High Middle Ages Research Articles

Sobre as origens da diocese do Porto na Alta Idade Média. Uma reflexão sobre o Parochiale Suevorum e a diocese de Magneto/Meinedo (sécs. VI-VII)

Traditionally, scholars considered Magneto/Meinedo as the originary See of Porto/Portucale in the 6th century. This conclusion grounds mainly on two sources: the Parochiale Suevorum and the acts of the II Council of Braga, where among the subscribers appears a «Viator Magnetensis ecclesiae episcopus». The analysis of the sources in their historical context and chronology show, however, a more complex and contradictory panorama. In this work, we will try to examine the different interpretations elaborated by scholars and to propose a reflection on both the Parochiale Suevorum and the relations between Meinedo and Porto between the Late Antiquity and the High Middle Ages. In order to achieve these objectives, we will first introduce the historiographical outcomes on this specific theme. Second, we will analyse and compare historiographical data to the information contained in both written sources and archaeological materials. Finally, we will advance some possible hypotheses to interpret the eventual connection between these two dioceses.

Church, cemetery and village IN 12TH century Álava (Spain). Material evidence of the establishment of the Catholic parish?

This paper analyses the archaeological record of six villages of Alava, north-central Iberia, in the High Middle Ages (11-13th centuries AD): Armentia and the deserted villages of Zornoztegi, Zaballa, Aistra, Torrentejo and Dulantzi. The approach focuses on their churches, their associated structures and the relationship with the surrounding domestic households, with a double aim. First, to establish if these elements were subject to widespread and synchronic transformations. Second, to assess whether these changes, if identified, had any connections with the implementation of the Catholic parish network, a process that so far has been almost exclusively studied after the written sources. The results come to confirm both issues, showing the notable heterogeneity of the process in the territory. The discussion serves here to define a set of diverse scenarios for the establishment of the parish and to evaluate the different material markers used for their identification.

Social Practices in the Latin Theology of the High Middle Ages: Urbain Square as Public Space of Medieval City

Social Practices in the Latin Theology of the High Middle Ages: Urbain Square as Public Space of Medieval City

<em>Asinarius</em>, or <em>The Donkey Tale</em>

The Latin narrative poem Asinarius (The Donkey Tale, ca. 1200) is one of the most fairytale-like texts to have come out of the High Middle Ages. Its story tells of a prince born in the shape of an ass who is educated as a proper nobleman, learns to play the lyre, leaves his home, and weds a foreign princess, and on his wedding night is revealed to be a handsome young man. This contribution will provide readers with the first Englishverse translation of this engaging poem.

СТЕКЛЯННЫЕ ИЗДЕЛИЯ ДОМОНГОЛЬСКОГО ПЕНДЖИКЕНТА И ЕГО ОКРУГИ

The period of High Middle Ages witnessed the development of glassmaking in Central Asia. The paper presents glass articles from pre-Mongolian Penjikent and its suburbs. The Penjikent col- lection contains all major groups of glass articles recognized in the functional classification tradi- tionally used in the region: table glassware (fig. 1; 2; 3, 1–7; 4, 1, 2; 5, 8; 6, 15, 17), perfume and drug jars (fig. 2, 13; 5, 4–7, 9, 10), chemical glassware (fig. 4, 7), household items (fig. 3, 6; 4, 3–5; 5, 1–3; 6, 16), adornments (fig. 5, 11–13) and window-glass (fig. 6, 1–14). The material under study can be dated to the X–XII cc. These glass articles find analogies in the materials from Samarkand, Tash- kent oasis, Bukhara, Fergana valley, Northern Tokharistan, as well as some synchronous urban centers on the territory of modern Kazakhstan. There is also a tendency to a certain uniformity (fashion) in the main types of glass articles that were produced during that period in both Central Asia and the Near East.

Dark Ages woodland recovery and the expansion of beech: a study of land use changes and related woodland dynamics during the Roman to Medieval transition period in northern Belgium

AbstractThe results from analyses of botanical remains (pollen, wood, charcoal, seeds) from several archaeological features excavated in Kluizen (northern Belgium) are presented. The region was largely uninhabited until the Iron Age and Roman period when a rural settlement was established, resulting in small-scale woodland clearance. The site was subsequently abandoned fromc.AD 270 till the High Middle Ages. The results of the archaeological and archaeobotanical analyses provide information on changes in land use and resulting dynamics of woodland cover and composition betweenc.600 BC and AD 1200, with a spatial and temporal resolution unrivalled in northern Belgium. Especially the long period of woodland regeneration following abandonment of the site around AD 270, covering the Late Roman and Early Medieval period, could be reconstructed in detail. Abandoned fields were first covered with pioneer woodland (Salix,CorylusandBetula), thenQuercus-dominated secondary forest and finally a late-successional forest withFagus sylvatica,Carpinus betulusandIlex aquifolium, an evolution that took over 300 years. The results also indicate that the observed increase ofFagusduring the Early Middle Ages, which was never an important element in the woodland vegetation in northern Belgium before, was related to climatic changes rather than anthropogenic factors.

