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Articles 1 - 12 of 12

Full-Text Articles in History

Mentalités And The Search For Total History In The Works Of Annalistes, Foucault, And Microhistory, Jason U. Rose Oct 2021

Mentalités And The Search For Total History In The Works Of Annalistes, Foucault, And Microhistory, Jason U. Rose

The Hilltop Review

In this brief essay, the links between the Annales, the works of Michael Foucault, and microhistory are analyzed through the theoretical lens of histoire des mentalités (mentalités). Common threads that link these approaches include the willingness of using outside fields of analysis as well as the willingness to work with vagueness in search of those who Foucault calls, “lost people.” Relatedly, each of these groups and individuals are willing to analyze all aspects of the historical record to fully understand the minds, cultures, and histories of past people. The key to recognizing the relationship of these approaches involve knowing and …


Pirates, Merchants, And A Small Battle On The Island Of Kythira In The Later Middle Ages, David D. Terry Aug 2019

Pirates, Merchants, And A Small Battle On The Island Of Kythira In The Later Middle Ages, David D. Terry

The Hilltop Review

Merchants in the later medieval Mediterranean crossed boundaries both geographical and moral. In November 1327 two Mallorcan investors complained to the king’s court that their ship, which they had sent to the eastern Mediterranean laden with tradable goods, had been ransacked by the violent natives of Kythera, an Aegean island at that time ruled by Venice. The Venetians, always conscious of maintaining good trade relations, sent representatives to the island and conducted a full investigation. After interviewing the islanders, the duke of the island sent his conclusions back to Venice: the Catalan “merchants” had come ashore on the island and …


Royalist Propaganda: Fabrication Of Magna Farta, Daniel R. Palthe Aug 2019

Royalist Propaganda: Fabrication Of Magna Farta, Daniel R. Palthe

The Hilltop Review

This paper examines the perception and usage of Magna Carta in interregnum England. The central question is whether or not Oliver Cromwell ever referred to this royal document as the "Magna Farta." While one of the most common posthumous charges against him was a disdain for Magna Carta and English rights, accounts of his calling it a "Magna Farta" are questionable. The ways in which the Magna Carta was actually used under Cromwell rather seems to indicate a different opinion. Essentially, this paper compares royalist propaganda with the Commonwealth's accounts.


Book Review Of King & Etty's England And Scotland, 1286-1603, Austin M. Setter Jan 2019

Book Review Of King & Etty's England And Scotland, 1286-1603, Austin M. Setter

The Hilltop Review

This review addresses the strengths and weaknesses of Andy King and Claire Etty's 2016 book England and Scotland, 1286-1603.


Passion Through Slander: Saintliness, Deviance, And Suffering By Speech In The Book Of Margery Kempe, Connor Yeck Oct 2018

Passion Through Slander: Saintliness, Deviance, And Suffering By Speech In The Book Of Margery Kempe, Connor Yeck

The Hilltop Review

A late medieval mystic prone to violent bouts of sobbing, Margery Kempe suffers a range of verbal abuse in her titular text, ranging from simple rumors, to outright accusations of heresy and possession. While we might accept such accusatory speech as indicative of the era and Margery’s controversial role as a public “holy woman,” further investigation reveals a narrative strongly driven by the notion of “suffering by slander,” and the weight attributed to the spoken word. The Book of Margery Kempe shows us an oral culture filled with “deviant speech,” and within its own rhetorical construction as a text, elevates …


Liturgical Processions In The Black Death, Eric A. Gobel Jun 2017

Liturgical Processions In The Black Death, Eric A. Gobel

The Hilltop Review

The popularity of the flagellant movement in the German speaking lands during the Black Death is due to a number of factors. Flagellation may seem like a nonsensical reaction to despair from a modern perspective, but for medieval people, the itinerant processional penitent pilgrims represented more than a bloody, painful spectacle. Rather, it was a rational and emotion reaction to their troubles. The success of the flagellants lays, not in the grotesquerie of their performances, but instead in their ability to provide people with familiar, engaging ways to perform and observe penance while also departing from ecclesiastical norms that had …


Killing The Rotten Citric Lump: A Somatic Reading Of The Death Of Shahrazād’S Hunchback, Erin S. Lynch Jan 2016

Killing The Rotten Citric Lump: A Somatic Reading Of The Death Of Shahrazād’S Hunchback, Erin S. Lynch

