Late Eighth Century Research Articles

Some New Ideas on the Role and Scale of Artisan Production in Dorestad

Although the amount of production waste and semi-finished products in Dorestad is low compared to what was found in contemporary trading sites in north-western Europe, artisanal activities nonetheless played a certain role at Dorestad. The small quantities are largely the result of formation processes and also of the excavation methods that were used during the large-scale rescue excavations of the 1960s and 1970s. The organisation of artisan production in Dorestad probably changed through time. During the late seventh and eighth century workshops were concentrated in the area near the river, while the ninth-century workshops were located in various parts of the settlement. The scale of artisan production and its role in interregional trade may also have changed. The ninth-century craftsmen worked with a wide range of local and imported raw materials such as glass, precious metals, amber and possibly ivory, producing objects for the local and regional market as well as for long-distance trade, whereas the...

Of Allochthons and Alibis: Otherworldly Ideologies in Seventh- and Eighth-Century Japan

Of Allochthons and AlibisOtherworldly Ideologies in Seventh- and Eighth-Century Japan David B. Lurie (bio) Imperial Politics and Symbolics in Ancient Japan: The Tenmu Dynasty, 650–800. By Herman Ooms. University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009. 376 pages. Hardcover $50.00. The seventh and eighth centuries—roughly, the Asuka and Nara periods—were a particularly fertile and dynamic moment in the history of Japan, with concepts and organizational frameworks created during these centuries shaping later political and institutional developments. Foremost among these new inventions are the name Nihon (Nippon) itself and the title tennō, both of which were created in the late seventh century as part of a complex ideological project set in motion by Emperor Tenmu (r. 672–686) and his consort and successor Jitō (r. 686–697).1 With a strong but nonexclusive focus on Tenmu, Herman Ooms has written a book about the transformation of Japanese rulership in this period, emphasizing religious and ideological components of power that do not fit easily into the traditional tripartite framework of “Shinto,” “Buddhism,” and “Confucianism.” Imperial Politics and Symbolics examines territory surveyed in earlier Anglophone studies by Gary Ebersole and Joan Piggott. It also joins a number of other recent monographs that consider the nexus of religion and temporal power in early Japan, including studies by John Bentley, David Bialock, Michael Como, and Donald McCallum—a cluster of works that suggests a renewed sense of the importance of this period for our general understanding of the political, institutional, intellectual, and cultural history of premodern Japan.2 Put simply, Ooms’s concern in this book is the role played in early Japanese political ideology by “manipulators of supernatural symbolics” (p. 209), most prominently [End Page 79] Tenmu himself, but also his successors and the experts he and they employed—many of whom were from immigrant lineages. The period covered by Imperial Politics and Symbolics begins with Tenmu’s military victory over his nephew (son of his predecessor Tenji ; r. 661–671) and ends with the extirpation of Tenmu’s heirs by Tenji’s grandson Emperor Kōnin , who reigned from 770 to 781 (although portions of the latter half of the book make reference to developments of the late eighth century and beyond). As Ooms summarizes, “the Tenji line was thus embroiled in succession conflicts at both ends, in the beginning as the loser in a civil war and a century later as victor through murder and the manipulation of accusations of black magic. These two events frame a century of dynastic turmoil among Tenmu’s offspring” (p. 209). It is this tumultuous period that the book frames as “the Tenmu dynasty,” as in its subtitle, but it is important to recognize the provisional nature of this designation. We are frequently reminded that “the notion of a dynastic line originating with Tenmu was already in dispute in the eighth century. In other words, the idea of a Tenmu ruling house was being contested while under construction” (pp. xvi–xvii). Over the course of the decades thus delineated, and with occasional excursions both back and (especially) forward in time, Ooms shows how “through Tenmu, a politico-religious discourse and practice was set up, one that could accommodate a number of enchanting idioms” (p. 69). The passive voice here is typical of the book’s treatment of Tenmu, who is presented not only as a historical actor but equally as a vehicle for larger forces and intellectual constructs. The “enchanting idioms” surveyed include mythology; royal genealogy; constructed spaces of palaces, cities, and tombs; rituals and sacrifices; imported knowledge of stars, portents, and various kinds of magic; Daoist (or at least traditionally Chinese) imagery of cosmically sanctioned political legitimacy; political plots employing black magic; fear of the vengeful dead; and a discourse on purity that becomes steadily more influential from the ninth century onward. Imperial Politics and Symbolics begins with a chapter on the retrospective creation of royal lineages, which Ooms terms “genealogical bricolage” (p. 1), but overall the book is concerned with a more general form of bricolage, as summed up in a key passage: This potpourri of symbols should not surprise. Most traditions are not entities that police themselves through a...

