A typology of representative institutions in late medieval Europe

This article attempts to follow the tradition established by Hintze and Elias in comparing several aspects of representative institutions throughout medieval Europe. It uses numerous recent case studies and a new more detailed examination of the Low Country sources and it tries to take into account the criticisms levelled at the rather unsophisticated generalizations of earlier scholars. Attention is given to the structure of the institutions, their actual working and their functions.Comparisons are made whenever the available information permits, if possible by quantification, although our information is often too vague and incomplete to permit this. A number of ideal types are formulated as a working hypothesis for further investigation, based on the social structures within which these types of institutions functioned. The essential variables were the extent of urbanization in a particular territory, the form of government and the economic and juridical situation of the nobles and peasants.     

A typology of representative institutions in late medieval Europe

This article attempts to follow the tradition established by Hintze and Elias in comparing several aspects of representative institutions throughout medieval Europe. It uses numerous recent case studies and a new more detailed examination of the Low Country sources and it tries to take into account the criticisms levelled at the rather unsophisticated generalizations of earlier scholars. Attention is given to the structure of the institutions, their actual working and their functions.Comparisons are made whenever the available information permits, if possible by quantification, although our information is often too vague and incomplete to permit this. A number of ideal types are formulated as a working hypothesis for further investigation, based on the social structures within which these types of institutions functioned. The essential variables were the extent of urbanization in a particular territory, the form of government and the economic and juridical situation of the nobles and peasants.     

Reply to comments on trade,towns and states: A reconsideration of early medieval economics

The aim of this paper is to discuss a specific group of stamped gold foils with human representation from the late Scandinavian Iron Age (AD 550/600–800) from the perspective of size. The article argues that the framed gold foils embed sophisticated and multi-layered transformations that capture and echo basic principles of northern cosmology and belief systems related to Odin as the god for kings and his ability as a seer.     

Problems of spatial and temporal continuity of rural settlement in Ireland,A.D. 400 to 1169

In Ireland the period A.D. 400 to 1169 is characterized by an abundance of field evidence for dispersed enclosed homesteads known as ring-forts. This paper examines a number of hypotheses concerning the spatial characteristics of ring-forts in an attempt to explain puzzling discontinuities in their distributional pattern. Environmental constraints and evidence for alternative settlement forms are discussed. The significance of place-name elements in the understanding of social organization and settlement is critically examined; and attention is focused on the relationship between indigenous Irish settlement and alien settlement forms introduced at the time of the Norman conquest.     

Exercise of royal power in early medieval Europe: the case of Otto the Great 936–73

Current scholarly orthodoxy holds that the German kingdom under the Ottonians ( c. 919–1024) did not possess an administration, much less an administrative system that relied heavily upon the 'written word'. It is the contention of this essay that the exercise of royal power under Otto the Great (936–73) relied intrinsically on a substantial royal administrative system that made very considerable use of documents, particularly for the storage of crucial information about royal resources. The focus of this study is on Otto I's use of this written information to exercise royal power in the context of confiscating and requisitioning property from both laymen and ecclesiastical institutions.     

The ages of man. A study in medieval writing and thought

It has often been repeated that Wollstonecraft was not read for a century after her death in 1797 due to the negative impact of her husband William Godwin's Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798) on her posthumous reputation. By providing the first full-scale reception history of Wollstonecraft in continental Europe in the long nineteenth century—drawing on rare book research, translations of understudied primary sources, and Wollstonecraft scholarship from the nineteenth century to the present—this article applies a revised Rezeptionsgeschichte approach to tracing her intellectual influence on the woman question and organised feminism in Europe. Although the Memoirs and post-revolutionary politics everywhere dampened and even drove underground the reception of her persona and ideas in the first decades of the nineteenth century, Wollstonecraft's reception in nineteenth-century continental Europe, like the United States, was more positive and sustained in comparison to the public backlash she faced as a ‘fallen woman’ in her homeland of Britain through the bulk of the Victorian era.     

Gunnar Karlsson,Iceland's 1100 Years: The History of a Marginal Society, (London: Hurst, 2001). 418 pp. ISBN 1-85065-420-4.

This paper explores the role of personal networks and social capital in the assimilation of individuals into the elite of 18th‐century England. In it, I draw on the letterbooks of two merchants from north‐west England to assess the ways in which individuals accessed established networks and thus augmented their social status and business opportunities. In particular, I examine how networks were articulated, and consider their impact on both the social standing of the individual merchant and the construction of a shared culture amongst merchants. It is therefore possible to see business networking as an important counterpart to polite sociability in the construction of an expanded elite.     

A company of women and men: men's recollections of childbirth in medieval England

The events that took place in medieval English birthing chambers were witnessed and assisted by a company of women. Although these events may have been isolated, they did not exist in isolation. Rather, they interacted in complex ways with the lives and activities of the men in the manor hall. This article examines those interactions as they are evidenced in proof-of-age inquests, legal documents that record the recollections of husbands, fathers, and male relatives and neighbors regarding the events surrounding the birth of an heir to crown land. It concludes that even though men rarely entered the birthing chamber, their dynastic interests and social politics routinely penetrated its walls, blurring the boundary between private and public spheres, female and male space.