What’s new in medieval studies? Here are ten open-access articles published in February, which range from plague in Baghdad to the inquisition in Bologna.
This ongoing series on Medievalists.net highlights what has been published in journals over the last month that deal with the Middle Ages. All ten articles are Open-Access, meaning you can read them for free. We now also have a special tier on our Patreon where you can see the full list of 47 open-access articles we found.
Inventories as Keys to Exploring Castles as Cultural Heritage
By Christina Antenhofer, Elisabeth Gruber-Tokić , Gerald Hiebel , Ingrid Matschinegg , Claudia Posch and Gerhard Rampl
Open Archaeology
Abstract: This article explores the potential of engaging the public in an ongoing interdisciplinary research project on castle inventories at the universities of Salzburg and Innsbruck. Our aim is to create a digital platform that uses inventories as a key to explore the living conditions in late medieval and early modern castles. In this article, we want to give an initial insight into the research project in terms of the theme of this volume: how the digital platform we are creating will contribute to engaging the public with material culture projects. We start from the hypothesis that inventories are neither objective nor simple lists of things, but products of an inventory practice, with traces of this activity, found both in the texts and in the materiality of the archival records. They contain a wealth of information on relations between things, people, activities, rooms, and the words used for them. We use digital methods of text recognition to interpret a corpus of 130 castle inventories from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries in the historical region of Tyrol (Austria/Italy) as historical sources and on castles as social spaces.
With ontological modelling and deduction from the archival records, we want to make the historical practice of creating inventories visible and use the information to explore everyday life at the castles. For selected castles, we will combine historical data with results from building history to create virtual room books. Digital tools will allow presenting the relations of objects, spaces, individuals, actions, and social practices and provide results for the scientific community as well as for the interested public.
Enclosure Riots on the Commons: Memory and Conflict at Lytham Priory, 1200–1540
By A T Brown
The English Historical Review
Abstract: Enclosure riots in England have been understood through their importance to early modern social history, representing a conflict over rights and access to resources. Driven by Tudor demographic growth, these disputes demarcate changing social relations in the sixteenth century. Yet, as this article shows, enclosure riots could reflect a much longer heritage of disputation, including centuries-old boundary disputes. An enclosure riot involving the monks of Lytham Priory and neighbouring tenants in the 1530s had its origins over three centuries before, in the original grant of land to the monks, and raised its head in every century until the suppression of the priory. Through these conflicts, we can understand the construction and inculcation of popular and institutional memory across this period, as both their neighbouring tenants and the monks of Lytham sought to justify their occupation of the commons.
Above all, this case-study highlights the importance of the interpretative framework that we use as historians: if read forwards, the conflict of the 1530s takes on all the features of the archetypal early modern enclosure riot, presaging the struggle for the commons of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; but if read backwards, it becomes the culmination of centuries of medieval boundary disputes before the eventual suppression of the priory. This article demonstrates both the artificial nature of temporal boundaries in the study of history and how the access rights of tenants could align with the jurisdictional claims of lords against an outside seigneurial authority, producing conflict but not necessarily class conflict.
The significance of feathers in early and medieval China
By John Donegan-Cross
Bulletin of SOAS
Abstract: This article opens with a mystery: why was Zizang 子臧 assassinated in the seventh century bce, and why was his assassination justified in the Zuozhuan by his fondness of snipe-feather caps? It is well established that feathers were a common item of clothing in early and medieval China, used to confer status, to flaunt wealth, to embellish rituals. This article argues that there may also have been accompanying beliefs surrounding their use; beliefs that feathers might bestow upon the wearer certain imagined characteristics of the birds from which they came. It uses case studies of soldiers and their relationship to brown-eared pheasants, dancers and their relationship to long-tailed pheasants, and immortals and their relationship to cranes and egrets. Finally, it returns to Zizang’s snipe-feather cap, and suggests reasons for his fate.
