Encounters with Iron: An Archaeometallurgical Reassessment of Early Anglo-Saxon Spearheads and Knives

Studies of early medieval weapon burials make surprisingly little mention of the material properties of the deposited weapons. How did these artefacts’ metallurgical properties, and people’s experiences making and shaping the materials from which they were made, relate to the social and ‘magical’ potential these weapons were ascribed? This article reassesses metallurgical data from fifty-two early Anglo-Saxon spearheads discovered in cemetery contexts, and 118 knives from cemeteries and settlements, and reinterprets their technological properties as a glimpse into the social experiences of their makers and users. The choices smiths made when forging these blades are visible in their surviving metallurgy, and reveal their makers’ desired outcomes — and their mixed results. The difficulties smiths negotiated while forging iron shaped the social biographies that blades accumulated after leaving the workshop. By studying the materials from which these artefacts were made, and the practices of the makers who struggled to shape and control them, we may better appreciate the social agency and value ascribed to material objects in the early medieval period.     

Ultra-modern thoughts: political theology in Leo Strauss’s Philosophy and Law

A primary theme in Leo Strauss’s early work is how medieval Jewish and Islamic political philosophy, while influenced by Plato, differs from him in crucial ways. This theme is central to Strauss’s 1935 book Philosophy and Law. Philosophy and Law concerns the medieval ‘philosophic foundation of the law,’ which provides a rational justification of revelation. For Strauss, the foundation provides this justification by virtue of some difference it has from Plato. In this paper, I offer a new interpretation of Strauss’s view of this difference. I suggest that, for Strauss, whereas Plato conceived of the legislator and his legislation, the foundation conceives of the sovereign and his sovereign laws. On this basis, I also suggest a solution to a perennial mystery of Philosophy and Law: Strauss claims that the medieval foundation reveals ‘ultra-modern thoughts,’ yet does not explicitly state the identity of these thoughts. I suggest that their author is Carl Schmitt.     

The Charms of Women and Priests: Sex,Magic, Gender and Public Order in Late Medieval Italy

How did judicial authorities in late medieval Italy understand the relationship between gender, sexuality, social status, magic and public order, especially when magic was used to facilitate the crime of adultery? What might this reveal about the intersection of gender, magic and public order in a place and time so fraught with political and social tensions? This study qualitatively compares four love‐magic trials from fourteenth‐century Lucca and suggests that the anxieties underpinning these trials were both particular to late medieval Italian communes and projected onto two populations, women and priests, whose unchecked sexuality posed the greatest threat to civic order. Historians examining gender in medieval European magic trials have often treated judicial officials’ anxieties as portents of the ‘witch craze’ of early modern Europe. Historians of medieval Lucca have tended to treat the political and gender histories of the city as largely separate. This article suggests that the courts’ increasing regulation of gender and sexuality in late medieval Lucca reflected larger ecclesiastical and communal concerns about the dissolution of civic order. In a world of civic power that increasingly belonged to secular men, the unchecked sexuality of women and clergy represented a dual threat to the stability of the family and, by extension, the city. This article argues that secular and ecclesiastical judicial officials feared not magic itself, but the ability of magic to invert power relations between men and women and between clergy and laity, destroying public order.     

Medieval Ireland and the Shannon Hydro-Electric Scheme: reconstructing the past in independent Ireland

This essay considers the position of Irish medieval buildings in the early years of the twentieth century. Focusing on the treatment of the oratory of St. Lua at Killaloe, it examines the ways in which the ruins of the medieval past were used to signify a range of political, religious and cultural ideas and attitudes. The rising water levels following the Shannon Scheme works (begun in 1925) meant that this stone oratory was moved from its original position on Friar’s Island to the grounds of St. Flannan’s Roman Catholic Church in 1929. The resulting paper trail reflects the complex processes of decision-making within a civil service in transition as the new Irish Free State calibrated its position with regard to the past and the treatment of medieval ruins throughout the countryside. The case study of St. Lua’s oratory is considered here in the context of the nineteenth-century tradition of scholarship on medieval buildings, the development of the idea of a national Irish architecture during this period, and the impact of this tradition on subsequent engagement with the buildings of the medieval past.     

From First Reich to Third Reich: German Imperialism and Early Medieval Scholarship in the Southeastern Alpine Region (c. 1919–1945)

This article explores how the early medieval past was used to justify Germanic political and cultural hegemony across East Central Europe during the first half of the 20th century. It highlights the ways in which medieval historians and archaeologists contributed to, and were influenced by, the program of ??Ostforschung?? (Eastern Research). A close reading of the work of two prominent German archaeologists during the interwar and National Socialist periods suggests that their conception of the early medieval eastern Alps was not only influenced by national chauvinism, but also reveals striking parallels with Western imperial ideologies typical of overseas colonial contexts.     

