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This book provides an overarching, comprehensive analysis of the French military in the medieval period. The focus is on the armies of the French monarchy and the lands close around them, extending from the Low Countries to Provence. Central themes include recruitment and payment; military organisation; leadership, strategy, and tactics; weapons and arms; chivalry, military culture, and the rise of military professionalism.

Este artículo explorará desde la historia social de las mentalidades una de las formas más notorias de celebración fúnebre en el reino de Galicia durante la Edad Media: los banquetes funerarios. Y lo hará desde la perspectiva de la larga duración, considerando en espacio, tiempo y forma el camino transcurrido entre dos fuentes que los documentan para todo el período: los Capitula Martini, del II concilio de Braga, en el año 572; y la pragmática de los Reyes Católicos que reglamenta para Galicia la celebración de los llamados mortuorios, en 1495. Desde ambas, certificaremos la celebración de unos prandia ad defunctorum en el noroeste como solemnidad cristianizada desde la tradición imperial, y la pervivencia de estas formas conmemorativas luctuosas hasta constituir un comportamiento documentable a finales del siglo XV. Un camino en el cual marcaremos además el cambio que tales celebraciones experimentan: de un culto altomedieval vinculado a lo espiritual y cultual, a una práctica más relacionada con la diferenciación social de los grupos familiares en la baja Edad Media.

The Peace of God was one of the most important movements of the Middle Ages, yet is highly contested. It has been seen as both radically innovative and fundamentally traditional; as millenarian and not millenarian; as a popular movement and as a way of consolidating power for the elites. Geoffrey Koziol argues for the validity of all these differing viewpoints, because specific instantiations of the Peace of God varied greatly, and there were inherent contradictions in early ideas of peace and peace-making.

The aim of this English-language series on medieval studies is to establish a methodical, discerning connection between text analysis and cultural history.  The series addresses the fundamental cultural themes of the medieval world from the perspective of literary studies and the humanities. These fundamental themes are the culture-formative conceptualizations, world views, social structures and everyday conditions of medieval life, namely, childhood and old age, sexuality, religion, medicine, rituals, work, poverty and wealth, superstition, earth and cosmos, city and country, war, emotions, communication, travel etc. Fundamentals of Medieval Culture  pursues important current discussions in the field and provides a forum for interdisciplinary medieval research. The series is open to anthologies as well as monographs. The aim of the series is to present compendium-like works on the central topics of medieval cultural history that provide a sound overview of a limited subject area from the perspective of various disciplines. On the whole, the series thus presents an encyclopedia of medieval literary and cultural history and its main topics.

Abstract World societies can often be characterized by their attitude towards elderly and illness. It is well known that most cultures were concerned about those who were not able to produce and take care of themselves. This brings to the development of social processes that involve such individuals within the community, resulting in groups who stick together, and at last, ensuring the survival of the group. The contextualization of many of those social processes might be studied through Physical Anthropology and Paleopathology. This paper presents tomb 05 (T-05) as a new case of probable tuberculosis in Toledo from the medieval maqbara of the Roman Circus that provides new paleoanthropological data to understand the treatment given to sick people in a sparsely studied context.

The article deals with the formation of sacred music by Christians in the early Middle Ages. Basing on the historical sources and scientific literature, the authors show a connection between the musical traditions of Rome, the Western Goths of Spain and the empire of Charlemagne. The teaching of professional church singers, the birth of Mass, the complexity of the musical pattern of Christian singing, the educational ideas of Isidore of Seville and Alcuin of York, the metriz school timely opened by Christian mentors – all of it contributed to the formation of the early medieval educational process. Alcuin is the author of many (about 380) Latin instructive, panegyric, hagiographic, and liturgical poems (among the most famous are The Cuckoo (lat. De cuculo) and The Primate and Saints of the York Church (lat. De pontificibus et sanctis Ecclesiae Eboracensis )). Alcuin also wrote puzzles in poetry and prose. Alkuin conducted the extensive correspondence (with Charles the Great, Anguilbert, Pope Leo III and many others, a total of 232 letters to various people); Alcuin's letters are an important source on the history of the Carolingian society. At the Palace Academy, Alquin taught trivium and quadrivia elements; in his work On True Philosophy, he restored the scheme of the seven liberal arts, following Kassiodor’s parallel between the seven arts and the seven pillars of the temple of Wisdom of Solomon. He compiled textbooks on various subjects (some in a dialogical form). The Art of Grammar (lat. Ars grammatica) and the Slovene of the Most Noble Young Man Pipin with Albin Scholastic (Lat. Disputatio regalis et nobilissimi juvenis Pippini cum Albino scholastico) became very famous. Alcuin’s textbooks on dialectics, dogmatics, rhetoric, and liturgy are also known.