The Hilltop Review

Throughout the narrative of the Hunchback’s Tale within the Thousand and One Nights, the hunchback is always at the center of the action, yet with the exception of the first time he is “killed,” he is never written as the reader’s focus, except in instances of violence performed against the hunchback’s body. The reader’s gaze is constantly drawn to the killer, rather than the victim, and led to laugh at or empathize with the killers of the hunchbacked corpse, rather than the deformed, ever-abused body. Neither the champion nor the foil, the body of the hunchback functions merely as …


Late Medieval Mediterranean Apocalypticism: Joachimist Ideas In Ramon Llull’S Crusade Treatises, Michael Sanders May 2015

Late Medieval Mediterranean Apocalypticism: Joachimist Ideas In Ramon Llull’S Crusade Treatises, Michael Sanders

The Hilltop Review

The thirteenth century witnessed dramatic changes that transformed the medieval world and remain important today. The violent changes caused by the War of the Sicilian Vespers and Spiritual Franciscan movement popularized the apocalyptic ideas of the twelfth-century Italian abbot, Joachim of Fiore. The abbot's historical paradigms of biblical history influenced many southern Europeans, including the medieval mystic, missionary, and philosopher Ramon Llull (c. 1232-1316). Llull dedicated his life to converting the world to Catholic Christianity using a variety of means, including evangelical missions, Neoplatonic philosophy, and crusades. Llull's crusade treatises, the Tractatus de modo convertendi infideles (1292), Liber de fine …


Ritual, Culture, And Power: Politics And The Shrine Of Notre-Dame De Cambron, 1322-1329, Benjamin Wright Jun 2012

Ritual, Culture, And Power: Politics And The Shrine Of Notre-Dame De Cambron, 1322-1329, Benjamin Wright

The Hilltop Review

Does religious ritual transform political identities? Political identities often rise out of culture; and cultures in turn are shaped by the countless manifestations of religious ritual. It should come as no surprise that this triangle of ritual, culture, and power is used as a tool for the construction of the homogeneous political identities upon which nation states are created. The case study of the religious cult center of Notre-Dame de Cambron, a 14th century pilgrimage shrine in Belgium a few miles from the French border, provides one example of this triangularity. In the midst of its bicultural region, Cambron's shrine …


Viking Women In The Isle Of Man, Valerie Dawn Hampton Jun 2012

Viking Women In The Isle Of Man, Valerie Dawn Hampton

The Hilltop Review

The gender roles of important women in the Viking controlled Isle of Man has never been studied before. This is an exceptional case as women were not normally so influential in the Middle Ages, especially in Viking controlled regions. By examining memorial stones, burial goods, and their excavated skeletal remains, certain facts about Viking women's life in Medieval Manx society can be discerned. The visual remains of the Viking period in Mann, covering the ninth to thirteenth centuries, emphasizes the influence of women, confirming their importance in the kingdom's language, society, and religion.


Power, Piety, And Rebellion In Al-Andalus: The Reception And Influence Of Al-Ghazali's Political Philosophy In Islamic Iberia, Patrick Harris Jun 2012

Power, Piety, And Rebellion In Al-Andalus: The Reception And Influence Of Al-Ghazali's Political Philosophy In Islamic Iberia, Patrick Harris

The Hilltop Review

Dissident Muslims have utilized discourses of pious rulership to justify their revolt against centralized authority at least as far back as the Kharijite rebellion in the 1st/7th century, which, in turn, resulted in the first major schism within the Islamic community. One may, indeed, interpret the very founding of Islam, in part, as a pietist response to a Meccan regime which fostered an environment of injustice and iniquity. Thus, the need for a pious rulership has been at the heart of Islamic political sensibility, if not from its very foundation, then at least from its first division. Rebels and reformers …


Greek In Marriage, Latin In Giving: The Greek Community Of Fourteenth-Century Palermo And The Deceptive Will Of Bonannus De Geronimo, Jack Goodman Sep 2011

Greek In Marriage, Latin In Giving: The Greek Community Of Fourteenth-Century Palermo And The Deceptive Will Of Bonannus De Geronimo, Jack Goodman

The Hilltop Review

This article explores some of the difficulties inherent in the discussion of medieval ethnicity. Early fourteenth-century Palermo was a city with a celebrated multi-ethnic Latin, Arabic, and Greek past, but by the 1300s, much had changed, with Latin culture eclipsing the others. However, two small Greek ethnic minorities persisted in this culture: one indigenous, descending from the ministers, notaries, and monks who thrived under twelfth-century Norman rule, and the other immigrant, composed primarily of Byzantine slaves and freed slaves. The second group is identified in the sources as grecus, while the indigenous Italo-Greeks cannot easily be located in the …