Northumbrian angels in Rome: religion and politics in the anecdote of St Gregory

The article examines the legend of Pope Gregory's encounter with boys – Angli – in a Roman market. The legend takes the form of an anecdote which dramatises Gregory's decision to launch a mission to Britain. It is argued that this oft-cited story had political resonance and that this is discernible in the early sources of the legend: the anonymous Vita S. Gregorii and Bede's Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum. A new perspective is opened up by re-inserting the legend into the Northumbrian debates of the late seventh and early eighth centuries. By reading internal evidence with external contexts, the article establishes that the anecdote represents an attempt to revise the history of the conversion in Northumbria. This revision is intrinsically connected with a number of overlapping discourses: the stigma of the belated Northumbrian acceptance of Roman orthodoxy, the threat of the Celtic churches, monastic competition for primacy and status, and possibly dynastic rifts.

Vocabularies of Pleasure: Categorizing Female Entertainers in the Late Tang Dynasty

Examining changing terminology for female entertainers from early imperial times through the Tang dynasty, Beverly Bossler argues that the so-called "Tang courtesan culture" emerged only in the very late Tang. She shows that well into the Tang commercially available female entertainers ( chang 娼) were socially distinct from the private entertainers ( ji 妓) found in elite households. With the expansion of markets and entertainments during the late eighth and ninth centuries, new categories of female entertainers-including courtesan-entertainers maintained by the government to perform at official banquets-proliferated, and the social distinctions between commercial and household entertainers blurred. By the late Tang, relationships with entertainers became an important aspect of literati culture and were to remain so into the Song dynasty and beyond.

Pagan Saxon Resistance to Charlemagne’s Mission: ‘Indigenous’ Religion and ‘World’ Religion in the Early Middle Ages

What is “known” about the interplay between Paganism and Christianity in the Middle Ages grows more problematic with every new scholarly contribution. Recently it has become fashionable to assert that nothing can be known of the earlier oral tradition of Pagans, as all that remain are Christian texts written by Christian clergy who drew upon Biblical models such as Canaanite “idolatry” to depict the Paganism of medieval peoples like the Anglo-Saxons and the Frisians of whose religion they were ignorant. Extreme versions of this position deny the existence of Paganism entirely; this is because all the texts were produced by Christians, and other potential sources of information about Paganism (archaeological evidence, comparative Indo-European parallels, and folklore) are deemed inadmissible. The encounter between literate, urban Christianity and non-literate rural Paganism in early medieval Europe resembles contemporary cases where the claims of “indigenous religions” (e.g. legal actions to establish native title mounted by peoples who were non-literate at the time they were colonized by Europeans) and “world religions” (e.g., missionary religion directly or indirectly facilitating colonialist enterprises) clash. Yet this is rarely recognized within the academic disciplines of history and medieval studies. This article considers the struggle between the Pagan Saxons and the Frankish Christian army of Charlemagne in the late eighth and early ninth centuries as a case study of an indigenous people and religion being crushed by a universalizing world religion promoted by a globalizing colonialist empire. It argues that medieval Christian missionary and colonialist programs were intended to bring about the deliberate obliteration of indigenous Pagan cultures, a fact which is rarely recognized by scholars.

True to Her Word: The Faithful Maiden Cult in Late Imperial China by Weijing Lu (review)

