The article examines a specific connection between practices of cultural appropriation and racialising attributions that emerged in the aftermath of the English conquest of Ireland in the late Middle Ages and early modern period. It will be examined whether or to what extent analogies to modern concepts of race can be observed in this context. To this end, the focus is placed on contemporary perceptions of the adoption of cultural phenomena by the English conquerors who settled in Ireland from the 12 th century onwards and in some respects assimilated into their social environment. These perceptions are then linked to contemporaneous forms of ethnic stereotyping put forward by the English in relation to the native Irish in order to legitimise the conquest of the island. It is argued that the transfer of this stereotyping to those actors who, as descendants of the English colonists, had adapted to their cultural environment in Ireland was accompanied by the formation of a specific concept of ‘race’ in the sixteenth century, which is instructive in terms of the discursive orders in which it emerged. Against this background, similarities and differences between medieval and modern concepts of race are discussed.
The townspeople of Béziers conspired and killed their lord, Raymond Trencavel, viscount of the city, at the altar of Sainte-Marie-Madeleine on 15 October 1167 initiating an urban revolt. Sparse evidence from disparate sources makes the motive difficult to discern. The count of Toulouse is largely suspected of orchestrating the event, so much so that the cives themselves have been left absent from the narrative at worst or manipulated pawns at best. Only two individuals mentioned within the ‘Cartulary of Béziers’ ( the ‘Livre Noir’ ) are inculpated in the rebellion: a certain Richer and one Petrus Vairatus called the ‘Traitor’. Briefly discussed by others in the past, this article reexamines the records which bear their names and those of their associates illuminating a group of elites existing in two spaces – both tenant and lord. The influence of these men, their families, and others of their position throughout the twelfth century forms the social context of the revolt itself, an aspect which has hitherto been undervalued.
This contribution highlights the measures taken by the Franks in the eighth and ninth centuries to control the movement of goods and people on the peripheries of the empire. It focuses on the northeastern frontier zone of the Carolingian empire, where Charlemagne adopted a series of restrictive policies aimed at channelling trade into centres, often fortified, administered by royal envoys. In the context of studies of the mobility of goods and people in the Early Middle Ages, restrictions of this kind were nothing new: in the first half of the eighth century, the Lombard kings Ratchis and Aistulf had already created trade posts at the chokepoints of the Alpine passes to control the passage of travellers and merchants into and out of Italy. Charlemagne himself had similar laws in place for the trade of certain types of goods, such as weapons, armour and grain. However, they were only possible if they were adequately accompanied by logistical and military infrastructure. This contribution argues that the Capitulary of Diedenhofen, listing trade centres located along the Elbe and Saale rivers that were fortified from 806 and onwards, offers the opportunity to study such intertwined efforts. It shows that for the Carolingian kings, and for the central authorities of the Early Middle Ages, the management and control of the mobility of people and goods was a fundamental tool through which they could impose their authority. Part of this article was written during my stay at the Center for Advanced Research ‘Migration und Mobilität in Spätantike und Frühmittelalter’ at the University of Tübingen. I would therefore like to thank Steffen Patzold, Mischa Meier and Sebastian Schmidt-Hofner for the opportunity to work in Tübingen. I would also like to thank Francesco Veronese for his suggestions and help during the first draft of this article. I also received many suggestions from Becca Grose, Sonsoles Costero-Quiroga, Marco Stoffella, Francesco Borri and Courtney Luckhardt, whom I would like to thank for their help and support. The corrections and suggestions of the two reviewers have also been fundamental in improving this article, and I am therefore grateful to them for their work. Any other errors of language, grammar or content are my own.
This article examines the applicability of three theoretical models – cultural appropriation, entanglement, and creolization – for understanding Jewish religious architecture in medieval Cologne in relation to contemporary Christian architecture in the same city. Focusing on the synagogue and mikveh constructed from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries, it argues that these Jewish structures reveal underlying similarities despite being visually distinct from concurrent Christian buildings. Looking at shared technologies, resources, infrastructures, attitudes to ritual, and design aspirations confirms the underlying overlaps between these distinct architectural cultures. By favoring creolization as a model, the article illuminates how both rivalry and cooperation, adoption, and rejection underpinned by profound power imbalances influenced Cologne’s Jewish architecture in the Middle Ages.
