Using Concepts In Medieval History
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Using Concepts in Medieval History
Author: Jackson W. Armstrong
language: en
Publisher: Springer Nature
Release Date: 2022-01-24
This book is the first of its kind to engage explicitly with the practice of conceptual history as it relates to the study of the Middle Ages, exploring the pay-offs and pitfalls of using concepts in medieval history. Concepts are indispensable to historians as a means of understanding past societies, but those concepts conjured in an effort to bring order to the infinite complexity of the past have a bad habit of taking on a life of their own and inordinately influencing historical interpretation. The most famous example is ‘feudalism’, whose fate as a concept is reviewed here by E.A.R. Brown nearly fifty years after her seminal article on the topic. The volume’s contributors offer a series of case studies of other concepts – 'colony', 'crisis', 'frontier', 'identity', 'magic', 'networks' and 'politics' – that have been influential, particularly among historians of Britain and Ireland in the later Middle Ages. The book explores the creative friction between historical ideas and analytical categories, and the potential for fresh and meaningful understandings to emerge from their dialogue.
Rethinking Migration
Available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. Humans have always moved, but across the world ‘migration’ has become a major policy, political and media concern. How can we understand human movement without positioning ‘the migrant’ as a problem? This interdisciplinary collection rethinks migration and movement. It explores mobility beyond the human and across time, from the movement of soil in the Middle Ages to contemporary cow passports. It also examines the histories of contemporary international borders and how they are intertwined with the politics of race and nation. The book illustrates that conceptually based, critical and creative thinking is as important for practice as it is for theory and can help us understand and respond to migration as a force that connects rather than divides.
Irish Kingship in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries
Irish Kingship in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries examines the power of medieval Irish kings but treats ‘power’ as a complex concept worthy of study in its own right. It starts from the premise that historians of medieval Ireland have interpreted ‘power’ in a narrow way. This book engages with the rich corpus of literature on power produced by political scientists and sociologists, which reveals the sheer complexity, and vicissitudes, of ‘power’ as a concept. Where there is power, there is resistance. Hence, drawing on evidence from medieval Irish chronicles, hagiographies, saga literature, and advice texts, this book explores the largely ignored phenomena of revolt, resistance, and violence in eleventh- and twelfth-century Ireland. It argues against a panoptic narrative of royal centralisation and suggests that the existence of a multiplicity of kings and non-royal lords has proven to be more of a problem for historians than it was for the Irish kings themselves. This book will appeal to scholars and students of medieval Ireland, as well as those interested in the history of kingship, power, and resistance.