The Templar Order in North-west Italy


Book Description

Based on extensive archival searches, this book provides the first reconstruction of the Templar presence in North-west Italy giving general insights into the development and organization of the Order in this area and providing an outline of the history of each Templar house.




Power & Purity


Book Description

Catharism was a popular medieval heresy based on the belief that the creation of humankind was a disaster in which angelic spirits were trapped in matter by the devil. Their only goal was to escape the body through purification. Cathars denied any value to material life, including the human body, baptism, and the Eucharist, even marriage and childbirth. What could explain the long popularity of such a bleak faith in the towns of southern France and Italy? Power and Purity explores the place of cathar heresy in the life of the medieval Italian town of Orvieto. Based on extensive archival research, it details the social makeup of the Cathar community and argues that the heresy was central to the social and political changes of the 13th century. The late 13th-century repression of Catharism by a local inquisition was part of a larger redefinition of civic and ecclesiastical authority. Author Carol Lansing shows that the faith attracted not an alienated older nobility but artisans, merchants, popular political leaders, and indeed circles of women in Orvieto as well as Florence and Bologna. Cathar beliefs were not so much a pessimistic anomaly as a part of a larger climate of religious doubt. The teachings on the body and the practice of Cathar holy persons addressed questions of sexual difference and the structure of authority that were key elements of medieval Italian life. The pure lives of the Cathar holy people, both male and female, demonstrated a human capacity for self-restraint that served as a powerful social model in towns torn by violent conflict. This study addresses current debates about the rise of persecution, and argues for a climate of popular toleration. Power and Purity will appeal to historians of society and politics as well as religion and gender studies.




Monographic Series


Book Description




"Death, Torture and the Broken Body in European Art, 1300?650 "


Book Description

Bodies mangled, limbs broken, skin flayed, blood spilled: from paintings to prints to small sculptures, the art of the late Middle Ages and early modern period gave rise to disturbing scenes of violence. Many of these torture scenes recall Christ?s Passion and its aftermath, but the martyrdoms of saints, stories of justice visited on the wicked, and broadsheet reports of the atrocities of war provided fertile ground for scenes of the body?s desecration. Contributors to this volume interpret pain, suffering, and the desecration of the human form not simply as the passing fancies of a cadre of proto-sadists, but also as serving larger social functions within European society. Taking advantage of the frameworks established by scholars such as Samuel Edgerton, Mitchell Merback, and Elaine Scarry (to name but a few), Death, Torture and the Broken Body in European Art, 1300-1650 provides an intriguing set of lenses through which to view such imagery and locate it within its wider social, political, and devotional contexts. Though the art works discussed are centuries old, the topics of the essays resonate today as twenty-first-century Western society is still absorbed in thorny debates about the ethics and consequences of the use of force, coercion (including torture), and execution, and about whether it is ever fully acceptable to write social norms on the bodies of those who will not conform.




Deeds Done Beyond the Sea


Book Description

This volume celebrates Peter Edbury’s career by bringing together seventeen essays by colleagues, former students and friends which focus on three of his major research interests: the great historian of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, William of Tyre, and his Historia rerum in partibus transmarinis gestarum and its continuations; medieval Cyprus, in particular under the Lusignans; and the Military Orders in the Middle Ages. All based on original research, the contributions to this volume include new work on manuscripts, ranging from a Hospitaller rental document of the twelfth century to a seventeenth-century manuscript of Cypriot interest; studies of language and terminology in William of Tyre’s chronicle and its continuations; thematic surveys; legal and commercial investigations pertaining to Cyprus; aspects of memorialization, and biographical studies. These contributions are bracketed by a foreword written by Peter Edbury’s PhD supervisor, Jonathan Riley-Smith, and an appreciation of Peter’s own publications by Christopher Tyerman.




The Western Codification of Criminal Law


Book Description

This volume addresses an important historiographical gap by assessing the respective contributions of tradition and foreign influences to the 19th century codification of criminal law. More specifically, it focuses on the extent of French influence – among others – in European and American civil law jurisdictions. In this regard, the book seeks to dispel a number of myths concerning the French model’s actual influence on European and Latin American criminal codes. The impact of the Napoleonic criminal code on other jurisdictions was real, but the scope and extent of its influence were significantly less than has sometimes been claimed. The overemphasis on French influence on other civil law jurisdictions is partly due to a fundamental assumption that modern criminal codes constituted a break with the past. The question as to whether they truly broke with the past or were merely a degree of reform touches on a difficult issue, namely, the dichotomy between tradition and foreign influences in the codification of criminal law. Scholarship has unfairly ignored this important subject, an oversight that this book remedies.




The Laws of Late Medieval Italy (1000-1500)


Book Description

In The Laws of Late Medieval Italy Mario Ascheri examines the features of the Italian legal world and explains why it should be regarded as a foundation for the future European continental system. The deep feuds among the Empire, the Churches unified by Roman papacy and the flourishing cities gave rise to very new legal ideas with the strong cooperation of the universities, beginning with that of Bologna. The teaching of Roman law and of the new papal laws, which quickly spread all over Europe, built up a professional group of lawyers and notaries which shaped the new, 'modern', public institutions, including efficient courts (like the Inquisition). Politically divided, Italy was partly unified by the legal system, so-called (Continental) common law (ius commune), which became a pattern for all of Europe onwards. Early modern Europe had for long time to work with it, and parts of it are still alive as a common cultural heritage behind a new European law system.




Merchants, Pirates, and Smugglers


Book Description

In der Geschichte des Seehandels unterscheidet man traditionell zwischen erlaubtem Handel und illegalen Praktiken. Doch was wir heute als "unerlaubt" ansehen, wurde bis zur Durchsetzung des souveränen Staates oft als legitim wahrgenommen, weil es innerhalb der Spielregeln des Wirtschaftslebens erfolgte. Je nachdem, wie gut ein Akteur seine Vorstellung durchsetzen konnte, wurde er als Pirat, Schmuggler, Kaufmann oder Admiral wahrgenommen.




Roger II of Sicily


Book Description

Although many studies have addressed important aspects of medieval southern Italy, this was the first work for nearly ninety years to be devoted specifically to the life and reign of King Roger II, the founder of the kingdom of Sicily. The book provides a comprehensive introductory narrative of the reign and a clear, scholarly analysis of its culture and of the development of royal government. The kingdom created by the Norman Roger of Hautville in the first half of the twelfth century was a monarchy with highly developed absolutist ideas, an elaborate bureaucracy, a reasonably well-filled treasury, and a mixed cultural heritage reflected by the presence of Arabs and Greeks at court. Based on many years of research in archives and libraries across Europe, the book offers a valuable overview of one of the most striking periods in south Italian and European history.




The Bishop's Palace


Book Description

This lavishly illustrated book looks at the art and architecture of episcopal palaces as expressions of power and ideology. Tracing the history of the bishop's residence in the urban centers of northern Italy over the Middle Ages, Maureen C. Miller asks why this once rudimentary and highly fortified structure called a domus became a complex and elegant "palace" (palatium) by the late twelfth century. 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. The coercive use of spiritual authority contributed to the emergence of a "persecuting society" in the central Middle Ages.




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