El mito inagotable. Estudio de las reescrituras del mito de Sigfrido a lo largo de trece siglo

This paper analyses all major appearances of the myth of Siegfried, from the earliest AngloSaxon texts, through the great narratives of the high Middle Ages, to its modern use by 19th century nationalism. The review allows not only to verify the logic of adaptation according to the intention of each of the texts, but also to make a history of the use of the legend which reveals, on the one hand, the ideological constant in the appropriation of the story and, on the other hand, how the legend of Siegfried is the last survivor of a type of heroic tale, that of the hero-king, which begins to be replaced in the the literature of the high Middle Ages.

Asinarius , or The Donkey Tale

The Latin narrative poem Asinarius (The Donkey Tale, ca. 1200) is one of the most fairytale-like texts to have come out of the High Middle Ages. Its story tells of a prince born in the shape of an ass who is educated as a proper nobleman, learns to play the lyre, leaves his home, and weds a foreign princess, and on his wedding night is revealed to be a handsome young man. This contribution will provide readers with the first Englishverse translation of this engaging poem.

The Hollerroute – landscape awareness as a driving factor in regional development

The Holler Landscapes are a European testimony of a marsh and dyke landscape through land reclamation starting in the High Middle Ages. This Dutch originating cope cultivation were found in many places in Europe, but spread particularly in Germany and Poland. These landscapes had, and for most of their part still have in common that they were created by Dutch water experts – most often on demand from local authorities, like archbishops or kings – and are therefore called Holler Colonies. The tangible landscape heritage was often linked to the import of many Dutch society features (e.g. related to laws, habits, equal rights of men and women), making the Holler Colonies a unique document to the intangible heritage as well. Today, the remainders of these landscapes give an important testimony to European economic and social history. These landscapes were predominately shaped during the great clearances in the High Middle Ages, with some of them, in particular Poland, dating from a later period. Of course, not all landscapes and associated traditions have survived until today. Several Holler landscapes have been completely transformed by more recent land reclamation processes or due to abandonment. The examples that still bear the vivid impression of the land transformation are therefore not only a unique but as well rare testimony of tangible and intangible heritage of European history. The article focusses on an awareness raising process that took place in the Altes Land (Lower Saxony, Germany) within the last 15 years: After a difficult beginning, finally the understanding of the historical transformations and of the particularity of this traditional cultural landscape became a trigger towards local and regional development strategies. The awareness on the Dutch landscape heritage lead to an identification process among the inhabitants and last but not least, triggered local development. It helped finally to start the will to sustain the historic regional character, allowing a sustainable economic development, and is accompanied by tourism and awareness building measures. One of them is the “Holler Route” – a project recognized within the European Year of Cultural Heritage, which will develop, among others, teaching materials about Holler Landscapes which will be integrated into the official geography curriculum for schools and will be available at the online-education server (NibiS) of the Federal State of Lower Saxonia.

Long-term construction of vineyard landscapes in the Ebro Valley: The deserted village of Torrentejo (Basque Country, Spain)

Cultural landscapes are the result of human societies interacting with their environment, which is reflected in the onset and evolution of social practices such as settlement and agricultural production. This paper discusses the results of a transdisciplinary research program carried out on the vineyard landscape of the Rioja Alavesa district, one of the main wine-producing regions of Spain, focusing on the deserted village of Torrentejo (Basque Country, Spain). The study of archival records, combined with extensive archaeological survey and excavation, as well as the intensive analysis of geoarchaeological core samples, permitted the reconstruction of a long sequence of human settlement and agricultural practices extending over ~4000 years. The oldest documented records refer to a Chalcolithic occupation, developed on a buried gypsisol and possibly related to the climatic event at 4.2 ka BP. After a long hiatus, four phases of landscape transformation were documented above this Chalcolithic occupation: (1) the formation of a nucleated village in the Early Middle Ages, represented by the construction of a terraced agricultural landscape, and its passage under the control of different seigneurial powers over the High Middle Ages; (2) the abandonment of the village during the Late Middle Ages and the subsequent concentration of settlement in the charted town of Bastida; (3) a complete reorganisation and expansion of the local terraced systems in the 18th–19th centuries, in a context of specialisation and commercialisation of agricultural production; and (4) present-day mechanisation and capitalisation. These results therefore offer an interesting overview on the complexity and diversity of the historical trends that lie beneath the vineyard landscape of Torrentejo, proving the value of interdisciplinary research approaches for the investigation of the role of human settlement and agriculture in the formation and evolution of agricultural landscapes.

