Roman-canonical elements in the ancient 'Germanic' system of proof

In its entry for 793 the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records the first major Viking raid against the north-east coast of England, for in that year the Danes ravaged the monastery at Lindisfarne. In the following year Jarrow, Bede’s former home, was sacked, and in 795 the monastery at Iona, on the other side of Britain, was plundered. These raids were to become more frequent as the ninth century progressed and of all the English kingdoms it was Northumbria that initially bore the brunt of the attacks, because it had a long eastern coastline and perhaps also because it had many rich monastic foundations on or near the coast which provided tempting targets to the raiders from over the sea. To start with these attacks were no more than raids to win booty; it was only in the second half of the ninth century that the Danes and the Norwegians began to think seriously of conquest and settlement. However, these assaults undermined the power of Northumbria and they confirmed the growing strength of Mercia, which had already in the eighth century become the most powerful kingdom in England. The boundaries of any kingdom are difficult to define at this period, and how far Mercia extended in the eighth and ninth centuries is uncertain. Probably it included much of what we now delineate as the West Midlands and extended eastwards to include counties like Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire. However, its centre appears to have been more in the west than the east, although this may partly be explained by the destruction of many eastern towns and monasteries by the Vikings. It is from the west that most of what sources which can be described as Mercian come.

Obsidian hydration dating has been successfully applied to East African archaeological sites. Chemical sourcing of obsidian artefacts has documented long-distance movement of obsidian from the Central Rift valley. A date in the ninth or eighth century b.c. has been obtained for iron objects in the Er Renk District of the Southern Sudan. Tentative culture-historical sequences are available from excavations around the Sudd and in the Lake Besaka region of Ethiopia. Archaeological research has begun in the interior of Somalia. In northern Kenya, claims that Namoratunga II is an archaeo-astronomical site have been challenged. Excavations at Mumba-Höhle and Nasera have shed new light on the transition from the Middle to Later Stone Age in northern Tanzania perhaps 20,000 to 30,000 years ago. Knowledge of the Elmenteitan Tradition has been considerably advanced by excavations in south-western Kenya. Iron-smelting furnaces with finger-decorated bricks have been discovered in south-eastern Kenya, though not yet dated. New dates falling in the last few centuries have caused first millennium a.d. dates obtained previously for Engaruka to be rejected. Excavations at several sites on the East African coast indicate that the beginnings of coastal occupation from the Lamu archipelago to Mozambique fall in the ninth century a.d. In Malawi the Shire Highlands seem to have been settled around the tenth century a.d. Investigations of large smelting-furnaces in central Malawi indicate that they were used as concentrators of poor-quality iron ore. Excavations in rock-shelters on the southern edge of the Copperbelt have produced a culture-historical sequence spanning the last 18,000 years. The western stream of the Early Iron Age was established in the Upper Zambezi valley by about the mid fifth century a.d.

It has been argued that the handbooks of penance known as the ‘Frankish’ penitentials, though ‘an important and necessary stage in the development of medieval church and society’, were an ‘ephemeral and ultimately despised intrusion’ into the Frankish Church of the eighth and ninth centuries. The importation of these books by Irish and Anglo-Saxon missionaries and the adverse reaction of the Frankish bishops to the Irish system of private penance which they introduced is a story too well known to require rehearsal here; after spreading rapidly in the eighth century the penitentials were challenged and condemned by several synods in the century which followed. This reaction had important consequences for the penitentials, to be sure, but to my knowledge it has not previously been asserted that the Frankish penitentials were merely transitional or that their impact on the Frankish Church was either peripheral or minimal. On the contrary, Fournier, Watkins and McNeill and Gamer, among others, believe the Carolin-gian era to have been heavily influenced by these texts and, in turn, to have been decisive in their development.

The type of economic organization known as the manor existed in the north of Gaul, including the regions which were later to be known as the Low Countries,1 in the Merovingian period and even in Roman times, but it is not till the eighth century that evidence regarding it becomes relatively abundant. The little that can be said of its structure and diffusion before the Carolingian period can only be of an introductory character. We have no evidence as to the relative proportions of large, middle-sized, and small estates, but there can be no doubt from texts of the seventh and early eighth centuries that large, indeed very large, estates existed at this period.

