Gerd Althoff

"Gerd Althoff's new book collects fifteen of his more recent contributions, most of them previously published in German, which elucidate the functioning of prestate societies. Examples from the Frankish and later German realm (800-1200) are used to clarify how rules and political rituals governed behavior in the power games between kings, churchmen and nobles. Such rules (Spielregeln) and rituals guided public and private behavior despite the fact that they existed only as unwritten customs. The long-overlooked significance of this way of establishing order has sparked a vivid and controversial international discussion in the last decades which continues today"--

Eine grosse Sonderausstellung im LWL-Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte und in der Domkammer der Kathedralkirche St. Paulus in Münster zeigt diese "Goldene Pracht" in neuem Licht. Die Schau würdigt erstmals sowohl den künstlerischen Rang der Werke, als auch ihren historischen Kontext. Grundlage für die neue Herangehensweise bildet die Zusammenarbeit mit dem Exzellenzcluster "Religion und Politik" der Universität Münster. Das zugehörige, opulente Katalogbuch vereinigt Aufsätze ausgewiesener Spezialisten für die Schatzkunst des Mittelalters und die Geschichte Westfalens, einer vielfältigen Region mit europaweiten Beziehungen. Dabei werden die Funktionen mittelalterlicher Prachtentfaltung ebenso beleuchtet wie die Beweggründe für die Stiftung wertvollster Kunstwerke und die Bedeutung von Kirchenschätzen.

"Political life in the middle ages was influenced heavily by the bonds people had to one another. Among these, the bonds of kinship, friendship and lordship were by far the most important. Ritual was also often used to create and strengthen these bonds, and conduct and behaviour within social groups was shaped by unwritten rules. People bound in these ways had a right to expect help and support from one another. Such bonds were both a fact and a necessity of life in the middle ages. Over time, however, these bonds and relationships changed, as did the rules and norms which governed them." "The aim of this book is to document and describe the history of these crucial bonds, and the ways in which they shaped political life in Europe in the early and high middle ages."--Jacket.

Medieval Concepts of the Past shows how the history of the Middle Ages is being reshaped by leading medieval historians in Germany and the United States in light of cultural and social-scientific investigations into ritual, language, and memory. These two national traditions of medieval scholarship, which have been largely separated over the course of the twentieth century, are drawing closer together through a common interest in issues of social science and linguistic theory as applied to the representation of the past. This book marks a significant step in the reconvergence of these two historiographical traditions.