Volume 1 (2013)

Networks and Neighbours 1

N&N aims to promote the study of how people and communities interacted within and ‘without’ their own world and localities in the early middle ages. We set out with the view that identity and meaning were not determined by fixed sets and integers, but by a complex network of interrelated signs. In practice, this suggests that a single person within their personal world could have travelled within various worlds and realities, identifying with various neighbours at even single overlapping points of identity; one did not encounter another as a fixed category, either of ‘self’ or ‘other’. Therefore, by ‘network’ we do not mean a fixed identifier, a singularizing category, but refer to the complex ways that individuals, groups, institutions et cetera constructed self-considered, coherent and singular existences from the multiplicity of mental activity, perceptions, ideas, and the varying confrontation with images, physical and non-human being, languages, sounds, senses, ‘discourses’ and all else that was life in the period.

Invited Paper

Ian Wood, The Pagans and the Other: Varying Presentations in the Early Middle Ages, pp. 1-22

Articles

Philipp Dörler, The Liber Historiae Francorum – a Model for a New Frankish Self-confidence, pp. 23-43

Catalin Taranu, The Elusive Nature of Germanic Heroic Poetry: A Rhizomatic Model, pp. 44-66

Book Reviews

Guy Ron-Gilboa, review of Konrad Hirschler, The Written Word in the Medieval Arabic Lands: A Social and Cultural History of Reading Practices (Edinburgh, 2013), pp. 67-71

Jamie Wood, review of Luca Larpi, Prologomena to a new edition of Gildas Sapiens ‘De excidio Britanniae’ (Firenze, 2012), pp. 72-73

Conference Reports

Richard Broome and Tim Barnwell, Cultural Memory and the Resources of the Past, 400-1000AD, pp. 74-82

Michael Burrows, Networks and Neighbours: Early Medieval Correlations, pp. 83-94

Michael J. Kelly, Jamie Wood and Andy Fear, Isidore of Seville: Transforming Knowledge from Scriptorium to Cyberspace, pp. 95-99