This is the first book to investigate how people in the early middle ages used the past: to legitimate the present, to understand current events, and as a source of identity. Each essay examines the mechanisms by which ideas about the past were - sometimes - subtly reshaped for present purposes.

This book considers the role of anger in the social lives and conceptual universes of a varied and significant cross-section of medieval people: monks, saints, kings, lords, and peasants.

This volume examines the use of the textual resources of the past to shape cultural memory in early medieval Europe.

This highly interdisciplinary volume, with a focus on southern European case studies, sets out to illuminate medieval thought, and to consider how the underlying values of the Middle Ages exerted significant influence in medieval society in the West.

De Re Metallica brings together a wide variety of perspectives on metal use in the Middle Ages, a topic that has received less systematic scholarly attention than it deserves, given its central importance for medieval culture. Because of its strength, beauty, and prestige, metal figured prominently in many medieval contexts, from the military and utilitarian to the architectural and liturgical. Metal was a crucial ingredient in weapons and waterpipes, rose windows and reliquaries, coinage and jewelry. The 23 essays presented here, from an international team of scholars, explore the production and use of such objects, from the early Middle Ages to the sixteenth century, and from the British Isles, Iceland, and Scandinavia, to France, Germany, Spain and Italy. This thematic, chronological, and geographical scope will make this volume into a valuable resource for historians of art, technology, and culture.

Compares the archives of European states after 1500 to reveal changes in how records supported memory, authority and power.

An examination of the barbarian laws in Carolingian Europe, contributing to debates concerning written law, kingship and ethnic identities.

This highly original book is both a study of emotional discourse in the Early Middle Ages and a contribution to the debates among historians and social scientists about the nature of human emotions.

Although the topic of humour has been dealt with for other eras, early medieval humour remains largely neglected. These essays go some way towards filling the gap, examining how early medieval writers deliberately employed humour to make their cases. The essays range from the late Roman empire through to the tenth century, and from Byzantium to Anglo-Saxon England. The subject matter is diverse, but a number of themes link them together, notably the use of irony, ridicule and satire as political tools. Two chapters serve as an extended introduction to the topic, while the following six chapters offer varied treatments of humour and politics, looking at different times and places, but at the Carolingian world in particular. Together, they raise important and original issues about how humour was employed to articulate concepts of political power, perceptions of kingship, social relations and the role of particular texts.

Saint-Maurice d'Agaune - Gudme - Vistula - Francia - Maastricht - Aachen - Gaul - Cordoba.