L'Agenda des Médiévistes

What does it mean – and what might it yet come to mean – to write ‘history’ in the twenty-first century? History After Hobsbawm brings together leading historians from across the globe to ask what being an historian should mean in their particular fields of study. Taking their cue from one of the previous century’s greatest historians, Eric Hobsbawm, and his interests across many periods and places, the essays approach their subjects with an underlying sense of what role an historian might seek to play, and attempt to help twenty-first-century society understand ‘how we got here’. They present new work in their sub-fields but also point to how their specialisms are developing, how they might further grow in the future, and how different areas of focus might speak to the larger challenges of history – both for the discipline itself and for its relationship to other fields of academic inquiry. Like Hobsbawn, the authors in this collection know that history matters. They speak to both the past and the present and, in so doing, introduce some of the most exciting new lines of research in a broad array of subjects from the medieval period to the present.

Table des matières :

INTRODUCTION

1: The Challenges of History, John H Arnold, Matthew J Hilton, and Jan Rüger

I. NATION AND EMPIRE

2: Gendering Property, Racing Capital, Catherine Hall
3: Writing Europe into the History of the British Empire, Jan Rüger
4: Indigenous Comparisons, Renaud Morieux
5: Hobsbawm and Researching the History of Nationalism, John Breuilly
6: Decolonisation as Tragedy, Bill Schwarz

II. MATERIAL ECONOMIES

7: Jiangnan style: doing global economic history in the medieval period, Chris Wickham
8: Global history and the transformation of early modern Europe, Maxine Berg
9: Industry, Working Lives, Nation and Empire, viewed through some key Welsh woollen objects, Pat Hudson
10: Social and environmental history in the Anthropocene, Paul Warde
11: Material Histories of the World: Scales and Dynamics, Frank Trentmann

III. PEOPLE AND POLITICS

12: Five swans over Littleport: fenland folklore and popular memory, c. 1810-1978, Andy Wood
13: Rethinking Gender and Labour History, Sonya Rose and Sean Brady
14: Postcolonial History as War History in the Twentieth Century, Yasmin Khan
15: The People’s History and the Politics of Everyday Life since 1945, Jon Lawrence
16: A Visit to the Dead: Genealogy and the Historian, Alison Light

CONCLUSION

17: A ‘Slight Angle to the Universe’: Eric Hobsbawm, Politics, and History, Geoff Eley

Index

Informations pratiques :

John H. Arnold, Matthew Hilton et Jan Rüger (éd.), History after Hobsbawm. Writing the Past for the Twenty-First Century, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2017. 352 Pages | 32 figures/illustrations. 234x156mm. ISBN: 9780198768784. Prix : 75,00 £.

Source : Oxford University Press

Jonas of Bobbio was an Italian monk, author, and abbot, active in Lombard Italy and Merovingian Gaul during the seventh century. He is best known as the author of the Life of Columbanus and His Disciples, one of the most important works of hagiography from the early medieval period, that charts the remarkable journey of the Irish exile and monastic founder, Columbanus (d. 615), through Western Europe, as well as the monastic movement initiated by him and his Frankish successors in the Merovingian kingdoms. In the years following Columbanus’s death numerous new monasteries were built by his successors and their elite patrons in Francia that decisively transformed the inter-relationship between monasteries and secular authorities in the Early Middle Ages. Jonas also wrote two other, occasional works set in the late fifth and sixth centuries: the Life of John, the abbot and founder of the monastery of Réomé in Burgundy, and the Life of Vedast, the first bishop of Arras and a contemporary of Clovis. Both works provide perspectives on how the past Gallic monastic tradition, the role of bishops, and the Christianization of the Franks were perceived in Jonas’s time. Jonas’s hagiography also provides important evidence for the reception of classical and late antique texts as well as the works of Gregory the Great and Gregory of Tours.This volume presents the first complete English translation of all of Jonas of Bobbio’s saints’ Lives with detailed notes and scholarly introduction that will be of value to all those interested in this period.

