This extensive bibliographic essay underpins the entire Tarragona Vortex study by focusing on this arena as one of the most contested frontiers in Western history, comparable to Jerusalem in the East, for broad issues of Romanization, Westernization, Islamization, and Christianization. Its book length chapters treat (1) diverse historiographies from local and Spanish to comparative Mediterranean and Crusade History, and especially Ethno-historiography and the explanatory concept of frontiers; (2) the phenomena of religion conversion and reform, and the conditioning agents of Islam and Latin Christianity in practice and adversity; (3) religious universalism and violence, especially religious war; (4) the Crusade and Reconquest paradigms and century-long debate; (5) the environment on land and sea, and setting for this History. Although these themes are explored to include due reconsideration but avoid major digressions in its telling about Tarragona and the Tarraconensis, they underly so much of Late-Antique and Medieval historical research that this discussion pertains to the whole field of historical, cultural, and religious studies.

The fourteenth century witnessed a late medieval arms race; an era that began with knightly combatants armed in mail - and ended with them dressed head-to-toe in the complete plate armour that is commonly associated with knights. Although well documented in art and effigies, only a very few examples of this early plate armour survive. In this first-of-its-kind series, Douglas Strong brings together three decades of research to offer a lavishly illustrated catalog of these surviving pieces with a detailed record of their provenance, characteristics, construction details, and current whereabouts. Filled with color and black-white photos, line-drawings, this 8.5 x 11 hardback is a piece of artwork in its own right. VOLUME I focuses on the bascinet, the ubiquitous helmet of the period. Developing out of a small skull-cap worn beneath the great helm, it quickly evolved into a complete head defense of its own, becoming the helmet that defines the knightly harness of the second half of the fourteenth century that survived in common usage into the early decades of the fifteenth century. Organizing the surviving examples into broad, morphological categories for both helmets and visors, Douglas Strong not only creates a catalog of surviving pieces, but presents a basic typology, the first of its kind, into which future discoveries can be fit.

To those who study the physical culture of arms in medieval Europe, the German Fechtbucher-treatises on combat arts-are among the most important surviving documentary sources: no other region in Europe produced such an extensive body of writings on the techniques of medieval combat. Among these, and indeed among the martial-arts treatises produced by any culture, the massive compendia commissioned by the scholar-swordsman Paulus Hector Mair (1517-1579) stands out as uniquely ambitious and monumental. The text survives in three manuscript copies, each consisting of two volumes, with each manuscript running to approximately 1200 pages, and includes about 17weapon-forms (depending on how one counts them) from two-handed sword to rapier, armoured combat to sickle and scythe; each form consists of anywhere from 8 to 136 lavishly illustrated techniques, in many cases followed by one or more seminal texts on the form. The various weapon-forms are mutually integrated with each other in techniques and vocabulary, and collectively offer an enormous volume of interpretable material. The combination of text and image in the illustrated techniques offers obvious advantages to the understanding of a physical practice, and Mair is unique among the German masters in systematically giving instructions to both combatants, so that as one learns how to perform a technique, they also learn how to counter it. Lastly, one of the most important features of the Ars Athletica is the Latin translation, which serves as something of a Rosetta stone for interpreting the vocabulary of these long-lost martial arts. In this series, Dr. Jeffrey Forgeng, translator of the equally seminal Fechtbucher of Joachim Meyer and Hans Leckuchner has compiled a team of translator-practitioners to tackle Mairs opus. Over a decade of work has gone into transcribing, translating and annotating the Ars Athletica (Treatise on the Martial Arts) presenting both the original German and Latin, as well as a modern English translation. Volume One of this series presents the Longsword, which was the traditional centerpiece of the German medieval tradition and provides the core instruction through which all other weapons of the tradition can be understood. In three languages and full-color illustrations readers will find a complete curriculum of cuts, thrusts, disarms and grapples; even using the sword as a short spear, which forms the foundation for armoured combat-the subject of a later volume.

In vormodernen Monarchien beobachten wir Widerspruch und Widerstand gegen einzelne Herrscher, ihre politischen Entscheidungen und ihre Verwaltung, aber in der Regel keine direkten Angriffe auf die Ordnungsprinzipien und das politische System. Wenn Unzufriedenheit zu Aufstanden und Revolten fuhrten, blieb es normalerweise bei einem bloen Austausch des Regenten. Subtilere Methoden der Herrscherkritik konnten sich mittels fester Usancen oder spezifischer Codes und Spielregeln innerhalb des legalen Rahmens Gehor verschaffen und zielten darauf ab, die Qualitaten des Regenten zu verbessern oder spezifische Modi der Amtsfuhrung zu reformieren. Diese verschiedenen Formen und Praktiken von Herrscherkritik in vormodernen monarchischen Gesellschaften sind Gegenstand dieses Bandes.When looking at pre-modern monarchical societies, one does not expect to observe fundamental dissent directed at the social order as such or at the political system. As a rule, criticism was limited to individual monarchs, their performance and decisions. While discontent could lead to insurrection and rebellion, which normally only culminated in the ruler being replaced by another monarchical figurehead, the subtler methods of voicing criticism were applied within a framework of legality, of a set of customs or of a code of rules of the game and intended to improve the performance of the incumbent or reform his conduct at court. The various forms of verbal or staged censure of rulers in pre-modern monarchical societies are the subject of this volume.

