The book investigates a riveting, richly documented conflict from thirteenth-century England over church property and ecclesiastical patronage. Oliver Sutton, the bishop of Lincoln, and John St. John, a royal household knight, both used coveted papal provisions to bestow the valuable church of Thame to a familial clerical candidate (a nephew and son, respectively). Between 1292 and 1294 three people died over the right to possess this church benefice and countless others were attacked or publicly scorned during the conflict. More broadly, religious services were paralyzed, prized animals were mutilated, and property was destroyed. Ultimately, the king personally brokered a settlement because he needed his knight for combat. Employing a microhistorical approach, this book uses abundant episcopal, royal, and judicial records to reconstruct this complex story that exposes in vivid detail the nature and limits of episcopal and royal power and the significance and practical business of ecclesiastical benefaction. This volume will appeal to undergraduate and graduate students alike, particularly students in historical methods courses, medieval surveys, upper-division undergraduate courses, and graduate seminars. It would also appeal to admirers of microhistories and people interested in issues pertaining to gender, masculinity, and identity in the Middle Ages.

This book is a biography of Pueblonuevo del Terrible, a mining town located in Andalusia, Spain. Based on previously unexamined sources, the study paints a fresh portrait of industrial workers and their families in Córdoba province, enriching our understanding of this mostly agricultural region. Previous studies of laboring communities in Spain have identified radical workers, miners among them, as a destabilizing element due to their insurgent protest activity, including lethal violence. This study, by contrast, describes both worker activism and cross-class organizing as constructive, not destructive, and aimed at integration into Spanish society. Economically, the mining zone was dominated by a French company in the Rothschild portfolio. But by running their own city, waging peaceful labor strikes, raising a church, building housing, and honoring their dead, residents turned a quasi-colonial outpost into a pueblo worth defending, and they rallied in defense of the Republic at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. In the making of Pueblonuevo del Terrible, Spanish men and women contended with the perils of mine work, the jolts of industrial capitalism, creeping fascism, and civil war. As such, this book tells a village-scale story of global events that defined the twentieth century.

This book was conceived as a laboratory on microhistory, an attempt to illustrate its main processes and advantages. Through the microhistorical approach the reader is off on an adventurous journey to discover an individual’s perspective, that of maestro Luigi Prisco who emigrated to the USA from the south of Italy. Luigi Prisco was a provincial musician and composer, born in 1857, who lived in Avellino, in Campania. In May 1902 Prisco joined millions of people in emigrating from southern Italy and the rest of the country to the United States, one more droplet in the immense river of Italian migration. Luigi Prisco’s personal correspondence with his mentor and friend Senator Donato Di Marzo (1840–1911) provides us with a precious insight into the aspirations and desires of a man who, through his actions, brought radical change to his life. Maestro Prisco’s letters are an interesting and insightful form of self-narration, which can only be fully understood using a microhistorical approach. The study of these letters is particularly valuable in highlighting the relationship between society and the intimate life of an individual, but also in underlining the active role that Prisco as an individual was able to play. This volume will be of great use to scholars interested in microhistory, the history of migrations, the history of ‘the self’ and in the development of theoretical approaches and methodologies when using letters as sources in interdisciplinary historical research.

This book offers an original reading of Carlo Ginzburg’s work, tracing his trajectory in the context of Italian micro-history, his debates on the objectivity of historical knowledge, and the connection of his work to the expanded perspectives constructed in recent decades by global history. Ginzburg's theories have achieved notoriety not only in the field of history but also among the wider public. This volume uses Ginzburg’s own aesthetic and intellectual practices in its analysis, and it deciphers the elements that drove and influenced the making of his work. By highlighting the procedures that Ginzburg has constructed to respond to problems of cultural history, the book also pays close attention to Erich Auerbach and Aby Warburg, whose influences played a crucial role in reformulating Ginzburg’s conception of micro-history. From there, the volume demonstrates the radicality of Ginzburg's micro-history through the discussion of some of his most recent contributions to international historiographical debates. Thought-provoking and thoroughly researched, Deciphering Carlo Ginzburg is an innovative study in Ginzburg’s methods and theories.