Some researchers seeking to establish the origins of the medieval village in England see a beginning in the seventh or eighth centuries as part of a Middle Saxon ‘Great Re-Planning’, but most currently argue that villages were founded as part of a process beginning in the tenth century. The organisers of England's most extensive test-pitting scheme inside currently-occupied rural settlements have suggested that there is little evidence for roots before the tenth century. This paper demonstrates, however, that test pits are not an appropriate way to detect ephemeral Middle Saxon remains, that the ability of such methods to accurately reconstruct early medieval settlement sequences has been overemphasised and that occupation pre-dating the ninth century is only likely to be located through more extensive excavation. It is further suggested in the paper that medieval villages often emerged through a two-stage process, as from the tenth century existing Middle Saxon centres were shifted short distances and restructured into their more lasting historic forms. The seventh, eighth and ninth centuries can therefore be seen as having left an important legacy in the landscape of England.

This article explores the history and textual relationships of the unpublished tithing sermon De reddendis decimis. The sermon, which was likely composed in the eighth century, survives in two manuscript witnesses of the eighth and ninth century, both of which have strong Hiberno-Latin affiliations. In addition to presenting an edition, translation, and full commentary on the text, I trace the sermon’s transmission history and manuscript context, and reveal its debt to a variety of late-antique, early-medieval, and apocryphal literary sources. The collocation of these material, textual, and orthographical features, I argue, locates this sermon’s origin in a Continental monastic center under the strong influence of Irish textual and intellectual traditions.

By the middle of the eighth century, a new genre of Christian writing had developed among those Christians living within the Islamic empire, that of apologetics intended to defend Christianity against attacks from Muslims. Although the Islamic empire had come into existence a century earlier, a series of changes took place in the mid eighth century, including the rise of the Abbasid caliphal dynasty and the stabilization of the empires border with Byzantium, which led to more stable internal politics. In this new atmosphere, Christian authors began to consider, for the first time, the theological ramifications of an empire that was ruled by Muslims, but which still had a majority Christian population. The purpose of this essay is to enter into the ongoing scholarly discourse surrounding the genre of Christian apologetics produced under Islam in the eighth and ninth centuries. There are two competing perspectives on studying these works. One argues for them as historical sources authentically representing an ongoing dialogue between Christians and Muslims during a period commonly known as the Golden Age of Islam. The other argues that these texts are literary creations; at its most extreme, this school of thought asserts that these texts are purely fictional, creating a world of Christian rhetorical superiority in the face of mass conversion from Christianity to Islam.