The warriors of medieval Italy practiced a complex and complete martial art, which included the wielding of sword, axe and spear with wrestling, knife-fighting and mounted combat. In the waning years of the 14th century, Fiore dei Liberi was a famed master of this art, whose students included some of the most renowned and dangerous fighting men of his day. Credited by fencing historians as the father of Italian swordsmanship, toward the end of his life, Master Fiore preserved his teachings in a series of illustrated manuscripts, four of which have survived to the present day, and have become the basis of a world-wide effort to reconstruct this lost martial art. This magnum opus, il Fior di Bataglia (The Flower of Battle), composed in early 1409, is one of the oldest, most extensive, and most clearly elucidated martial arts treatises from the medieval period. Freelance Academy Press is proud to announce Flowers of Battle, a multi-volume series of lavishly illustrated, hard-cover books, combining full-color facsimiles of the masters original manuscripts; professional, annotated translations; and extensive, peer-reviewed essays. Vol. I: Historical Context and the Getty Manuscript Vol. II: Florius de Luctandi Vol. III: Flos Duellatorum Vol. IV: A tradition with Deep Roots--The Morgan Ms, Later Transmissions and General Concordance Vol. I: Historical Context and the Getty Manuscript presents a complete translation, transcription and reproduction of the largest and most complete of the manuscripts. Serving as a sourcebook for the entire series, it also includes chapters on the life of Fiore dei Liberi, his students, and patrons, arms & armour in the Getty Manuscript, dueling and chivalric culture in Italy at the close of the 14th century, a detailed analysis of the manuscripts use of pedagogy, number and metaphor and the Flower of Battles relationship to other medieval combat manuscripts. Not only a record of a complete, medieval martial tradition, this work provides unique insights into the life, mindset and milieu of the professional fighting man at the birth of the Italian Renaissance.

The expression "liturgical drama" was formulated in 1834 as a metaphor and hardened into formal category only later in the nineteenth century. Prior to this invention, the medieval rites and representations that would forge the category were understood as distinct and unrelated classes: as liturgical rites no longer celebrated or as theatrical works of dubious quality. This ground-breaking work examines "liturgical drama" according to the contexts of their presentations within the manuscripts and books that preserve them.

Inspired by our age-old fascination with equids, Materiality of the Horse brings the latest academic research in equine history to a wider readership. Themes examined within the book by specialist contributors include explorations of material culture relating to horses and what this discloses about the horse-human relationship; fresh observations on significant medieval horse-related texts from Europe and the Islamic world; and revealing insights into the effect of the introduction of horses into indigenous cultures in South America. Thought-provoking and original, Materiality of the Horse is the second volume in Trivent Publishings innovative "Rewriting Equestrian History" series.

To those who study the physical culture of arms in medieval Europe, the German Fechtbucher - treatises on combat arts - are among the most important surviving documentary sources: no other region in Europe produced such an extensive body of writings on the techniques of medieval combat. Among these, and indeed among the martial-arts treatises produced by any culture, the massive compendia commissioned by the scholar-swordsman Paulus Hector Mair (1517-1579) stands out as uniquely ambitious and monumental. The text survives in three manuscript copies, each consisting of two volumes, with each manuscript running to approximately 1200 pages, and includes about 17 weapon-forms (depending on how one counts them) from two-handed sword to rapier, armoured combat to sickle and scythe; each form consists of anywhere from 8 to 136 lavishly illustrated techniques, in many cases followed by one or more seminal texts on the form. The various weapon-forms are mutually integrated with each other in techniques and vocabulary, and collectively offer an enormous volume of interpretable material. The combination of text and image in the illustrated techniques offers obvious advantages to the understanding of a physical practice, and Mair is unique among the German masters in systematically giving instructions to both combatants, so that as one learns how to perform a technique, they also learn how to counter it. Lastly, one of the most important features of the Ars Athletica is the Latin translation, which serves as something of a Rosetta stone for interpreting the vocabulary of these long-lost martial arts. In this series, Dr. Jeffrey Forgeng, translator of the equally seminal Fechtbucher of Joachim Meyer and Hans Leckuchner has compiled a team of translator-practitioners to tackle Mairs opus. Over a decade of work has gone into transcribing, translating and annotating the Ars Athletica (Treatise on the Martial Arts) presenting both the original German and Latin, as well as a modern English translation. Volume Two of this series presents the Dusack, a sporting version of the older Langesmesser (long-knife) a single-edged utility sword characteristic of the German-speaking areas of Europe. Made sometimes of wood, sometimes of leather, occasionally of steel, the Dusack was the training weapon for all single-handed swords. Mairs 44 Dusack sequences contained herein represent one of the earliest surviving treatises on this weapon: previous texts tend to focus on the Messer, and readers will find Mair ends this section by including his own redaction and treatment of some of the most famous Messer texts of the previous century.