Reviewed by: True to Her Word: The Faithful Maiden Cult in Late Imperial China by Weijing Lu Jennifer W. Jay (bio) Weijing Lu. True to Her Word: The Faithful Maiden Cult in Late Imperial China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008. xiii, 347 pp. Hardcover $60.00, isbn 978-0-8047-5808-6. In the Ming to Qing dynasties, faithful maidens (zhennü貞女), most in their teens to thirties, committed suicide or carried out other acts of fidelity to honor their deceased fiancés. About five thousand of them earned a place in a subgroup among exemplary/martyred women (lienü 烈女) and chaste widows (jiefu 節婦) in their communities as well as in the local and general histories of late imperial China. Perusing dynastic and reign records, gazetteers, biographies, Confucian literati discourse, and the few writings by women, Lu’s study of the cult or social phenomenon of faithful maidens is a substantive contribution to the disciplines of women’s/ gender studies and Chinese social history. Seven provocatively titled chapters grouped into three parts (history, choices, and ideology) engage the reader in an edifying exercise to contextualize the faithful maidens and their exercise of agency in the backdrop of the sociopolitical environment and within a Confucian discourse. Throughout the study, Lu reiterates her primary arguments: faithful maidens willingly played an active role in self-defining the conduct of honor and duty; the social environment, political crises, and government mechanism of honor caused a social practice to proliferate into a cult in the Qing; and through this cult, these young women had an impact in shaping history and culture across communities in premodern China. [End Page 105] True to the author’s respect for the individuals under discussion, Lu refers to them by name whenever possible, beginning with the Shijing 詩經 reference to Lady Weixuan 衛宣夫人 and the Cypress Boat 柏舟 vow in the Spring and Autumn Period (771–476 b.c.e.), from which the cult of faithful maidens originated. The daughter of the duke of Qi, Weixuan mourned the death of her fiancé and refused to marry his brother. Such acts of fidelity were given a moralistic interpretation in the late eighth century, linking ritual to female virtue. In the thirteenth century, the faithful maidens were placed above virtuous women and commemorated in collective biographies. Here we read about faithful maidens disfiguring or killing themselves to reject another betrothal, or following their fiancés to death, or living the rest of their lives as virgin widows. The cult of faithful maidens developed in the fourteenth century and generated a spurt of growth as it crossed paths with the political crises of the seventeenth century (dynastic change and Ming resistance). However, it was between 1644 and 1850 that the cult proliferated as the state became more intrusive in social conduct and granted exemption of corvée taxes to families of faithful maidens, in addition to expanding the mechanism of honoring testimonials (jingbiao 旌表) and granting of commemorative arches and shrines. Visitors to some of the shrines claimed to have experienced spiritual rejuvenation and efficacious incidents that derived from the moral strength of the women honored by these shrines. Compared to 156 faithful maidens honored in the Ming, 4,394 faithful maidens received honoring testimonials between 1644 and 1850. By the mid-nineteenth century, with a population in China of 400 million, many more faithful maidens must have practiced acts of fidelity than the average of 21.8 individuals honored per year. Indeed, the cult was widespread in the empire and especially concentrated in the lower Yangzi, the economic powerhouse of the empire. The cult had originated in literate, elite families, but as it cut across class and education lines, there was ample representation from the top political and intellectual circles as well as from illiterate peasant families. Confucian literati, who recorded these biographies and then circulated them from localities to the central government, played a pivotal role in popularizing the acts of fidelity. Faithful maidens became public and personal icons of morality, which Confucian scholars felt a social and personal responsibility to document. The moral icon moved thinkers such as Liu Zongzhou (1578-1645), who killed himself out of loyalty to the Ming upon completion of the...

The Formation of the Arabic Pharmacology Between Tradition and Innovation

Summary The pharmacological tradition in the medieval Islamic world developed on the basis of the Greek tradition, with the works of Dioscorides and Galen being particularly popular. The terminology was influenced not only by Greek, but also Middle Persian, Syriac, and indigenous Arabic words. Through recent research into Graeco-Arabic translations, it has become possible to discern the evolution of pharmacological writing in Arabic: in the late eighth century, the technical terms were being developed, with transliterations being used; by the mid-ninth century, many standard Arabic translations for Greek words have been established. Various authors, however, expanded the pharmacology inherited from the Greeks. Galen had established a system of degrees of primary faculties (dry or moist, and warm or cold) that various physicians in the Islamic world modified. Al-Kindī, for instance, invented a theory of how to calculate these degrees in compound drugs, whereas ar-Rāzī criticised the epistemology that underlies Galen's theories. Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna) complemented the various degrees in his description of simple drugs. Furthermore, both Ibn Sarābiyun and al-Kaskarī integrated new drugs from the Islamic heartland, and the Far East into the Greek system. In these ways, the Arabic pharmacology developed in a creative tension of tradition and innovation.

