Medieval Lives: Eight Charismatic Men and Women of the Middle Ages by Norman F. Cantor

Los siglos finales de la Edad Media vieron como nuevas modas en el vestir irrumpían en Europa con un ritmo cada vez más acelerado. Eran una de las manifestaciones de una sociedad más dinámica, que utilizaba la vestimenta como un código de comunicación privilegiado del estatus social y la pujanza económica y política. Sin duda, las cortes nobiliarias jugaron un importante papel en esa activación de la moda, pero el fenómeno alcanzó a buena parte de la población urbana y a las capas más acomodadas del campesinado, como lo demuestran las leyes suntuarias y la difusión del mercado de segunda mano. Hombres y mujeres rivalizaban por acceder a las novedades, que viajaban de un país a otro con cierta facilidad, sin que la indumentaria, no obstante, llegara a homogeneizarse del todo en el continente. De esta manera, el cuidado de la apariencia, y la constante adaptación a las novedades en el vestido, se convertirían ya entonces en acicates básicos para un nivel de consumo sostenido, que a la larga alentaría importantes mutaciones del sistema económico.PALABRAS CLAVE: Edad Media, moda, leyes suntuarias, consumo, gusto.ABSTRACTThe Late Middle Ages saw new fashions in clothing appearing in Europe with an increasingly frequent rhythm. These trends were one of the manifestations of a more dynamic society that used clothing as a privileged communication code of social status and economic and political importance. Noble courts no doubt played an important role in this activation of fashion, but the phenomenon reached a large part of the urban population and the more affluent layers of the peasantry, as evidenced by sumptuary laws and the spread of the second-hand market. Men and women competed for access to novelties, which travelled from one country to others quite easily, although clothing never became homogenous across the whole continent. Thus, the care of appearance, and the constant adaptation to new fashion trends, became two basic positive stimuli for a sustained consumption level, which, in the long run, promoted important changes in the economic system.KEY WORDS: Middle Ages, fashion, sumptuary laws, consumption, taste.

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Gender and The Christian Traditions

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199582174.013.011 ◽

2013 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Dyan Elliott

Keyword(s):

Middle Ages ◽

Female Body ◽

Social Roles ◽

Early Christianity ◽

Gender Issues ◽

Competing Values ◽

Men And Women ◽

And Behaviors ◽

The Middle Ages

Classical and medieval thinkers had much to say about gendered topics, including proper social roles and relationships for men and women, differing physical and psychological make-ups, and behaviors that might cause blurring between characteristics understood to belong to each sex. The theological arguments and pastoral direction of the Middle Ages relied heavily on precedents drawn from early Christianity, making an understanding of the apostolic and patristic periods essential when examining gender issues. This essay, therefore, addresses debates from both early Christianity and the central Middle Ages, concentrating primarily on discussions about the merits of virginity versus celibacy, but also treating discourse on "virile" women and the effects of the rediscovery of Aristotelian thought on ideas about procreation and the female body. Since these discussions often took place as their authors addressed contemporary crises, they offer an opportunity to examine Christian society's shifting, and often competing, values, especially those pertaining women.

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From England to France

10.23943/princeton/9780691164953.001.0001 ◽

2015 ◽

Author(s):

William Chester Jordan

Keyword(s):

Middle Ages ◽

Corporal Punishment ◽

Western Europe ◽

Legal Tradition ◽

Hundred Years War ◽

Men And Women ◽

English Law ◽

Shed Light ◽

The Middle Ages

At the height of the Middle Ages, a peculiar system of perpetual exile— or abjuration—flourished in western Europe. It was a judicial form of exile, not political or religious, and it was meted out to felons for crimes deserving of severe corporal punishment or death. This book explores the lives of these men and women who were condemned to abjure the English realm, and draws on their unique experiences to shed light on a medieval legal tradition until now very poorly understood. The book weaves an historical tapestry, examining the judicial and administrative processes that led to the abjuration of more than seventy-five thousand English subjects, and recounting the astonishing journeys of the exiles themselves. Some were innocents caught up in tragic circumstances, but many were hardened criminals. Almost every English exile departed from the port of Dover, many bound for the same French village, a place called Wissant. The book vividly describes what happened when the felons got there, and tells the stories of the few who managed to return to England, either illegally or through pardons. The book provides new insights into a fundamental pillar of medieval English law and shows how it collapsed amid the bloodshed of the Hundred Years' War.

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Gender in the Transition to Merchant Capitalism

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199582174.013.015 ◽

2013 ◽

Author(s):

Martha Howell

Keyword(s):

Gender Roles ◽

Early Modern ◽

Middle Ages ◽

Class Identity ◽

Men And Women ◽

The Public ◽

New Class ◽

And Gender ◽

Merchant Capitalism ◽

The Middle Ages

This essay argues that the slow transition from the commercial economy of the later Middle Ages to early modern merchant capitalism produced significant changes in gender roles and gender meanings for women and men from the middle and upper ranks of cities where commerce had found its most secure home. The changes in gender were filtered, however, through a public/private divide that had taken shape in such cities during the centuries closing the Middle Ages, making this a story not just about economy and gender, but also about sociopolitical space. As prosperous men and women in commercial cities of the era came to be newly positioned along the axis dividing the public from the private, both acquired a new class identity presaging much that would characterize bourgeois Europe.