Focusing on languages political power, these essays discuss how representation, through language norms, plays and court spectacles, manipulations and adaptations of texts and images, both constitutes and reflects a cultural milieu. The volume brings together various disciplinary approaches, offering a complex appreciation of these questions. While a core of the essays focuses on France, the contributions engage a broad range of geographical contexts, from Byzantium to eastern Germany and England from the early centuries of the Common Era to the seventeenth century, revealing the prevalence and persistence of the key interconnected issues of images and authority. Contributors: Carla Bozzolo; Philippe Caron; Robert L. A. Clark; Paul Cohen; Thomas Conley; Jean-Philippe Genet; Douglas Kibbee; Gillette Labory; Nicole Pons; Mara R. Wade.

The Jeu dAdam is an Anglo-Norman mid-twelfth-century representation of several biblical stories, including the temptation of Adam and Eve and the subsequent fall, Cain and Abel, and the prophets Isaiah and Daniel. Its framework builds on the Latin responses of the mass during the liturgical season of Septuagesima, from before Lent to Easter. This collection of essays explores whether this early play was monastic or secular, its Anglo-Norman character, and the texts musical provenance.

Eric Bohme analyses two processes of conquest which are generally considered prime examples of the expansion of Latin-Christian powers into the Islamicate Mediterranean. The Norman conquest of Sicily 10611091 put a close to more than two hundred years of Muslim rule over the island. Two centuries later, the Catalan-Aragonese conquest of eastern al-Andalus (c. 12291245) and its transformation into the Kingdom of Valencia constituted a major advance in the Christian expansion on the Iberian Peninsula. The striking parallels between both changes of rulership are now analysed indepth for the first time. At the centre of the analysis is the perspective of the conquered Muslim communities: With what motivation and strategies did they participate in processes of interaction and negotiation with the new rulers and other immigrant groups?

Religious Horror and Holy War in Viking Age Francia explores how authorities in western Francia used horror rhetoric to cast Christian soldiers, who robbed the poor and the church, as monsters that devoured human flesh and drank human blood. Adapting modern literary horror approaches to medieval sources, this study reveals how such rhetoric served as a form of spiritual weaponry in the clergys attempts to correct and condemn wayward military men. This investigation, therefore, unearths long-forgotten Carolingian thought about the dreadful spiritual reality of internal enemies during a time of political division and the Northmens depredations. Yet such horror also informed a new understanding of Christian heroism that developed in relation to the wars fought against the invaders. This vision of heroic soldiers, which included military martyrs, culminated in ideas about holy war against the pagans. Thus Carolingian religious horror and holy war together belonged to a body of ideas about the spiritual, unseen side of the churchs cosmic conflict against evil that foreshadowed later medieval Crusading thought.

This is the third and final volume of essays issuing from the Leverhulme International Network Renaissance Conflict and Rivalries: Cultural Polemics in Europe, c. 1300c. 1650. The overall aim of the network was to examine the various ways in which conflict and rivalries made a positive contribution to cultural production and change during the Renaissance. The present volume, which contains papers delivered at the third colloquium, draws that examination to a close by considering a range of different strategies deployed in the period to manage conflict and rivalries and to bring them to a positive resolution. The papers explore these developments in the context of political, diplomatic, social, institutional, religious, and art history.

This volume focuses on phenomena, structures and constellations of power and rule in the 12th century from a comparative perspective. Comparing England and the Empire is a promising research project, because the Staufen and the Plantagenets ruled over more than one kingdom and claimed hegemony. Therefore, the divergence between legality and the demands of ruling over diverse lordships can be explored. The examples of extended royal rule in different constellations, treated by international authors, show how the practice of power and the structures of rule based on legitimate claims diverge.

This volume concerns premodern understandings of vegetal nature that encompass multiple semantics and perspectives. Scholars from the disparate fields of art history, literature, and religious studies present tantalizing studies of trees and plants in sacred and secular thought. Some discuss the concept of the Book of Nature and its implications. Others explore narratives of symbiosis between humans and vegetal material, tree-dwelling hermits, spirits metamorphosing into wood, flowers or trees that sprout from bodies or the dissolution of the self into the natural world. Complementary to these approaches are studies that suggest a collapsing of time and space in spiritually charged yet ambiguous natural motifs or topographies where forests or groves are spaces of transformative experience.

