L'Agenda des Médiévistes

Making Domesday presents a fresh interpretation of William the Conqueror’s survey of England, made possible by a major collaborative study and a new online edition of Exon Domesday, the earliest of the three original manuscripts to survive from the Domesday survey. The book addresses big questions about pre-modern government, written records, and the use of intelligence in both senses: the minds behind the planning and execution of Domesday, and the information about England that Domesday gathered. It characterizes Exon as the surviving part of the ‘working papers’ of one of the writing offices that over a period of ten weeks in summer 1086 dealt with all seven ‘circuits’ (regional groupings of shires) of the Domesday survey. The circuit offices had the task of recasting the manorial descriptions assembled in an earlier stage of the survey into an interim form intended for further redaction as Great Domesday Book by rearrangement, rewording, and abbreviation. A new deep understanding of the codicology and palaeography of Exon underpins every part of the analysis, and offers a model of documentary production for royal government at an exceptionally early period in western Europe. Part I describes and analyses each Exon text in unprecedented detail; Part II places Domesday in context and in broad comparative perspective, ranging across and beyond the Latin West. The dual approach provides a new interpretation of Domesday and a deeper understanding of both the Domesday survey and Domesday Book. It emerges that the survey was even more complex than we had dared to imagine, involving the production of different kinds of text intended to meet a range of fiscal and political needs. It is also clear that the survey was immediately effective, transforming the politics of land in a newly conquered society. Domesday has always been thought awesome, as its very name shows; Making Domesday contends that it was also a feat of intelligent government deployed by an aggressive and ambitious regime. As such it speaks to broader concerns with the colonial domination of conquered societies through the purposeful collection of systematic statistical information.

Stephen Baxter, Professor of Medieval History, St Peter’s College, Oxford, Julia Crick, Professor of Palaeography and Manuscript Studies, King’s College London, and C. P. Lewis, Senior Fellow, Institute of Historical Research, University of London. Stephen Baxter read History as an undergraduate at Wadham College, Oxford, and, following a short career in strategy consulting and investment banking, returned to Oxford to read for his doctorate at Christ Church. He was elected a Fellow by Examination at Magdalen College, Oxford, and then joined the History Department at King’s College London as Lecturer and Senior Lecturer in Medieval History. He was appointed Clarendon Associate Professor and Barron Fellow in Medieval History at St Peter’s College, Oxford, in 2014, and became Professor of Medieval History there in 2020. He has published widely on politics, government, and society in early medieval England.

Julia Crick read Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic and History at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, completing her doctorate in the same institution. She held a JRF and Official Fellowship at Caius before moving to the University of Exeter to take up a Lectureship in Medieval History, becoming Senior Lecturer and Associate Professor. In 2012 she was appointed Professor of Palaeography and Manuscript Studies at King’s College London. Between 2014 and 2017 she was Principal Investigator of the Exon Domesday research project (AHRC grant reference AH/L013975/1).

C. P. Lewis read History and completed a DPhil at Merton College, Oxford. He joined the staff of the Victoria County History in 1982, working on Cambridgeshire, and later was county editor for Cheshire and then Sussex, taking early retirement in 2009. Since then he has been a research assistant on projects involving Domesday Book. He is a senior fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London. His research interests and publications are on English and Welsh history in the central Middle Ages, English local and regional history, the historiography of English local history, and onomastics.

Table des matières :

Introduction
Part I: Exon: The Earliest Manuscript of the Domesday Survey
1:The Anatomy of Exon
2:The Form and Shape of the Manuscript
3:The Exon Geld Accounts and the Great Geld of 1085-1086
4:Exon Fiefs I: The First Draft of Domesday
5:Exon Fiefs II: The Lists of Hundreds
6:Exon Fiefs III: The Sources of Information
7:Exon Fiefs IV: Compiling the Fiefs Booklets
8:Terrae Occupatae: Recording Unauthorized Tenures
9:The Fief Summaries
10:Writing Great Domesday Book
11:Inside the Exon Office: The Making of Domesday Imagined
Part II: Placing Domesday
12:1085 and the Invasion Threat
13:The Significance of King Henry I’s Pipe Roll
14:Estate Management and Written Records in England and on the Continent Before Domesday
15:Domesday and the Geld
16:The Profits of Royal Lordship
17:Title to Property in the Age of the Great Confiscation
18:The Men Behind the Survey
Part III: Conclusions
19:Making Domesday
20:Intelligent Power in Conquered England

Informations pratiques :

Stephen Baxter, Julia Crick, C. P. Lewis, Making Domesday. Intelligent Power in Conquered England, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2025 ; 1 vol., 1072 p. ISBN : 978-0-19885-012-0. Prix : GBP 143,00.