Toward an Ethnopoetically Grounded Edition of Homer’s Odyssey

Toward an Ethnopoetically Grounded Edition of Homer’s Odyssey1 Steve Reece (bio) My contribution to this Festschrift for Professor John Miles Foley has its origin in an experimental course on comparative oral traditions titled “The Singers of Tales” that I have taught three times in quite different formats, once at Vanderbilt University and twice at Saint Olaf College. I began envisioning this course at the 1992 NEH Summer Seminar on Comparative Oral Traditions administered by Professor Foley in his capacity as the director of the Center for Studies in Oral Tradition at the University of Missouri. The seminar was one of the most pleasant, productive, and pivotal experiences of my academic career, largely because of the warm collegiality of my eleven colleagues and the generous mentoring of Professor Foley, and it continues to this day to have an effect on both my teaching and research. In the most recent incarnation of “The Singers of Tales” I decided, at great risk to my reputation as a traditional teacher and scholar, that the form of the course should match its content—that is, that the entire course should be conducted whenever possible without the aid of reading and writing. Almost all the material that we were studying in this course was composed, performed, and in many cases transmitted without the use of writing and reading, in an “illiterate” or, perhaps I should say, “preliterate” period of history. Each successive time that I have taught this course, I have discovered that my students relate better and better to this orally generated material. This generation of students seems to be on the verge of ushering in a new “post-literate” period of history: they are engaged by the aural pleasures of music and speech and the visual pleasures of icons, and thanks to their exposure to newer methods of technologizing the word, their concept of a text is of something much more fluid than the silent, two-dimensional, black-on-white, typographical words that so tyrannized students of previous generations. There is a certain perverseness, is there not, in expecting our students to enjoy traditional Zuni narrative poetry or traditional Appalachian folktales by sitting alone, in a quiet recess of the library and under a fluorescent light, reading a text speedily and silently, without even moving their mouths? Hence, in the most recent version of this course I determined that textbooks, written quizzes, exams, and final papers would be replaced whenever possible by public readings (even very long readings of the Odyssey and Beowulf), by shorter musical performances (with Homeric lyres, South Slavic gusles, Southern fiddles and banjos), and by oral presentations (of final research projects). The results were gratifying: students were personally engaged in these often difficult and exotic narratives, their individual and team research projects were outstanding, the class as a whole developed into a close-knit, interactive community, and, best of all, I did not have to read any examination essays or term papers. I enthusiastically recommend it. We began the course, naturally, with Homer’s Odyssey, and one of the first methodological obstacles that arose on the first day was the question of the relationship between the glossy, compact, rectilinear texts that the students had recently purchased from the shelves of the college bookstore and the oral performances with musical accompaniment of epic verse by a Greek bard on (let us say) the island of Chios in (let us say) the late eighth century BCE. What vestiges of the historical oral performance do these modern texts preserve? How does one textualize an oral performance? How does one take a non-spatial utterance in time and record it as a spatial and timeless and silent sequence of symbols? It happened that on that first day of class a student who was understandably trying to save some money pulled out of his backpack a tattered copy of a prose version of the Odyssey that his mother had used when a student at Saint Olaf College some thirty years earlier. I was startled and overreacted. I begged him not to open it, appealing to the class with as much passion as I could muster to purchase the stichic verse version that I...

Vikings in the Prehistoric Landscape: Studies on Mainland Orkney

Norse colonists in Orkney contended not only with the islands' existing occupants, but also with a foreign landscape filled with visible ancient monuments. This paper provides a brief synthesis of the results of research on the landscapes of Viking-Age and Late-Norse Orkney which explored the strategies undertaken by the Norse settlers to re-model their social identities in their adopted environment. The study focuses on Mainland Orkney between the late eighth and fourteenth centuries. In two distinct case study regions, the archaeological record for Norse settlement and activity was mapped against the 'backdrop' of prehistoric monuments and integrated with toponymic evidence. The studies suggest that integration and continuity at landscape level were important ways of promoting a Norse ancestry on Orkney, based on responses to the new landscape as well as to traditional Scandinavian practice. Late Iron Age sites often informed Norse settlement location, and dwellings were rebuilt over centuries, creating deep sequences of occupation. Physical interaction with Neolithic monuments was more occasional, although they were often integrated into the contemporary landscape through naming and reference. Eventually most of Orkney's landscape features, including its more ancient monuments, were familiarised, becoming part of the Norse Orcadian landscape.