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Représentations du corps ivre dans la littérature et la peinture hispaniques

Topiques, études satoriennes - Maître-disciple : une relation topique ◽

10.7202/1081521ar ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 5 ◽

pp. 17-26

Author(s):

Juan Ibeas ◽

Lidia Vazquez

Keyword(s):

Middle Ages ◽

21St Century ◽

Early Christianity ◽

Alcoholic Beverage ◽

Men And Women ◽

Religious Texts ◽

Pros And Cons ◽

Divine Origin ◽

Ideological Transformation ◽

The Middle Ages

Wine has been linked to Spanish culture since the time of the Romans and early Christianity. In Spain, a land of vines since antiquity, the representation of the drunken body in literature and painting is an omnipresent topos since the Middle Ages. The pros and cons of this are found in medical, philosophical, moral and religious texts, but especially in novels, which warn against excess. This article studies how Spanish painters and writers developed the imaginary of wine in all its forms, be they masculine or feminine, solar or twilight, enthusiastic or drowsy, in their reflections, in their drawings and paintings, in poems or novels, in order to transmit the ideological transformation that was going to occur in Spain around this drink. For only the artist seems to preserve the tradition of the divine origin of wine, reclaiming its thaumaturgical role thanks to the Bacchic nectar. Spanish men and women suffer or benefit from the virtues of wine, the main alcoholic beverage in Spain until the 21st century.

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Cults of Saints

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199582174.013.006 ◽

2013 ◽

Author(s):

Miri Rubin

Keyword(s):

Middle Ages ◽

Material Objects ◽

Religious Institutions ◽

Men And Women ◽

Early Christian ◽

Christian Communities ◽

Cult Of Saints ◽

The Middle Ages

The cult of saints in the Middle Ages is considered here through the operation of gender. Gender is shown to be have determined who was considered a saint, how holiness was pursued by individuals, described in hagiography, remembered, and approached. Early Christian communities admired heroic martyrdom in men and women, but medieval religious institutions offered men many more opportunities to develop saintly reputations: as bishops, hermits, and missionaries. With the growth of towns after the year 1100, niches developed for collective as well as individual holy lives for men and women, in households and neighborhoods; friars often appreciated and encouraged such lives, sometimes committing them to hagiography. Such writing about saints was a prolific genre, alongside the pilgrimage travelogue and miracles worked by saints at shrines. Gender, wealth and status determined the chances to encounter saints through pilgrimage, to possess hagiography, and to use material objects in devotion.

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Tristan the Artist in Gottfried's Poem

PMLA ◽

10.2307/460560 ◽

1962 ◽

Vol 77 (4-Part1) ◽

pp. 364-372 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

W. T. H. Jackson

Keyword(s):

Middle Ages ◽

Social Function ◽

Gottfried Von Strassburg ◽

Men And Women ◽

Arthurian Romance ◽

The Arts ◽

Grand Design ◽

Christian Men ◽

The Universe ◽

The Middle Ages

Although the thinkers of the Middle Ages il did not develop any theories about the function of the artist which can be compared with those of Plato or the Romantics, they had definite views on art and its relation to society. Art in its broadest sense had for them an ethical and social function which inevitably became part of the grand design of the universe. None of the great writers of romance is without consciousness of this function. In the creation of the Arthurian romance in particular they were fully aware of their responsibilities, but they interpreted them in differing ways. It seems to me that Gottfried von Strassburg realizes most fully the intellectual aspects of his responsibility and takes most note of the esthetic theories which justified the arts, and in particular music, as beneficial for Christian men and women and as leading towards that harmony of the spirit with the eternal which was regarded as the highest good.

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The Jews and Christian Apologetics After Theodosius I Cunctos Populos

Harvard Theological Review ◽

10.1017/s0017816000002273 ◽

1980 ◽

Vol 73 (3-4) ◽

pp. 451-471 ◽

Cited By ~ 6

Author(s):

Robert L. Wilken

Keyword(s):

Young People ◽

Middle Ages ◽

Past History ◽

Fourth Century ◽

New Age ◽

Men And Women ◽

John Chrysostom ◽

Christian Apologetics ◽

The Middle Ages

To the men and women of the Middle Ages the figure of Constantine loomed large over the fourth century. Born a pagan, he converted to Christianity and became the first Christian emperor, the convenor of councils, the defender of orthodoxy, the builder of churches, the herald of a new age, the founder of Christian Europe. But to the men and women of the later fourth century, the generation of John Chrysostom, it was not Constantine, but Julian, raised a Christian only to forsake his “hereditary piety,” Julian the pagan emperor, Julianus Apostata, whose deeds were alive in their memory. The age of Constantine was part of past history, but Julian's actions, abortive as they may have appeared to later generations, were still remembered not only by the old, says John Chrysostom, but also by the “young people” of our day.

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Introduction

The Lay Saint ◽

10.7591/cornell/9781501740206.003.0001 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 1-20

Author(s):

Mary Harvey Doyno

Keyword(s):

Middle Ages ◽

Convincing Evidence ◽

Men And Women ◽

Domestic Servants ◽

Early Christian ◽

The Church ◽

The Middle Ages

This introductory chapter provides an overview of lay saints. Between the twelfth and early fourteenth centuries, in the independent citizen-governed communes of Italy, numerous civic cults dedicated to contemporary laymen and laywomen appeared. Joining long-established cults for early Christian martyrs and holy bishops were new cults dedicated to midwives, goldsmiths, domestic servants, and merchants. These new cults promoted the idea that it was these laymen and laywomen who had lived model Christian lives and personified civic ideals. Although only one lay saint from the Italian communes would be canonized by the Roman church in the Middle Ages, the vitae, miracle collections, civic statutes, tombs, and altars dedicated to pious men and women provide convincing evidence that their cults were of great local importance. This book argues that the phenomenon of contemporary lay civic sanctity had a meaning and significance that went well beyond the confines of particular Italian cities. Moreover, it contends that the rise of lay sanctity in the Italian communes illuminates a complex debate that was taking place between the laity, the church, and civic authorities over the source of religious power and charisma.

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