El presente artículo tiene como objeto contribuir al conocimiento de la religiosidad bajomedieval castellana y dilucidar las actitudes ante la muerte del hombre medieval. Con el propósito de esclarecer la mentalidad de los miembros privilegiados de la sociedad seguntina bajomedieval, tanto de laicos como de eclesiásticos, hemos analizado un grupo de testamentos conservados en el Archivo de la Catedral de Sigüenza de los siglos XIII, XIV y XV. Gracias a estos documentos oficiales podemos acercarnos a las concepciones sobre la vida y la muerte que imperaban en dicho contexto. En los testamentos quedan codificados los ritos y actitudes que el hombre utilizaba para transitar de la vida terrenal al más allá y  alcanzar la tan ansiada Salvación Eterna.This article contributes to the knowledge of Castilian medieval religious belief and to explain the attitudes of medieval man towards death. It aims at shedding light on the mentality of the privileged members of late medieval Sigüenza, both lay and clergymen, by studying a collection of wills preserved in the Sigüenza Cathedral Archive from the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Through these official documents we can begin to discern the ideas regarding life and death that prevailed in this context. These wills establish models of rites and attitudes that people adopted in order to go from earthly life to the afterlife and to reach the much-coveted eternal salvation.

New research methods allow us to explore how relics of the material culture of the medieval north can confront, corroborate, or disprove the depiction of social norms in the Old Norse-Icelandic literary corpus, which remains the most important source of our present-day knowledge of social development in the Viking Age and medieval Scandinavia. This interdisciplinary volume considers in depth how social values such as reputation, honour, and friendship, were integral to the development of rituals, customs, religion, literature, and language in the medieval North.

Clothing, jewelry, animal remains, ceramics, coins, and weaponry are among the artifacts that have been discovered in graves in Gaul dating from the fifth to eighth century. Those who have unearthed them, from the middle ages to the present, have speculated widely on their meaning. This authoritative book makes a major contribution to the study of death and burial in late antique and early medieval society with its long overdue systematic discussion of this mortuary evidence. Tracing the history of Merovingian archaeology within its cultural and intellectual context for the first time, Effros exposes biases and prejudices that have colored previous interpretations of these burial sites and assesses what contemporary archaeology can tell us about the Frankish kingdoms. Working at the intersection of history and archaeology, and drawing from anthropology and art history, Effros emphasizes in particular the effects of historical events and intellectual movements on French and German antiquarian and archaeological studies of these grave goods. Her discussion traces the evolution of concepts of nationhood, race, and culture and shows how these concepts helped shape an understanding of the past. Effros then turns to contemporary multidisciplinary methodologies and finds that we are still limited by the types of information that can be readily gleaned from physical and written sources of Merovingian graves. For example, since material evidence found in the graves of elite families and particularly elite men is more plentiful and noteworthy, mortuary goods do not speak as directly to the conditions in which women and the poor lived. The clarity and sophistication with which Effros discusses the methods and results of European archaeology is a compelling demonstration of the impact of nationalist ideologies on a single discipline and of the struggle toward the more pluralistic vision that has developed in the post-war years.

While medieval Europe is known for its cathedrals and crusades, pointing to a societal emphasis on religious institutions, many medieval tales treat subjects that seem to counter modern notions of religious purity. Contemporary romance, like Chrétien de Troyes’s tales, did not avoid even adulterous relationships, although the acts themselves were not described; rather, the lovers head to the bedroom and Chrétien discreetly picks up the story on the following morning. Language, even in troubadour love poetry, could be direct or even vulgar (in the sense of using slang or common terms) in naming body parts and sexual acts. The poet