Warren C Brown | California Institute of Technology (original) (raw)

Books by Warren C Brown

Enclosed here are the dust jacket text (longer than an abstract), and the front matter of Conflic... more Enclosed here are the dust jacket text (longer than an abstract), and the front matter of Conflict in Medieval Europe, my other edited book. Coedited with Warren C. Brown, the book emerged from a conference under the same title convened by the two coeditors at the Huntington Library (San Marino, California) in spring 2001. Conflict is here understood in its social meaning—as a tension among individuals or groups concerning claims or grievances, or more generally divergent expectations, rules, or normative frameworks—and experienced in several ways, including but not limited to: litigation and its alternatives; long-term enmity and threats; or violence. The individual articles, and the book in its entirety, address all these issues, and engage with the historiography of each.

* * *

This book can now be received as an offprint from Routledge/Taylor and Francis, at: www.routledge.com/products/search?keywords=Conflict+in+medieval+europe.

Papers by Warren C Brown

Parergon, 2018

Flaying in the Pre-Modern World: Practice and Representation. Edited by Larissa Tracy. Boydell. 2... more Flaying in the Pre-Modern World: Practice and Representation. Edited by Larissa Tracy. Boydell. 2017. xviii + 406pp. £60.00. Flaying as a punishment-for treason or otherwise-was a rare occurrence in the pre-modern world. Indeed, as some of the essays in Larissa Tracy's collection establish, even allusions to human flaying in some pre-modern cultures are hard to find. Mary Rambaran-Olm notes only 'scattered references to flaying in Old English literature' (p. 101); William Sayers finds likewise that 'the flaying of the human body features only marginally in the traditions of early medieval Ireland' (p. 261). In cultures where flaying is allowed as a punishment in the law it is an exceptional one and the known instances of it being meted out are few and far between. It is, nonetheless, a persistent image in some medieval genres (hagiography, romance and literature of the life of Christ, in particular), as well as in the post-medieval imagination, as this collection demonstrates across its fourteen essays and epilogue, which span from the eleventh to the early seventeenth centuries, and range across Irish, English, French, Italian and Scandinavian examples. While its main subject thus sometimes proves elusive, this book's usefulness partly derives from the explanations it finds for the literary prevalence of human flaying in cultures where its practice is unusual if not nonexistent. For this reason too it is necessarily a book that is about many other things-flagellation, cannibalism, painting techniques, surgical instruments and Mediterranean conflicts, among others-but, perhaps most prominently, also about skin: its relation to the body and to the self, and to what constitutes the individual human as well as the social body. Rambaran-Olm's inquiry into the emergence and persistence of the so-called 'Dane-skin' myth in the seventeenth century and beyond is illustrative. The fantasy of pre-modern flaying (that eleventh-century hostile Danes, living in England, are massacred, flayed and their skins displayed on church doors) is used, Rambaran-Olm argues, to construct and uphold a post-medieval sense of national identity. Thus she notes: 'For seventeenth-century viewers', the skin-bound doors 'were material evidence of Anglo-Saxon fortitude and moral justice in punishing invaders for crimes against their community and Church' (p. 105). It is another near myth of human flaying that forms the focus of Perry Neil Harrison's epilogue on early modern anthropodermic bibliopegy (or, the binding of books in human skin). Harrison notes that 'scientifically verified examples of the practice during the Middle Ages are exceedingly rare, and perhaps even non-existent' (p. 368). However, Harrison argues that one verified

Early Medieval Europe, 2009

Global Intellectual History

The Cambridge History of Terrorism, 2021

The Oxford Handbook of Terrorism, 2019

This chapter explores the instrumental use of terror in the region that first produced the concep... more This chapter explores the instrumental use of terror in the region that first produced the concept “terrorism,” Europe, in a period before the conditions that produced it existed, the Middle Ages. For much of this thousand-year period, Europeans did not make the distinctions on which most modern definitions of terrorism depend, such as between state and non-state actors, civilian and military targets, civil and criminal offenses, or political and religious orders; nor did they restrict the legitimate use of force to a state. It is only towards the end of the period that European ideas about proper order and about the legitimate use of violence began to evolve in ways that set the stage for modern terrorism both as a concept and as a practice.

