Search

Dayekut'iwn, a practice of fostering found in early medieval Armenian sources, formed a significant basis of social interaction between families in the historical Caucasus and Iran. This article presents a new and extensive analysis of fostering in the context of early medieval Armenian sources written between the fifth and seventh century, illustrating the broad context in which early medieval Armenian social history can be understood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article traces how medieval texts written in English and French adopt the link between human language and bear roaring to inscribe bears into the poetic landscape. I place this discussion in the context of archaeological evidence, which reveals a steady increase in the presence of ursids in England after the Norman conquest, before which they were extinct, and culminating in the bear fighting arenas of early modern England. I show that works such as the Femina, the Roman de Renart and the Ovide moralisé depict ursids in ways that reflect a foundational interest in the ties that bind the act of writing with a zoopoetical reflection on animality. In this way, bears in literary texts are not limited by their extinction from a landscape, or conversely by their presence as commodities. Rather, literary bears may be read in dialogue with a complex and evolving historical and archaeological record. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The results from archaeological fieldwork between 2014 and 2016 at Burdiehouse, Edinburgh, have revealed evidence of structures, pits and enclosures related to rural settlement and activity ranging across the Early Medieval period from the 7th century AD up to the 12th century AD. A suite of features included a truncated stone platform, remains of a small post-built building with a hearth and numerous pits, postholes and curvilinear ditches. In addition, a circular clay-lined kiln was recorded. Radiocarbon dating indicates that while the building and hearth, the stone platform and numerous of the pits, postholes and linear features related to activity between the 7th and 10th centuries AD, the kiln was a later feature, dated to the 12th century AD. The evidence for rural Early Medieval settlement sites as identified at Burdiehouse is limited but recent work has emphasised how important they are for understanding everyday activity in this period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Archaeological investigations were undertaken at Quien, Isle of Bute in 2010 as part of the Discover Bute Landscape Partnership Scheme. Excavations demonstrated that a putative early medieval chapel in fact dates to between the 11th and 13th centuries AD. Associated artefacts from the surrounding enclosure bank suggest a more domestic character to the structure. An isolated pit also provided evidence of prehistoric activity in the vicinity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

GUARD Archaeology Ltd were commissioned by Scottish Water to undertake an archaeological watching brief during ground works associated with the installation of a waste water outfall and associated Combined Sewer Outflow (CSO) as part of development works at Castlebank Street, Partick. Earlier adjacent archaeological works had identified a large ditch and sandstone well on the periphery of the area to the south-west (Green 2019). The archaeological watching brief included the initial monitoring of borehole drilling, expanding to all overburden stripping along the full length of the working area for the drainage tract as well as the adjacent CSO area, stretching from the existing River Kelvin's edge to the boundary of Castlebank Street. The works identified the remaining extent of previously identified features, along with a wide range of further features of interest. These consisted of several distinct phases of structural stonework and two substantial intersecting ditches; a substantial assemblage of pottery was also recovered, along with several metal objects including a medieval decorative pin and a copper alloy decorative boss. The stonework likely relates to the seventeenth century Hutcheson's tower house, with some of the earlier deposits, pottery and metal objects possibly originating from activity around the earlier twelfth century Bishops' residence. Bore hole monitoring was undertaken in early 2016, while overburden stripping and archaeological excavation took place between February and August 2016. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores belief and identity as expressed through the material culture of dress. It focuses on supernatural engagements through material culture linked to human and animal bodies and offers a view of the means by which everyday ritual, habit and devotion were embodied and facilitated through dress and other amulets, including contextually re-purposed coins. The evidence is primarily archaeological and derives from medieval Perthshire, a place with wide connections, and so the discussion is presented in the context of Scottish and European practices. The key themes are status, magic and belief, all three of which speak to identity. The practices they elucidate are explored primarily through jewellery and dress fittings, pilgrimage souvenirs, coins and other amulets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Keywords: Scotland; medieval; early modern; dress and décor EN Scotland medieval early modern dress and décor 305 313 9 12/09/21 20211201 NES 211201 The articles in this special issue of I The Scottish Historical Review i are the product of a conference entitled 'Dress and Décor: Domestic Textiles and Personal Adornment in Scotland up to 1700', hosted at the University of St Andrews in March 2018.[1] The event brought together a wide range of researchers from the fields of history, archaeology, heritage, and dress and textile studies to focus on material display in medieval and early modern Scotland. Caroline Paterson opens with a discussion of dress and textiles from roughly two hundred early medieval pagan Norse graves in Scotland. She uses a variety of sources to recover the monarchs' own perspectives and intentions in relation to the visual and material aspects of their weddings, including James VI's personal writing on dress, eyewitness accounts and records of the incredible expense outlaid by the royal household on wedding-related dress and textiles. Moving the subject of dress accessories to Perthshire, Mark Hall explores the apotropaic and religious powers of dress fittings, jewellery, horse accessories, seal matrices, pilgrimage souvenirs and coins. [Extracted from the article]

