Micro Middle Ages (The New Middle Ages)

✍ Scribed by Paul Edward Dutton

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2023
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 442
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Micro Middle Ages brings together five microhistorical case studies focusing on small or seemingly inconsequential evidence that leads to broader conclusions about medieval history and the way we do and understand history in general. Paul Dutton provides an overview of microhistorical approaches and theorizes about its use in pre-modern history. As opposed to studying history “from above” or history “from below,” Dutton shows the advantages for historians of doing history “from the inside out,” starting from some single, overlooked, but potentially knowable thing, delving deep inside, and then reattaching it to its time and place. Such an approach has one abiding advantage: its insistence on being grounded in the particularity of the evidence. The book highlights what the microhistorical is, its conceptual and practical challenges. Dutton argues that the attention to the micro has always been with us and is a constitutive, cognitive part of who we are as human beings.

✦ Table of Contents

Contents
List of Figures
Preamble
An Incident: The Strange Case of the Green Children
1 The Stories
2 Why the Children Were There
3 Why the Children Were Green
A Name: Heloise, Philosophess and Prostitute
1 The Assault on Philosophy
1.1 Magistra Philosophia
2 The Dance of Masters and Prostitutes around Money
2.1 Masters and Money
2.2 Nameless Prostitutes
2.3 Prostitutes and Schoolmen
2.4 Thais
3 The Dance of Abelard and Heloise Around Money
3.1 Abelard and Money
3.2 Abelard and Women
3.3 After Castration
3.4 Multa Heloisae Nomina
3.5 Coda
A Scene: Slipping Below the Surface of the Bayeux Tapestry
1 Seeing the Image
2 The Object
3 Patron
4 The Making
5 Display
6 Animals
7 Border Issues
8 Two Fables
9 Below the Line
10 Experiencing the BT
11 The Usual Reading
12 History of the Scene
13 The Paired Paired Fish
14 The Daisy-Chain of Creatures: The So-Called Centaur
15 The Three Creatures
16 The Little Man on His Back
17 The Six Eels
18 Zooming Out
19 An Elf-Given Doubt
20 Bayeux Tapestry, Lower Border 17: What It Is and What It Means to Say
Backpacking through Microhistory: Thanks for ‘Nothing’
1 Micro Gazing
2 Micro Sizing History
3 Terms of Engagement
4 Small Things, Large Limits
5 Clues to the Prehistory of Microhistory
6 Holmes and Doyle Afoot
7 Micro Medieval Studies
8 Thanks for ‘Nothing’
A Joke: The Tiny Revolution of Theodulf’s ‘Stolen Horse’
1 Two Scenarios
1.1 The More Daring: A Microbridge Too Far
1.2 The More Likely: The Bridling of an Equestrian World
A Sentence: The Desert War of One Carolingian Monk
1 The Codex and Its Colophon
2 The Journey
3 Ellenhart the Scribe
4 Why a Colophon
5 Why the Desert Fathers
6 Home
Ambles End in Tears
Index