[PDF] Aspects Of Power And Authority In The Middle Ages eBook

Author : Brenda Bolton
Publisher : Brepols Publishers
Page : 376 pages
File Size : 27,8 MB
Release : 2007
Category : History
ISBN :

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Concepts of power and authority and the relationship between them were fundamental to many aspects of medieval society. The essays in this collection present a series of case studies that range widely, both chronologically and geographically, from Lombard Italy to early-modern Iberia and from Anglo-Saxon, Norman, and later-medieval England to twelfth-century France and the lands beyond the Elbe in the conversion period. While some papers deal with traditional royal, princely and ecclesiastical authority, they do so in new ways. Others examine groups and aspects less obviously connected to power and authority, such as the networks of influence centring on royal women or powerful ecclesiastics, the power relationships revealed in Anglo-Saxon and Old-Norse literature or the influence that might be exercised by needy crusaders, by Jews with the ability to advance loans or by parish priests on the basis of their local connections. An important section discusses the power of the written word, whether papal bulls, collections of miracle stories, or the documents produced in lawsuits. The papers in this volume demonstrate the variety and multiplicity of both power and authority and the many ways by which individuals exercised influence and exerted a claim to be heard and respected.

Author : Sini Kangas
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter
Page : 340 pages
File Size : 44,21 MB
Release : 2013-04-30
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 3110294567

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Medievalists reading and writing about and around authority-related themes lack clear definitions of its actual meanings in the medieval context. Authorities in the Middle Ages offers answers to this thorny issue through specialized investigations. This book considers the concept of authority and explores the various practices of creating authority in medieval society. In their studies sixteen scholars investigate the definition, formation, establishment, maintenance, and collapse of what we understand in terms of medieval struggles for authority, influence and power. The interdisciplinary nature of this volume resonates with the multi-faceted field of medieval culture, its social structures, and forms of communication. The fields of expertise include history, legal studies, theology, philosophy, politics, literature and art history. The scope of inquiry extends from late antiquity to the mid-fifteenth century, from the Church Fathers debating with pagans to the rapacious ghosts ruining the life of the living in the Sagas. There is a special emphasis on such exciting but understudied areas as the Balkans, Iceland and the eastern fringes of Scandinavia.

Author : Professor Robert C Figueira
Publisher : Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Page : 366 pages
File Size : 43,16 MB
Release : 2013-06-28
Category : History
ISBN : 1409479471

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'I study power' – so Robert Louis Benson described his work as a scholar of medieval history. This volume unites papers by a number of his students dealing with matters central to Benson's historical interests – ecclesiastical institutions and administration, emperorship and papacy, canon law, political ideology, and historiography. The justification and exercise of political power is considered in two chapters that look at how the hagiography of a late Roman military saint, Maurice, was harnessed in the 11th century to the discussion of the power exercised by both emperor and pope, and how both pious purpose and political pretext animated the Hohenstaufen emperors' suppression of heresy. Three subsequent chapters focus on the Church: a study of the legal commentaries that taught that the 'authority to bind and loose' in a specific ecclesiastical matter could be determined by the opinions of 'the elders of the province'; an argument that Innocent III's administration of the Roman church represented a model for the ordering of all Christian society; and an inquiry into the doctrinal formation of the 'territorial principle' in the exercise of jurisdiction by papal legates. The late Middle Ages provides the focus for two additional studies, namely an exploration of the issues of power and authority in the charitable institutions of Cologne in the 13th–14th centuries, and the argument that the current desire for universal standards of governmental conduct in the area of basic human rights hearkens back to natural law theory as outlined in the 15th century by Nicholas of Cusa. Two historiographical studies round out the volume: an estimation of modern research regarding the political theology of late antiquity, and a reflection on Benson's own contribution to historical scholarship. Together, these papers both epitomize and further develop Benson's distinctive approach to the study of the Middle Ages, while themselves making their own important contribution.

Author : Mary Erler
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
Page : 293 pages
File Size : 35,69 MB
Release : 1988
Category : History
ISBN : 0820323810

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Power in medieval society has traditionally been ascribed to figures of public authority--violent knights and conflicting sovereigns who altered the surface of civic life through the exercise of law and force. The wives and consorts of these powerful men have generally been viewed as decorative attendants, while common women were presumed to have had no power or consequence. Reassessing the conventional definition of power that has shaped such portrayals, Women and Power in the Middle Ages reveals the varied manifestations of female power in the medieval household and community--from the cultural power wielded by the wives of Venetian patriarchs to the economic power of English peasant women and the religious power of female saints. Among the specific topics addresses are Griselda's manipulation of silence as power in Chaucer's "The Clerk's Tale"; the extensive networks of influence devised by Lady Honor Lisle; and the role of medieval women book owners as arbiters of lay piety and ambassadors of culture. In every case, the essays seek to transcend simple polarities of public and private, male and female, in order to provide a more realistic analysis of the workings of power in feudal society.