The Mongol empire’s expansion and rethinking research trends in Chinese historical climatology
By Ka wai Fan
Humanities and Social Sciences Communications
Abstract: Historical climatology, an emerging interdisciplinary field, seeks to reconstruct reliable climate data to understand the impact of climate change on historical events. This article introduces the underlying reasons for the westward expansion of the Mongol Empire, challenging entrenched assumptions through the lens of climate. It reviews scholarly discourse, focusing in particular on a theory linking Mongol expansion to a global dry period, while juxtaposing this with recent research spearheaded by climatologists. Their findings reveal that Mongol expansion coincided with favorable climatic conditions, casting doubt on the traditional narrative.
Additionally, this article probes the use of the Granger Causality Test in Chinese historical climatology, as exemplified by the work of David Zhang. While Zhang’s research underscores correlations between climate fluctuations and historical events, this review initiates conversations regarding the limitations of the test and the necessity of meticulous contextualization. The article concludes by emphasizing the importance of verifying historical facts and considering nuanced historical contexts when employing statistical methods such as the Granger Causality Test in historical climatology. Through critical analysis of the history of the Mongol Empire, this study contributes to a deeper understanding of the complex relationships between climate change and human history, advocating for prudence in drawing causal inferences.
Plague history, Mongol history, and the processes of focalisation leading up to the Black Death: a response to Brack et al.
By Monica H. Green and Nahyan Fancy
Medical History
Abstract: This essay responds to Brack et al., ‘Plague and the Mongol Conquest of Baghdad (1258)? A reevaluation of the sources’, which is a critique of our 2021 essay in this journal, ‘Plague and the Fall of Baghdad (1258)’. We argue that Brack and colleagues have misunderstood our investigation as an attempt to pinpoint the exact timing of the outbreak of plague connected with the Mongol siege of Baghdad, and so believe that an altered timeframe invalidates our suggestion that plague was involved. Taking this opportunity to revisit the state of plague historiography in western Asia, we address four issues: (1) why Mongol historiography has, until recently, avoided the question of plague’s late mediaeval resurgence within the Mongol Empire and why the ‘new genetics’ of plague now makes the question unavoidable; (2) why reconstruction of the biological processes of ‘focalisation’ is now the most urgent question in plague historiography since it constitutes what we call the prodromal stage of the Black Death pandemic; (3) how a newly informed biological perspective on disease history can allow a more sensitive reading of past observers’ reports of epidemics; and finally, (4) what a plausible scenario might look like for plague’s presence in western Asia and the eastern Mediterranean region in the late-thirteenth and early-fourteenth centuries as an emerging zoonotic disease with occasional epizootic and human outbreaks, before the more catastrophic outbreaks of the 1340s commonly referred to as ‘the Black Death’.
Excerpt: By investigating Dante’s views on abortion and contraception, I hope to strengthen our understanding of the variety of attitudes toward contraceptive practices in the late Middle Ages. In addition to what was expressed in medical, theological, religious, and legal texts, I contend that the way these issues were treated in works of literature may further enrich our understandings of them. Since medieval attitudes toward abortion and contraception expressed in literary traditions have not yet been as thoroughly explored as they have been in other contexts, this work is necessarily preliminary. I begin with Dante’s treatment of the issues in this article, but in current and subsequent work I plan to expand the focus to address Boccaccio’s treatment of abortion and contraception as well.
Nationcraft and the Origins of Territory: Experiencing Romanía in the Medieval Empire of New Rome
By Nicholas S M Matheou
Past & Present
Abstract: The modernism debate in the historiography of nationhood and nationalism has fizzled out to a curious détente: the idea that nationhood and nationalism are unique to ‘modernity’ remains dominant, but ‘premodern’ fields continue to research ethnonational phenomena while largely avoiding the vocabulary. Compelling research continues to be produced on both sides of the pre/modern divide, but there is little cross-fertilization between the two. This article returns to the modernism debate, to argue for the utility of political economy as a mode of analysis able to address the dynamics of nationcraft across a range of times and places. The case study is the production and experience of national territory in the medieval empire of New Rome, traditionally termed Byzantium. Between the eighth and thirteenth centuries East Roman political economy produced a national territory known as Romanía, ‘Romanland’, experienced for the most part in terms strikingly similar to the ‘countries’ produced by contemporary nation-states, including a kind of patriotism. The implication, fleshed out with comparative suggestions in the conclusion, is that similarities and differences between the nationcraft of different times and places should be situated in political and economic motions, rather than a pre/modern binary.
