Yolanda Plumley, Guiliano Di Bacco, and Stefano Jossa, eds., Citation, Intertextuality and Memory in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, vol. 1, Text, Music and Image from Machaut to Ariosto. (Exeter Studies in Medieval Europe.) Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 2011. Pp. xvi, 272; tables and 10 black-and-white figures. £75. ISBN: 978-0-85989-851-5.Table of contents available online at http://liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/products/59987 (accessed 12 July 2016)

Speculum ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 91 (4) ◽  
pp. 1155-1156
Author(s):  
Daisy Delogu
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
The Middle Ages

Visions of Kinship in Medieval Europe

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans Hummer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Social Mechanisms ◽  
Divine Love ◽  
Ethnographic Approach ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
High Middle Ages ◽  
The Middle Ages ◽  
Late Roman

What meaning did human kinship possess in a world regulated by biblical time, committed to the primacy of spiritual relationships, and bound by the sinews of divine love? In the process of exploring that question, this book offers a searching re-examination of kinship in Europe between late Roman times and the high Middle Ages, the period bridging Europe’s primitive past and its modern present. It critiques the modernist and Western bio-genealogical and functionalist assumptions that have shaped kinship studies since their inception in the nineteenth century, when biblical time collapsed and kinship became a signifier of the essential secularity of history and a method for conceptualizing a deeper prehistory guided by autogenous human impulses. It argues that this understanding of kinship is fundamentally antagonistic to medieval sentiments and is responsible for the frustrations researchers have encountered as they have tried to identify the famously elusive kin groups of medieval Europe. It delineates an alternative ethnographic approach inspired by recent anthropological work that privileges indigenous expressions of kinship and the interpretive potential of native ontologies. The book reveals that kinship in the Middle Ages was not biological, primitive, or a regulator of social mechanisms; nor is it traceable by bio-genealogical connections. In the Middle Ages kinship signified a sociality that flowed from convictions about the divine source of all things and wove together families, institutions, and divinities into an expansive eschatological vision animated by “the most righteous principle of love.”

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