Reconstruction of the earliest Islamic history is a highly debated topic among scholars of Islam, due primarily to the fact that Islamic sources are not contemporaneous to the events they describe. Efforts to illuminate the formative period of Islam have led some Islamicists to consult non-Islamic sources. Such is the case with the controversial work Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World (1977) by Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, and Robert Hoyland's Seeing Islam as Others Saw It (1997). Not only does Michael Penn's Envisioning Islam constitute a great and welcome contribution to this project, but its significance is associated with two other scholarly discourses. First, the study presents a comprehensive Syriac (Eastern) perspective on early Islamic history and Christian–Islamic interactions that offers a clearer and closer portrayal than the unbalanced and hostile image of Islam found in Greco-Roman (Western) sources. Second, the book engages with scholarship on these subjects and challenges modern discussions about the nature of the early encounters between Christianity and Islam. Penn argues that “not simply Syriac authors were slow to distinguish Islam from Christianity, but that Syriac texts reflect a much more substantial and long-lasting overlap between Christianity and Islam than the standard narrative allows” (11). In terms of methodology, the book follows an inclusive approach that offers a contextualized and synthetic examination of diverse collections of Syriac writings on Islam composed between the seventh and ninth centuries. The book consists of four chapters in which the first two are arranged chronologically, while the other two follow a thematic organization.Applying the theoretical approach of collective memory, Penn dedicates the first chapter to Syriac narratives of Islamic conquests and Christian reactions. He claims that these writings reflect intra-Christian conflicts and shifts in the attitudes toward Islam, as well as the terms used to describe Arabs/Muslims. While early Syriac accounts portray negative impacts of the conquests, one finds a relatively positive outlook in sources written after the mid-ninth century. Political changes within the Islamic empire also influenced Syriac writings in terms of recollection and genres. After the consolidation of the Umayyad caliphate under ʿAbd al-Malik b. Marwān (r. 685–705), Syriac texts can be characterized as apocalyptic in nature, accounting for the reasons behind Muslims' victory with “intricate, intertextual revenge fantasies” (32). Syriac conquest accounts, composed from the first half of the eighth century on, downplay the significance of conquests either by presenting them as a change of worldly power or by finding biblical parallels to depict them as a temporary punishment for Christians' sins. As a result of increased interactions between Christians and Muslims during the Abbasid period, Syriac conquest writings focused on contemporary concerns, such as intra-Christian religious debates and Christian–Jewish rivalries.In chapter 2 Penn examines religious and ethnic perceptions of Islam in Syriac sources and analyzes how these changing attitudes influenced their religious distinctions and self-identity. He claims that political changes in Islamic rurlership affected both the amount of information that Syriac Christians had about Islam and their conceptual categorizations. Shifts in nomenclature are reflected in the varying terms used by Syriac authors to refer to Muslims between the seventh and eighth centuries. Such is the case with ḥanpē (“pagans”), mhaggrāyē (“Hagarenes”), and later ishmaʿelāyē (“Ishmaelites”). Penn adds that between the mid-seventh and early eighth centuries, Syriac perceptions shifted from characterizing Islam as a derivative of Christianity to a distinguished, and even challenging, religious group. These Syriac–Islamic interactions paved the way for Syriac writers to expand and develop their knowledge of Islam during the early Abbasid period when not only did Syriac authors provide more information about Islam's religious nature, but they also portrayed Islam as a distinct religion. This orientation is evident in the Chronicle of Zuqnin and Timothy I's writings, where for the first time we see the designation of the term mashlmānē as “a unique abstract noun to speak of Islam” (77). Penn also adds that Syriac writings composed during the Abbasid period “reflected both their authors' more frequent dealings with Muslims and their audiences' increased knowledge of Islam” (86).In chapter 3 Penn, following cross-traditional genre categories, examines the portrayals of Muslim leaders in Syriac writings. To begin with, Prophet Muḥammad's image in Syriac works underwent a number of shifts, ranging from political leader and military commander to lawgiver and prophet. These representations of Muḥammad were not, as Penn demonstrates, objective accounts of a seventh-century Muslim ruler. Rather, “Syriac writers used these characterizations of Muhammad to further both apology and polemic” (112). Penn also shows that representations of Muḥmmad in Syriac writings were more informed and balanced and less hostile than those in the Greek and Latin texts, such as the works of Niketas of Byzantium (fl. ninth century.) or the Venerable Bede (d. 735). Syriac descriptions of later Muslim rulers, characterized by a bifurcation of good and evil traits, were constructed works “more concerned with literary convention than with narrative consistency” (123). These portrayals serve primarily to extoll the miraculous abilities of Syrian Christian holy men, settle intra-Christian rivalries, or merge anti-Islamic and anti-Jewish polemics. The employment of Muslim figures in these literary settings, therefore, “helped Syriac authors better define Christianity” (141).In chapter 4 Penn examines interreligious interactions between Muslims and Christians and how these contacts affected religious-communal boundaries and confessional identity. Analyzing Syriac sources (both legal and literary works), Penn illustrates that Christians and Muslims maintained close daily interactions and interreligious contacts that in certain cases blurred confessional divides. Syriac texts “challenge the modern assumption of clearly defined boundaries between early Christianity and early Islam” (155). This orientation of religious ambiguity and cross-confessional interaction can be also seen in Syriac accounts of conversion. Penn does agree with some Islamicists (such as Fred Donner) suggesting that Muslims during Islam's formative stage were not a distinct religious group; rather Jews, Christians, and other religious entities were part of the umma. Unlike other Islamicists, Penn claims that Syriac writings “point towards a world characterized by continued religious ambiguity and border crossing that did not end under ‘Abd al-Malik” (181). However, this claim is not convincing because it is based entirely on a Syriac source without taking into consideration the Islamic sources.Penn's Envisioning Islam is a great addition to the study of the earliest period of Islam and Muslim–Christian interactions during that stage of Islamic history. Not only do his comprehensive presentation and thorough analysis of Syriac sources offer a constructive perspective on Muslim–Christian relations, but they also debunk some of the modern claims of “clash of civilization,” showing that Christian–Muslim relations were interconnected and more complex than commonly imagined. Despite the advantages demonstrated in the way Penn analyzes Syriac sources, we ought to be reminded of problematic aspects of these sources, such as consistency, interpretations, and religious or political powers' influence on the sources. Any discussion of early Islamic history, therefore, will be lacking without the inclusion of Islamic (including Arab Christian) sources. Hence, pairing Syriac accounts with relevant Islamic writings on these subjects could strengthen the book's arguments and offer a clearer picture of the earliest history of Islam and early Muslim-Christians encounters.