In 1222, Adam, bishop of Caithness, was murdered by a group of Caithness landholders. Although it appears in a fourteenth century manuscript, the Old Norse text Brenna Adams Byskups (The Burning of Bishop Adam) originated in Iceland in the 1230s. It provides a Caithness-based perspective on Adam's death to compare with other accounts from around the world. Including a new transcription and translation of the text, this article contextualises Brenna Adams Byskups and the events of Adam's death. At this time, the bishops of Caithness were used by the Scottish kings to promote royal authority in the territory of the jarls of Orkney and Caithness, leading to moments of violence. By comparing Brenna Adams Byskups to other accounts, Jarl Jón's (died 1231) role in Adam's death can be established, as can the extent of King Alexander II's (1214–49) punishments. Adam's murder had a significant impact on northern Scotland, consolidating Scottish royal authority in Sutherland and possibly contributing to Jarl Jón's murder in 1231. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article experiments with using the Pelagios Linked Open data infrastructure and its annotation tool Recogito to explore the geographical framework of Burchard of Mount Sion's thirteenth-century Descriptio terrae sanctae. It places Burchard's text in the context of medieval practices of linking information intertextually and illuminates the roles played by geographical intertextual links in the text's conceptual geography. In particular, it explores the functions of geographical links to Old Testament books of the Deuteronomic History in the Descriptio, and explores Burchard's methods in using geographical links to harmonize the different textual traditions and geographical frameworks on which the Descriptio draws and to give meaning to the landscape he describes. Overall, the article shows the usefulness of infrastructures such as Pelagios and platforms such as Recogito, alongside more traditional methods of textual and source analysis, in illuminating the geographical framework of a complex medieval text. It highlights some of the difficulties in using such infrastructures to grapple with the complexities of medieval geographical frameworks, while noting some recent developments in digital mapping technologies that may help to address these. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a passage from Beyond Aporia? translated into English as 'Nightmare: At the Margins of Medieval Studies', Sarah Kofman relates how an encounter with the work of the medievalist Bernard Cerquiglini 'induced the return of an entire buried past', '[her] dark ages'. Kofman states that the key to this return lay in an untranslatable Old French adverb of grief, mar, which she understood as having helped generate a cathartic nightmare drawing on recollections of a childhood lived under the Nazi occupation. Approaching Kofman's work in the light of medievalists' notorious penchant for deconstructive and psychoanalytic approaches, this article argues that despite its intensely personal status, Kofman's nightmare bears traces of an important nightmare of Freud's recounted in his Interpretation of Dreams (1900), one with which she would certainly have been familiar: both dream of their mothers through the actions of human–animal hybrids (Kofman dreams of a bat with a human head, Freud of humans with bird beaks). Beyond this, Kofman's nightmare recalls the role of the dream vision (or visio) in the most famous works of medieval philosophy (for example, Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, with the apparition of Lady Philosophy), where dreams aid the dreamer in coordinating a complex interplay between painful personal experiences, the weighty influence of past thinkers, and the impetus to philosophical reflection in the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although there was no legal definition of noble status, the most powerful and prestigious in society became increasingly aware of themselves as a distinct group—an aristocracy—in the century between c. 1160 and c. 1260. Elite men, both lay and clerical, were accorded the title dominus ('lord', or 'sir') before their names, along with other linguistic status markers, with increasing frequency during this time. Titles like dominus were not applied uniformly, however. In this article, the People of Medieval Scotland database is used for the first time to undertake an exhaustive analysis of the charter evidence. Status markers have been used to examine the power dynamics inherent in the relationships between individuals and groups within the aristocracy, allowing for a much richer understanding of the contexts in which high-status language was successfully deployed. This period saw the concept of the aristocracy expanded, as second-tier knightly landowners tussled for recognition as members of the elite along with the much more powerful magnates. This article offers a new methodology for examining and understanding status anxiety among medieval elites. The study is set against wider European developments and rooted in an appreciation of the wider European historiography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the werewolf of the medieval romance displays behaviour comparable with modern studies of the wolf. In the dualistic medieval world of nature versus society, however, this seems inconsistent. How does the medieval werewolf exhibit realistic traits of the wolf? I examine the realistic lupine qualities of the werewolf Alphouns in the Middle English poem William of Palerne to justify my argument. Citing examples from his actions in the wilderness, I argue that Alphouns's lupine behaviour is comparable to traits such as cognitive mind-mapping and surrogate parental roles, which are found in contemporary studies of wolves in the wild. Recognising the ecology of the (were)wolf of the medieval romance helps us to understand better the werewolf's role as metaphor and its relationship to humans and society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using writings from observers of the 1518 Strasbourg dancing plague, this article explores the various understandings of dancing mania, disease, and divine judgment applied to the dancing plague's interpretation and treatment. It argues that the 1518 Strasbourg dancing plague reflects