Placing the Pillar of Eliseg: Movement,Visibility and Memory in the Early Medieval Landscape

THE LANDSCAPE CONTEXT of the early 9th-century monument known as the Pillar of Eliseg is interrogated here for the first time with GIS-based analysis and innovative spatial methodologies. Our interpretation aims to move beyond regarding the Pillar as a prominent example of early medieval monument reuse and a probable early medieval assembly site. We argue that the location and topographical context of the cross and mound facilitated the monument’s significance as an early medieval locus of power, faith and commemoration in a contested frontier zone. The specific choice of location is shown to relate to patterns of movement and visibility that may have facilitated and enhanced the ceremonial and commemorative roles of the monument. By shedding new light on the interpretation of the Pillar of Eliseg as a node of social and religious aggregation and ideological power, our study has theoretical and methodological implications for studying the landscape contexts of early medieval stone monuments.     

Gendering the Black Death: Women in Later Medieval England

This review article of Mavis Mate's Daughters, Wives and Widows after the Black Death: Women in Sussex, 1350–1535 (1998) locates Mate's work within the broader context of the debate about changes in women's social position caused by the collapse in population following the Black Death. Was demographic decline accompanied by growing social and economic opportunities for women or should historians emphasise the continuity of female work as low‐skilled, low‐status and low‐paid throughout the late medieval and early modern periods? How did women's role in the labour market affect the age of marriage, fertility rates and long‐term population change? In general, Mate's conclusions offer support to the ‘pessimists’: women's work was vital to the household but economic centrality did not bring a commensurate social power or legal rights and the ideology of female subordination remained firmly in place. The main problem with Mate's case is, inevitably, a lack of evidence, for family structure, for the sexual division of labour and, above all, for affective relations. Nevertheless, this detailed, empirically based local study shows how successfully women's history has moved into the historical mainstream.     

Local meetings and meeting places in early medieval León

This article explores the written evidence for local meetings and meeting places in early medieval León between the tenth and early eleventh centuries. It considers the functions of local meetings, as well as the role they played in the negotiation of social relations within the localities. The analysis of meeting places – among which churches feature prominently in the record – provides further insight into the ways in which links between the localities and the overarching social and political framework developed, and reveals the different forces that could lead to the institutionalization of local meetings.     

Consumption and the ‘Social Self’ in Medieval Southern England

Over the last 30 years we have become increasingly aware of the commercialising nature of the medieval English economy. However, these insights have had little impact on narratives of consumption, which persist in seeing it as a characteristic of modernity. Here it is argued that we must move away from seeing an early modern consumer revolution and instead think about consumption in medieval society, particularly to examine the implications of commercialisation for identity and selfhood. A framework is developed, building upon David G. Shaw’s use of the ‘social self’ and the writing of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, to explore how the increasing variability, and wider range, of objects impacted upon the negotiation of selfhood in the 13th–15th centuries.     

Sermons,Preaching, and Liturgy: Practices,Research Methods,and the Case of Giordano da Pisa

This article analyses the relationship between sermons, preaching, and liturgy within the Order of the Friars Preachers in late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century Italy. It provides an account of a specific method for the study of the medieval ‘modern sermon’ by investigating the reportationes of the sermons given by Giordano da Pisa, a Dominican friar who preached in Florence and Pisa between 1302 and 1309. The investigation using this method shows that the sermons’ subjects and arguments, often considered by historians to be a direct consequence and reflection of Florence’s social and economic reality, had in fact also much to do with the evangelical story or epistolary passage assigned to the specific date of the liturgical calendar: there are thus two principal influences rather than just one. This approach to Giordano’s sermons provides a new perspective on his work as a preacher by being more attentive to the internal construction mechanisms of sermon discourse.     

Metamorphoses of the early medieval signum of a ruler in the Carolingian world

This article uses the approach of diplomatic semiotics to explore early medieval signs of authority in charters and on coins, especially the monogram and the sign of the cross used as an individual ‘signature’. Coins and charters used these signs communicating royal or imperial authority differently, addressing diverse regional and social audiences. From the fifth through the ninth centuries, the early medieval signum of a ruler gradually transformed from the individualizing sign of a particular monarch, designed to differentiate him symbolically from other rulers, to the generalizing sign of the king by the grace of God, which as a visual attribute of authority could be shared by several rulers. This transformation signified the inauguration of a new ‘medieval’ tradition in the communication of authority in late Carolingian times.     

Somatic Styles of the Early Middle Ages

‘Somatic Styles’ examines how classical modes of gender played significant roles in carving out competitive arenas between clerical and lay elites, c.600–900 CE. The paper explores the hermeneutical obstacles standing between the contemporary theorist of gender and the complex nature of the early medieval texts under scrutiny. The analysis reconstructs classicising techniques of gender deployed by early medieval churchmen, and it does so in a way that both challenges the stranglehold of the ‘one‐sex’ model on pre‐modern understandings of gender and heals the ‘rupture’ between the ‘Ancient’ and the ‘Dark Age’. Finally, the essay maps early medieval somatic and gendered styles onto an architectural space where lay and consecrated bodies met – a ninth‐century monastic basilica.     

