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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.
Price: $167.00
Pages: 282
Publisher: Brill
Imprint: Brill
Series: Medieval Law and Its Practice
Publication Date:
17 October 2019
ISBN: 9789004408487
Format: Hardcover
"This volume is a welcome contribution. Gerd Althoff is a major German historian of the early Middle Ages whose generation of scholars developed a new perspective on German political history [...] The value of the cultural turn as found in the work of Gerd Althoff and his generation
of historians has provided a signal service – most especially in German historiography – of separating medieval German history from the awfully destructive legacy of an intense nationalistic modern historiography centered on the German state. For helping provide this specific »German Perspective« we are in his debt and can appreciate the import of this volume in his honor."
Joseph P. Huffman, in Francia 2020 (4).
Joseph P. Huffman, in Francia 2020 (4).
Gerd Althoff, Ph.D. (1974), Münster, has been Full and Senior Professor of Medieval History at that university from 1997-2018. His many publications include Spielregeln der Politik im Mittelalter (WBG, 1997); Die Macht der Rituale (WBG, 2003); and Family, Friends and Followers (Cambridge University Press, 2009).