St. Cuthbert, His Cult and His Community to AD 1200


Book Description

Very fine collection of essays a rich feast of scholarship with many discoveries and new interpretations of greatest value for Anglo-Saxon history.' SPECULUM St Cuthbert is known to many as the the saintly bishop of Holy Island inthe 7th century, but he was also a figure of great political and territorial power. The book is divided into four sections, each dealing with different aspects of Cuthbert and his milieu. Among the topics investigated are the early Livesof the Saint, two by Bede himself, and his cult; Lindisfarne, its scriptorium and of course the famous Gospels; the sumptuous treasures gathered round the coffin, such as a portable altar and elaborately-worked silks, many of which are still preserved at Durham; and St Cuthbert's community at Chester-le-Street and Durham. Contributors: J. CAMPBELL, CLARE STANCLIFFE, MICHAEL HERITY, BENEDICTA WARD SLG, MICHAEL LAPIDGE, WALTER BERSCHIN, ALAN THACKER, DEIRDRE O'SULLIVAN, CHRISTOPHER D. VEREY, MICHELLE P. BROWN, JANET BACKHOUSE, R. BRUCE-MITFORD, DIBHI CRINN, NANCY NETZER, ROSEMARY CRAMP, RICHARD N. BAILEY, J.M. CRONYN, C.V. HORIE, R.I. PAGE, JOHN HIGGITT, ELIZABETH COASTWORTH, HERO GRANGER-TAYLOR, CLARE HIGGINS, ANNA MUTHESIUS, ERIC CAMBRIDGE, GERALD BONNER, LUISELLA SIMPSON, DAVID ROLLASON, DAVID HALL, A.J. PIPER, VICTORIA TUDOR







A Companion to Medieval Miracle Collections


Book Description

A companion volume for the usage of medieval miracle collections as a source, offering versatile approaches to the origins, methods, and techniques of various types of miracle narratives, as well as fascinating case studies from across Europe.




Materializing Englishness in Early Medieval Texts


Book Description

The aim of this book is to restore to the story of Englishness the lively material interactions between words, bodies, plants, stones, metals, and soil, among other things, that would have characterized it for the early medieval English themselves. In particular, each chapter demonstrates how a productive collapse, or fusion, between place and history happens not only in the intellectual realm, in ideas, but is also a material concern, becoming enfleshed in encounters between early medieval bodies and a host of material entities. Through readings of texts in a wide variety of genres including hagiography, heroic poetry, and medical and historical works, the book argues that Englishness during this period is an embodied identity emergent at the frontier of material and textual interactions that serve productively to occlude history, religion, and geography. The early medieval English body thus results from the rich encounter between the lived environment—climate, soil, landscape features, plants—and the textual-discursive realm that both determines what that environment means and is also itself determined by the material constraints of everyday life.




Miracle Cures


Book Description

"Scott has written a magnificent book on the realities of religious healing. He brings sensibility, reason, impressive insight, and the best information to bear—qualities seldom manifested in the centuries of claim, cynicism, and controversy on the topic. His analysis is destined to raise the level of discourse on dramatic religious experiences."—Neil Smelser, author of The Odyssey Experience




Forgetful of Their Sex


Book Description

In this remarkable study of over 2,200 female and male saints, Jane Schulenburg explores women's status and experience in early medieval society and in the Church by examining factors such as family wealth and power, patronage, monasticism, virginity, and motherhood. The result is a unique depiction of the lives of these strong, creative, independent-minded women who achieved a visibility in their society that led to recognition of sanctity. "A tremendous piece of scholarship. . . . This journey through more than 2,000 saints is anything but dull. Along the way, Schulenburg informs our ideas regarding the role of saints in the medieval psyche, gender-specific identification, and the heroics of virginity." —Library Journal "[This book] will be a kind of 'roots' experience for some readers. They will hear the voices, haunted and haunting, of their distant ancestors and understand more about themselves." —Christian Science Monitor "This fascinating book reaches far beyond the history of Christianity to recreate the 'herstory' of a whole gender." —Kate Saunders, The Independent




Studies in Byzantine, Islamic and Near Eastern Silk Weaving


Book Description

This volume complements Anna Muthesius' two earlier ground-breaking volumes in the field of silk as material culture: Studies in Byzantine and Islamic Silk Weaving and Studies in Silk in Byzantium. The publication highlights the fact that similar patterns of selection were at work in the acquisition of silks by secular and ecclesiastical bodies. These patterns of selection were governed not only by fashions of the time, but by access to international trade routes leading to the Great Silk Road linking the Near East to the Mediterranean. The surviving silks prove that Mediterranean/Near Eastern silk trade flourished continuously and for centuries prior to the thirteenth century, contrary to what has previously widely been assumed. It also highlights the crucial role of the Caucasian silk routes in accessing the Great Silk Road in the early period, and the contribution of Georgian (and Armenian) silk weaving after the thirteenth century. Above all, the book demonstrates how important it is to assess the impact of Near Eastern silk manufacture and distribution in relation to Byzantine and Islamic Mediterranean silk production and trade.




The Hymns of the Anglo-Saxon Church


Book Description

This book provides a study and critical edition of the corpus of hymns sung by monks and canons in their services in England before the Norman Conquest. When Christianity was introduced into Anglo-Saxon England at the end of the sixth century, the practice of singing hymns in the liturgy of the Office was already well established. The hymnal that the missionaries brought with them was replaced during the Benedictine Reform in the tenth century by another body of hymns, itself introduced from the Continent. This edition assembles textual evidence of these early hymns, some of it hitherto unpublished, based on all extant manuscripts. Of these, an eleventh-century Latin manuscript known as the 'Durham Hymnal' (and in particular its accompanying Old English interlinear gloss) provides the core of the edition and its base manuscript. An introduction and commentary include descriptions of the manuscripts concerned and discussions of the sources, liturgical use and music of the hymns, as well as the phonology and vocabulary of the Old English gloss. The text of the hymns is accompanied by a translation of the Latin into modern English prose.




Willibrord between Ireland, Britain and Merovingian Francia (690–739)


Book Description

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.




How, When and Why did Bede Write his Ecclesiastical History?


Book Description

Bede’s Ecclesiastical History is our main source for early Christian Anglo-Saxon England, but how was it written? When? And why? Scholars have spent much of the last half century investigating the latter question – the ‘why’. This new study is the first to systematically consider the ‘how’ and the ‘when’. Richard Shaw shows that rather than producing the History at a single point in 731, Bede was working on it for as much as twenty years, from c. 715 to just before his death in 735. Unpacking and extending the period of composition of Bede’s best-known book makes sense of the complicated and contradictory evidence for its purposes. The work did not have one context, but several, each with its own distinct constructed audiences. Thus, the History was not written for a single purpose to the exclusion of all others. Nor was it simply written for a variety of reasons. It was written over time – quite a lot of time – and as the world changed during that time, so too did Bede’s reasons for writing, the intentions he sought to pursue – and the patrons he hoped to please or to placate.