This volume focuses on Wendy Davies's work on early medieval Breton texts and their implications. Beginning with core analyses of the Redon and Landévennec cartularies, it continues with papers that tease out some of the key social implications of the 9th-century Redon material - on the nature of political power, on rural communities, on the settlement of disputes, and on transmission of property. While the Redon charters have long been known as a source of fundamental importance for Breton history, the author's database (established in the 1980s) allowed much greater understanding of the role of individuals - at all social levels, and particularly peasant level - than had previously been possible. Attention to the detail of the east Breton past also includes papers on some of the results of her fieldwork, on building stone in particular. Early medieval Brittany is not merely interesting in itself (and it is certainly not some Celtic backwater): Breton evidence can usefully be differentiated from the evidence of other Celtic areas and has a significant role in wider issues of European history. As well as papers on the familiar themes of kingship, rulership, cult sites and cemeteries, the final section highlights the distinctive quality of the Breton evidence for the protection of sacred and personal space, for slavery and serfdom and for village-level courts.

An in-depth study of coexisting social norms of princely power cutting across categories of hierarchy, gender, and collaborative rulership.

How did Brittany get its name and its British-Celtic language in the centuries after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire? Beginning in the ninth century, scholars have proposed a succession of theories about Breton origins, influenced by the changing relationships between Brittany, its Continental neighbours, and the 'Atlantic Archipelago' during and after the Viking age and the Norman Conquest. However, due to limited records, the history of medieval Brittany remains a relatively neglected area of research. In this new volume, the authors draw on specialised research in the history of language and literature, archaeology, and the cult of saints, to tease apart the layers of myth and historical record. Brittany retained a distinctive character within the typical 'medieval' forces of kingship, lordship, and ecclesiastical hierarchy. The early history of Brittany is richly fascinating, and this new investigation offers a fresh perspective on the region and early medieval Europe in general.

This book is a study of imperialism and its consequences in the early Middle Ages. Focusing on the development of Brittany as a Carolingian principality, this book offers interpretations of the largest western empire of the medieval period.

A collection of papers in English by one of the foremost historians of the social and economic structure of medieval rural communities, who here examines local societies in rural northern Spain and Portugal in the early middle ages. Principal themes are scribal practice and the analysis of charter texts; gift, sale and wealth; justice and judicial procedures. Always with a concern for personal relationships and interactions, for mobility, for decision-making and for practice, a sense of land and landscape runs throughout. The Spanish and Portuguese experience has seemed irrelevant to the great debates of early medieval European history that occupy historians. But Spain and Portugal shared the late Roman heritage which influenced much of western Europe in the early middle ages, and by the tenth century records and practice in Christian Iberia still shared features with the Carolingian world. This book offers a substantial corpus of Iberian evidence to set beside Frankish, Italian, English and Scandinavian material and thereby makes it possible for northern Iberia to play a part in these great debates of medieval European history. (CS1084).

Drawing on 28 original essays, A Companion to the Early Middle Ages takes an inclusive approach to the history of Britain and Ireland from c.500 to c.1100 to overcome artificial distinctions of modern national boundaries. A collaborative history from leading scholars, covering the key debates and issues Surveys the building blocks of political society, and considers whether there were fundamental differences across Britain and Ireland Considers potential factors for change, including the economy, Christianisation, and the Vikings

What is it about Brittany that makes it such a favourite destination for the British? To answer this question, Bretons and Britons explores the long history of the Bretons, from the time of the first farmers around 5400 BC to the present, and the very close relationship they have had with their British neighbours throughout this time. More than simply a history of a people, Bretons and Britons is also the author's homage to a country and a people he has come to admire over decades of engagement. Underlying the story throughout is the tale of the Bretons' fierce struggle to maintain their distinctive identity. As a peninsula people living on a westerly excrescence of Europe they were surrounded on three sides by the sea, which gave them some protection from outside interference, but their landward border was constantly threatened - not only by succeeding waves of Romans, Franks, and Vikings, but also by the growing power of the French state. It was the sea that gave the Bretons strength and helped them in their struggle for independence. They shared in the culture of Atlantic-facing Europe, and from the eighteenth century, when a fascination for the Celts was beginning to sweep Europe, they were able to present themselves as the direct successors of the ancient Celts along with the Cornish, Welsh, Scots, and Irish. This gave them a new strength and a new pride. It is this spirit that is still very much alive today.

This book is a collection of original essays on gift in the early Middle Ages, from Anglo-Saxon England to the Islamic world. Focusing on the languages of gift, the essays reveal how early medieval people visualized and thought about gift, and how they distinguished between the giving of gifts and other forms of social, economic, political and religious exchange. The same team, largely, that produced the widely cited The Settlement of Disputes in Early Medieval Europe (Cambridge University Press, 1986) has again collaborated in a collective effort that harnesses individual expertise in order to draw from the sources a deeper understanding of the early Middle Ages by looking at real cases, that is at real people, whether peasant or emperor. The culture of medieval gift has often been treated as archaic and exotic; in this book, by contrast, we see people going about their lives in individual, down-to-earth and sometimes familiar ways.

In the fifteenth-century kingdom of Brittany, seventeen-year-old Ismae escapes from the brutality of an arranged marriage into the sanctuary of the convent of St. Mortain, where she learns that the god of Death has blessed her with dangerous gifts--and a violent destiny.