Late Medieval

The very title of John Heywood’s interlude A Mery Play between Johan Johan, the Husband, Tyb  his Wife, and Sir Johan the Priest (in print by 1533) suggests a fabliaux-like, farcical intrigue, which can be enacted by three characters only: a hen-pecked husband, a shrewish wife and a parish priest, i.e. the wife’s lover. The play centres on the motif of eternal triangle, Tyb being at the heart of the whole intrigue and responsible for disrupting order within the household. This paper examines how the official ideology of household is subverted in the play, deals with carnivalesque empowerment of the female character which results from this subversion, shows how female rebellion is counterattacked with misogynist implications of the play, and, finally tries to hint at political implications the interlude might have had despite its entertaining and comic qualities.

This article aims to analyse how the Burgundian dukes managed to control the political process in Holland and Zeeland and get a grip on the noble elites of the counties in the period 1425-1477. During the fourteenth and fifteenth century, noble networks in Holland competed continuously for princely favours and official positions. In the Burgundian period, from 1425 onwards, some fundamental changes in this competition took place. In the Bavarian period princes normally favoured especially one of the competing networks. Moreover, the ruler was nearby and could be approached relatively easily. The Burgundian duke, however, hardly ever visited his northernmost territories. The rivalling noble networks were not integrated into the central institutions but were given material compensations and influence at a regional level in exchange for allegiance. Subsequently, in Holland and Zeeland the Burgundian court did not have a stabilising and integrating function.

In July 2010 an excavation was undertaken in the car park of the Masonic hall at Bawtry, South Yorkshire as part of a field school run by the Department of Archaeology, University of Sheffield, with support from Wessex Archaeology (Sheffield). The Masonic hall was the chapel of the medieval hospital of Bawtry, and the principal aim of the field school was to throw new light on the hospital and on the cemetery that was associated with it, which had been identified during excavations in 2006 and 2007. During the 2010 excavation, eighteen graves were identified, and subsequent analysis of both the articulated and disarticulated skeletal remains identified a minimum number of fifty three individuals. It was demonstrated that the cemetery served a broad cross-section of the population, which was relatively healthy. A radiocarbon date is awaited from one of the skeletons, but at this stage all of the evidence indicates that the burials were all of later medieval date. A small number of medieval artefacts were recovered, including a 13th-century coin, a copper-alloy plate (of a type used in medieval medicinal cures for damaged or infected joints) and the copper-alloy ferrule from the end of a walking stick. The remains of a late medieval wall were encountered running eastwards from the east wall of the Masonic hall; this wall was either the remains of a boundary wall or of a building, and it appears to be perpetuated into the 19th century, when a wall in a similar location is depicted on images of the chapel.

Published in "Nottingham Medieval Studies", L, 2006, pp. 59-114.
Contrary to assumed ideas, the support of inhabitants of the principality of Aquitaine to its prince Edward of Woodstock (nicknamed "the Black Prince" from the 16th century onwards) was more important than usually assumed, particularly in Poitou, Saintonge and Angoumois until the military defeat of the "Poitevins" in 1372, but also in other regions (ex. of the towns of Millau and Montauban). Similarly while the "City" of Limoges submitted to the French and was later sacked by the Black Prince's army on 19 September 1370, the "Castle" of Limoges, the main part of Limoges, remained faithful to the Prince until 1371. Several other examples demonstrate that the assumed ideas on a tyrannical rule of the English and the Black Prince in Aquitaine are to be seriously qualified or even refused.

"""Bodiam Castle, one of the most visually striking medieval castles in England, is situated in East Sussex on the river Rother, near Robertsbridge. In 1385 Sir Edward Dallingridge (c.1364-1393) was licensed to ‘strengthen with a wall of stone and lime and crenellate and construct and make into a castle his manor house at Bodyham [Bodiam], near the sea in the county of Sussex, for defence of the adjacent county and resistance to our enemies’.  This licence was issued at a particularly turbulent time in English history. England faced the threat of invasion from France and internal conflict during the reign of Richard II. However, interpretations of the function and purpose of the castle have been deeply divisive in the field of castle studies over the course of the last two decades. In the absence of documentary sources, with the exception of the licence to crenellate, attention has focused on the architectural evidence for the castle. The traditional view, as characterised by Thompson, is that Bodiam Castle was built to provide protection for the nearby coastal towns of Rye and New Winchelsea, which were navigable from Bodiam via the river Rother. 