The workshop-houses of the Colombier hill (Ardèche)

The Colombier hill, located in the Chassezac valley (Ardèche, France), had been temporarily occupied during the High Middle Ages (11th and 12th centuries) in order to mine from a silver-lead vein. Adjoining the mining networks, a building was erected. After several years of excavation, a conclusion has been reached, characterizing the hill’s occupancy and establishing its functions. Building on an archaeological and morphological study, as well as the examination of the artefacts originating from the building (stone tools, slag, pottery, glass, fauna, natural resources, manufactured objects), it has been possible to identify it as a mining site, built in order to process the ore and assist the workers. It was seemingly composed of workshop-houses that were regularly inhabited by small mining companies.

O modo de vida dos hobbits no legendário de Tolkien

O presente ensaio tem por finalidade caracterizar o modo de vida dos hobbits no legendário de Tolkien. Para tanto, tomamos como referência as obras O Hobbit (2002-a) e O Senhor dos Anéis (2002-b) como corpus de pesquisa, e as analisamos na perspectiva da estética marxista, em especial, da teoria do Reflexo, discutidos por Lukács (2010). Procuramos relacionar alguns aspectos da sociedade dos hobbits com a sociedade europeia medieval da Alta Idade Média, figurada por Ginzburg (2010) em O queijo e os Vermes.

La <em>meloterapia</em> en el pensamiento y la obra de Isidoro de Sevilla

Isidoro de Sevilla (ca. 565-633), Padre y Doctor de la Iglesia, es considerado uno de los más grandes enciclopedistas de la Antigüedad tardía y la Alta Edad Media. Entre los muchos temas que trató se encuentra la música y, dentro de esta, el poder medicinal o sanador de la misma, temática que gozó de una gran tradición literaria en la Antigüedad clásica debido, en gran parte, a la difusión de sus profundas raíces filosófico-musicales, fundamentalmente de índole pitagórica y platónica. En este artículo se localizan y analizan por primera vez todas las reflexiones isidorianas sobre este tema distribuidas por varias obras del obispo hispalense. Para ello se partirá de la tradición clásica y patrística de la que proceden, teniendo en cuenta también el resto del pensamiento musical isidoriano.

La restauración de la diócesis de Ávila y el episcopado de la repoblación (1085-1198)

This work tries to offer an interpretation to understand how the restoration of the diocesan structure in Avila, during the 11th and 12th Centuries, could be achieved in a broader process of repopulation of the Castilian Extrema Durii. In opposition to the model proposed by Sanchez-Albornoz, contemporary historiography no longer contemplates the hypothesis about the total depopulation of the central valleys and mountains during the 9th and 10th Centuries. But today there is no doubt that, in this territory, during the High Middle Ages, the institutional power structure of the Church was dismantled. The work of Alfonso VI and Raimundo de Borgona seems to be behind the reinstatement of the headlines of the miter in the city of Avila.

Classification of engraved pottery sherds mixing deep-learning features by compact bilinear pooling

The ARCADIA project aims at using pattern recognition and machine learning to promote a systematic analysis of the large corpus of archaeological pottery fragments excavated in Saran (France). Dating from the High Middle Ages, these sherds have been engraved with repeated patterns using a carved wooden wheel. The study of these engraved patterns allows archaeologists to better understand the diffusion of ceramic productions. In this paper, we present a method that classifies patterns of ceramic sherds by combining deep learning-based features extracted from some pre-trained Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models. A dataset composed of 888 digital patterns extracted from 3D scans of pottery sherds was used to evaluate our approach. The classification capacity of each CNN model was first assessed individually. Then, several combinations of common pooling methods using different classifiers were tested. The best result was obtained when features of the VGG19 and ResNet50 models were combined using Compact Bilinear Pooling (CBP) with a high classification rate of 95.23%.

Alexander Fidora and Görge K. Hasselhof (eds.). The Talmud in Dispute During the High Middle Ages. Bellaterra: Servei de Publicacions de la Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona, 2019, 282 p.

