friends and relatives. Including numerous color illustrations of ghosts and their trappings, this book presents a unique and intriguing look at medieval culture. 28 color plates.

Author: Nils Hybel
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004358358
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
In The Nature of Kingship c. 800-1300. The Danish Incident Nils Hybel presents the first comprehensive history of the changeable nature of monarchial power in Danish territories from the Viking Age to the Central Middle Ages. The work offers a pioneering methodological approach entirely based on medieval conceptions on sovereign power. This innovative approach involves contemporary ideas, not modern notions of power and kingship, being used to undertake the analysis. The Danish “Incident” is therefore integrated within the European context. Kingship experienced a profound transformation during the half millennium investigated. A royal genealogy and strong bonds with Christian institutions were established in the late eleventh century. In the middle of the twelfth century the Danish realm was united, followed by the final liberation from German hegemony and the expansion of the realm with German and Slavic fiefs in the late twelfth century. At the same time, with the first signs of taxation, legislation, law enforcement and the notion of a national, military force, kings began the transition from warlords to medieval kingship. With stirrings of constitutionalism from 1241 onwards, this development of a national, medieval, kingdom intensified, though by c. 1300 the kingdom had not yet reached the point of total sovereign power.

Author: Alice Rio
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198704054
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
Slavery After Rome, 500-1100 offers a substantially new interpretation of what happened to slavery in Western Europe in the centuries that followed the fall of the Roman Empire. The periods at either end of the early middle ages are associated with iconic forms of unfreedom: Roman slavery at one end; at the other, the serfdom of the twelfth century and beyond, together with, in Southern Europe, a revitalized urban chattel slavery dealing chiefly in non-Christians. How and why this major change took place in the intervening period has been a long-standing puzzle. This study picks up the various threads linking this transformation across the centuries, and situates them within the full context of what slavery and unfreedom were being used for in the early middle ages. This volume adopts a broad comparative perspective, covering different regions of Western Europe over six centuries, to try to answer the following questions: who might become enslaved and why? What did this mean for them, and for their lords? What made people opt for certain ways of exploiting unfree labor over others in different times and places, and is it possible, underneath all this diversity, to identify some coherent trajectories of historical change?

Author: Robert Stein
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198757107
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
In the late fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries, the Dukes of Valois-Burgundy created a composite monarchy in the Netherlands, an area that had been dominated for centuries by several regional dynasties. In this way they laid the foundation for the modern states of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxemburg. The rise of the House of Burgundy can be read as the success story of a dynasty that in little over a century managed to assemble a great number of principalities, thus creating a new state. The Burgundian takeover, however, resulted in a modernization of administration, jurisdiction, and finances. The process of unification and the character of the union are the central topics of Magnanimous Dukes and Rising States. Robert Stein mirrors continuity and modernization in Burgundian times with the bankruptcy of the former dynasties and the decline of feudal government. The powerful towns played an important background role; it was only with their support that a unification of the Netherlands was possible, but this support was not unselfish. This study is about the development of power relations and institutions in the field of tension between ruler and subject, between centralization and particularism.