Why did commercial cities begin to emerge in Western Europe as they did after 1100 CE? In this chapter, I review and synthesize important thinking about the evolution of commercial cities as a market economy took hold. After discussing ideas about the state in prehistory, I trace thinking about the economic functioning of communities in the ancient world, Roman World, early medieval Western Europe, and into the rise of commercial cities. I integrate the work of Abu-Lughod, Bairoch, Braudel, Cooley, Heaton, Hurd, Mann, Marshall, Power, Smith, Tawney, Tilly, and Weber. I am not so much interested in the historical accuracy of their thinking as I am in how these writers each conceptualized a process based on purposeful behavior. Of particular interest to me is the how the notion and practice of the state changed and how this affected the formation of cities. I build this review around seven themes. Continuing from Chap. 1, I see these as follows: the importance of the governance of a nation to the urban economy; occupational division of labor, command and control, and power; decentralization and entitlement within governance; the functioning of a community as settlement, trading city, or commercial city; the significance of transportation costs, the spatial division of labor, and trade; importance of networks, routes, and nodes in circuits of trade ; and the conflicted role of the city.

Zubin Mistry’s Abortion in the Early Middle Ages, c.500–900 seeks to uncover the cultural significance of abortion in early medieval societies. While evidence about pre-modern attitudes to abortion in early medieval Western Europe is fragmentary, Mistry manages to summon a range of sources, all condemning the practice. In excerpts of canon laws, penitentials, sermons, saints’ lives, and biblical commentaries, he reads deeply into the context that occasioned authoritative statements on abortion. The resulting monograph is the first to comprehensively gather all of the authoritative fragments on abortion in continental Western Europe from the period and to consider their cumulative effects, addressing how they relate to one another to reflect, if not a cohesive discourse on abortion, then at least the “thought-worlds” of their authors. Abortion in the Early Middle Ages firmly establishes that reactions to the practice of abortion were situational, rooted in specific historical circumstances, and unrepresentative of contemporary abstract concerns about fetal “life.”

The extensive use of glass inlays on ivories and as separate inlays together with ivories, presumably on the same furniture, is one of the features characteristic of Western Asiatic ivories dating from the ninth and eighth centuries B.C. Their introduction marked a clear departure from second millennium B.C. traditions of ivory carving and their disappearance after the eighth century B.C. coincided with the end of the Golden Age of Western Asiatic ivory carving.In this discussion I intend to call attention to some phenomena connected with the use of glass inlays on and together with ivories from the ninth and eighth centuries B.C. rather than presenting a full review of the subject — a project beyond the scope of the present study. It will be shown that the distinction between non-inlaid and inlaid groups of ivories in Phoenician style has a bearing on their attribution to different workshops and possibly also on their chronology.

