The role of the past in late medieval hidalgo historical writing and memory

ABSTRACT

This essay is structured around two themes: the writing of history and memory. On the one hand, it analyses the use of the past in Lope García de Salazar's Libro de las buenas andanças e fortunas (1471–5). His approach to history is imbued with nostalgia for a legendary past, and more specifically for a political arrangement between the Lord of Biscay and the lesser nobility (hidalgos) which ensured respect for their privileges. This is set in contrast to a second group of material, legal documentation relating to the town of Escalante in Cantabria. Historically under seigniorial control, the inhabitants created a collective memory that framed a past prior to the fourteenth century which was free of lords and feudal obligations.     

Material culture as memory: combs and cremation in early medieval Britain

This paper argues that mortuary practices can be understood as 'techno-logies of remembrance'. The frequent discovery of combs in early medieval cremation burials can be explained by their mnemonic significance in the post-cremation rite. Combs (and other objects used to maintain the body's surface in life) served to articulate the reconstruction of the deceased's personhood in death through strategies of remembering and forgetting. This interpretation suggests new perspectives on the relationships between death, material culture and social memory in early medieval Europe.     

Detecting the medieval cod trade: a new method and first results

This paper explores the potential of stable isotope analysis to identify the approximate region of catch of cod by analysing bones from medieval settlements in northern and western Europe. It measures the δ¹³C and δ¹⁵N values of cod bone collagen from medieval control samples collected from sites around Arctic Norway, the North Sea, the Kattegat and the Baltic Sea. These data were considered likely to differ by region due to, for example, variation in the length of the food chain, water temperature and salinity. We find that geographical structuring is indeed evident, making it possible to identify bones from cod caught in distant waters. These results provide a new methodology for studying the growth of long-range trade in dried cod and the related expansion of fishing effort—important aspects of the development of commercialisation in medieval Europe. As a first test of the method, we analyse three collections of cod bones tentatively interpreted as imported dried fish based on a priori zooarchaeological criteria. The results tentatively suggest that cod were being transported or traded over very long distances since the end of the first millennium AD.     

Gender, memory and Jewish identity: reading a family history from medieval southern Italy

This article combines recent work on memory in the early and central Middle Ages to read the Scroll of Ahimaaz, a well-known eleventh-century Jewish text from southern Italy. It suggests that previous readings of the text have been shaped by the dominant tradition of intellectual history within Jewish studies, and that Ahimaaz's work has been overlooked for the information it contains about gender and family history. It concludes that whilst the primarily Jewish identity of Ahimaaz and his family is reinforced by the text, they were at the same time as much a product of the southern Italian environment in which they lived.     

The world of medieval learning

Karl Kautsky's writings on the French Revolution were crucial to the construction not only of the Marxist interpretation of the Revolution, which was perhaps the most important reference point for the historiography of that event during the 20th century, but even of Marxism itself as a comprehensive, systematic theory partly based on historical studies. However, these writings have been neglected and practically forgotten for decades, mainly because of the general rejection of Kautsky's theories after the October Revolution of 1917, in Marxist as well as non-Marxist circles.

Studying these writings, spanning roughly four decades from 1889 till 1930, we may see dynamic interrelations between historical study, theory construction and contemporary political intervention. Kautsky's approach to such key Marxist concepts as class and state prove to be much more subtle and nuanced than what has commonly been assumed, incorporating the results of historical study rather than pure social theory. Yet, his account does contain important internal tensions and contradictions between agency and objective conditions and between the historical material and the normative and political perspective of the historiographer. Several of these internal tensions were carried on into mainstream Marxist accounts of the Revolution, with important historiographical as well as political consequences.     

The early medieval secular: spectrum and strategies

This special issue seeks to fill a gap by taking the first steps towards locating the early Middle Ages in the broader history of the secular. While it has generally been assumed that a division between religion and secular was impossible to make in the early medieval period, taken together the articles in this collection show a variety of early medieval seculars, all arising from a general assumption that distinctions could, indeed had to, be made between what was secular and what was not. The introduction proposes that scholars should think in terms of a spectrum of secularity; key to determining what sits within this spectrum must be the identification of secularizing strategies, i.e. attempts to draw a distinction between religious and secular in a particular context. Such an approach offers the possibility of a history of the secular that does not privilege one time or place.     

The evolution of urbanization in medieval Ireland

In Ireland, relatively little research has been carried out into the influence during the medieval period of the Anglo-Normans upon the evolution of urbanization. This paper presents a model (which primarily operates at a regional scale), the purpose of which is to explain interrelationships between the evolutionary processes operating in the early medieval period. It is argued that a settlement's relationship to a stratified land-holding system determined the operation of locational and temporal constraints, varying combinations of which influenced the functional development of urban settlements. Evidence supporting the validity of the model is presented and discussed.     

The mystery of plague in medieval Iceland

This article is aimed at encouraging scholars to continue to take critical, interdisciplinary approaches to understanding the cause and scale of historic plague outbreaks. It does this by reinvestigating two recorded outbreaks of plague in Iceland in 1402–4 and 1494–5. It is argued that these were episodes of pneumonic plague, caused by Yersinia pestis, and that the likely mortality was no more than 25% of the population in both cases. This contrasts with the higher rates (50–60% and 30–50%) postulated elsewhere. Although it is recognised there are other explanations for plague in Iceland, greater caution needs to be taken in interpreting the direct and indirect evidence for its demographic effects. A lower mortality rate fits better with a less widespread and more fragmented epidemic. The numbers and types of Icelandic farms which might have been vacant during the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries are given more detailed consideration than in previous accounts. ‘Farm abandonment’ in the fifteenth century was continually driven by a series of environmental and economic factors and need not be interpreted as a demographic collapse caused solely by the plague. Greater attention is also given to understanding how plague could have reached Iceland and the biological, ecological and sociological factors which might then have sustained it.     

The church and sexuality in medieval Iceland

Although the Church's regulation of marriage and sex was felt by all Germanic tribes, this subject can be studied most closely in Iceland because of the richness of its source material. Four problems are examined here, from literary, legal, and historical sources, namely marriage, divorce, clerical celibacy and extramarital sex. All three categories of sources agree that marriage was a contractual arrangement between the families of the bride and the groom, as known elsewhere among Germanic tribes. They likewise concur that divorce was possible and easily obtainable. Clerical marriage, among both bishops and priests, was seen as acceptable in the legal and historical sources; the literary sagas do not deal with this issue. That extramarital sexual activities were common, is clear from the legal and historical sources but, in contrast, the literary materials depicts Icelandic couples as largely monogamous and faithful. This discrepancy between the historical and literary sagas, both products of the thirteenth century, can be explained by the growing influence of the Church, which by this time was attempting to introduce clerical celibacy and marital fidelity into Iceland. The thirteenth-century clerical authors of the literary sagas, set in ancient times, provided models intended to improve the sexual behavior of their audiences.