The Talmud in Dispute During the High Middle Ages has been produced in the framework of the ERC project The Latin Talmud and Its Influence on Christian-Jewish Polemic (LATTAL). The aim of this project, which finalized in 2019, was the study of the use of Jewish sources by Christian scholastics as apologetic materials to probe the veracity of the Catholic dogma and the falsities of Judaism. Alexander Fidora, principal researcher of the project and ICREA research professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, is also the editor of this exhaustive book composed by ten independent contributions on the Disputation of Paris and the Latin translations of the Talmud in the mid-thirteenth century.

Stone and Brick Work Churches Composition and Structural Features

One of the typical features of the early Armenian culture of cemetery is its original church architecture. The radical changes in socio-economic and political relations were the basis of 301 cc to proclaim Christianity as a state religion. Church building has a great progress in the high middle Ages (9th-14th cc.) Where stone blocks are used as a building blend together with bricks. In the article, comparisons have been made between the Kirants Monastery and Makaravank, which are located in the same region and were built at the same time. As a result of the study, it is noticeable that these two monasteries, which have been high middle age construction material, have eras and similar buildings (churches, subsidiary structures, cemeteries around). Churches are a cross-shaped central dome and a domed hall volumetric spatial type. The facade is decorated with luxurious decoration, the exterior facades are decorated with colored bricks in Kirants monastery, and in Makaravank, in the form of stone carving. Similarities are seen in structured nodes - entrances and windows. There are remarkable differences in interior decorations - the interior walls of the Kirants monastery are decorated, with a small part of them preserved up to now, and there is no interior decoration in Makaravank.

Astronomy in romanic churches

AbstractIn this poster we present a study of the orientation of the church of San Adrián de Sasabé in Borau, Huesca (Spain) in a practical way. This church is a characteristic Romanesque construction, predominant in the High Middle Ages, mainly in southwestern Europe.The apse of Romanesque churches are oriented towards the east. But, in some churches, the apse has three windows and these are oriented in the direction of the sunrises on the days of the solstices and equinoxes. But sunrises and sunsets depend on the latitude of the place.The church of San Adrián de Sasabé, the object of our study, has three windows in the apse, which allows us to carry out the necessary calculations to determine its orientation with precision outside the church.

Sind die Namen der Saar keltisch oder vorkeltisch?

Abstract A special feature in the history of the hydronym Saar is that in the first centuries of its attestation up to the high Middle Ages it shows two parallel, morphologically different forms, Sar- vs. Sar-Vv-, the longer form being attested earlier. For the shorter form Sar- an Old European formation *Sorā- from a root PIE *ser- ‘(to be) liquid’ seems most probable. For the longer form actually three possibilities exist: either (a new proposal) it is a secondary u̯o-derivative of the aforementioned *Sorā-; or one of two different Celtic etymologies hitherto proposed applies: both claiming u̯o-derivatives, either (less probably) from the root PIE *serh- ‘to approach (with unfriendly intentions)’ or (more probably) from the root PIE *sterh<sub>3</sub>- ‘to stretch, spread, broaden’, both in the end resulting in Late Proto-Celtic *sarau̯o-. As the two attestations in a metrical text reflect Latin Sarāv-, at some point in the history of the name there seems to have been some (analogical) restructuring of the suffix vowel.

Pactism in Catalonia: A Dual Conception of the Political Community

Abstract This article offers a historiographic definition of ‘pactism’, i.e. the pact-based model institutional doctrine and practice held in Europe from the High-Middle Ages onwards, until the emergence of the modern concept of sovereignty in the absolutist state of the 16th and 17th centuries. As institutional doctrine, pactism found in Catalonia one of its most elaborate formulations. This article defines the constitutive elements of Catalan legal pactism, stemming from the Romanist concept of ius commune and the conceptual work on interpretation and early public law carried out by legal scholars. It distinguishes different kinds and degrees of jurisdictio (senyoria, in Catalan language)—universals, generals and speciales—and it defines populus, constitutio populi, imperium and contrafaccions. Catalan legal instruments related to the enactment of laws by the General Courts—Constitucions, Capítols i Actes de Cort—and the limited power of the King, the composition of Generalitat (the General of Catalonia), and the role of the three Catalan branches (braços, estaments) are also elucidated. It also delves into the procedure for establishing constitutions which was followed by the Cort General of Montsó of 1585. The 15th c. legal compilation called Llibre dels Quatre Senyals and the recent discovery of the Llibre dels Vuit Senyals allow a more accurate dating of origins (1289, 1291, 1359, 1376), and a better understanding of its financial objectives, procedures and protections. Finally, this article introduces the notion of a dual conception of the political community as a suitable interpretative thesis to make sense of the whole process of the development of public law in Medieval Catalonia.