Did Women Have a Transformation of the Roman World?

Despite intense and interdisciplinary interest in the transition from antiquity to the middle ages, work on women and gender generally remains marginal to the dominant paradigms for understanding political and social change in the period from c. 300 to c. 800 ce . This article critiques these interpretations from a gendered perspective and also reviews recent work on women and gender in late antiquity, Byzantium and the early medieval Europe. By outlining similarities and contrasts between women's lives in early medieval western and Byzantine cultures, it emphasises the diversity of women's experience. Suggestions about how to envisage a fully gendered history of this period conclude with a call for radically new approaches to the study of the transformation of the Roman world.     

Presencing the divine: religion and technology in the Latin West

ABSTRACT

For over a millennium, Catholic and Protestant traditions have deployed technologies to address the central paradox of the Christian faith: God’s absence after Easter. The following essay brings together scholarship on religious technics in the Christian Latin West during the medieval and early modern periods with a focus on the performance of presence. Medieval actors utilized an array of techniques, instruments, and contraptions to manifest the divine power present in holy matter. The movement of artifacts and people across medieval and early modern horizons mobilized and multiplied the effects of sacred proximity. The Society of Jesus’ emphasis on sensuality in worship and spectacle linked older forms of ritual piety with routinized religion. The shift from a predominantly Christian to modern culture in the West did not terminate organized religion’s close association with technology, but extended the experience of spiritual presence in the West through industrial and post-industrial, digital means.     

Ancient molecules and human prehistory

Abstract

DNA and other molecules found in ancient remains are yielding new information about the origins, spread, interaction, and culture of early humans. Molecules of animal fats preserved in archaeological pottery have shown that in medieval societies people ate non-ruminant animals, such as pigs, but burned tallow from ruminants, such as sheep and cattle. Geochemical analysis of bitumen in the Middle East has documented ancient trade routes. Studies of molecular genetic diversity have shed light on when and how cattle were domesticated. Analysis of human hair from remains up to 5200 years old has revealed the diets of those ancient people. DNA recovered from other remains has also provided evidence for theories about the origins and spread of agriculture, and human migration into the Pacific.     

Towards a Critical Anthology of Pre-Modern Bosom Serpent Folklore

We present a preview of our work for a critical anthology of medieval and pre-medieval fantastic folklore narratives about animals in the human body. These are generally referred to among English-speaking scholars as ‘bosom serpent’ legends. In particular, we provide here two of the most ancient texts from the section of the anthology on medieval Scandinavia. We also offer two little-known narratives, a medieval Latin saint’s life and one from the Byzantine Greek world.     

Pig diet in medieval York: carbon and nitrogen stable isotopes

This study investigates bone stable isotopes from pigs from medieval York, to characterise the pigs' diet and to explore their contribution to isotopic values from contemporary human bones. Pig bones from the Swinegate (N?=?9) and Coppergate (N?=?14) sites were used for carbon and nitrogen stable isotope analysis to test the hypothesis that the majority of pigs in medieval York were yard-kept and fed on scraps and fish waste, elevating their nitrogen ratios. The results show that the Swinegate and Coppergate pigs gave nitrogen isotope values similar to contemporary sheep and therefore that animal protein made little or no dietary contribution. One sample showed C and N results consistent with more animal protein in the diet, and we propose that this could have been a yard-kept pig consuming human refuse. The majority of the data indicate that the pigs were eating a largely herbivorous diet and that pigs in medieval York may have been raised in rural or woodland locations rather than in the city.     

Technologies of Appearance: Hair Behaviour in Early Medieval Europe

Personal appearance in general—and the grooming of hair in particular—has long held a position of interest in historical, art-historical, and literary scholarship. The same cannot be said of archaeology, and the material aspects of personal grooming in the construction and communication of identity have not been fully synthesized. As a result, little attempt has been made to understand the social role of hair in less well documented societies, such as those of early medieval northern and western Europe. This paper considers archaeological, iconographic and documentary evidence for the significance of, and physical engagement with hair in early medieval northern and western Europe, and offers a model for the interpretation of grooming as a social phenomenon. It is argued that grooming was a socially meaningful practice, and that it played a key role in the construction of early medieval identities, as well as in the maintenance and manipulation of boundaries and distinctions between individuals and groups.     

Social Policy,Inequalities and the Battle of Rights in Latin America

Targeted social policies and other more universal forms of social protection have shaped (the shifts in) the politics of popular support in Latin America. Since the early 2000s this has led to a tendency towards the election of left-leaning governments, stimulating stronger political pressure for more extensive redistribution. Yet despite a wide range of cash transfers, subsidies and other social policies, the ‘post-neoliberal’ ideal of welfare did not reshape the political and relational powers of citizens in the ways necessary to redress the structural determinants of poverty and inequality across the region. This article reveals a ‘dark side’ of social policy in Latin America, arguing that targeted and precariously funded welfare regimes are creating tensions between the socio-economic and ecological spheres that undermine inclusive citizenship and democracy.