Prilozi proučavanju crkve Svetog Mateja u Splitu

Predmet rada je crkva Svetog Mateja, koja se do 1881. nalazila uz južni ulaz u splitsku katedralu, naknadno umetnuta između periptera i temenosa Dioklecijanova mauzoleja. Analizom antičke prostorne situacije, pisanih izvora, raspoznatljivih ostataka crkve i njenoga izvornog sadržaja (sarkofag ukrašen reljefom ukriženih ljiljana s epitafom nadbiskupa Ivana) autor se zalaže za njenu dataciju u drugu polovinu 8. stoljeća. Naglašava ravensko porijeklo uzoraka reljefnog ukrasa, naslovnika crkve te njenog utemeljitelja, kojeg poistovjećuje s obnoviteljem salonitanske nadbiskupije u Splitu, Ivanom iz Ravene.

La réécriture des Actes apocryphes des Apôtres dans le Moyen-Âge latin

The early medieval interest in the apostles as founding figures of the universal Church and martyrs of faith is reflected by the presence of Latin rewritings of the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles in a large number of manuscripts from the late eighth century onwards. The stories on the life and mission of the apostles after Pentecost, often crowned with martyrdom, are embedded in a hagiographic and liturgical context: most of the manuscripts under consideration are passionaries to be used in the liturgical cycle of commemoration. However, the rewriting of the narratives is not confined to textual practice. Performative practices as well as visual sources in different forms are equally important witnesses of the transmission of these stories. As in the process of textual rewriting, the narrative traditions are not copied without modification. Rather, they are adapted to the needs of local communities and temporary concerns. Three stages of rewriting of the apocryphal Acts of the Apostles are at the centre of this article. In the first place, the motivations of the Latin rewriters of the apocryphal Acts are studied as they are traceable in the prologues to the Latin rewritings (Virtutes apostolorum). Secondly, the commemorative aspects of rewriting are studied with the help of liturgical texts, in which the Virtutes apostolorum are incorporated for a performative practice of commemoration. Finally, the visual rewriting of the narrative traditions is studied, particularly in thirteenth-century stained glass windows in European cathedrals. A multidisciplinary approach to the concept of rewriting turns out to be helpful to explore not only the traces of origin of the Virtutes apostolorum, but also the Sitz im Leben of the ancient apocryphal Acts in the commemorative and performative culture of medieval Christianity.

Valerie L. Garver . Women and Aristocratic Culture in the Carolingian World . Ithaca : Cornell University Press . 2009 . Pp. xix, 310. $49.95.

In Bishop Jonas of Orléans's ninth-century advice book or “mirror” for the (especially male) lay aristocracy, four things made women desirable to men: genus, prudentia, divitiae, and pulchritudo. Valerie L. Garver uses these, translated as “family,” “prudence,” “wealth,” and “beauty,” to structure her book. Jonas's desideranda are reordered and glossed to serve as chapter titles: “Beauty: Appearance and Adornment,” “Family: Bonds and Memory,” “Prudence: Instruction and Moral Exemplarity,” and “Wealth: Hospitality and Domestic Management.” “Textile work,” the final chapter, combines all Jonas's characteristics: beautiful objects, the skills which demonstrated prudence, and the wealth which enabled aristocratic women to create valuable items and to further family interests through their production and deployment. The female lifecycle is the vehicle for conclusions. Garver discusses both lay and religious women, and, in contrast to some previous work, emphasizes what united elite women across this divide. Her focus is on Carolingian Europe during the late eighth and ninth centuries. Severe source constraints confront all historians of ninth-century women. The Carolingian world is relatively rich in sources but not in material overtly concerned with women. Yet Garver has read widely. She uses the hagiographical material to particularly good effect, though caution is needed when comparing eighth-century Anglo-Saxon missions with some, more cloistered, examples of ninth-century female monasticism. Her methodology embraces the limitations of her sources. She does not read them against the grain, nor to address topics with which they were unconcerned, such as female friendship. The topoi and tropes of her—largely clerical—sources are not rejected, but read for what they, consciously and inadvertently, reveal. However, a “disciplined imagination” is invoked to guide frankly “speculative” readings (p. 12), and the results are not always convincing. Under “Wealth” attempts to flesh out previous historians' statements on household and estate management produce speculations, which are weak sustenance for strong assertions. By contrast, the chapter on “Beauty” deploys varied and unusual sources to good effect, underlining not only the nature and importance of this female capital but the tensions and ambivalences in attitudes toward it in a Christian society with the dual inheritance of asceticism and critiques of luxuria. The complex relationship of virtue, beauty, and adornment emerges strongly, and there is novel discussion of old age and appearance.