Kymry, Walenses, Brytaniaid, Britones: Naming the Welsh in the Middle Ages
By Rebecca Thomas
Early Medieval England and its Neighbours
Abstract: This article surveys how the Welsh and their territory have been described, from the early Middle Ages to the present. It begins by examining the terms used by Welsh writers in the early medieval period, before proceeding to consider English nomenclature and the important shift from Brit(t)ones to Walenses in the twelfth century. This shift is re-examined through the lens of the Vita Griffini, which reveals the political motivations behind the increasing focus on Wales and the Welsh. Despite this development in nomenclature, the island of Britain remained central to the identity of the Welsh. This is evident in vernacular texts, especially poetry, and this article explores the different names used in this context. It concludes with a brief foray into the early modern period, ultimately illustrating the continued relevance and significance of the identities fashioned in the early Middle Ages to writers in subsequent centuries.
King Alfred and the Opening of the Medieval Mind: A Cautionary Tale
By Erik Wade
Public Humanities
Abstract: The public humanities have shaped ideas about sex, race, and gender. This is a cautionary tale that points to the repeated problems of the model of public humanities as academics or elites dispensing knowledge to a public audience. King Alfred of England ordered a set of texts “most needful for all men to know” translated into English. Long celebrated in English history as an example of public education, these translations also put forward certain ideas about race and sexuality for the emerging English public, a reminder of the ideological function of the public humanities. Likewise, modern scholars worried about medieval and classical texts that depict homosexuality becoming available to the public, so they refused to translate them or altered them. As a counter to such models, I consider the seventh-century Archbishop Theodore, a Syrian-born ecclesiast who ran the English church and who provides a model of a collaborative public humanities in which lay people shape knowledge and law together. Their model of public humanities encourages us to explore the historical Black public and their contributions to medieval studies that academic medieval studies have ignored.
Gender, kinship, and other social predictors of incrimination in the inquisition register of Bologna (1291–1310): Results from an exponential random graph model
By David Zbíral, Katia Riccardo, Tomáš Hampejs, Zoltán Brys
PLoS ONE
Abstract: The medieval inquisition of heresy strongly relied on depositions, where witnesses were expected to report on the crimes of others and oneself. The resulting patterns of incrimination could be influenced by various factors, including the characteristics of the underlying dissident social network; the investigators’ choices and biases; the trial circumstances, some of which must have exerted considerable pressure upon deponents; and the deponents’ decisions to protect some suspects more than others. This case study aimed at disentangling selected social factors of incrimination in the register of the inquisition in Bologna, 1291–1310. We used social network analysis and, more specifically, an Exponential Random Graph Model (ERGM) to assess the influence of four social predictors: gender, churchperson status, membership of the urban “middle class”, and kinship ties between incriminators and the incriminated. To increase the validity of our results, we controlled for various trial circumstances and structural parameters of the incrimination network. Our model corroborated a tendency towards female-to-female incrimination, while we did not find any positive or negative tendency towards male-to-male incrimination. We identified no effect of churchperson status on incriminating, while we found that among Cathars, members of the middle class were more likely to be incriminated than people without this status. Our model also corroborated the tendency to incriminate one’s kinship group. Overall, our study underlines the relevance, but also the non-trivial operation, of social and demographic predictors in medieval heresy trials.
We found 47 open-access articles from February – you can get the full list by joining our Patreon – look for the tier that says Open Access articles in Medieval Studies.
What’s new in medieval studies? Here are ten open-access articles published in February, which range from plague in Baghdad to the inquisition in Bologna.
