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Noble society in the twelfth-century German kingdom was vibrant and multi-faceted, with aristocratic families spending their lives in the violent pursuit of land and power. This book illuminates the diversity of the aristocratic experience by providing five texts that show how noblemen and women from across the German kingdom, from Rome to the Baltic coast and from the Rhine River to the Alpine valleys of Austria, lived and died between approximately 1075 and 1200. The five subjects of the texts translated here cut across many of the strata of German elite society. how interconnected political, military, economic, religious and spiritual interests could be for some of the leading members of medieval German society-and for the authors who wrote about them. Whether fighting for the emperor in Italy, bringing Christianity to pagans in what is today northern Poland, or founding, reforming and governing monastic communities in the heartland of the German kingdom, the subjects of these texts call attention to some of the many ways that noble life shaped the world of central medieval Europe.
society encounters on its road is political entrepreneurship, imagination, patience here, impatience there, and other varieties of virtu and fortuna – I cannot see much point (and do see some danger) in lumping all of this together by an appeal to Gemeinsinn. (Albert O. Hirschman 1994 : 216) Genealogy and
Bacon 05 3/2/06 10:29 AM Page 102 5 Civil society According to Aleksandr Gurov, a current member and former chairman, the Duma Committee for Security ‘considers the concept of national security in the widest sense. In today’s Russia we have to go beyond protecting only the state’s interests … We think that the state can only flourish and be strong if every citizen is protected from crime, and sometimes from those in power themselves. Only then can a developed civil society exist. The security of the individual and of society is the basis for a state
(or the organisation) for entirely principled, rational reasons, their commitment soon begins to shade over into their social life. As time goes on, more and more of their friends and acquaintances will be connected with the movement, and more and more of their leisure time will reflect their involvement, even if only to the extent of reading a ‘politically correct’ newspaper or patronising businesses that ‘do the right thing’. The net effect was that Jacobitism generated a dissident commensality within English, Irish and Scots society, that is, it produced
frontiers of servitude 6 Society and slaves By the mid-1630s, the English colony on Saint Kitts had received so much immigration that it extended beyond the agreed boundaries with the French settlement. The English governor had rejected the protests of a French delegation, and the governor d’Esnambuc ordered the population to take up arms. According to Du Tertre’s account, French planters were ordered to send their slaves, each armed with a cutlass and a burning torch, to lay waste to the English plantations when the confrontation began. Capuchin friars
application to the affairs of society, and to judge its advantages and its dangers’, Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) observed in 1835, ‘that country is surely America’. This ‘dogma’ was of as much practical as theoretical import in the United States, working
When interviewed for an edition of Panorama in 1959, the Guyana-born writer and author of To Sir, With Love , E. R. Braithwaite, likened the extreme right to a boil or a pimple growing on the body of democracy. He argued that British society was capable of containing extremist views, as espoused by fascists in Notting Hill in the later 1950s, and he for one saw
Local societies were not independent of their surroundings in most parts of western Europe in the early Middle Ages, perhaps with the exception of some very localised regions in northern Iberia. Most ‘small worlds’ belonged to regional or supra-regional networks and structures. Office holders and agents – ranging from mayors and priests to bishops, counts, viscounts and centenarii (hundredmen) – intervened in local affairs for landowners, kings and other lords they represented. Since kings, powerful lay aristocrats and religious institutions had large
6 The reality of society1 Abraham Rotstein As we commemorate the fifty years since Karl Polanyi’s death, we may also recall the three people responsible for the fact that we are all here today: number one, Kari Polanyi Levitt, who invented this Institute; number two, Margie Mendell, who directed it all of this time; and finally, Ana Gomez who did all of the hard work. Today in their presence, I feel somehow that I was an also-ran. The late Frank Scott, when he was honoured on a similar occasion, said with his characteristic touch of humour, ‘I feel that this is
3 REMEMBERING IN SOCIETY If remembering is fundamentally an activity engaged in by individual minds, it equally fundamentally possesses a social dimension. To say this is not to say that social units – groups or societies – are themselves to be considered as mnemonic agents, possessed of a capacity for remembering that is conceptually distinguishable from that exhibited by their individual members. It is to say only that the individuals who remember do so not as isolated agents, but as social beings, constantly engaged in interactions with other such beings