Early Medieval Europe最新文献

This article uses the reign of Pippin I of Aquitaine (d. 838) as a case study for the historiographical concept of ‘sub-rulership’ in Carolingian Francia. It unpicks how Pippin’s status varied over time, arguing that Pippin’s rulership represents well the tension between kingship as an office and as a dynastic status. Pippin was a king’s son, and therefore became a king, but once he had this title it provided a status linked to, but apart from, his familial ties. This article demonstrates how this relationship played out in practice, from Pippin’s accession to the throne to his own son’s succession.

Women played a significant part in tenth-century Rome, and the documentation makes them visible in a way rarely seen in early medieval sources. First examining the political agency of the foremost among them, women like Marozia and the Theophylact family senatrices, this paper also highlights the socio-economic, legal and cultural role of many women of lower status. As donors, buyers and lessees, able to acquire property as well as to dispose of it within Roman law, their impact as part of a family group or in their own name becomes far more visible than either earlier or later.

The aim of this article is to discuss forms of domestic exchange in the north of the kingdom of Italy between the late ninth and early eleventh centuries. In the early part of this period the economy of the area was based on large rural estates and redistributive exchanges. Only from the late tenth century did economic structures change, with a sharp increase in commercial activities, and a focus of manufacturing activity on cities. However, this reconfiguration of the economic system, fully accomplished by the mid-eleventh century, did not result in an economic take-off.

This paper examines judges and judgement in Bavarian dispute charters from the first decades of the ninth century. It argues that justice in Carolingian Bavaria was an amateur affair, in which of primary importance was the ability to create a stable consensus around an outcome. Accordingly, distinctions between judges and other participants in judicial assemblies were blurred, and the capacities in which assembly-goers participated often blended into each other. Even when royal agents intervened in the region, they did this mainly through, rather than against, the consensus dynamics of local judicial assemblies.

Using the Digital Humanities methods of network analysis and visualization to study the social networks of migrants and locals in the charters of Carolingian Septimania, this article argues that within these documents women played a central role in the relational social actions of kinship, patronage, and legal ties. The diffuse, horizontal social networks visually demonstrate how migration to the Marca Hispanica from both Hispania and Francia allowed many people, including women, to take advantage of a socio-economic system in flux.

This article argues that there is no strong evidence for the continuity of the cult of St Alban at Verulamium from the fifth to the eighth century. The written evidence suggests rather that the martyr narrative and cult of Alban was created in Gaul and reimported to Britain through texts. The activity at late and post-Roman Verulamium is contextualized by comparing it with archaeological evidence from contemporary British sites. The article explores how the contrasts and connections between Britain and the Continent determined the survival of devotion to Alban.

This article studies the ways the sixth-century queen and monastic founder Radegund (c.520–87) managed the non-textual elements of communication by letter. While Radegund’s role as a writer and commissioner of letters has been well studied, her efforts as an orchestrator of letter deliveries, gift exchanges and other associated acts of public communication remain under-explored. Drawing on two Merovingian hagiographies, one written c.590–600 by Radegund’s friend and agent Venantius Fortunatus, and another composed shortly after 600 by a fellow nun, Baudonivia, this article offers a new methodological approach to the study of letter-writing in the early Middle Ages.