In the early Middle Ages, the conversion of the early English kingdoms acted as a catalyst for significant social and cultural change. One of the most visible of these changes was the introduction of a new type of household: the monastic household. These reproduced through education and training, rather than biological means; their inhabitants practised celibacy as a lifelong state, rather than as a stage in the life course. Because monastic households depended on secular households to produce the next generation of recruits, previous studies have tended to view them as more mutable than their secular counterparts, which are implicitly regarded as natural and ahistorical. Katharine Sykes charts some of the significant changes to the structure of households between the seventh to eleventh centuries, as ideas of spiritual, non-biological reproduction first fostered in monastic households were adopted in royal households in the tenth and eleventh centuries, and as ideas about kinship that were generated in secular households, such as the relationship between genealogy and inheritance, were picked up and applied by their monastic counterparts. In place of binary divisions between secular and monastic, biological and spiritual, real and imagined, Sykes demonstrates that different forms of kinship and reproduction in this period were intimately linked.

In the early Middle Ages, the conversion of the early English kingdoms acted as a catalyst for significant social and cultural change. One of the most visible of these changes was the introduction of a new type of household: the monastic household. These reproduced through education and training, rather than biological means; their inhabitants practised celibacy as a lifelong state, rather than as a stage in the life course. Because monastic households depended on secular households to produce the next generation of recruits, previous studies have tended to view them as more mutable than their secular counterparts, which are implicitly regarded as natural and ahistorical. Katharine Sykes charts some of the significant changes to the structure of households between the seventh to eleventh centuries, as ideas of spiritual, non-biological reproduction first fostered in monastic households were adopted in royal households in the tenth and eleventh centuries, and as ideas about kinship that were generated in secular households, such as the relationship between genealogy and inheritance, were picked up and applied by their monastic counterparts. In place of binary divisions between secular and monastic, biological and spiritual, real and imagined, Sykes demonstrates that different forms of kinship and reproduction in this period were intimately linked.

Essays on the depiction of animals, birds and insects in early medieval material culture, from texts to carvings to the landscape itself. For people in the early Middle Ages, the earth, air, water and ether teemed with other beings. Some of these were sentient creatures that swam, flew, slithered or stalked through the same environments inhabited by their human contemporaries. Others were objects that a modern beholder would be unlikely to think of as living things, but could yet be considered to possess a vitality that rendered them potent. Still others were things half glimpsed on a dark night or seen only in the mind's eye; strange beasts that haunted dreams and visions or inhabited exotic lands beyond the compass of everyday knowledge. This book discusses the various ways in which the early English and Scandinavians thought about and represented these other inhabitants of their world, and considers the multi-faceted nature of the relationship between people and beasts. Drawing on the evidence of material culture, art, language, literature, place-names and landscapes, the studies presented here reveal a world where the boundaries between humans, animals, monsters and objects were blurred and often permeable, and where to represent the bestial could be to holda mirror to the self. Michael D.J. Bintley is Senior Lecturer in Medieval Literature at Canterbury Christ Church University; Thomas J.T. Williams is a doctoral researcher at UCL's Institute of Archaeology. Contributors: Noël Adams, John Baker, Michael D. J. Bintley, Sue Brunning, László Sándor Chardonnens, Della Hooke, Eric Lacey, Richard North, Marijane Osborn, Victoria Symons, Thomas J. Williams

Traces the development of towns in Britain from late Roman times to the end of the Anglo-Saxon period using archaeological data.

This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ++++ The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to ensure edition identification: ++++ An Essay On Symbolic Colours: In Antiquity--the Middle Ages--and Modern Times Frederic Portal (baron de) W. S. Inman J. Weale, 1845 Art; Color Theory; Art / Color Theory; Body, Mind & Spirit / General; Psychology / Applied Psychology; Social Science / Folklore & Mythology; Symbolism of colors

Nearly everyone would agree that humans and their societies evolved by natural selection, that humans are biologically a single species but societies vary greatly, and neither genetic inheritance nor cultural inheritance alone can fully explain humans and their social systems. While there is a literature that addresses dual inheritance theory or the coevolution of culture and genetics, almost all of it is written from a perspective that accepts the neo-Darwinian evolutionary framework but does not give proper weight to social and cultural theory as it has been developed by cultural anthropologists. At the same time, cultural anthropologists have ignored the question of dual inheritance altogether, leaving the theorizing of how it works almost exclusively in the hands of those with a strong biological viewpoint. In this book anthropologist and psychoanalyst Robert Paul attempts to reconcile evolutionary and cultural approaches in anthropology through a comparative ethnographic exploration of how humans receive behavioral instructions from two separate channelsthe genetic code carried in the DNA and the symbolic systems that constitute culture. He develops a dual inheritance model that aims to do justice to both the genetic and cultural channels of inheritance. Paul elaborates his model of the relationship between genes and cultural symbols and then shows how it can make sense of both the similarities and variations found in human social life as captured in the now very extensive ethnographic record. He argues that cultural systems evolve to manage intra-group competition that would ensue from the genetic program pursuing its interests. The book uses thick descriptions and heavy interpretations from the ethnographic record to demonstrate how different societies tackle this challenge. The book fills a niche, connecting the dual-inheritance literature and symbolic cultural anthropology, using insights from the former to detect patterns in the latter. This is a rare and well-researched project, and should receive a broad readership among biological and cultural anthropologists, and students of human nature more broadly."

In this fascinating read, William Kuskin argues that the development of print production is part of a larger social network involving the political, economic, and literary systems that produce the intangible constellations of identity and authority.