Dr Alexander O’Hara is a Research Fellow of the Institut für Mittelalterforschung in the Austrian Academy of Sciences and an Hon. Research Fellow of the School of History, University of St Andrews.

Professor Ian Wood is Professor of Early Medieval History in the Institute for Medieval Studies at the University of Leeds. His research interests focus on the history and historiography of the early Middle Ages. Previous publications include Avitus of Vienne: Letters and Selected Prose (TTH, LUP, 2002).

Table des matières :

Abbreviations

Introduction
1. The works of Jonas of Bobbio.
2. Francia in the Days of Columbanus.
3. The Gallic Church of the Late Sixth Century.
4. Columbanus and his ascetic exile to the continent.
5. Columbanus’s legacy.
6. Jonas of Bobbio: an Italian monk in Merovingian Gaul.
7. The manuscripts of the Life of Columbanus and the structure of the text.
8. Jonas the hagiographer and his Christian sources.
9. The Second Book of the Life of Columbanus and his Disciples.
10. Language and Style.
11. Jonas’s Life of John.
12. The Life of Vedast of Arras. Author and text.
13. Conclusion – the influence of Jonas’s hagiography.
14. A note on the text and translations of the Life of Columbanus.

Jonas, The Life of Columbanus.
Book I.
Verses and Hymn.
Book II.

Jonas, The Life of John.

Jonas (?), The Life of Vedast.

Appendices
1. Textual Variants.
2. Distribution of Biblical Quotations.
3. Parallels between Regula cuiusdam ad virgines and Jonas’s hagiographical works.
4. Three diplomas associated with Bobbio and Faremoutiers in the time of Jonas.

Bibliography

Maps
1. Ireland in the Days of Columbanus,
2. Francia, c. 590.
3. Burgundy c. 590-610.
4. Luxeuil and its environs.
5. Francia, c.610.
6. Early Columbanian foundations.
7. The World of Jonas.
8. The World of the Life of Vedast.
9. Arras in the Merovingian period.

Informations pratiques :

Jonas of Bobbio, Life of Columbanus, Life of John of Réomé, and Life of Vedast, trad. Alexander O’Hara and Ian Wood, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2017(Translated Texts for Historians, 64). 210 x 147 mm, 400 p. ISBN : 9781781381762. Prix : 25 £.

Source : Liverpool University Press

In Dark Age Nunneries, Steven Vanderputten dismantles the common view of women religious between 800 and 1050 as disempowered or even disinterested witnesses to their own lives. It is based on a study of primary sources from forty female monastic communities in Lotharingia—a politically and culturally diverse region that boasted an extraordinarily high number of such institutions. Vanderputten highlights the attempts by women religious and their leaders, as well as the clerics and the laymen and -women sympathetic to their cause, to construct localized narratives of self, preserve or expand their agency as religious communities, and remain involved in shaping the attitudes and behaviors of the laity amid changing contexts and expectations on the part of the Church and secular authorities.

Rather than a « dark age » in which female monasticism withered under such factors as the assertion of male religious authority, the secularization of its institutions, and the precipitous decline of their intellectual and spiritual life, Vanderputten finds that the post-Carolingian period witnessed a remarkable adaptability among these women. Through texts, objects, archaeological remains, and iconography, Dark Age Nunneries offers scholars of religion, medieval history, and gender studies new ways to understand the experience of women of faith within the Church and across society during this era.

Steven Vanderputten, Dark Age Nunneries. The Ambiguous Identity of Female Monasticism, 800–1050, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, à paraître en mai 2018. 330 p., 11 b&w halftones, 3 maps, 11 halftones, black & white, 3 maps. ISBN : 978-1-5017-1595-2. Pré-commande : 95 $ (Hardback) ou 35 $ (Paperback).

Source : Cornell University Press