The Rise of Early Sufism: A Survey of Recent Scholarship on its Social Dimensions

AbstractBy the late mediaeval period, Sufism (sometimes defined as Islamic mysticism) was a clear presence in every Muslim town or village, and Sufis were present in many different levels of Muslim society. However, if we were to look back to the earliest centuries of Islamic history, it becomes increasingly harder to find evidence of individuals going by the description of ‘Sufi’. Individuals with the name appear around the late eighth century C.E., but we only start to see the rise of a particular group using that name in the mid‐nineth century. But how and why did Sufism rise in this period, and what were the reasons behind its growing importance for Muslim society? By looking at the contributions of scholars in recent decades, this article will try to trace the development of Sufism from its early origins, up to its consolidation as a visible social institution during the 12th century.

Perimortem mutilation of human remains in an early village in the American Southwest: A case for ethnic violence

Recent excavations at the Sacred Ridge Site, just south of the town of Durango, Colorado, have uncovered the single largest deposit (to date) of mutilated and processed human remains in the American Southwest. This deposit dates to the very late eighth or very early ninth century A.D. and therefore represents an incidence of large-scale violence and perimortem mutilation dating to the Pueblo I period (A.D. 700–900), when initial village formation occurred in the northern San Juan Region of the Southwest. Expectations for various interpretations for the Sacred Ridge assemblage are generated based on previous research and cross-cultural data on cannibalism, warfare, and human bone processing. Based on a lack of fit with previous models developed to account for extreme processing (EP) events, including starvation cannibalism, warfare and social intimidation, and witch-craft accusations, it is proposed that the Sacred Ridge massacre was the result of ethnic conflict during the Pueblo I period.

The First Vaulted Churches in Cyprus

The reroofing of a group of Early Christian basilicas on the Karpas peninsula is the subject of The First Vaulted Churches in Cyprus. Charles Anthony Stewart argues that the barrel vaults, which replaced the wooden roofs of these churches, can be dated to the late seventh or early eighth century. Mustering all the evidence now available and placing these monuments in their historical context, he confirms the consensus about dating that was reached, but not fully argued, by investigating archaeologists in the 1970s, Andreas Dikigoropoulos, Athanasios Papageorghiou, and A. H. S. Megaw. When these churches were rebuilt in the seventh and eighth centuries, Cyprus was a neutral state divided between the Arab Caliphate and the Byzantine Empire. In this environment, builders experimented with methods to erect and support heavy vaulting while maintaining the traditional basilical form. Their designs foreshadowed the later development of Romanesque architecture in the West.

Editorial practice in Smaragdus of St Mihiel's commentary on the Rule of St Benedict

This paper examines the editorial principles that guided Smaragdus of St Mihiel (fl. 809–26) in the composition of his commentary on the Rule of St Benedict. Scholars in the late eighth and early ninth centuries actively engaged in an official programme of educational reform that called for the production of accurate texts. Smaragdus' commentary provides a valuable witness to this movement, revealing how scholars applied grammatical and doctrinal criteria to root out errors in the manuscript tradition. Smaragdus' concern with the monastic life also draws attention to the importance of considerations of practice and observance in the pursuit of textual authority.

The landed endowment of the Anglo-Saxon minster at Hanbury (Worcs.)

AbstractMany of the minsters founded and generously endowed in the first century and a half of Anglo-Saxon christianity were evidently failing as efficient managers of their estates by the late eighth century, if we judge by the actions of the bishops in whose dioceses they sat. In the diocese of Worcester bishops can be seen transferring the administration of the lands of such minsters to the cathedral community, and then seeking ratification from the Mercian kings whose direct ancestors or royal predecessors had often been involved in the original acts of foundation. When ninth-century kings were acutely short of land, they alleviated the problem by engineering forced loans of the lands concerned from the see of Worcester. These processes are well exemplified in the history of the minster at Hanbury (Worcs.) and its landed endowment, for which particularly good contemporary evidence survives.

