Local Networks and Witness Subscriptions in Early Medieval Ravenna

STUDIA UNIVERSITATIS, THEOLOGIA ORTHODOXA,, 2020

Ravenna and the Traditions of Late Antique and Early Byzantine Craftsmanship, 2020

This article discusses the structural elements of Ravenna's society in Late Antiquity, through five key factors, namely: (1) environment and demography; (2) the long-lasting consequences of the establishment in the city of the imperial court; (3) its episcopate; (4) the transformations resulting from the Byzantine conquest of the city in 540; (5) the features, in Ravenna, of an economic organization that we could qualified as a late antique one. In the model of economic operation offered by Ravenna in Late Antiquity, the state played a key role. The city needed to turn to external sources of supply (Istria,

2012

The present contribution starts from the debate about kinship as a social institution in medieval Europe initiated by Jack Goody's pioneering anthropological work in the 1980s and drawn upon by historians and anthropologists alike. We focus on the aspect of the allegedly systematic separation of kinship from the organization of memory of the dead brought about by the establishment of Christianity. However, throughout the European Middle Ages families did not completely cede memorial tasks to religious institutions. Rather, they reaffirmed memorial bonds to religious institutions by legal arrangements and through family members within these communities, just as kinship continued to play a key role in medieval political organization. Given their social heterogeneity medieval cities provide a rich documentation of networks across ties of family, kinship, friends, and clients that intersected with more institutionalized communities (parish churches, monasteries, hospitals). People bestowed economic benefits on these communities in return for their members' "eternal" prayer for the donators' souls. This created mutual bonds both between kin and religious communities. The ensuing forms of belonging were part of a more complex frame of social exchange, as families used the same institutions as "hubs" to corroborate social and political relations to their peers. These bonds would intersect with ties between representatives of kin groups with positions in key political organizations such as city councils. A further clue to understanding these relations is gender. Economic transactions and related memorial practices feature a considerable number of female actors underlining the salience of bilateral kin relations and practices of property devolution.

2013

This article proposes a model of political friendship in the European Middle Ages drawn from current research into medieval friendship networks. It reviews the main interpretive and methodological developments in network studies for this period, now emerging as a distinct research area from the more established fields of the theory and philosophy of friendship and the study of particular relationships and their emotional content. Recent research proposes friendship as a distinct category of social and political relations separate from patronage, kinship and other bonds, in ways which mark a break from earlier, anthropologically-based approaches. Medieval friendship was a formal, public bond to which collective and institutional relationships were integral and which was emotional but not private or individualistic. Trust-building is proposed as an interpretive framework which can account for the historical evidence of friendships in practice in ways which established models of spirit...

2003

Acknowledgements List of plates, figures and tables The construction of communities and the persistence of paradox: an introduction Walter Pohl Structures and resources of power in early medieval Europe Dick Harrison Gens. Terminology and perception of the 'Germanic' peoples from late Antiquity to the early Middle Ages Hans-Werner Goetz The refugees and evacuees in the age of migrations Wolf Liebeschuetz The 'gold hoards' of the early migration period in south-eastern Europe and the late Roman Empire Michael Schmauder Th enomad's greed for gold: from the fall of the Burgundians to the Avar treasure Matthias Hardt Alaricus rex: legitimizing a Gothic king Hagith Sivan Changes in the topography of power: from civitates to urbes regia in Hispania, Gisela Ripoll Deconstructing the Merovingian family Ian Wood Hair, sacrality and symbolic capital in the Frankish kingdoms Maximilian Diesenberger The ritual significance of vesels in the formation of Merovingian Christian ...

Medieval merchants and money: Essays in honour of James L. Bolton, 2016

Intersticios Sociales, 2017

El artículo presenta la reflexión metodológica y los resultados del enfoque que he aplicado para comprender los procesos sociales y políticos presentes en una fuente textual. El tema sobre el que se fundó el estudio fueron las interacciones entre los actores sociales tal como se desarrollan en una narrativa histórica. Un enfoque relacional puede contribuir a la comprensión de las narrativas y su utilidad histórica, y las dos preguntas principales rectoras de mi investigación fueron: 1) ¿Cómo extraer datos relacionales y construir redes que representan la información contenida en una fuente narrativa; y 2) ¿qué nos dicen las redes así construidas sobre el significado y las implicaciones del espacio social presente en el mensaje? Con el fin de concentrarme en la información sociológicamente relevante que el texto ofrece, ‘traduje’ un informe retórico en un conjunto relacional de datos. El primer paso de este esfuerzo consistió en trasladar una estructura textual en una construcción sociológica, es decir, en un conjunto de datos socio-relacionales. Los conjuntos de datos narrativos proporcionaron una serie de sociomatrices narrativas listas para ser analizadas a través de herramientas analíticas de redes. De éstos, el uso e interpretación de las medidas de centralidad resultó ser uno de los enfoques más fructíferos para comprender las dimensiones sociales del texto. Medidas de centralidad y prestigio resultaron útiles al explorar las interacciones narrativas de comunicación e influencia social. Este estudio intenta demostrar que, a través de un enfoque relacional, se puede superar la brecha entre los puntos de vista cognitivo y estructural y, por lo tanto, avanzar hacia una mejor comprensión de las construcciones sociales ‘entre líneas’ de una fuente histórica textual.

Medieval Church Studies, 2017

Golden Middle Ages in Europe: New Research into Early-Medieval Communities and Identities. Edited by Annemarieke Willemsen and Hanneke Kik. Brepols. 2015. 168pp. €59.00. This volume represents a collection of studies first presented at the second Dorestad Congress, which accompanied the 2014 exhibition 'Golden Middle Ages: The Netherlands in the Merovingian World, 400-700 AD' held at the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden. The articles contained within all sit somewhere between the breadth suggested by the volume's title and the narrower focus suggested by the title of the congress and exhibition. Most of the articles are about either Dorestad itself (in the final section), or Frisia and the Low Countries area, and there are also articles on connections with the North Sea world, though nothing outside northwest Europe. This range serves to provide the volume with a coherent if slightly ill-defined focus, which is consolidated by the concentration of most of the articles on archaeological matters and the division of the book into three sections: 'Settlements and Cemeteries', 'Material Culture' and 'New Research on Dorestad'. While all the contributions are worthy of consideration, for reasons of space I shall focus only on two from each section here, before concluding with some thoughts on the volume as a whole. I should note at the outset of this review that I am not an archaeologist by training, and have approached this book primarily through the lens of assessing its accessibility to a literary historian. The first section, 'Settlements and Cemeteries', is the least cohesive of the three, and contains: an interesting survey of the evidence for linguistic diversity in the early medieval Low Countries by Michiel de Vaan (which, it must be noted, it about neither settlements nor cemeteries); two articles-by Annemarieke Willemsen and Johan Nicolay respectively-on the thorny subject of royalty in the early medieval Low Countries (and the Rhineland); and a multi-authored survey of the archaeological work undertaken at Borgharen, a listed monument near Maastricht containing a Roman villa and a Merovingian cemetery. Willemsen and Nicolay challenge, in different ways, perceptions and assumptions about early medieval 'royalty' and 'upper classes'. Willemsen demonstrates that there is often little to distinguish between graves which have been termed 'royal', 'princely' or simply 'high status', and that, in most cases, 'royal' graves cannot be linked to any rulers known from the literary record, with the grave of Childeric I representing an important exception. Nicolay, meanwhile, presents a response to the influential construction by Pieter Boeles of the idea of 'Frisia Magna', the

Late Roman History Seminar, University of Oxford, 30 October 2014