Using the concept of the habitus, this article analyses the passage of the ‘Vita I S. Francisci’, written in 1228/1229 by Thomas of Celano, which deals with the conversion of Saint Francis. Thomas asserts that the saint has led an eremitic life while restoring the Portiuncula. The eremitic habitus is constituted by a set of practices: Francis lives in a church under benedictine observance and still has many possessions. His main attention is focused on the restoration of the church, so he has no ambition to pray and preach. After listening to the Evangelium, he decides to change his way of life ( again ) and becomes an apostle, a form of life which is defined by preaching, asceticism, austerity, and phases of solitude. The passage obviously has a legitimizing function: By devaluating hermetism, Thomas affirms that Francis is the only founder of a religious order who lives an apostolic life. But the dualism between the hermit and the apostle breaks with hagiographical tradition: in the eleventh and twelfth century, laymen founded eremitic communities, claimed to live an apostolic life, mainly defined by asceticism and austerity, and preached regularly. So, on a praxeological level, Francis still has many similarities with a hermit, and Thomas had to construct a new, non-realistic space of life-styles to suggest that Francis found a new form of religious living: he presents a set of practices which was not considered as eremitic as the constituents of an eremitic habitus, and marks the constituents of the former, traditional eremitic habitus explicitly as apostolic and not-eremitic.
The article attempts to shed more light on the accession of Suinthila to the Visigothic throne after the mysterious deaths of king Sisebut and his son and short-time successor Recared II, and that one of Sisenand who succeeded in overthrowing Suinthila with the help of a Frankish army. The fight for the throne obviously seems to have been the result of the ambitions of two families of the high nobility called primates or optimates in the sources. Besides identifying individual members of these two families, a special focus lies on explaining the causes that enabled Suinthila – presumably a son of Chindasuinth – to win the throne and the reasons for the loss of it to Sisenand – presumably a brother of Sisebut. Finally, the reactions of the Fourth Council of Toledo ( 633 ) to the alarming political events are dealt with. Under the leadership of Isidore of Seville its canon 75 for the first time laid down several basic rules of a constitution for the Visigothic kingdom. Special attention is paid to the oath of fidelity ( sacramentum fidei ) which – as a summary of recent investigations shows – can no longer be regarded as rooted in Germanic traditions, and to the meaning of gens Gothorum which, besides rex and patria , was one of the three constituents the Visigothic Kingdom consisted of.
Hartmut Hoffmann’s seminal essay ‘Grafschaften in Bischofshand’ made clear that the grants of comitatus to episcopal authorities by Ottonian and Salian rulers from the later tenth to the early twelfth century did not provide the basis for the emergence of ecclesiastical polities during the later twelfth and thirteenth century. However, in discussing the transfer of these comitatus Hoffmann assumed that each grant consisted of the royal judicial bannum , previously held by a count. On the basis of this assumption, Hoffmann revived the model of a scattered county ( German Streugrafschaft ) first developed by Walter Schlesinger in the context of the New Constitutional History, which denied the existence of public or governmental authority in early medieval Germany. Hoffmann, by contrast, accepted that the Ottonian and Salian kings did exercise public/governmental authority but saw the comitatus in this period as divorced from the territoriality of the earlier Carolingian period in which a count’s judicial bannum was exercised over a circumscribed area, usually coterminous with one or more pagi . However, when one examines the grants of comitatus discussed by Hoffmann, it is clear that this term was polyvalent in meaning. In some cases, it is evident that rulers transferred to bishops the royal judicial bannum , as Hoffmann argued. In other cases, the grant of a comitatus did not entail the transfer of the bannum but rather of royal fiscal assets. As a consequence, it is possible to reject Hoffmann’s assumption that the identification in the sources of a comitatus spread across several pagi necessarily entailed the existence of a Streugrafschaft whose holder exercised the judicial bannum and, in turn, Hoffmann’s views regarding the deterritorialization of a count’s administrative and judicial authority over a pagus or pagi with specific boundaries. Ultimately, these findings permit a reopening of the question regarding the fate of the Carolingian-style comital office that was based on the specific and circumscribed territory of a pagus or pagi , and whether this type of office actually disappeared under the later Ottonians or even under the Salians.
This study re-examines the Ottonian Empire’s self-conception and its relationship with its eastern counterpart in the context of the empire’s re-establishment in the West. Building on earlier Roman, Byzantine, and Carolingian precedents, the Ottonians redefined their empire as a continuation of the Frankish realm, placing comparably little emphasis on Byzantine or ancient Roman models. The coronation of Otto I, which took place without direct Byzantine involvement, marked a significant moment in the establishment of the western empire, with recognition by the Byzantine emperor regarded as a retroactive consideration rather than an immediate concern. The study argues that, unlike Charlemagne, the Ottonian emperors viewed their empire as a distinct entity, one that did not aim to merge with or mirror the eastern empire, despite their shared heritage. This distinction was also reflected in ethnic and territorial terms, with the Ottonians cultivating a unique imperial identity based on their Frankish inheritance. The collapse of the Carolingian empire and the subsequent interregnum played a critical role in the separation of the western and eastern empires, fostering a growing divergence in their respective political and cultural trajectories. However, Byzantine influence was not absent. Empress Theophanu, who brought a Byzantine presence to the Ottonian court, and her son Otto III, demonstrated the persistence of eastern traditions in their rulership. Nevertheless, Otto III’s reign also highlighted a distinctively western identity, as he balanced his Roman legacy with his Greek heritage, firmly placing the empire within the context of the western Christian world. This study thus presents the Ottonian empire as a uniquely western political entity, shaped by its Frankish roots and a pragmatic approach to its imperial heritage.