The hidden material culture of the Dark Ages. Early medieval ceramics at Sagalassos (Turkey): new evidence (ca AD 650–800)

AbstractOn the basis of recent archaeological evidence unearthed in the course of systematic excavations by the Sagalassos Archaeological Research Project (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven) in southwestern Turkey, this paper attempts to pull together different strings of ceramic data in order to bridge the era between late antiquity and the Middle Ages (mid seventh century to ninth century AD). Our aim is to present samples of the ceramic assemblages excavated at the site of ancient Sagalassos from layers that are most probably dated to the late seventh and eighth centuries. An attempt has been made to examine rigorously the stratigraphy and its contents that are admittedly completely different to the known ceramic forms of the late Roman/early Byzantine (fourth century to mid seventh century) and middle Byzantine (early tenth century to mid 13th century) periods at Sagalassos. Five different pottery types are presented, both kitchenwares and tablewares. The fact that all the ware types presented here are local products should not be seen necessarily as a result of a general decline in trade, rural and/or urban life, but rather as a local response to a generally changing economic system and an emerging local pottery tradition based on household-organised production. The shift from the Roman mass-produced and customised wares (that started to disappear from the market) to non-specialised local/regional production (that started to satisfy basic household needs) need not have been a sudden one. Our ultimate aim is to contribute to recent attempts to throw more light on the archaeologically ‘hidden’ material culture of the so-called ‘Dark Ages’.

Muhammad’s Grave: Death Rites and the Making of Islamic Society (review)

Reviewed by: Muhammad’s Grave: Death Rites and the Making of Islamic Society Christine D. Baker Muhammad’s Grave: Death Rites and the Making of Islamic Society. By Leor Halevi. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. 416 pp. $35.00 (cloth). In Muhammad’s Grave: Death Rites and the Making of Islamic Society, Leor Halevi cogently argues that an examination of the development of specific Islamic funerary practices in the eighth and ninth century can shed light on the Islamification of Arab society as a whole. More controversially, however, Halevi also contends that the development of these practices were not meant to unite the nascent Islamic community but were viewed by religious elites as an opportunity for social construction and a chance to demarcate boundaries between Muslims and non-Muslims while establishing a distinct hierarchy with religious experts at the top. [End Page 453] Theoretically, the earliest Muslims tried to follow the example of the Prophet Muhammad in establishing rituals for burying and mourning the dead. However, as Halevi points out, the memories of these earliest events in Islamic history were contested, even at this early period. Thus, the decisions about what constituted proper praxis were left largely in the hands of the early Islamic jurists who, during the course of the seventh through ninth centuries, developed a corpus of decisions relating to proper funerary practices. Halevi argues that these key decisions on how Islamic society should comport itself in the face of death served to circumscribe the borders of the nascent Islamic community and differentiate Islamic practice from both its pre-Islamic Arabian tribal roots and Christian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian practices. Halevi’s study contains seven chapters, each focusing on a different facet of emerging Islamic funerary rites: tombstones, preparation of the corpse for burial, shrouds, wailing for the dead, funerary processions and communal prayers, tomb construction, and beliefs about the afterlife and the fate of the spirit/corpse after death. In each of these chapters, he analyzes how it is possible to see debates over proper Islamic funerary practices as the site of contention in broader deliberations over what constituted an Islamic society. As public events involving a large number of social actors, funerals became the ideal site for Islamic legalists and pietists to craft a distinct Islamic identity. The development of Islamic tombstones reflect this larger process of change. Halevi uses the inscriptions on tombs as a record of religious trends and popular practice independent from the legal discussions of proper practice. Thus, he is able to show that while the earliest tombs lacked Qur’anic inscriptions, by the late eighth century standardized Qur’anic epitaphs on tombs became de rigueur. Most interestingly, Halevi connects this discussion of an emerging Islamic style of tombstones with long-standing debates on the canonization of the Qur’an. Because these eighth-century Qur’anic inscriptions correspond precisely to the ‘Uthmanic codex of the Qur’an, Halevi challenges John Wansbrough’s theory of scriptural polygenesis and argues that these early tombs confirm a process of scriptural diffusion. Within the process of Islamification of funerary rituals, Halevi shows the conflicts within the nascent community regarding what constituted proper practice. Debates over the proper preparation of a Muslim corpse for burial reveal growing anxieties about maintaining appropriate social and sexual boundaries in the emerging Islamic polity. Could a man prepare his wife’s body for burial even though the bond of marriage was severed at death? Was it appropriate to perfume and beautify the [End Page 454] body before interment? Did washing a corpse render the washer ritually impure? Dramatic difference of opinion emerged between Medinan and Basran / Kufan jurists about the answers to these questions. Halevi thoroughly explores these dissimilarities and attributes them to the difference between the Medinan and southern Iraqi contexts: while the Medinan code reflects Jewish and Zoroastrian notions of ritual purity, the Iraqi codes invert these practices. Halevi argues that the southern Iraqi sectarian milieu led the Kufan and Basran jurists to work harder to differentiate Islamic practice from those of the other monotheistic faiths in their community. In addition, Halevi contends that Medinan and Iraqi jurists actively sought to shape collective memory in order to develop a...