This ongoing series on Medievalists.net highlights what has been published in journals over the last month that deal with the Middle Ages. All ten articles are Open-Access, meaning you can read them for free. We now also have a special tier on our Patreon where you can see the full list of 47 open-access articles we found.
Inventories as Keys to Exploring Castles as Cultural Heritage
By Christina Antenhofer, Elisabeth Gruber-Tokić , Gerald Hiebel , Ingrid Matschinegg , Claudia Posch and Gerhard Rampl
Open Archaeology
Abstract: This article explores the potential of engaging the public in an ongoing interdisciplinary research project on castle inventories at the universities of Salzburg and Innsbruck. Our aim is to create a digital platform that uses inventories as a key to explore the living conditions in late medieval and early modern castles. In this article, we want to give an initial insight into the research project in terms of the theme of this volume: how the digital platform we are creating will contribute to engaging the public with material culture projects. We start from the hypothesis that inventories are neither objective nor simple lists of things, but products of an inventory practice, with traces of this activity, found both in the texts and in the materiality of the archival records. They contain a wealth of information on relations between things, people, activities, rooms, and the words used for them. We use digital methods of text recognition to interpret a corpus of 130 castle inventories from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries in the historical region of Tyrol (Austria/Italy) as historical sources and on castles as social spaces.
With ontological modelling and deduction from the archival records, we want to make the historical practice of creating inventories visible and use the information to explore everyday life at the castles. For selected castles, we will combine historical data with results from building history to create virtual room books. Digital tools will allow presenting the relations of objects, spaces, individuals, actions, and social practices and provide results for the scientific community as well as for the interested public.
Click here to read this article
Enclosure Riots on the Commons: Memory and Conflict at Lytham Priory, 1200–1540
By A T Brown
The English Historical Review
Abstract: Enclosure riots in England have been understood through their importance to early modern social history, representing a conflict over rights and access to resources. Driven by Tudor demographic growth, these disputes demarcate changing social relations in the sixteenth century. Yet, as this article shows, enclosure riots could reflect a much longer heritage of disputation, including centuries-old boundary disputes. An enclosure riot involving the monks of Lytham Priory and neighbouring tenants in the 1530s had its origins over three centuries before, in the original grant of land to the monks, and raised its head in every century until the suppression of the priory. Through these conflicts, we can understand the construction and inculcation of popular and institutional memory across this period, as both their neighbouring tenants and the monks of Lytham sought to justify their occupation of the commons.
Above all, this case-study highlights the importance of the interpretative framework that we use as historians: if read forwards, the conflict of the 1530s takes on all the features of the archetypal early modern enclosure riot, presaging the struggle for the commons of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; but if read backwards, it becomes the culmination of centuries of medieval boundary disputes before the eventual suppression of the priory. This article demonstrates both the artificial nature of temporal boundaries in the study of history and how the access rights of tenants could align with the jurisdictional claims of lords against an outside seigneurial authority, producing conflict but not necessarily class conflict.
Click here to read this article
The significance of feathers in early and medieval China
By John Donegan-Cross
Bulletin of SOAS
Abstract: This article opens with a mystery: why was Zizang 子臧 assassinated in the seventh century bce, and why was his assassination justified in the Zuozhuan by his fondness of snipe-feather caps? It is well established that feathers were a common item of clothing in early and medieval China, used to confer status, to flaunt wealth, to embellish rituals. This article argues that there may also have been accompanying beliefs surrounding their use; beliefs that feathers might bestow upon the wearer certain imagined characteristics of the birds from which they came. It uses case studies of soldiers and their relationship to brown-eared pheasants, dancers and their relationship to long-tailed pheasants, and immortals and their relationship to cranes and egrets. Finally, it returns to Zizang’s snipe-feather cap, and suggests reasons for his fate.
