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assembly of Attigny. 3 Hincmar recalled a marital dispute brought before the emperor there. Though he can only have been at most twenty when he was an eye-witness of what occurred, and though he was writing nearly forty years later an extremely lengthy and complicated legal opinion, he focused on the events in the manner of a historian, succinctly and in sequence, then coolly stated his retrospective approval of the bishops’ handing-over of the case to ‘noble laymen who were cognisant of such affairs and possessed very expert knowledge in the laws of the world’ and who
Archbishop Hincmar of Rheims (d. 882) is a crucial figure for all those
interested in early medieval European history in general, and Carolingian
history in particular. As the powerful Archbishop of Rheims, Hincmar shaped the
times in which he lived, advising and admonishing kings, playing a leading role
in the Frankish church, and intervening in a range of political and doctrinal
disputes. But Hincmar also shaped how those times would later be seen by
historians up to the present day, by writing historical accounts such as the
Annals of St-Bertin, and by carefully preserving dossiers of material for
posterity.
This book puts the archbishop himself centre-stage, bringing
together the latest international research across the spectrum of his varied
activities, as history-writer, estate administrator, hagiographer,
pastorally-engaged bishop, and politically-minded royal advisor. For the first
time since Jean Devisse’s magisterial studies in the 1970s, it offers a
three-dimensional examination of a controversial figure whose actions and
writings in different fields are often studied in isolation, at the cost of a
more integrated appreciation. Combining research from recognised experts as well
as early-career historians, it will be an essential companion for all those
interested in the early medieval Frankish world, and in the history of early
medieval Europe more broadly.
Froissart, the Hainaut-born writer and chronicler, who spent the years before the queen’s death in 1369 writing what he called ‘pretty ditties and treatises of love’ for her entertainment. 48 It was by no means only the francophone areas of Europe, however, that contributed to the cosmopolitanism of the English court in the fourteenth century. The royal family, for example, retained physicians from Mediterranean lands. The medical expert (and financier) Pancio da Controne, who came from Lombardy, was in the service of Edward II, Queen Isabella
a period of three decades he served under four popes. Shortly after he arrived there a senior curia official who was also from Bologna took him on as an assistant in the Congregation of Rites. He became an expert in matters pertaining to canonisation from serving in the role of promoter of the faith for two decades. Custodian of the papal library was one more of the many posts he held, one that gave him much in common with his friend Muratori. Another formative experience came with his assignment to take charge of a diocesan synod called by Benedict XIII in 1724
imports of goods, fuelling further demand for expert services and skills from abroad, and leaving permanent markers on spoken and written language. We therefore need to reflect not only on how immigrants to England in the later Middle Ages were able, so comparatively easily, to become ‘English’, but also on how Englishness itself adapted and changed to reflect a continuous and creative process of acculturation. Notes 1 A Relation … of the Island of England , pp. 20–1. See the similar reflections
between congenital and acquired deviations from the ‘norm’ feed into such definitions, therefore remain pertinent to contemporary medical, bioethical and social experts and practitioners. Normative texts, such as medical, legal and naturalphilosophical authorities, were the medieval equivalent of modern scientific experts with regard to defining, assessing and controlling notions of ID. We can then ask what the medical, legal and social implications of such concepts were. To find out more about how the names and words used to describe people also influenced the social
barons’ guilt or innocence. The king had even gone to the lengths of recruiting ‘men expert in the art of fighting in the duel [in duello] and chosen from his lands on this side of the sea and beyond’; and this expert band of duellers was to accompany John from Normandy to Poitou. The barons, whom Howden unfortunately did not name, were to appear in a court summoned by the king to a place which was also unidentified: the court was probably convened for early autumn in the year 1201, although the precise sequence of events is not entirely clear. 1 But Howden does
the market that now stands on the site bears her name. 23 In Bergamo the late-thirteenth-century fresco in the church of Saint-Michael-by-the-White-Well bearing the image of Alberto had been forgotten when it was covered over with other frescos in the fifteenth century. However, when the original fresco was rediscovered in the early 1940s, anyone could see that the inscription over the figure said ‘S. Albertus’, but the local experts were left wondering: Yes, but which Saint Alberto? The art historian who then published the fresco, even
area, the Val di Sole, supplied Mantua especially with butchers and tripe makers. After the Trentino, the next largest groups of immigrant labourers in Mantua came from Piedmont and Lombardy. In general the immigrants to that city held jobs that they could do in the streets, and hence rarely worked inside shops. Yet another example shows that they completely dominated the work of the garaveni , the stevedores of Mantua’s port. An expert on Mantuan immigration concluded that these outsiders did work that most of the local people would not accept to do because it
memory by a miracle, the king will retain the land during his life, because the idiocy was once tried in chancery’. 32 Thus it seems that, although a number of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English cases refer to people lapsing in and out of what they termed ‘idiocy’, by the late fifteenth century English legal experts were treating idiocy as a permanent condition that needed miraculous means to be cured. England saw the development, dating from 1255x90, of some legal provision for both the ‘idiot’ and the non-congenital lunatic