In ninth-century Córdoba, Paulus Alvarus and his friend Eulogius were promoters of the so-called ‘movement’ of ( voluntary ) Christian martyrs in Umayyad al-Andalus. They resented the political and cultural dominance of Arabic and Islam, resorting to an idealised past marked by the Latin und Christian culture of Visigothic Spain. In this context, Paulus Alvarus argued with Eleazar, a Christian convert to Judaism, reproaching him with allegedly appropriating Biblical traditions for himself. According to Paulus Alvarus, the Christian church was now the true Israel, whereby he himself appropriated Jewish traditions for Christianity. On the other hand, he also argued with his Christian opponents who pointed to the monotheistic character of Islam and the generally peaceful nature of Umayyad rule in al-Andalus, denying the possibility of Christian martyrdom under such conditions. To counter such irenic claims, Paulus Alvarus charged the Islamic prophet with falsely appropriating Jewish and Christian, especially heretical, traditions for his new religion. The charge of cultural appropriation was a weapon wielded by proponents of a Christian minority position in the context of their struggle against the political and cultural advances of the Islamicate world.
Focusing on numismatic material from the medieval Iberian Peninsula, this essay explores the hermeneutic potential of the concept of ‘cultural appropriation’ for the study of pre-modern processes of cultural exchange. In a first section, the text discusses current notions of ‘cultural appropriation’, many of which refer specifically to modern or contemporary societies. Abandoning epoch-specific premises, the essay proposes a more general semiotic reading of ‘culturally appropriated’ objects as ‘transcultural signifiers’ that interrelate the parties involved in cultural exchange and create entanglements of cultural orders and systems of meaning. The second section tests this specific understanding of ‘cultural appropriation’ on a series of numismatic takeovers from medieval Spain: in 1172, King Alfonso VIII of Castile began issuing gold coins in imitation of the established Almoravid dinar. While maintaining the outward appearance of the Muslim model, Alfonso changed the Arabic inscriptions on the coins to proclaim the superiority of Christian faith and rule. Comparison with other examples of imitative Muslim coinage issued by Christian rulers from the eighth to the twelfth centuries helps to assess this particular case of ‘cultural appropriation’, which in several respects defies current understandings of the concept.
This paper focuses on the ancient Egyptian god Amun and the way he was perceived in Nubia. His perception changed during the period from about 1500 BCE to the 3 rd century CE and saw a gradual transformation of this originally Egyptian god to the central state deity in the Kingdom of Kush. The alterations in his appearance, naming, and functions in the ideology of kingship as well as cult practices can be followed in order to identify stages that, using Hans-Peter Hahn’s terminology, created a model of cultural appropriation in Nubia. This article follows the transformation, naming, contextualisation, and finally incorporation that are recognizable as the component steps.
Three distinct sources are investigated in relation to the conventional practice of ‘serial notation’. We define serial notation as a special instance of a conventional form of writing that is dependent on compliance. Serial notation is not limited to the function of bureaucratic clarity, but also fulfils the purpose of producing social meaning. The sources we investigate have attracted the attention of researchers from the perspectives of social and economic history: the financial accounts of the city of Duisburg and the early modern prose novel ‘Fortunatus’ as well as the notations of knight titles in Cologne are all sources of the cultural reality of late medieval and early modern economic circumstances. However, a praxeological approach focusing on the social meaning established by the practice of repetition itself has not yet been applied. Here, we will combine the three case studies to carve out the underlying praxeological structure of the production of meaning through scriptural uniformity – a structure that deliberately undercuts the complexity of its denotations.
The change of the weekday terminology for Wednesday from ‘Wodan’s day’ to ‘middle of the week’ in Old High German around the year 1000 is commonly explained through a rejection of the Germanic god Wodan by Christian intellectuals. This article takes a closer look at the institutional setting and textual context of this change. Effectively, Notker Labeo was following Augustine’s comments on Psalm 93 in the same way as Irish intellectuals had already done in the early eighth century. This article demonstrates the vibrancy of Irish teaching at St Gall in the two core areas relevant for this shift, psalm studies and especially calendrical science. Notker’s momentous decision can therefore be traced back to strong, and often underrated, Irish intellectual influence at St Gall in the early Middle Ages.