Click here to read this article
The Mongol empire’s expansion and rethinking research trends in Chinese historical climatology
By Ka wai Fan
Humanities and Social Sciences Communications
Abstract: Historical climatology, an emerging interdisciplinary field, seeks to reconstruct reliable climate data to understand the impact of climate change on historical events. This article introduces the underlying reasons for the westward expansion of the Mongol Empire, challenging entrenched assumptions through the lens of climate. It reviews scholarly discourse, focusing in particular on a theory linking Mongol expansion to a global dry period, while juxtaposing this with recent research spearheaded by climatologists. Their findings reveal that Mongol expansion coincided with favorable climatic conditions, casting doubt on the traditional narrative.
Additionally, this article probes the use of the Granger Causality Test in Chinese historical climatology, as exemplified by the work of David Zhang. While Zhang’s research underscores correlations between climate fluctuations and historical events, this review initiates conversations regarding the limitations of the test and the necessity of meticulous contextualization. The article concludes by emphasizing the importance of verifying historical facts and considering nuanced historical contexts when employing statistical methods such as the Granger Causality Test in historical climatology. Through critical analysis of the history of the Mongol Empire, this study contributes to a deeper understanding of the complex relationships between climate change and human history, advocating for prudence in drawing causal inferences.
Click here to read this article
Plague history, Mongol history, and the processes of focalisation leading up to the Black Death: a response to Brack et al.
By Monica H. Green and Nahyan Fancy
Medical History
Abstract: This essay responds to Brack et al., ‘Plague and the Mongol Conquest of Baghdad (1258)? A reevaluation of the sources’, which is a critique of our 2021 essay in this journal, ‘Plague and the Fall of Baghdad (1258)’. We argue that Brack and colleagues have misunderstood our investigation as an attempt to pinpoint the exact timing of the outbreak of plague connected with the Mongol siege of Baghdad, and so believe that an altered timeframe invalidates our suggestion that plague was involved. Taking this opportunity to revisit the state of plague historiography in western Asia, we address four issues: (1) why Mongol historiography has, until recently, avoided the question of plague’s late mediaeval resurgence within the Mongol Empire and why the ‘new genetics’ of plague now makes the question unavoidable; (2) why reconstruction of the biological processes of ‘focalisation’ is now the most urgent question in plague historiography since it constitutes what we call the prodromal stage of the Black Death pandemic; (3) how a newly informed biological perspective on disease history can allow a more sensitive reading of past observers’ reports of epidemics; and finally, (4) what a plausible scenario might look like for plague’s presence in western Asia and the eastern Mediterranean region in the late-thirteenth and early-fourteenth centuries as an emerging zoonotic disease with occasional epizootic and human outbreaks, before the more catastrophic outbreaks of the 1340s commonly referred to as ‘the Black Death’.
Click here to read this article
Preventing Pregnancy: Dante and Medieval Culture
By Anne C. Leone
Dante Studies
Excerpt: By investigating Dante’s views on abortion and contraception, I hope to strengthen our understanding of the variety of attitudes toward contraceptive practices in the late Middle Ages. In addition to what was expressed in medical, theological, religious, and legal texts, I contend that the way these issues were treated in works of literature may further enrich our understandings of them. Since medieval attitudes toward abortion and contraception expressed in literary traditions have not yet been as thoroughly explored as they have been in other contexts, this work is necessarily preliminary. I begin with Dante’s treatment of the issues in this article, but in current and subsequent work I plan to expand the focus to address Boccaccio’s treatment of abortion and contraception as well.
Click here to read this article
Nationcraft and the Origins of Territory: Experiencing Romanía in the Medieval Empire of New Rome
By Nicholas S M Matheou
Past & Present
Abstract: The modernism debate in the historiography of nationhood and nationalism has fizzled out to a curious détente: the idea that nationhood and nationalism are unique to ‘modernity’ remains dominant, but ‘premodern’ fields continue to research ethnonational phenomena while largely avoiding the vocabulary. Compelling research continues to be produced on both sides of the pre/modern divide, but there is little cross-fertilization between the two. This article returns to the modernism debate, to argue for the utility of political economy as a mode of analysis able to address the dynamics of nationcraft across a range of times and places. The case study is the production and experience of national territory in the medieval empire of New Rome, traditionally termed Byzantium. Between the eighth and thirteenth centuries East Roman political economy produced a national territory known as Romanía, ‘Romanland’, experienced for the most part in terms strikingly similar to the ‘countries’ produced by contemporary nation-states, including a kind of patriotism. The implication, fleshed out with comparative suggestions in the conclusion, is that similarities and differences between the nationcraft of different times and places should be situated in political and economic motions, rather than a pre/modern binary.