However, since the 1990s, a new consensus on castle studies, particularly following from the work of Charles Coulson, using the evidence of licences to crenellate, claims that castle architecture in the Late Medieval Period was primarily motivated by symbolism and status.  In his view, Bodiam has weak defensive features, such as an easy-to-drain moat, badly situated gun-ports, and thin walls, with the military themed architecture intended to convey a ‘message of power and deterrence’ through the studied exaggeration of features of defensive origin.  In Coulson’s opinion, Dallingridge was a newcomer to the area, who needed to compensate for his lack of pedigree; by constructing a magnificent looking castle he was able to promote his wealth and social standing.  This interpretation is contested by Platt, who stresses that Bodiam Castle was intended to serve a military purpose, but other authors, such as Creighton and Liddiard, have sought to move away from the ‘war or status’ debate. 

The most contentious issue regarding Bodiam Castle has centred on Dallingridge’s motivation in building the castle. Why would a member of the gentry build such an impressive castle at this particular time in Southern England?  In the absence of other evidence, the study of Dallingridge’s life is important in understanding why Bodiam Castle was built. Previous studies on Bodiam Castle have been rather superficial in their treatment of Dallingridge, which has tended to reflect their views on the motivation for its construction; for instance, by laying emphasis on his social aspirations or his military career. This article will examine Dallingridge’s life to see what insights it provides into the circumstances in which Bodiam was built in the late fourteenth century. By looking at his family background, military career, political career and his financial holdings, it will show that the motivation for the construction of Bodiam Castle was influenced by the turbulent events of 1385, and served as a visual demonstration of Dallingridge’s social standing in east Sussex."""

Whereas tournaments of the late thirteenth century were infused with cross-channel contact, whether in reciprocity of form or in the international composition of the participants involved, by the early fifteenth century, tournament forms in England and the Netherlands had significantly diverged. As has been thoroughly explored by recent historians, English tournaments became increasingly socially exclusive, whilst retaining an international dimension in the interests of diplomacy. However, this essay demonstrates that this development was by no means typical of all late medieval tournaments. The case of the Low Countries demonstrates that the more socially inclusive style tournaments did continue into the fifteenth century, and provided an opportunity for the ducal household and noblemen to come into contact with patrician townspeople and even more diverse urban audiences.

Giovanni Visconti ottiene la cattedra ambrosiana nel 1342. A quella data egli, vescovo di Novara (1331-1342), ha già, da alcuni anni, riedificato sontuosamente il palazzo arcivescovile di Milano. Si tratta forse di un caso unico. Giovanni dagli inizi del quarto decennio del secolo è amministratore dei beni e delle giurisdizioni della mensa milanese, grazie a un accordo con il pontefice che gli consente di tenere in "esilio", in quanto avversario politico, il presule, il frate Minore Aicardo da Camodeia, a cui è lasciato il governo spirituale della diocesi. Il Visconti non si accontenta però di godere di tali rendite (e di detenere castelli e giurisdizioni ecclesiastici), ma intraprende questa e altre iniziative che, ben oltre la corretta, normale amministrazione patrimoniale, segnalano abitualmente l'eccezionalità, o comunque la rilevanza, dell'azione di un vescovo medievale. Senza però essere il vescovo. È una circostanza che merita di essere approfondita, perché segnale di un atteggiamento nei confronti della "propria" Chiesa, da parte di una signoria in faticosa stabilizzazione, per la quale si rivelano insufficienti le consuete categorie dello "sfruttamento" o dell'appropriazione dei beni ecclesiastici( 1 ).