Abstract Current research in medieval studies focuses on how the future was dealt with in medieval culture. While Reinhart Koselleck has denied the Middle Ages any interest in an inner-worldly future, recent contributions show a variety of diverse endeavours to know and influence the future. By examining naval campaigns of the city commune of Genoa from the 12th–14th centuries, this article argues in favour of examining the social practice of medieval societies more intensively in terms of how people tried to influence what would happen in the future. The study of three military campaigns – the attacks on the Spanish harbour cities of Almería and Tortosa in 1147 and 1148, the conquest of Chios and Phocaea in 1346 and a failed expedition to Cyprus in 1383 – shows that in all cases the exercise of military force was at best planned in outline. As a rule, it was assumed that the available contingents and experience would be sufficient for success. Concrete tactics, but in the case of Chios and Phokaia also the targets of the attacks, were only agreed upon during the campaigns. A record of one such negotiation has even been preserved from Cyprus. On the other hand, there were diplomatic and, above all, economic planning horizons that stipulated long-term agreements even before the attack, in which precise deadlines and dates for payments were fixed as well as alliance obligations. The interference between these futures, which were planned and plannable to varying degrees, resulted in the inherent dynamics of non-synchronised temporalities.
Abstract The article dealing with the so-called Ansbert, his ‘Historia de expeditione Friderici imperatoris’ and related sources offers a research overview and analysis of the topic as it has evolved over the past 200 years and presents a new and more productive way to approach the narrative – the most important source documenting Frederick Barbarossa’s crusade ( 1188–1190 ). Firstly, the circumstances of the source’s reappearance in 1826 are explained, showing the troubled fate of the Strahov manuscript, where the narrative is extant in its fullest form. Secondly, the course of the academic discussion is traced, the main protagonist being Anton Chroust, the author of an edition used to this day. The main characteristics of the source are explained and the historiographical debate on the ‘Tageno-Ansbert-Frage’ is analysed, demonstrating that in almost desperate attempts to solve the question of authorship, the interconnectedness of sources and the exact manner of composition, research has gone up a blind alley, hindering more result-yielding questions from even being asked, which has not been remedied even by crusading studies that have bloomed in the past 100 years. Finally, a fresh approach to the topic is introduced: the narrative may be researched more viably through the lens of the functions and aims the source may have followed and the role the crusading idea may have played in it. Rediscovery of the ‘Historia’, p. 362. – The ‘Tageno-Ansbert-Frage’, p. 363. – Anton Chroust Enters the Scene, p. 365. – Karl Zimmert Disagrees, p. 367. – Towards the Modern Edition, p. 368. – The Edition, p. 371. – Reactions and Aftermath, p. 375. – The So-Called Ansbert in Crusading Studies and Barbarossa’s Biographies?, p. 377. – ‘Historia de Expeditione’ and its Modern Translations, p. 380. – New Horizons?, p. 385.
Abstract The paper deals with the instruments the king of the Holy Roman Empire used to settle disputes between the princes and to create a consensus between the parties involved, as well as the king’s efforts to integrate the other princes into the solution. The focus lies on the period between 1150 and 1300, when the rulers were not only concerned with individual conflicts, but by means of the so called ‘Landfrieden’ fundamentally started to limit and sanction the use of violence and to develop court proceedings as the norm in settling disputes. If these proceedings based on consensus gained or lost significance, is the central question of the paper, which is explored by using two case studies. These are Frederick Barbarossa’s efforts to settle the conflict between Henry the Lion and Henry Jasomirgott and Rudolf of Habsburg’s endeavours to resolve the conflicts between the Landgrave of Thuringia and his relatives. On the one hand, the investigation of these case studies shows that the ‘Landfrieden’ moved from the end of the conflict settlement to its beginning and that the kings hardly sought the consensus of the other princes in their search for agreement between the parties involved in the dispute.
Abstract Based on the example of King Conrad I’s death, this paper wants to contribute to the question of how medieval historiography chose and arranged its contents. It postulates that chroniclers narrated their histories just like medieval authors of fictional literature by using plot schemes. Before King Conrad I died, Ottonian sources tell us, he had called for his brother and designated the Saxonian Duke Henry I king. Former research saw vast similarities between the sources as either evidence for their reliability, as textual references, or regarded them as written result of an oral tradition at the Ottonian court. A comparison with several ( East-/West- ) Franconian and English narratives about other rulers’ deaths ( e. g. Pepin the Younger, William the Conqueror or Saladin ) shows us that not only Ottonian, but chroniclers in general used the same textual elements, which they arranged in a similar order. One reason for this might be references to the Bible and hagiography. However, since there are no obvious linguistic borrowings tangible between the narratives, the death of Conrad I in the Ottonian sources can be interpreted as a variation of narratives, based on a more widespread scheme used probably all over Latin Europe. This scheme was distributed in different ways: by the use of textual models, but also by the adaption of oral narratives.
