Search results for ""author dr. michael bintley""

Drawing on sources from archaeology and written texts, the author brings out the full significance of trees in both pagan and Christian Anglo-Saxon religion. Trees were of fundamental importance in Anglo-Saxon material culture - but they were also a powerful presence in Anglo-Saxon religion before and after the introduction of Christianity. This book shows that they remained prominentin early English Christianity, and indeed that they may have played a crucial role in mediating the transition between ancient beliefs and the new faith. It argues that certain characteristics of sacred trees in England can be determined from insular contexts alone, independent of comparative evidence from culturally related peoples. This nevertheless suggests the existence of traditions comparable to those found in Scandinavia and Germany. Tree symbolismhelped early English Christians to understand how the beliefs of their ancestors about trees, posts, and pillars paralleled the appearance of similar objects in the Old Testament. In this way, the religious symbols of their forebears were aligned with precursors to the cross in Scripture. Literary evidence from England and Scandinavia similarly indicates a shared tradition of associations between the bodies of humans, trees, and other plant-life. Though potentially ancient, these ideas flourished amongst the abundance of vegetative symbolism found in the Christian tradition. Michael Bintley is Senior Lecturer in Medieval Literature at Canterbury Christ Church University.

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Essays on aspects of iconography as manifested in the material culture of medieval England. Professor Jane Hawkes has devoted her career to the study of medieval stone, exploring its iconographies, symbolic significances and scholarly contexts, and shedding light on the obscure and understudied sculpted stone monuments of Anglo-Saxon England. This volume builds on her scholarly interests, offering new engagements with medieval culture and the current scholarly methodologies that shape the discipline. The contributors approach several significantobjects and texts from the early and later Middle Ages, working across several disciplinary backgrounds and periods, largely focusing on the Insular World as it intersects with wider global contexts of the period. The chapters cover a wide range of subjects, from the material culture of baptism, to the material, symbolic and iconographic consideration of the artistic outputs of the Insular world, with essays on sculpture, metalwork, glass and manuscripts,to ideas of stone and salvation in both material and textual contexts, to intellectual puzzles and patterns - both material and mathematic - to consideration of the ways in which the conversion to Christianity played out on the landscape. MEG BOULTON is Research Affiliate and Visiting Lecturer in the History of Art Department at the University of York; MICHAEL D.J. BINTLEY is Lecturer in Early Medieval Literature and Culture at Birkbeck, University of London. Contributors: Elizabeth Alexander, Michael Brennan, Melissa Herman, Mags Mannion, Thomas Pickles, Harry Stirrup, Heidi Stoner, Colleen Thomas, Philippa Turner, Carolyn Twomey,

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Essays on the depiction of animals, birds and insects in early medieval material culture, from texts to carvings to the landscape itself. For people in the early Middle Ages, the earth, air, water and ether teemed with other beings. Some of these were sentient creatures that swam, flew, slithered or stalked through the same environments inhabited by their human contemporaries. Others were objects that a modern beholder would be unlikely to think of as living things, but could yet be considered to possess a vitality that rendered them potent. Still others were things half glimpsed on a dark night or seen only in the mind's eye; strange beasts that haunted dreams and visions or inhabited exotic lands beyond the compass of everyday knowledge. This book discusses the various ways in which the early English and Scandinavians thought about and represented these other inhabitants of their world, and considers the multi-faceted nature of the relationship between people and beasts. Drawing on the evidence of material culture, art, language, literature, place-names and landscapes, the studies presented here reveal a world where the boundaries between humans, animals, monsters and objects were blurred and often permeable, and where to represent the bestial could be to holda mirror to the self. Michael D.J. Bintley is Senior Lecturer in Medieval Literature at Canterbury Christ Church University; Thomas J.T. Williams is a doctoral researcher at UCL's Institute of Archaeology. Contributors: Noël Adams, John Baker, Michael D. J. Bintley, Sue Brunning, László Sándor Chardonnens, Della Hooke, Eric Lacey, Richard North, Marijane Osborn, Victoria Symons, Thomas J. Williams

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The most recent cutting-edge scholarship on the tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries. The essays collected here demonstrate the rich vitality of scholarship in this area. This volume has a particular focus on the interrelations between the various parts of north-western Europe. After the opening piece on Lotharingia, there are detailed studies of the relationship between Ponthieu and its Norman neighbours, and between the Norman and Angevin duke-kings and the other French nobility, followed by an investigation of the world of demons and possession in Norman Italy, with additional observations on the subject in twelfth-century England. Meanwhile, the York massacre of the Jews in 1190 is set in a wider context, showing the extent to which crusader enthusiasm led to the pogroms that so marred Anglo-Jewish relations, not just in York but elsewhere in England; and there is an exploration of poverty in London, also during the 1190s, viewed through the prism of the life and execution of William fitz Osbert. Another chapter demonstrates the power of comparative history to illuminate the norms of proprietary queenship, so often overlooked by historians of both kingship and queenship. And two essays focusing on landscape bring the physical into close association with the historical: on the equine landscape of eleventh and twelfth-century England, adding substantially to our understanding of the place of the horse in late Anglo-Saxon and early Anglo-Norman societies, and on the Brut narratives of Geoffrey of Monmouth, Wace, and Laȝamon, arguing that they use realistic landscapes in their depiction of the action embedded in their tales, so demonstrating the authors' grasp of the practical realities of contemporary warfare and the role played by landscapes in it.

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