There was nothing second-rate about the English way of war in the Late Middle Ages, argues Tobias Capwell, Curator of Arms and Armour at London’s Wallace Collection, in a major new study published late last year. The early 15th-century English warrior was at the forefront of military innovation. And the key to success was combined-arms tactics.

Nesta dissertação pretendemos estudar o funcionamento e as dinâmicas
portuárias de Cascais durante a expansão marítima portuguesa Quatrocentista, altura em que esta vila já se distinguia como centro económico exportador de um pequeno
hinterland onde se destacavam as produções provenientes de Colares e de Sintra.
Será dada especial atenção às vertentes de apoio à navegação e defesa costeira.
Neste sentido, e face às condicionantes geográficas, veremos as águas de Cascais como escala quase que obrigatória para todo o movimento marítimo com destino a Lisboa e o seu território como parte integrante de um complexo defensivo que se estendia de Sintra até à capital do Reino, o qual terá começado a ganhar forma durante o período de ocupação islâmica da Península Ibérica.

In this dissertation we intend to study the working methods and dynamics of the port of Cascais throughout the maritime expansion of the fifteenth century, when this community was the economic and trade centre of a small hinterland with most of the output coming from the region of Colares and Sintra.
Special attention will be given to the navigation support and coastal defence dimensions. In this sense, and in view of the geographical constraints, we will see Cascais waters as a mandatory stopover for all maritime motion with destination to Lisbon and its territory as a part of a defensive complex that extended itself from Sintra to the capital of the Kingdom, which had started to take shape during the Islamic occupation of the Iberian Peninsula.

In the “calamitous” 14th century, as Barbara Tuchman called it in her classic „A Distant Mirror“ (1978) , the medieval world entered a period of severe crisis in demography, economy, politics and religion. This crisis took hold in all regions, ranging from China in the East to England in the West. Even before the catastrophic pandemic of the Black Death (1346-1352), deteriorating climatic conditions had ended the period of demographic and economic expansion that began in the 10th century.
The local and regional impacts and consequences of these general potentially crisis-laden conditions may have differed; outcomes ranged from actual societal collapse to the emergence of powerful new polities – while Byzantium´s power dwindled away, Hungary entered a period of strong rulership and external power in the reign of Louis I of Anjou (1342-1382), for instance. But these conditions provide a framework for global perspective on this period and allow us to use the 14th century-crisis as a field of “natural experiments of history”, as Jared Diamond and James A. Robinson have called them ; accordingly, we analyse how similar crisis phenomena influenced the development of societies with different (or similar) traditions, religions, institutions, geographies or ecologies.
In order to be able to capture the local variations and complexities, we adopt concepts and tools provided by the field of complexity science. Mono-causal or linear explanations are inadequate for the analysis and the description of crisis, transformation or collapse of pre-modern polities. Within this framework, complex systems are understood as large networks of individual components, whose interactions at the microscopic level produce “complex” changing patterns of behaviour of the whole system on the macroscopic level. In the last decades, historians and social scientists who became interested in complexity theory tried to use its concepts and terminology for the conceptualisation and description of phenomena in their own fields, but often only in a “metaphoric” way. Less frequently, though, historians have tried to make use of the mathematical foundations of complexity theory or of quantitative tools provided by this field. Recent scholarship has implemented some of these tools especially for the construction of macro-models of socio-economic development. While these studies help us construct analytical tools for the macro-level of our own research, they run the same risk as earlier scholarship of neglecting complex variations at the local and regional levels.
Therefore, we combine complexity theory with the analytical framework of „systems theory“ developed by the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann in order to capture the interveawements between politics, economy and religion within a polity and with the political, economic and ecological environment. In addition, we employ the methods and tools of network analysis, which allow us to capture, analyse and model linkages and cause-effect correlations in society, economy, politics and religion on the macro- and micro-level down to groups and individuals.
Overall, as a complement to earlier studies our analytical
approach shall allow us to capture the “diversité véritable” of our period without losing track of essential commonalities (the “strange parallels”, as Victor Liebermann has called them in his remarkable study on Southeast Asia in Global Context, 2009 ) of this “first world crisis” across all cultures and societies. The scientic value of this approach will be demonstrated for some specific cases.