Source : Oxford University Press

Thomas Aquinas and Medieval Canon Law bridges, for the first time, two worlds of scholarship that have never been explored in book-length form and investigates an under-researched area in Thomistic studies, namely the question of how Thomas Aquinas engaged the ecclesiastical law and jurisprudence of his day.

Neither historians of medieval canon law nor experts on Thomas’s thought have previously paid much attention to the canon law tradition as a source for Thomas’s work and an influence on his thought. But, as this volume shows, his consideration of mendicant life, law, justice, oaths, penance, clerical orders, the Eucharist, baptism, property, commerce, marriage and more reveal engagement with key canon law texts and concepts and with the jurisprudence of major canonists. The book uncovers how Aquinas encountered canonical regulations and jurisprudence as a Dominican, an educator in both theology and pastoral care, and a participant in the secular-mendicant controversy. In his life, education, community, and his way of thought, Thomas Aquinas could not avoid and necessarily encountered and dealt with the canonical tradition. He did so in a distinctive way, working as he did with his theological and philosophical source material to craft his own great synthesis. What this volume shows, if nothing else, is that the canon law tradition should be taken into consideration when assessing Thomas’s synthetic thought.

Following the editors’ introduction, thirteen scholarly contributions and an epilogue explore Aquinas’s interaction with medieval canon law through four major themes: Dominican Matters; Foundations Matters of Faith, Truth, and Law; Moral Matters; and Sacramental Matters. Approximately half the contributors are specialists from the field of medieval canon law, and half are grounded in Thomistic tradition. The result is a unique and scholarly contribution to two major research areas that may open avenues for similar studies of other key figures in the scholastic tradition.

Justin M. Anderson is professor and Chair of Moral Theology at Immaculate Conception Seminary School of Theology at Seton Hall University. Atria A. Larson is associate professor of medieval christianity at Saint Louis University, and the author of Gratian’s Tractatus de penitentia: A New Latin Edition with English Translation and Master of Penance: Gratian and the Development of Penitential Thought and Law in the Twelfth Century.

Informations pratiques :

Thomas Aquinas and Medieval Canon Law, éd. Justin M. Anderson, Atria A. Larson, Washington D.C., The Catholic Unievrsity of America Press, 2025 ; 1 vol., 402 p. ISBN : 978-0-81323-934-7. Prix : USD 85,00.

Source : The Catholic University of America Press

The lives of many early medieval saints show them working with their hands. Radegund cooks in the kitchen, carries firewood, and cleans privies; Fiacre cultivates a garden; Brigid milks cows and makes cheese; Dunstan shapes metal and constructs buildings. Other saints raise crops, herd cattle, write books, or weave cloth. Equally at home in garden, workshop, and scriptorium, these saints work alongside other people, interacting regularly with livestock, materials, and the land: miracles and other supernatural events are embedded in the habitual, everyday routines of the saints’ own communities. Saints exemplify the balance between productive, creative work and the toil or effort required to accompany it, sometimes aligned with penitential labour. But more often, the saints celebrate work as a rewarding result of divine gift, human ingenuity and communal cooperation.

This book examines the representation of work – from arable and pastoral agriculture to textile arts and caretaking – in the vitae of saints who lived in Ireland, Britain, and Francia between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Bringing together close readings of these texts, evidence from archaeology, and anthropological approaches to material culture, it argues that through such work, saints showed others how to survive, thrive, and build a world that promised both physical security and spiritual rewards.

Table des matières :

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations

Introduction

Part I – Labor, Work, and Materiality in the Early Middle Ages

1. The Artes mechanicae in the Early Middle Ages
2. Monastic Life and its Material Entanglements
3. Materia and the Dynamics of Early Medieval Making

Part II – The Craft of Early Medieval Saints

4. Household Work and Caretaking in the Lives of the Saints
5. Saintly Work in Horticulture and Arable Agriculture
6. Pastoral Agriculture in the Lives of the Saints
7. Saintly Scribal Work and Its Entanglements
8. The Textile Arts in Saintly Vitae
9. Saintly Smiths in the Early Middle Ages
10. The Opus of Saintly Builders

Conclusion
Bibliography of Saints’ Lives

Informations pratiques :

Christina M. Heckman, Work and its Representations in Early Medieval Saints’ Lives, Woodbridge, D.S. Brewer, 2025 ; 1 vol., 318 p. ISBN : 978-1-84384-750-2. Prix : GBP 85,00.

Source : Boydell and Brewer