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Leeds 2013 report part 3
This was the longest day of my attendance at the International Medieval Congress at Leeds last year, not just because of it ending in the dance but because it was the only day of the conference where I...
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Leeds 2013 report part 4 and final
I probably stayed at the dance of the International-Medieval-Congress-before-last longer than I should have done given that I was presenting the next day, but nonetheless I was on time, just, to my own...
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If you didn’t like that CFP, why not try this one?
The frontiers thing not catching your imagination? Perhaps you’re thinking: “So divisive! I want to look at what brings people together. Why couldn’t our subjects just all have been friends?” Well, Amy...
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Feudal Transformations XVIII: what’s behind it all
Cover of Guy Bois’s Transformation of the Year 1000 During my first days in Birmingham, while short of online access that wasn’t immediately swallowed by professional e-mail and bibliographical...
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Nice pictures if you can get them
After the flit to Cambridge in summer 2013 just mentioned, our next destination was the South of France! Lucky for some, you may say, and especially so for us as by reason of payback for favours and...
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Nearest neighbours in the pre-Catalan foothills
Cover of Guy Bois’s Transformation of the Year 1000 Another thing that Guy Bois’s book The Transformation of the Year 1000 has made me think about is the coherence of the village community in my area....
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Not the usual Beaulieu
Our actual base on the trip to the south of France last summer I now seem to be documenting was a town called Beaulieu-sur-Mer, not to be confused with the home of my stock non-Catalan monastery...
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Rue obscure et château-fort éminent
When we arrived in Nice last summer and travelled immediately to Beaulieu-sur-Mer, our journey took us through a place called Villefranche-sur-Mer, which our tourist information told us was worth a...
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Feudal Transformations XIX: change before the year 1000
Just after arriving in Birmingham, I finished reading Guy Bois’s provocative book The Transformation of the Year 1000 and was actually quite impressed; it represents a far better saving throw for the...
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Seven men in a high castle
The last of the Côte d’Azur tourist posts is also the largest and the most academic. Our final trip destination was a place called Roquebrune-Cap Martin, whither we were lured by the promise of a...
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Some more of that critical diplomatic
The first Leeds conference I went to was in 2005, and although I was not exactly in the money at that stage (not least because of having only been involved at very short notice to fill a gap in an...
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Beware of Greeks bearing names
Ruins of the palæochristian basilica at Empúries, one place it seems reasonable to say people came to Catalonia from actual Greece, albeit rather before this building was put up, let alone knocked...
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Who witnessed early medieval charters?
This apparently simple question has been bugging me a long time, and it was in the hope of answering it that I originally bought the book of Benoit-Michel Tock mentioned a post or two ago. Having got...
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Redactions of many stages
I finished reading Professor Benoit-Michel Tock‘s book on subscriptions to charters about which I’ve been raving here lately over the month of November 2013, so those posts will shortly cease, but...
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Ceasing to fear the End in the millennial Limousin
[This entry was written as a part of a larger one over the Christmas period of 2013/2014, and stuck in the queue at a position I've only now reached in my backlog. The second part, which bore no actual...
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Doorbells of the early medieval Dordogne
[This is the unrelated second part of the post I wrote over last Christmas holidays about interesting stuff in the Beaulieu-en-Limousin cartulary. The first part is here.] If this isn’t the place, it’s...
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More curiosities of the Beaulieu cartulary documents
One of the things that can happen with charter collections that interests me most is when we find that an institution has for some reason or other preserved two versions of the same document. My pet...
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How a saint’s cult gets started
When as medievalists we are told by our sources about a saint’s cult, it is most often of all via hagiography, a written Life of the saint that explains his or her lifelong holiness and authenticates...
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From the Sources VIII: a network of dowagers
I can’t now remember what it was I read or remembered that made me suddenly remember this document and decide to put it before you, but it may even have been writing the Widow Warlords post of a while...
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Genève médiévale I: beneath the cathedral
Firstly I should apologise for the longer-than-usual interval preceding this post; as you will see, it needed photos, and unfortunately my processing of photos is also backlogged…. Anyway, the...
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