new currents of thought, but remains closely linked to medieval philosophies; it was an event trapped between medieval and modern ideologies and treated according to two very different systems of belief. Understanding the ways in which observers comprehended the dancing plague provides insight into the ways in which, during the early modern period, new perceptions of the relationship between humanity and the divine developed and older conceptions of the body and disease began to change, while at the same time, ideologies surrounding dance and its relationship to sinful behavior remained consistent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Fall 2013, the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, engaged five postdoctoral fellows placed in five different institutions to explore issues related to data curation for medieval studies. In May 2015, these fellows convened a two-day workshop on the sharing and publishing of Linked Open Data (LOD). Funded by a CLIR/Mellon microgrant, the workshop brought together librarians, technologists, and scholars to brainstorm on the challenges posed to medievalists in sharing data on digital platforms. 2 The workshop offered a forum in which to discuss the complexity of medieval data and the challenges of sharing and publishing it. It enabled participants to appreciate LOD's potential to express complicated data sets in our area of study and aid the navigation of those data sets, as well as understand how LOD can facilitate scholars to share and publish research outcomes more effectively. In this article, we take the lessons learned from the workshop and apply them to a set of complex data: 13th-century French motets, short pieces of music usually consisting of three lines and incorporating manifold connections and references. Following an outline of LOD, a detailed explanation of the motet and the manner of its composition will set the scene for elucidating the levels of complexity to be found in motet metadata, and hence why the LOD model can aid us in negotiating the data. We will then demonstrate an effective application of LOD by proposing a proof-of-concept system for organizing a select set of motets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The medieval dioceses of Transylvania, Oradea, and Cenad were the easternmost ramparts of Western culture. Cathedrals, Benedictine and Cistercian abbeys, Franciscan and Dominican convents, parish churches, and urban communities owned books and libraries in the Middle Ages. Most of these were lost to fires and plunders. The Tartars' invasion in 1241 and the Reformation were also major occasions for book destruction. Starting from surviving book lists and manuscripts preserved in Romania and abroad, the present article attempts to reconstruct the landscape of literacy in medieval Transylvania. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 6 July 1331, two procurators arrived in Bergen claiming that Cormac son of Cormac had been elected bishop of Sodor by the clergy of Skye and the canons of Snizort. Their arrival is recorded in a letter sent by Eiliv, archbishop of Nidaros, to two canons of the church of Bergen ordering that there be an examination of the election in the cathedral of Bergen on 12 July 1331. Cormac's election was contentious for three main reasons: firstly, there was already a new bishop of Sodor; secondly the right to elect a bishop of Sodor seems to have lain with the clergy of Man; and thirdly the king of Scots had the right to present the candidate to the archbishop of Nidaros. This paper examines the identities and careers of both Cormac and his successful rival, Thomas de Rossy, and the potential reasons for Cormac's claim and its ultimate failure. Therefore, this study reveals some of the underlying geopolitical realities of the diocese of Sodor in the mid-fourteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When we consider the history of the Picts we are faced with the perennial challenge for the early medievalist of deciding whether the fragments of evidence which survive are representative of the reality of Pictish society, or whether they provide us with distortions, based on patterns of survival. This issue is as relevant to the subject of royal succession as it is to other aspects of Pictish history. The debate over whether the Picts practised a matrilineal system, with the son of the previous king's sister becoming the next king, or whether it was a patrilineal system, with the kingship generally passing through the male line, has dominated the discussion of Pictish succession. Until the 1980s, the matriliny thesis was virtually unquestioned, and accepted by scholars including F. T. Wainwright, Marjorie Anderson, and Isabel Henderson1. The bases for this view were the accounts of the Pictish settlement of northern Britain in Bede's ‘Ecclesiastical History of the English People’ and Irish texts written throughout the medieval period, but mainly surviving in versions from the twelfth century or later.2 In these sources it was claimed that the Picts went to Ireland before arriving in northern Britain, and that they obtained wives from the Irish, with some versions stating that this was done on condition that the succession went through the female line. Other sources which did not openly discuss the nature of Pictish succession, particularly the Irish chronicles and the Pictish king-lists, were then interpreted by scholars in relation to these accounts and were thought to support them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An iron-working bloomery mound was excavated by CFA Archaeology Ltd in 2004 at the head of Glen Docherty, near Kinlochewe, Achnasheen, Highland. A mound of waste material was excavated and dated to the 15th–17th centuries on the basis of radiocarbon analysis. A solidified bed of ferruginous deposit was revealed during the bloomery mound excavations but was found to be of an earlier date (1050–1285 AD). There was no further evidence for metalworking installations. A charcoal-burning platform was also excavated in Glen Docherty in 2005 and radiocarbon dated to the 15th–17th centuries. The above provide evidence for a long involvement with iron making in this part of the western Highlands and prior to the 17th century when the area, and the north shore of Loch Maree in particular, became known as the location for the installation of the first charcoal-operated blast furnace in Scotland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]