A key strand of research for social and economic historians of the pre-industrial period is the relationship between city and countryside. Sometimes urban and rural environments enjoyed mutually beneficial relationships, though in other cases cities reduced their rural hinterlands to poverty and decay – the question is, why? By focusing on late-medieval Florence and Tuscany, this paper moves away from approaching this question through an ‘urban bias’, and suggests the answers can be found within the structural configuration of rural societies themselves. Essentially, some rural regions were well set up to repel urban predatory tendencies, while other societies were susceptible to exploitation.

Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, Gran Capitán de los ejércitos españoles, destacó por mantener la fidelidad a la misión, por la aplicación deliberada de la violencia a gran escala como resorte para mover voluntades propias o del enemigo. Impuso en Europa la forma de guerrear característica en Granada, de ardides, escaramuzas y emboscadas.
Procuró que los combatientes armados de distinta manera  se complementaran en sus capacidades, formando  agrupamientos tácticos, base de los Tercios, dominadores de los campos de batalla europeosdurante siglo y medio.
Sus enseñanzas sobre el aprovechamiento del terreno pasaron a convertirse en algo básico de la praxis militar; llevó a Italia la sorpresa para multiplicar la eficacia de sus fuerzas, y con ello devolvió a la guerra europea uno de sus principios fundamentales, mereciendo por ello un puesto entre los grandes jefes militares de la Historia.

The Burgundian duke Charles the Bold (1433-1477) was not particularly well known for his liberality. According to De Barante, the nineteenth century historian of the Burgundian dukes, he was seen by his officers and the nobles as ‘bien avare et peu liberal pour un prince si jeune et si nouveau’. One of this article’s purposes is to investigate this claim, but my larger concern is to make sense of the patterns of gift-giving evidenced by the available sources. Although we do not have complete records of all Charles’s gift giving, the account of the highest financial officer, the argentier, combined with the household ordinances and a few narrative sources, provide a good overview of the importance and nature of gift-giving in Charles’s court. These texts reveal a charged and unstable culture of gift-giving, one in which the category of ‘gift’ itself is in some disarray and where bureaucratic pressures both distort the gift and ntensify Charles’s need to deploy gifts in order to secure his power.

The prestigious and exceptional characterization of Hildegard von Bingen, promoted for at least the past century, and popularized within the past few decades, has become the standard expectation in most textbooks and curriculums on Medieval Music. Some questions arise against many historians" claims however. While there might be many surviving chants of Hildegard, possibly numbering more than any other single contemporary individual, this claim seems to propose that there was no other individual writing significant amounts of innovative monophonic liturgical music during this time. However, evidence available to musicologists for the past fifty years would indicate otherwise. Music by such 12 th century composers as Hermannus Contractus clearly shows evidence for an extremely prolific and progressive monophonic compositional style at least fifty years before Hildegard von Bingen. This evidence suggests that the musically historical position that historians have given Hildegard von Bingen is perhaps over inflated and ultimately incorrect, neglecting the novel innovations of composers a generation before her time.

From 4 to 7 May 1439 a massive tournament (235 participants) was organized at the Grote Markt in Brussels, in which the Burgundian duke Philip the Good himself participated. This tournament was maybe one of the last in the massive (urban) melee-style in the fifteenth century. This article demonstrates that both the town and the duke had an interest in the organization of this tournament. The duke and his household officers were happy to exhibit the splendor of the court to the citizens of Brussels, the nobility of Brabant and the international community. The town considered the tournament as a stimulus for the local economy. At the same time the chivalric event would position Brussels as an attractive residence for the Burgundian duke.

Memorie Domenicane si avvale di una direzione scientifica collegiale. I contributi degli autori, che pervengono alla redazione, prima di essere pubblicati sono sottoposti al previo esame da parte di uno o più membri della direzione. Memorie Domenicane is governed by an Editorial Advisory Board. Upon submission, all manuscripts are reviewed for acceptance by one or more members of the Editorial Advisory Board.