This volume is devoted to the spheres in which conflict and rivalries unfolded during the Renaissance and how these social, cultural and geographical settings conditioned the polemics themselves. This is the second of three volumes on Renaissance Conflict and Rivalries, which together present the results of research pursued in an International Leverhulme Network. The underlying assumption of the essays in this volume is that conflict and rivalries took place in the public sphere that cannot be understood as single, all-inclusive and universally accessible, but needs rather to be seen as a conglomerate of segments of the public sphere, depending on the persons and the settings involved. The articles collected here address various questions concerning the construction of different segments of the public sphere in Renaissance conflict and rivalries, as well as the communication processes that went on in these spaces to initiate, control and resolve polemical exchanges.

Las Siete Partidas, compendio jurídico recopilado por encargo de Alfonso X de Castilla (1221–1284), sientan las bases de un influyente concepto de gobierno monárquico. Estas se enmarcan en el periodo

La ciudad, especialmente en la Baja Edad Media, constituye un espacio de atracción para la nobleza. Un espacio donde instala sus casas-palacio e incorpora sus prácticas clientelares, y en cuyo aparato de toma de decisiones procura hacerse presente. Pero, sobre todo, un espacio urbano que ambiciona, que procura ocupar alli y donde puede, y cuyo alfoz, en todo caso, somete a practicas de usurpacion, de violencia y tension por momentos permanentes en ciertas areas de la geografia castellana. Aunque esta violencia esta ampliamente documentada, las relaciones de la nobleza y el mundo urbano no transitaron solo caminos de conflicto. En paralelo a los alineamientos politicos a los que en cada momento se incorporan los linajes nobles en el marco de la alta politica del reino, surgio tambien una cierta capacidad para la cooperacion, la ayuda mutua y la solidaridad (relativamente desinteresadas) entre nobles y ciudades. Esta obra se ocupa de algunos de los elementos teoricos que un analisis de este tipo de relaciones (conflictivas, cooperativas, neutras) ha de alcanzar: los aspectos mas politicos del marco de relaciones que se construye alrededor de las conexiones entre ciudad y nobleza, y monarquia; las implicaciones de contenido economico que aquellas conllevaron; y la formulacion de algunos modelos discursivos en los que se sustentaron dichas relaciones.

El volumen "Sermonario de Aviñón" recoge, entre otros sermones, los de la predicación llevada a cabo en Mallorca por el maestro dominico Vicent Ferrer entre el mes de septiembre de 1413 y comienzos de enero del año 1414. Se sabe, gracias a los exlibris que se pueden leer en las paginas del manuscrito, que fue escrito por el dominico Antoni Anglada, fraile que formaba parte de la "compañia" y que viajo junto con el maestro Vicent durante algunas de sus campañas pastorales. A su muerte, este manuscrito permanecio en el convento dominicano aviñones para incorporarse, finalmente, a la biblioteca municipal de la ciudad papal, donde se ha conservado hasta la actualidad. La edicion de este interesantisimo conjunto de homilias permite descubrir aspectos ineditos de la forma de ser del dominico valenciano. Aunque se conoce desde muy pronto, el manuscrito ha permanecido inedito hasta la actualidad, cuando se publica integramente el texto.

The 14th century - a paradoxical time of world-shattering plague, the Hundred Years War, the Peasants Revolt, but also literary and artistic innovation, formed the basis of the Renaissance. In the later years of this turbulent time a shadowy figure named Johannes Liechtenauer systematized lessons for swordsmanship, wrestling, armoured, and mounted combat. Recorded in cryptic, rhyming verses, it fell to masters of the 15th and 16th century to record, clarify and expand the grandmasters instructions in an extensive body of fencing manuals. As the world of the knight receded into history, these texts - many extensively and beautifully illustrated - were forgotten by all but German-language antiquarians and fencing historians until the last decade of the 20th century, when they were rediscovered by a new audience of martial artists and historians. In Lance, Spear, Sword and Messer, Christian Tobler makes a deep dive into these fighting traditions, creating a rich anthology that has extensive, instructional material on topics as diverse as the two-handed sword, spear, poleaxe, wrestling, and the use of long shields, combined with thought-provoking analysis and historical commentary that will occupy the mind - and challenge the preconceptions - of long-time students of medieval German martial arts. Finally, the martial career - in arms and in the literature of arms - of the famed Emperor Maximillian I, often called "the Last Knight," who was himself a devoted student of the tradition, serves as a capstone of this collection, much as his literary output, including a planned, but unwritten fight book, did in his own lifetime at the waning of the Middle Ages and start of the Northern Renaissance.