In the spring of 1757, the Augustinian friar Leopoldo di San Pasquale was tried in Naples by the hierarchies of his own religious order on charges of financial fraud, heresy, and sexual immorality. He responded by accusing the heads of the convent of subjecting him to a series of inhuman cruelties, claiming to have been "buried alive". While waiting for a final judgment (it was pronounced seven years later, in 1764), the trial of Leopoldo di San Pasquale became a cultural phenomenon unlike any witnessed before in Naples. Cumulatively, reactions to the trial, both during and after it, broke the boundaries separating chronicle and literary fiction, engaged people’s faculties of reason and emotion, and ultimately transformed Leopoldo into a public spectacle—or what we might call today a “celebrity.” Focusing on the scandalous affair of the "buried alive", this book shows how the governing authorities in Naples managed the development of news and stories around current events through their systems of courts and bureaucracies. It also aims to demonstrate how, just as importantly, consumers played an increasing in the spread of information, as means to political empowerment. The sources analyzed call for a microhistorical analysis, as well as for an interdisciplinary discussion with media studies at its conceptual core. A Criminal Hero will appeal to students and scholars alike interested in microhistory, cultural history, media history, history of literature, social and political history, with a focus on the eighteenth century.

Based on an exhaustive and varied study of predominantly unpublished archival material as well as a variety of literary and non-literary sources, this book investigates the relation between patronage, piety and politics in the life and career of one Late Medieval Spain's most intriguing female personalities, Maria De Luna.

This collection explores how situations of authority, governance, and influence were practised through both gender ideologies and affective performances in medieval and early modern England. Authority is inherently relational it must be asserted over someone who allows or is forced to accept this dominance. The capacity to exercise authority is therefore a social and cultural act, one that is shaped by social identities such as gender and by social practices that include emotions. The contributions in this volume, exploring case studies of women and men's letter-writing, political and ecclesiastical governance, household rule, exercise of law and order, and creative agency, investigate how gender and emotions shaped the ways different individuals could assert or maintain authority, or indeed disrupt or provide alternatives to conventional practices of authority.

How the medieval right to appoint a parson helped give birth to English common law Appointing a parson to the local church following a vacancy—an “advowson”—was one of the most important rights in medieval England. The king, the monasteries, and local landowners all wanted to control advowsons because they meant political, social, and economic influence. The question of law turned on who had the superior legal claim to the vacancy—which was a type of property—at the time the position needed to be filled. In tracing how these conflicts were resolved, Joshua C. Tate takes a sharply different view from that of historians who focus only on questions of land ownership, and he shows that the English needed new legal contours to address the questions of ownership and possession that arose from these disputes. Tate argues that the innovations made necessary by advowson law helped give birth to modern common law and common law courts.

This collection of essays contains a wealth of information on the nature of the family in the early modern period. This is a core topic within economic and social history courses which is taught at most universities. This text gives readers an overview of how feminist historians have been interpreting the history of the family, ever since Laurence Stone's seminal work FAMILY, SEX AND MARRIAGE IN ENGLAND 1500-1800 was published in 1977. The text is divided into three coherent parts on the following themes: bodies and reproduction; maternity from a feminist perspective; and family relationships. Each part is prefaced by a short introduction commenting on new work in the area. This book will appeal to a wide variety of students because of its sociological, historical and economic foci.

This volume brings together a wide range of original, scholarly essays on key figures and topics in medieval literature by leading academics. The volume examines the major authors such as Chaucer, Langland and the Gawain Poet, and covers key topics in medieval literature, including gender, class, courtly and popular culture, and religion. The volume seeks to provide a fresh and stimulating guide to medieval literature.