So, is there a premodern state? Can the concept of "state" be employed meaningfully in medieval studies? Is this a purely Eurocentric approach, which should not be used for any non-European political entities? And how do we go about discussing it? In our 2023 summer volume we open the floor for a lively debate on these questions.
As a starting point, Brent D. Shaw offers a comprehensive essay on the Roman "state", to which seven scholars from different fields of Chinese, Byzantine and European medieval history (Nicola Di Cosmo, Stefano Gasparri and Cristina La Rocca, Hans-Werner Goetz, John Haldon, Yannis Stouraitis, and Régine Le Jan) respond, developing a stimulating discussion. In it, they examine, apply, reject and adapt political concepts and approaches in Antiquity and the Middle Ages.
Vibrant scholarship is also tangible in our research articles. Thus, Michaela Wiesinger, Christina Jackel and Norbert Orbán combine manuscript studies with digital humanities and not only offer new ideas about the use of German arithmetic treatises in every-day life in the Late Middle Ages but also present an approach to generate a model for handwritten text recognition for this material. In our second stand-alone article, Andrew Wareham uses English and Chinese sources to compare strategies of peace-making around the turn of the eleventh century.
In our thematic section guest editor Nathan P. Gibson presents the second instalment of Knowledge Collaboration among Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, and Muslims in the Abbasid Near East. Its case studies carefully analyse philosophical texts for evidence of contact with an "other" (religion or philosophy): Focusing on the famous Syrian Orthodox theologian Barhebraeus (1226-1286 CE), Jens Ole Schmitt uses the author’s writings on sleeping and dreaming animals to investigate the intellectual environment and sources of thirteenth-century Syriac and Medieval Latin treatises on natural history. Pavel Basharin takes the reader to ninth and tenth century Baghdad, when he analyses Manṣūr al-Ḥallāj’s (d. 309 AH /922 CE) cosmological texts to trace ideas of pseudo-Empedocles in mysticism of that time. Two further case studies explore digital tools and approaches that can be used advantageously in studies on knowledge collaboration: Off the Record describes systematic ways in which lost books can be studied, starting with biological approaches, such as unseen species or phylogenetic tree models, and focusing on network analysis and digital prosopography, where bio-bibliographical information is converted into machine-readable data. Labeling Religious Affiliation then goes into greater detail how complex networks might be transferred into databases without loss of nuances.
Rounding off this section, two projects concerned with knowledge collaboration and machine supported analysis report on their work: the edition project for the fourteenth-century Greek treatise On Psychic Pneuma has developed novel editing methods and uncovered new evidence for cross-cultural reception history. The project team of Communities of Knowledge explain the main processes through which they developed a machine supported qualitative study of networks of scholarly interchanges, based on Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa’s History of the Physicians.
Writing, signing, burying, touching, speaking before witnesses – these were all methods employed during the Middle Ages to make oaths visible and effective. Scholars today distinguish between various types, such as "promissory oaths" and "probatory" or "purgative oaths" but also have evidence for mixtures. Oaths might be unilateral or bilateral, they might be taken by an individual or by a group. In short, oaths were versatile means to achieve a variety of ends, and changed over time as people made use of them. With established scholars and upcoming talents in this field contributing, our thematic section Oaths in Premodern Japan and Premodern Europe in volume 19 not only presents case studies, which showcase examples of this wide array of oath-taking practice, but also offers in-depth analyses of changes over longer periods of time. In his introduction, guest editor Philippe Buc skilfully provides methodological and comparative observations. For Japan, Yoshikawa Shinji gives insights into the development of the written oath (kishōmon) from its predecessors and origins in the third to sixth centuries to the twelfth century. From the twelfth to the sixteenth century, kishōmon was widely used and second guest editor Thomas D. Conlan argues in his article The Gods Are Watching, that these oaths not only became linked to talismans but also underpinned laws and alliances and thus provide historical evidence for social norms and practices. Megan Gilbert and Horikawa Yasufumi support this argument in their two case studies of kishōmon in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the pinnacle of its use. Gilbert concentrates on accusations of adultery and the probatory oaths that were used in its investigation, proclamations of innocence and status negotiations. Horikawa reconstructs local disputes and mediation of a particular samurai family and draws conclusions about their collective organisation.
For Western Europe, Stefan Esders outlines the development of oaths from Late Antiquity to the tenth century under Christian doctrinal influence. In three case studies, Helmut Reimitz, Hélène Débax and Olivier Richard illustrate the use of oaths in the Early, High and Late Middle Ages. In his article The Promise of History Reimitz outlines the use of promissory oaths in historical narratives of the Frankish kingdoms and extracts not only insights about the ideas the authors of these histories had but, just as Gilbert and Horikawa, also about political and social structures of that time. Southern France in the eleventh and twelfth centuries provides ample evidence of promissory oaths. In the form of oaths of fidelity they were linked to a castle and defined hierarchies and authority within the local aristocracy. In her riveting analysis of this material Hélène Debax outlines a feudal network in which a plurality of political fidelities was accommodated and society structured through the use of oaths. Complex hierarchies established by oaths seem to have prevailed up to the late middle ages, as Olivier Richard attests in his study of late medieval towns. Here oaths were not only used as instruments of social and political cohesion but also as means of differentiating or fine-tuning the distinction between layers of society.
A fragment from early fourteenth-century Iceland is presented in our individual articles section. It contains parts of the Nikuláss saga erkibiskups, the Saga of Bishop Nicholas retold in Old Icelandic. Elliot Worrall, Rutger Kramer and Tom Grant not only provide a new edition, normalization and translation but also place the fragment into the larger context of the Saint Nicholas tradition, carefully teasing out linguistic and narrative features which seem to be specific to this version.