![]() ![]() Anne Duggan deals with the power of a specific document, and forgery, Laudabiliter, in Anglo-Irish history, and Swen Brunsch with the use and authority of documents in early medieval Italian pleas. Section 3 focuses on the “Power of words.” Jayne Carroll looks at concepts of power in Anglo-Scandinavian verse, specifically à propos the early tenth-century English king Athelstan Alice Jorgensen concentrates on power, poetry, and violence in the late tenth-century English poem The Battle of Maldon. Rebecca Rist covers papal regulations on usury vis-à-vis Jews and Crusaders. Two essays consider clerics: Walter Ysebaert on episcopal and elite clerical networks in late twelfth-century northern France and Jeremy Goldberg on knowledge as power wielded by the later medieval English parochial clergy. “Informal Influence” begins with three essays on queens: Ana Maria Rodrigues on late medieval Portugal and Patricia Dark on Matilda of Boulogne in twelfth-century England (both on queens consort) and Bethany Aram on late medieval Castile (on queens regnant). Gale Owen-Crocker writes on dress and authority in the Bayeux tapestry Claudia Bolgia on ostentation, power, and family competition expressed in the Aracoeli chapels in Rome and Marie-Thérèse Champagne on papal claims to authority in twelfth-century Rome, involving the Old Testament and Jewish Temple relics. ![]() “Image-making” includes two on image making and the specific problems of authority faced by conquerors-Jean Dunbabin on Charles of Anjou in the Regno, Chris. Eighteen papers are grouped under three headings. The theme of the 2003 Leeds International Medieval Congress was “Power and Authority.” This volume gathers papers from that congress, supplemented by (unidentified) commissioned articles. Another possible theme is northern Italy, through which so many French men, and a few women, passed, and where other cultural influences and fashions awaited the open-minded. Other fruitful interdisciplinary themes in this book concern how the knighting of lawyers and the style of sumptuary legislation, southern traditions, came north. He is the prime but not the only example of southerners whose path north was smoothed by the new links between Paris, where he became famous, and Naples, where he returned home to teach, and to die. Dunbabin’s ability to locate Thomas Aquinas in his southern Italian milieu is particularly refreshing, as is her view that many of his ideas were shaped long before his Paris sojourn. The kings of France also learned from their southern cousins to take a stronger interest in the faculty and to view it as a source for opinions to justify their policies toward the church in Rome and the Jews, among other issues. Medicine and science were interests in places like Salerno and Naples teachers and students came to expect more than arts and theology from Parisian masters. One interesting argument concerns how and why the university of Paris during the late thirteenth century became more like the one in Naples. This book becomes interdisciplinary and innovative in Dunbabin’s attempt to look beyond bureaucracies and taxes to illuminate possible southern influences on developments in the north. Because the years 12 mark a period of intense French engagement in Italian affairs, it makes sense for Dunbabin to focus on this period. Hence, it is not surprising that Dunbabin finds the origins of some late Capetian administrative and fiscal innovations in the lessons that returning veterans drew from the Norman and Hohenstaufen governance of Naples and Palermo. French nobles who understood lordship saw in the south one of the most legally sophisticated and centralized monarchies in Europe. Hence, this book is partly about the transformative experience of war, as well as the effects that an imperialist project had on both the colonizers and the colonized.īeing well aware that medieval France encountered a complex web of influences gained from wars and crusading in England, Languedoc, and the eastern Mediterranean, Dunbabin has to disentangle the particular effects of the Regno’s traditions from these other possible sources of experience. The few returning to Capetian France and Flanders were changed men with new knowledge gained in the Regno about how to rule more effectively. The vast majority of travelers (elites often by sea and armies by land) to the south were warriors, many of whom settled there or died in the wars. Her topic is not the Angevin conquest of southern Italy in the 1260s but rather what the temporary French visitors to their new Regno (southern Italy and Sicily) learned there and brought back to northern France. Dunbabin, an eminent authority on medieval France and the career of Charles of Anjou, has written a more thought-provoking book than this meager title suggests. ![]()
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