Reviewed by: The origin legends of early medieval Britain and Ireland by Lindy Brady Donato Sitaro (bio) Lindy Brady, The origin legends of early medieval Britain and Ireland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. ISBN 9781009225618 (hardback), 9781009225670 (ebook). x + 272 pages. $99.00. Origin myths and legends are prominent features of early medieval writings and mentalities. They became a popular genre, an ever-growing corpus of traditions and pseudo-histories, and eventually a late-antique/early medieval 'scholarly preoccupation', as underlined by Brady & Wadden in the foreword to their edited volume Origin legends in early medieval Western Europe (2022: 4). Despite not being the first recorded origines gentium, the Insular origin myths stand out as precious hermeneutic objects for scholars of early medieval culture, as part of a genre 'that has shaped national identity and collective history from the early medieval period to the present day', as we read in the synopsis. The variety of their approach and their richness in contents and traditions make the British, Irish, Pictish, and Anglo-Saxon origin narratives a perfect subject for a dedicated volume. Discussing these apparently divergent narratives in comparative terms was not an easy task, but Brady bravely attempts it in a relatively compact and easily readable book. Divided into five main chapters, the book is prefaced by a 27-page introductory section, eloquently titled 'The anachronism of nationalism', where modern scholarly debate around the contested concepts of ethnicity, post-Roman identities, and early medieval writers' agendas is summarized and discussed. Brady's approach consciously differs from the two major historiographical standpoints on ethnic identities, as it neither gives excessive weight to the influence of Classical ethnography (as Goffart did), [End Page 156] nor does it look too far forward by extending the effects of enduring ethnic identities from the Migration Period deep into the Middle Ages (as in certain readings by Wolfram and Pohl). Brady decides to look 'sideways' (21) to explore the textual and conceptual interrelations between the origin legends of the British Isles without attempting to construct from the texts a straightforward idea of the development of ethnic identities. She looks at the development of origin stories within and among the texts surveyed, more than outside and beyond them. For this reason, the interpretative keywords for Brady's analysis of the sources are 'discourse' and 'development' (3). Her assessment that the concepts enshrined in early medieval origin narratives were communicating and were part of a shared intellectual milieu is repeated throughout the introduction and beyond (1, 4, 16, 21, 63, 227, 229). This assumption finds support in the first chapter through a survey of the textual history of the Insular works containing origin stories: Gildas's De excidio, Bede's Historia ecclesiastica, the ninth-century Historia Brittonum, and the later Irish Lebor Bretnach and Lebor gabála Érenn. While the first two works are referred to in cursory fashion as embryonic nuclei of traditions that would develop later, the latter three pseudo-histories are discussed in depth throughout the book. The Historia Brittonum is given a justified pre-eminence as 'a valuable microcosm of the intellectual connections which form the focus of the study' (16). After the presentation of the sources, the proper narratological analysis begins: chapters 2, 3, and 4 focus on exile, kin-slaying, and intermarriage and incest, respectively. Having established the interrelated nature of the Insular writings in chapter 1, Brady is able to conduct a comparative survey of shared concepts and their development within three concentric levels of investigation corresponding to the three-part structure of these chapters: (i) first she explores the wider conceptual resonance of the motif in literature, usually through comparison with biblical and classical archetypes; (ii) then she outlines the recurrence of historical episodes involving the motif (cases of exiles or kin-slayers in the early medieval Insular context); and finally (iii) she considers the meaning of the motif within the Insular origin narratives. The second part of these themed chapters, the attempt to show 'resonances of these topics in [historical] early insular society' (138), could have been the trickiest. However, Brady addresses the eventual collision between literary motifs and the 'hard facts' drawn from legal and historical records through...

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Origin legends in early medieval Western Europe. Edited by Lindy Brady and Patrick Wadden. (Reading Medieval Sources, 6.) Pp. xii + 474 incl. 19 colour and black- and-white ills. Leiden–Boston: Brill, 2023. €198. 978 90 04 40036 8; 2589 2509 - Volume 76 Issue 2

There is surprisingly little early medieval social history being written. In recent years, more specifically economic history has had a remarkable rebirth, thanks to the (largely unconnected) efforts of archaeologists on the one side and Belgian and German historians on the other; but the study of society in general, outside the restricted spheres of the aristocracy and the church, has been neglected. I speak schematically; obviously, there are notable exceptions. But it is significant that noone, in any country, has thought it worthwhile to attempt a synthesis of early medieval European socio-economic history as a whole that could replace those of Alfons Dopsch or, maybe, André Déléage. It would be hard; but people have tried it for the centuries after 900, with interesting (even if inevitably controversial) results. Why not earlier? Richard Sullivan recently lamented the conservatism of most Carolingian scholarship; in the arena of social history, he could easily have extended his complaints back to 500.