Although this fourth-century saint had become popular very early among the eastern Christians, in Western Europe St Alexius was the recipient of a wave of devotion only in the ninth and tenth century. From the ninth century onwards, different versions of his life spread in diverse religious communities from Spain to England. Around 1040 his…
It is a well-known story of early medieval monastic life that the Europe-wide diffusion of the Benedictine life-style was intrinsically connected to the Carolingians’ reform of the Church. This older form of religious life imposed its dominance over other male (and female) monastic rules in the Southwestern periphery of the Carolingian Empire from the reign of…
In collaboration with the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, the After Empire project is pleased to announce the launch of a new website which will track ninth- to eleventh-century Catalan manuscripts, part of Prof. Dr. Matthias M. Tischler and Ekaterina Novokhatko’s research on ‘From Carolingian Periphery to European Central Region: The Written Genesis of Catalonia’. The…
From the last decades of the eighth century, the cult of the Archangel Michael spread throughout various Western regions and became a common European religious and spiritual phenomenon. Two important sanctuaries, Monte Gargano on the eastern coast of Italy and Mont Saint Michel in north-western France, invoked numerous pilgrimages at this time. A number of donations,…
The Bible in the Early Medieval Iberian World The world of the Iberian Bible is a fragmented one in a double sense. The transmission of old Bibles from late antique and Visigothic times and the production of new Bibles from the late eighth century onwards were situated in a scattered, if not fragmented Christian society…
There is a tendency amongst medieval scholars to leave the evidence of liturgical books to liturgical specialists, and scholars of the post-Carolingian world are no different in this respect. There are good reasons for this: surviving medieval liturgical manuscripts are not simply service books, compiled to support the minister in the delivery of rites, but…
The religious landscape of the tenth century is usually described as consisting of a hotchpotch of localities. Defining what was ‘local’ in the Middle Ages, however, is rather difficult for modern scholars. It could comprise a diocese, a town, a monastery, or a community of canons – all entities that were not necessarily separate from…
In any historical period, the expansion of new cults and the new texts accompanying them, serve for the commemoration of the past. But such expansion also reflects – whether consciously or unconsciously – the needs of the society at that time. Thus the apparition of new feasts and new saints’ lives and the more active…
The central aim of our Barcelona research project “From Carolingian Periphery to European Central Region: The Written Genesis of Catalonia” in the framework of the HERA-project “After Empire: Using and Not Using the Past in the Crisis of the Carolingian World, c.900‒c.1050 (UNUP)” is to show that it is indispensable for 21st-century Europe and its…
The Vatican library has digitised a host of new manuscripts, including a beautiful Ottonian evangeliary, Reg.lat.15. These images are now available to view online. More details about the digitised manuscripts at the Vatican library can be found here: https://macrotypography.blogspot.co.uk/2017/03/ottonian-artistry.html