In this report new findings and interpretations on the late medieval Beluga Ship are presented, which was discovered 2007 in Bremen, Germany. Particularly new dendrological results have shed an interesting light on the inconspicuous remains, which samples fall into two groups: an earlier of high quality timber cut in Livonia in the course of the 14th century, and a group of locally cut timber, dating into the second quarter of the 15th century. The first are interpreted here as imported timber and the latter as subsequent repairs, which were carried out locally before the ship was eventually scrapped on Bremen's historical shipbuilding site, the „Teerhof “, literally 'tar yard'. With an entirely clinker-built hull with iron rivets, cleft planks and wool caulking, it bears several characteristics that are reminiscent of Scandinavian shipbuilding.

This essay is focused on the Barrai family, a group of stonecutters operating in Cagliari between 15th and 16th centuries. The family played a leading role in the construction and diffusion of star-shaped rib vaults in the late Sardinian 16th centuries religious architecture. The study attempts to systematize available evidence and information about the Barrai family in order to provide a starting point for further investigation. New hypotheses about the family’s genealogy and activity during the second half of the 16th century are also explored.

Bribirska glavica, view from the north Eastern rampart of Liburnian and Roman Varvaria The fort from the time of the Venetian-Ottoman wars Australian Ambassador Ms Susan Cox visiting Bribir in 2014. Publisher: Museum of Croatian Archaeological Monuments, 2015. / www: mhas-split.hr Author: Ante Milošević Photographs: Zoran Alajbeg, photo collection of MGŠ, photo collection of MHAS Drawings: Darko Popovič Translation: Graham McMaster Prepress: Neven Marin Printing: Dalmacijapapir d.o.o. -Split Print order: 500 copies

Published in the "Journal of Medieval Military History", vol. 9 (2011). It has obtained the John Gillingham Price from the  American society "De Re Militari".
It is about the three major offensives led by the French armies against "English" Aquitaine-Gascony between 1404 and 1407 who had been inspired by the duke of Orléans, brother of King Charles VI of France. Despite a lack of support from England, the Gascons of the English party succeeded to resist and maintain their autonomy. This study is based on a large range of sources kept both in France and England.

This article treats the first entry of a new prince as the start of a series of exchanges between the prince and his subjects. On the occasion of an entry, gifts in all kind of forms, subsistence, luxury and symbolic goods, were exchanged with the intention of establishing a bond between the new ruler and the subjects. These gifts were not standardized in the Burgundian Low Countries. There was a wide range of gifts, from wine to silverware and from money to horses. Some gifts can be linked to the princely right of lodging in places he passed on his itinerary, whereas others refer to marks of honour offered by the host. However, not all gifts were given spontaneously, but were the result of a negotiating process between the town and the prince’s officials on the one hand and between the different towns of a principality on the other. Those officials benefited as well from entry gifts that trickled down to lower levels in the official hierarchy. Therefore, the gifts can be considered as personalized items in a bigger process of exchange and as a confirmation of the outcome of political negotiations.

The Register of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, which contains many valuable documents of the period 1315-1402, is one of the most important sources for the (church) history of this time of renewed Muslim expansion at Byzantium's cost. In this paper it will be analyzed how Islam is being described in those documents in regard to the terminology and the framework of traditional Byzantine polemics. A further topic is the reaction of the Byzantine laymen but also of the lower and high clerics to the Islamic expansion - whether in form of confrontation, collaboration, or even conversion. (The slides for the presentation of the paper are in the talks section of my academia.edu-website).

The book series Springer Water comprises a broad portfolio of multi-and interdisciplinary scientific books, aiming at researchers, students, and everyone interested in water-related science. The series includes peer-reviewed monographs, edited volumes, textbooks, and conference proceedings. Its volumes combine all kinds of water-related research areas, such as: the movement, distribution and quality of freshwater; water resources; the quality and pollution of water and its influence on health; the water industry including drinking water, wastewater, and desalination services and technologies; water history; as well as water management and the governmental, political, developmental, and ethical aspects of water.