Author : Robert F. Berkhofer
Publisher : Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Page : 312 pages
File Size : 11,67 MB
Release : 2005
Category : History
ISBN : 9780754651062

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This volume explores the experience of power in medieval Europe. The seventeen essays range geographically from England in the north to Castile in the south, and chronologically from the 10th century to the 14th, and address a series of specific topics in institutional, social, religious, cultural, and intellectual history. Taken together, they present three distinct ways of discussing power in a medieval historical context: uses of power, relations of power, and discourses of power.

Author : Thomas W. Smith
Publisher :
Page : 412 pages
File Size : 30,65 MB
Release : 2020
Category : Autorität
ISBN : 9782503585291

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While they often go hand-in-hand and the distinction between the two is frequently blurred, authority and power are distinct concepts and abilities - this was a problem that the Church tussled with throughout the High and Late Middle Ages. Claims of authority, efforts to have that authority recognized, and the struggle to transform it into more tangible forms of power were defining factors of the medieval Church's existence. As the studies assembled here demonstrate, claims to authority by members of the Church were often in inverse proportion to their actual power - a problematic paradox which resulted from the uneven and uncertain acceptance of ecclesiastical authority by lay powers and, indeed, fellow members of the ecclesia. The chapters of this book reveal how clerical claims to authority and power were frequently debated, refined, opposed, and resisted in their expression and implementation. The clergy had to negotiate a complex landscape of overlapping and competing claims in pursuit of their rights. They waged these struggles in arenas that ranged from papal, royal, and imperial curiae, through monastic houses, law courts and parliaments, urban religious communities and devotional networks, to contact and conflict with the laity on the ground; the weapons deployed included art, manuscripts, dress, letters, petitions, treatises, legal claims, legates, and the physical arms of allied lay powers. In an effort to further our understanding of this central aspect of ecclesiastical history, this interdisciplinary volume, which effects a broad temporal, geographical, and thematic sweep, points the way to new avenues of research and new approaches to a traditional topic. It fuses historical methodologies with art history, gender studies, musicology, and material culture, and presents fresh insights into one of the most significant institutions of the medieval world.

Author : Walter Ullmann
Publisher : CUP Archive
Page : 294 pages
File Size : 25,90 MB
Release : 1980-12-11
Category : History
ISBN : 9780521222754

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In this 1980 volume, friends and former pupils of Walter Ullmann contribute essays on subjects originally studied under his supervision.

Author : Robert C. Figueira
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 219 pages
File Size : 45,36 MB
Release : 2016-04-22
Category : History
ISBN : 1317079728

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'I study power' - so Robert Louis Benson described his work as a scholar of medieval history. This volume unites papers by a number of his students dealing with matters central to Benson's historical interests - ecclesiastical institutions and administration, emperorship and papacy, canon law, political ideology, and historiography. The justification and exercise of political power is considered in two chapters that look at how the hagiography of a late Roman military saint, Maurice, was harnessed in the 11th century to the discussion of the power exercised by both emperor and pope, and how both pious purpose and political pretext animated the Hohenstaufen emperors' suppression of heresy. Three subsequent chapters focus on the Church: a study of the legal commentaries that taught that the 'authority to bind and loose' in a specific ecclesiastical matter could be determined by the opinions of 'the elders of the province'; an argument that Innocent III's administration of the Roman church represented a model for the ordering of all Christian society; and an inquiry into the doctrinal formation of the 'territorial principle' in the exercise of jurisdiction by papal legates. The late Middle Ages provides the focus for two additional studies, namely an exploration of the issues of power and authority in the charitable institutions of Cologne in the 13th-14th centuries, and the argument that the current desire for universal standards of governmental conduct in the area of basic human rights hearkens back to natural law theory as outlined in the 15th century by Nicholas of Cusa. Two historiographical studies round out the volume: an estimation of modern research regarding the political theology of late antiquity, and a reflection on Benson's own contribution to historical scholarship. Together, these papers both epitomize and further develop Benson's distinctive approach to the study of the Middle Ages, while themselves making their own important contribution.

Author : Robert F. Berkhofer III
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 453 pages
File Size : 21,97 MB
Release : 2017-05-15
Category : History
ISBN : 1351889966

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Taking their inspiration from the work of Thomas N. Bisson, to whom the book is dedicated, the contributors to this volume explore the experience of power in medieval Europe: the experience of those who held power, those who helped them wield it, and those who felt its effects. The seventeen essays in the collection, which range geographically from England in the north to Castile in the south, and chronologically from the tenth century to the fourteenth, address a series of specific topics in institutional, social, religious, cultural, and intellectual history. Taken together, they present three distinct ways of discussing power in a medieval historical context: uses of power, relations of power, and discourses of power. The collection thus examines not only the operational and social aspects of power, but also power as a contested category within the medieval world. The Experience of Power suggests new and fruitful ways of understanding and studying power in the Middle Ages.