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The article begins with an analysis of a modern relic and of relics in general. This leads to a twofold conclusion: we do not know of a society without relics; and the cult of relics is a cult of individuals, groups, or events these relics are believed to be related to. Relics therefore preserve the memories of those of whom they are relics. As such, they are tools of memorising, but not the only...
The nature of the relation between city and countryside in medieval Italy was unique by comparison with the rest of Europe. Precisely for this reason, the question has drawn the attention of historiography, particularly starting in the early twentieth century, with the scholarship of Gaetano Salvemini and Gioacchino Volpe, and especially Romolo Caggese, the author of Classi e comuni rurali nel Medio...
This article highlights some of the challenges the nascent Florentine territorial state faced in the second half of the fourteenth century, after it was visited with the Great Plague of 1348. When mercenaries began to cross the territory, and the ruling class found itself unable to handle this kind of emergency, the exurban population turned to forms of self-defence. These initiatives resemble the...
It is only fourteenth- and fifteenth-century sources that help build an image of the functioning of the rabbinate in Jewish religious communities of medieval Poland. Latin Christian sources dating to the period mention individuals described as doctor scholae, senior scholae, or episcopus Iudaeorum (standing for the rabbi or the major senior). However, mentions referring to such persons usually only...
This article explores the ways episcopal milieus on the north-eastern peripheries of Europe created and renewed their identities and symbols of episcopal authority by domesticating their immigrant saints during the high Middle Ages. By comparing the examples of holy bishops arriving to Poland and Sweden (St Adalbert, St Sigfrid, St Henry), it studies the episcopal mythopoesis, that is, the creation...
The article discusses the participation of Italians in the town council and the judicial bench being local government authorities of the city of Cracow in the early modern period. As many as seventy-four Italians (this standing for 14 per cent of all the councillors and 8 per cent assessors or lay judges) are identifiable for the period in question; nineteen of them concluded their careers with the...
The article seeks to comparatively analyse the functions implemented in the Late Middle Ages by quarters in the main towns or cities of Prussia, including Rechtstadt Danzig (Main City of Gdańsk), Altstadt Königsberg (Old Town of Königsberg [today Kaliningrad]), Braunsberg (Braniewo), Altstadt Thorn (Toruń), and Kulm (Chełmno). Special attention is placed on answering the question of how the quarters...
An ancient Etruscan settlement located in the Valdichiana, along the border between Tuscany and Umbria, Cortona has attracted renewed interest over the last two decades among historians of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Falling into this line of research is the publication of the communal statute from 1325, when the government handed the reins of power to the seigneurial regime revolving around...
The 1335 foundation (chartering) of Kazimierz, the town situated beside Cracow, was a difficult venture as a group of settlers had to be brought from another strong urban centre. Owing to the memory of the rebellion led by alderman (vogt) Albert and due to the political situation, Casimir III the Great most probably sought assistance from the town of Sandomierz in an attempt to find an optimum solution...
Wherever the town owners did not literally grant the settlement official, i.e. founder (Pol. zasadźca), or the commune itself, full rights to privileged trading facilities, they reserved the competences to shape the size, location and appearance of their complexes. Decisions in this regard formed an element of economic and fiscal policy towards the town, albeit not always – they could also be part...
From the late twelfth century onwards, the German law became a universal organisational pattern of urban communes spread across Central Europe. Yet, the type of urban commune developed under the German law exceeded the limes of Latin Europe and the bounds of Central Europe, and extended to the area of Rus’ – notably, the Halyč-Volhynian Principality – in as early as the thirteenth century. The new...
The essay compares two cases of very intense panic caused by the destructive forces of nature. The panic caused by the Black Death – a topic Halina Manikowska also dealt with – is presented from the point of view of its frightening memory. The long-term evolution and changes in the then-prevailing attitudes is compared to the lasting fear and panic from the menace of wolves, which also represented...
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