On 3 August 1460, King James II of Scotland was killed by a gun whilst besieging the English-held castle of Roxburgh. He did not die as a result of gunfire by the defenders of Roxburgh however.  Instead he was killed by a fragment of his own bombard, a Flemish gun called ‘The Lion’, which burst under the strain of firing.  In the words of the sixteenth century Scottish chronicler, Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie, the arrival of Scottish reinforcements:

The analysis is directed at grammars used in 15th century Hungary. In this period, there were marked changes in the area of available grammars: besides the antique–late antique grammars (Donatus and Priscian) and then medieval grammars and vocabularies, first in Italy and later beyond the Alps too gradually new grammatical-rhetorical works meeting Renaissance and Humanist ideals started to appear (Guarino Veronese, Lorenzo Valla, Niccolò Perotti, Giovanni Sulpizio, Antonio Mancinelli, etc.).

In this article I give a comprehensive view of the relationship between Margaret of York (1446-1503), the wife of the Burgundian duke Charles the Bold, and Voorne, from 1477 onwards her dower lands in the south of the county of Holland. I will concentrate on three different aspects of this relationship. First, I will demonstrate the economic importance of the isle for the duchess. At the same time I will show the interests of the inhabitants of Voorne and explain how they benefited from the patronage of their new lady. Finally, I will treat Margaret’s charitable and devotional works on the isle. I will demonstrate how these fit into a pious tradition of the lords of Voorne on the one hand and into the devotional practises of Margaret and other members of the Burgundian-Habsburg dynasty on the other.

"Along with Hadewijch and Marguerite Porete Mechthild (of Magdeburg) is considered one of prime representatives of those Beguine Mystics who have also been literarily productive. While her exceptional position in literary history is not at issue, her perception as a beguine is more questionable, for it is primarily based on a particular reading of the "Flowing Light of the Godhead". This reading seems to be problematic from the perspective of current literary studies. Outlining the history of scholarship on the question of Mechthild’s religious status, the paper shows in a first step why some of the assumptions are questionable. Using an alternative approach the paper will then discuss Mechthild’s status by analyzing the reception of the "Flowing Light of the Godhead" and its translation in Latin ("Lux divinitatis").

Zusammen mit Hadewijch und Marguerite Porete gilt Mechthild (von Magdeburg) als eine der wichtigsten Vertreterinnen der auch literarisch produktiv gewordenen Beginenmystik. Auch wenn ihre exzeptionelle Stellung in der Literaturgeschichte nicht zur Debatte steht, darf nicht übersehen werden, dass Mechthilds Wahrnehmung als Begine an einem bestimmten Punkt der wissenschaftlichen Beschäftigung mit dem "Fließenden Licht" erfolgte und sich einer aus germanistischer Sicht nicht unproblematischen Lektüre des Textes verdankt. Dies soll in einem ersten Schritt aufgrund einer forschungsgeschichtlichen tour d’horizon aufgezeigt werden, um anschließend die Frage nach Mechthilds religiösem Status unter Einbeziehung der Überlieferung des "Fließenden Lichts" und seiner lateinischen Übersetzung ("Lux divinitatis") rezeptionsgeschichtlich zu perspektivieren."

Contents:

- Einige Grundlagen der (Historischen) Sozialen Netzwerkanalyse

- Vom historischen Dokument zum Netzwerk

- Das Individuum im Zentrum – Ego-Netzwerke in Byzanz

- Die Verflechtungen innerhalb einer Institution – Netzwerke der Interaktion in der Synode von Konstantinopel und ihre zeitliche Dynamik

- Die Ungleichverteilung von Netzwerkverbindungen – das Geflecht der spätbyzantinischen Aristokratie
-
Ein kurzer Ausblick: die Erfassung des Raumes – der geographische Aspekt von Netzwerken

- Zusammenfassung