Céli Dé in Ireland: Monastic Writing and Identity in the Early Middle Ages (review)

Reviewed by: Céli Dé in Ireland: Monastic Writing and Identity in the Early Middle Ages Patricia M. Rumsey Céli Dé in Ireland: Monastic Writing and Identity in the Early Middle Ages. By Westley Follett. [Studies in Celtic History, XXIII.] (Rochester, NY: The Boydell Press. 2006. Pp. xii, 253. $85.00. ISBN 978-1-843-83276-8.) The last major study of the Céli Dé was that of Peter O'Dwyer in 1977, which he revised with additions in 1981. This has been the standard work on the subject ever since, and many subsequent writers have adopted O'Dwyer's views unchallenged. Academic scholarship has waited thirty years for a reappraisal, and subsequently two major reassessments of this so-called "reform movement" in early medieval Ireland have appeared, including Westley Follett's work. O'Dwyer's work has had its critics, and writers such as Nora Chadwick and more recently, Colmán Etchingham, have questioned the categorization of the Céli Dé as a "reform," but their objections have been peripheral to the main thrust of their respective studies. Follett's work concentrates fully on reassessing the Céli Dé and is original in that it centers on the manuscript history of the various texts that have traditionally been associated with the Céli Dé monks. With painstaking thoroughness, Follett shows that the writings hitherto ascribed to the movement (if, as he says, it can be deemed a movement) are actually much fewer in number than O'Dwyer and other earlier commentators believed. Although this investigation of manuscript history forms the major part of the book, Follett also, in his long and detailed second chapter, explores Irish asceticism before the Céli Dé to put these monks in context. His carefully detailed study goes a long way to providing an up-to-date and much needed successor to John Ryan's now extremely dated Irish Monasticism. Etchingham argues that Irish monastic asceticism showed no sign of declining in the mid- to late-eighth century, and Brian Lambkin views Céli Dé as members of God's personal retinue who saw themselves accordingly as a kind of "religious elite." In his conclusions, Follett substantiates these premises of Etchingham and Lambkin, and it is, perhaps, the only disappointing element in his work that he takes these conclusions no further. However, it is in his methodology that he shows his originality. Whereas Lambkin based his suggestion mainly on the evidence provided by the poems of Blathmac and the Félire Óengusso, Follett examines and critiques all the texts that have been associated with the movement. He draws the conclusion that "céli Dé, at least in their eighth- and ninth-century manifestation, were more of a local phenomenon than a regional or general one, as has often been supposed" (218). [End Page 782] This is an important book both for the study of insular monasticism and for research into the history of early Irish texts. In the meticulousness of its scholarship it provides a model for the latter. It enters the current debate regarding the exact identity of the Céli Dé when this question is coming to the forefront of academic research and develops that debate in new and original ways by its examination of the manuscript history of crucial texts, showing how a more precise assessment of the authorship of these texts can assist in understanding Céli Dé identity. Although not everyone will agree with Follett's conclusions, by refining and narrowing the early medieval "database" of texts connected with the Céli Dé, he provides an important service to current and future scholarship. Patricia M. Rumsey University of Wales, Lampeter Copyright © 2008 The Catholic University of America Press