When media revolutions occur within in a predominately manuscript culture-as in Song dynasty Chin... more When media revolutions occur within in a predominately manuscript culture-as in Song dynasty China, or Carolingian Europe-how do understand ings of writing and genre also change? How can we gauge the awareness of all these changes among contemporaries? And how can historians guard against imposing their own categories on the texts of the medi eval past? In this exchange, two historians of these two different cultures reflect on what they have learned from one another's work, and on these larger questions.

The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 2019

In a book stemming from her 2014 doctoral dissertation, Patt takes on the so-called Farmulae impe... more In a book stemming from her 2014 doctoral dissertation, Patt takes on the so-called Farmulae imperiales, a group of models, mostly for imperial diplomas, that stem from the reign of the Carolingian emperor Louis the Pious (r. 814-40). The formulas, fifty-five in number, were copied in Tours sometime around 830, entirely in Tironian notes, into a rather disorganised manuscript that also includes theological texts and capitularies (BNF, Paris, MS lat. 2718). They get their name from their most recent editor, Karl Zeumer, who in 1886 published them in his edition of the early medieval formula collections for the Monumenta Germania Historica (MGH LL 5). There is no question that they are closely connected to Louis's chancery; they were only inconsistently anonymised, enough to tell us that most were taken from real, actually issued diplomas. Some of these diplomas still exist, but some have been lost, so that the Fannulae imperiales both significantly expand the range of Louis's surviving diplomas and tell us more about the legal matters with which Louis's chancery concerned itself

Speculum, 2012

The disappearance of the late-Roman gesta municipalia, or municipal document registers, is one of... more The disappearance of the late-Roman gesta municipalia, or municipal document registers, is one of the milestones along the road in Europe that leads from late antiquity to the early Middle Ages. While they survived, these registers apparently served two constituencies. The late-Roman state used the gesta municipalia to keep track of tax obligations as property changed hands. Citizens for their part validated and secured legal transactions by having the documents generated by their transactions ratified by the civic authorities and copied into the gesta.

German History, 2016

This volume stems from a conference held in 2009 on the island of Reichenau under the auspices of... more This volume stems from a conference held in 2009 on the island of Reichenau under the auspices of the Konstanzer Arbeitskreis fur mittelalterliche Geschichte. It focuses on political violence in the later Middle Ages, and in particular on violence both by and against rulers. Geographically it covers continental Europe, with side trips to England and Scotland. Nevertheless, it devotes significant attention to the Islamic world.

Encyclopedia of Political Theory

Violence in Medieval Europe, 2014

1.Violence and the Medieval Historian Part One Competing Orders 2. Violence among the early Frank... more 1.Violence and the Medieval Historian Part One Competing Orders 2. Violence among the early Franks 3. Charlemagne, God, and the License to Kill Part Two Local and Royal Power in the Eleventh Century 4. Violence, the Aristocracy, and the Church at the Turn of the First Millennium 5. Violence and Ritual Part Three Twelfth-Century Transformations 6. Violence, the Princes, and the Towns 7. Violence and the Law in England Part Four A Monopoly on Violence? 8. A Saxon Mirror 9. Violence and War in France 10. Conclusion: Competing Norms and the Legacy of Medieval Violence

Central European History, 2005

Many more documents survive from the early Middle Ages than from the Roman Empire. Although eccle... more Many more documents survive from the early Middle Ages than from the Roman Empire. Although ecclesiastical archives may account for the dramatic increase in the number of surviving documents, this new investigation reveals the scale and spread of documentary culture beyond the Church. The contributors explore the nature of the surviving documentation without preconceptions to show that we cannot infer changing documentary practices from patterns of survival. Throughout Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages-from North Africa, Egypt, Italy, Francia and Spain to Anglo-Saxon England-people at all social levels, whether laity or clergy, landowners or tenants, farmers or royal functionaries, needed, used and kept documents. The story of documentary culture in the early medieval world emerges not as one of its capture by the Church, but rather of a response adopted by those who needed documents, as they reacted to a changing legal, social and institutional landscape.