Click here to read this article
Kymry, Walenses, Brytaniaid, Britones: Naming the Welsh in the Middle Ages
By Rebecca Thomas
Early Medieval England and its Neighbours
Abstract: This article surveys how the Welsh and their territory have been described, from the early Middle Ages to the present. It begins by examining the terms used by Welsh writers in the early medieval period, before proceeding to consider English nomenclature and the important shift from Brit(t)ones to Walenses in the twelfth century. This shift is re-examined through the lens of the Vita Griffini, which reveals the political motivations behind the increasing focus on Wales and the Welsh. Despite this development in nomenclature, the island of Britain remained central to the identity of the Welsh. This is evident in vernacular texts, especially poetry, and this article explores the different names used in this context. It concludes with a brief foray into the early modern period, ultimately illustrating the continued relevance and significance of the identities fashioned in the early Middle Ages to writers in subsequent centuries.
Click here to read this article
King Alfred and the Opening of the Medieval Mind: A Cautionary Tale
By Erik Wade
Public Humanities
Abstract: The public humanities have shaped ideas about sex, race, and gender. This is a cautionary tale that points to the repeated problems of the model of public humanities as academics or elites dispensing knowledge to a public audience. King Alfred of England ordered a set of texts “most needful for all men to know” translated into English. Long celebrated in English history as an example of public education, these translations also put forward certain ideas about race and sexuality for the emerging English public, a reminder of the ideological function of the public humanities. Likewise, modern scholars worried about medieval and classical texts that depict homosexuality becoming available to the public, so they refused to translate them or altered them. As a counter to such models, I consider the seventh-century Archbishop Theodore, a Syrian-born ecclesiast who ran the English church and who provides a model of a collaborative public humanities in which lay people shape knowledge and law together. Their model of public humanities encourages us to explore the historical Black public and their contributions to medieval studies that academic medieval studies have ignored.
Click here to read this article
Gender, kinship, and other social predictors of incrimination in the inquisition register of Bologna (1291–1310): Results from an exponential random graph model
By David Zbíral, Katia Riccardo, Tomáš Hampejs, Zoltán Brys
PLoS ONE
Abstract: The medieval inquisition of heresy strongly relied on depositions, where witnesses were expected to report on the crimes of others and oneself. The resulting patterns of incrimination could be influenced by various factors, including the characteristics of the underlying dissident social network; the investigators’ choices and biases; the trial circumstances, some of which must have exerted considerable pressure upon deponents; and the deponents’ decisions to protect some suspects more than others. This case study aimed at disentangling selected social factors of incrimination in the register of the inquisition in Bologna, 1291–1310. We used social network analysis and, more specifically, an Exponential Random Graph Model (ERGM) to assess the influence of four social predictors: gender, churchperson status, membership of the urban “middle class”, and kinship ties between incriminators and the incriminated. To increase the validity of our results, we controlled for various trial circumstances and structural parameters of the incrimination network. Our model corroborated a tendency towards female-to-female incrimination, while we did not find any positive or negative tendency towards male-to-male incrimination. We identified no effect of churchperson status on incriminating, while we found that among Cathars, members of the middle class were more likely to be incriminated than people without this status. Our model also corroborated the tendency to incriminate one’s kinship group. Overall, our study underlines the relevance, but also the non-trivial operation, of social and demographic predictors in medieval heresy trials.
Click here to read this article
We found 47 open-access articles from February – you can get the full list by joining our Patreon – look for the tier that says Open Access articles in Medieval Studies.
See also our list of open-access articles from January
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