In Culture and Society in Medieval Galicia, twenty-three international authors examine art, religion, literature, and politics to chart Galicia’s changing place in Iberia, Europe, and the Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds from late antiquity through the thirteenth century.

For many in the Middle Ages, pilgrimages were seen to represent a risk of moral and religious perdition for women, who were generally discouraged from making them. Women and Pilgrimage in Medieval Galicia represents an analysis of the social history of women based on documentary sources and physical evidence, breaking away from literary and historiographical stereotypes, while at the same time contributing to a critical assessment of the myth that medieval women were kept hidden away from the world.

Bringing together artifacts, texts, and practices within an interpretive framework that stresses the cultural work performed by saints, Kathleen Ashley presents a comparative study of the cults of the medieval Sainte Foy at a number of the sites where she was especially venerated. This book analyzes how each cult site produced the saint it needed, appropriating or creating whatever was required to that end. Ashley’s approach is thoroughly interdisciplinary, incorporating visual, religious, medieval, and women’s and gender studies as well as literary studies and social history. She uses the theoretical framework of "cultural work" to analyze how the cult of Sainte Foy was sponsored and received by specific groups in different locales in Europe. The book is comprehensive in terms of historical as well as geographical range, tracing the history of the cult from the early Middle Ages into the present day. It also includes historiographical analysis, examining the way the cults of Sainte Foy have been represented in various historical accounts. Ashley’s narrative challenges the boundary between "elite" and "popular" culture and complicates the traditional vernacular vs. Latin language binary. A chief aim of the study is to show how "art" objects always operated in conjunction with other cultural texts to construct a saint’s cult. The volume is heavily illustrated, showing artifacts such as stained-glass windows and wall paintings which are not readily available from any other source. This book will be of special interest to scholars in art history, medieval history, gender studies, and religion.

How can dispute records shed light on the study of dispute settlement processes and their social and political underpinnings? This volume addresses this question by investigating the interplay between record-making, disputing process, and the social and political contexts of conflicts. The authors make use of exceptionally rich charter materials from the Iberian Peninsula, Italy, and Scandinavia, including different types of texts directly and indirectly related to conflicts, in order to contribute to a comparative survey of early medieval dispute records and to a better understanding of the interplay between judicial and other less formal modes of conflict resolution. Contributors are Isabel Alfonso, José M. Andrade, François Bougard, Warren C. Brown, Wendy Davies, Julio Escalona, Kim Esmark, Adam J. Kosto, Juan José Larrea, André Evangelista Marques, Josep M. Salrach, Igor Santos Salazar, and Francesca Tinti.

The bibliography includes material published from 2013 to 2015. Following on from the first bibliography (Brill, 1988) and its updates (Brill 2006, 2008, 2011, 2014) this volume covers recent literature on: Archaeology, Liturgy, Monasticism, Iberian-Gallic Patristics, Paleography, Linguistics, Germanic and Muslim Invasions, and more. In addition, peoples such as the Vandals, Sueves, Basques, Alans and Byzantines are included. The book contains author and subject indexes and is extensively cross-indexed for easy consultation. A periodicals index of hundreds of journals accompanies the volume.

Acclaimed historians Bernard F. Reilly and Simon R. Doubleday tell the story of the reign of Queen Sancha and King Fernando I, who together ruled the territories of León and Galicia between 1038 and 1065—often regarded as a period in which Christian kings and their vassals asserted themselves more successfully in the face of external rivals, both Viking and Muslim. The reality was more complex. The Iberian Peninsula remained a space of multiple, intertwined forms of power and surprisingly nuanced relationships between—and among—the diverse configurations of Christian and Muslim authority. Some of these complexities would be obscured by later generations of medieval chroniclers, whose narratives focused on the singular authority of the king and expressed a more binary view of interreligious relations. Through their account of the key events and turning points of Sancha and Fernando’s reign, Reilly and Doubleday propose a revised understanding of its political culture, offering a corrective to accounts that have emphasized a stark opposition between Christian and Muslim powers, a supposedly steady growth and centralization of royal government, and the individual figure of the monarch. Exploring the interplay of crown and elites, underscoring the role of royal women, and rejecting the Reconquista paradigm, León and Galicia Under Queen Sancha and King Fernando I reenvisions medieval Iberia at a pivotal stage in European history.

This book provides a new and fascinating view of the peasant society in thirteenth-century Galicia (Spain). The four authors open up a world of knights, squires and middle peasants who limited the actions of the monasteries settled in the area.