Giles E. M. Gasper and Svein H. Gullbekk, eds., Money and the Church in Medieval Europe, 1000–1200: Practice, Morality and Thought. (Religion and Money in the Middle Ages.) Farnham, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015. Pp. xii, 292; 21 color plates, 5 black-and-white figures, and 7 tables. $124.95. ISBN: 978-1-4724-2099-2.Table of contents available online at https://www.routledge.com/Money-and-the-Church-in-Medieval-Europe-1000-1200-Practice-Morality/Gasper-Gullbekk/p/book/9781472420992

Speculum ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 93 (3) ◽  
pp. 847-849
Author(s):  
Wolfgang Ernst
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Middle Ages

De Frédéric II à Rodolphe II: Astrologie, divination et magie dans les cours (XIIIe-XVIIe siècle), ed. Jean-Patrice Boudet, Martine Ostorero, and Agostino Paravicini Bagliani. Micrologus Library, 85. Florence: Sismel, Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2017, xxi, 432 pp.

Mediaevistik ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 435-436
Author(s):  
Albrecht Classen
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Difficult Situation ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Present Volume ◽  
Constant Tension ◽  
Entire Complex ◽  
Xviie Siecle ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Middle Ages

One of the most intriguing aspects pertaining to magic and astrology (not the same, of course, but closely related) in the Middle Ages proves to be the constant tension between black and white magic, between authorized magical work and condemnation of magical practices. The Church was in a very difficult situation in this regard, whereas worldly rulers tended to embrace magic much more openly and also pursued astrological operations with the help of hired experts. This entire complex is nicely addressed in the present volume, which contains the papers delivered at a symposium at the Université de Lausanne in October 2014.

Kinship in the City

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans Hummer
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Civic Life ◽  
City Of God ◽  
Social Form ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
Origin Myths ◽  
The City ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Middle Ages

This chapter examines the ancient traditions of thought bequeathed to the Middle Ages to show that in antiquity kinship was neither an object of analysis nor considered an elemental or primitive social form. Kinship did not loom large when the ancients pondered prehistory, neither in origin myths, nor in the philosophical works of Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine. What consumed them was human sociality in the preeminent mark of human civilization, the city. The fullest discussions of matters that we associate with kinship appear in discussions of civic life, where familial forms testify to the associative impulses inherent in friendship, rulership, and civic life. In his City of God, Augustine expressed a native view of kinship that became dominant in medieval Europe, that kinship is love and that humans instinctively multiply the bonds of kinship to extend the net of peace, a process perfected in the spiritual regeneration of the Church.

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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