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Most of us become medievalists by accident. We fall under the spell of a charismatic teacher at school or university, or, having been introduced to the subject—sometimes as pressed men and women, by the dictates of our chosen university’s curriculum—we find that the study of the middle ages speaks to our inner psyche.
‘It happened once in Paris that a certain sorceress impeded a man who had left her so that he could not have intercourse with another woman whom he had married. So she made an incantation over a closed lock and threw the lock into a well, and the key into another well, and the man was made impotent.
Is biography still a legitimate activity for professional historians in the twenty-first century? In contrast to many of the newer approaches towards the past, biography smacks of a very traditional top-down, mostly man-centred, approach. Medieval biographers face the particular problem of relatively restricted source material which led K. B.
Whether or not Michael Maas is right that ‘many excellent studies of Justinian and his age’ exist (p.
The first, main title of this volume might seem to promise too little or too much—either a very superficial work of generalization, or a heterogeneous assortment of broadly grouped pieces too diverse and disparate to cohere.
Post-classical archaeology emerged into the limelight in Italy in the 1970s, in particular with the founding of the national journal Archeologia Medievale in 1974 (whose principal editor and driving force, Riccardo Francovich, was recently killed in a tragic accident).
It is difficult to write a regional history for most areas of early-medieval Europe because convention and common form in writing tend to level off regional difference.
The history of the Hospitallers in the later-middle ages is still to be written, both in general terms and in many particular respects.
Bradbury’s text is a delightful read. His text discusses the Capetian dynasty of kings, from the events that brought the family to power in the tenth century up to the death of Charles IV in 1328. Charles died without male heirs, and so the kingship passed to a collateral line, the Valois.
The first nine studies in this notable book relate directly to monastic patronage, in England, France, Denmark, and the Empire.