Barbara H. Rosenwein

Barbara Rosenwein here examines more than 3000 charters issued during roughly the first century and a half of the existence of the great monastery of Cluny. She uses these charters as a means of reassessing the social meaning of land transfers and donations and how those changed over time, emphasising how these exchanges or gifts were a means of creating social relationships. To Be the Neighbor of Saint Peter is a very useful read for its methodology, even if at times it's a rather dry read and I did find some of the spatial relationships difficult to picture at times—sketches of the land holdings under discussion would have helped a lot.… (meer)

This is a really interesting look at how people in the early medieval West (concentrating on regions largely lying within modern France) understood and expressed emotions. Rosenwein argues against the usual dismissal of emotive words in early hagiographical or theological texts are mere topoi—stock language which was used by rote whether or not it was "genuine"—and claims instead that use of emotive language varies greatly according to a whole host of factors: political, religious, literary, etc. Since she's dealing with 6th-8th century Francia, the range of sources she has to draw on is not large, and Rosenwein is explicit about the caveats which much attach to her work. Indeed, some of her examples—for instance, looking at funerary epitaphs from three cities in central and eastern Francia—do not entirely convince. However, overall this is an extremely interesting book which opens up the potential for new ways of thinking about hagiographies in particular, and which also introduced me to some fascinating theorists I'd not heard of before who work with the history of emotions.… (meer)