This book reveals the social logic of the medieval rituals of reconciliation as showcased by the most potent rite, the kiss of peace. Ritual is presented as a contested ground on which individuals, groups, and political and moral authorities competed for and appropriated political sovereignty. The thesis of the study is that by employing ritual and bodily mnemonics as strategic tools, the forces of order and official morality strove to organize personality structures around a hegemonic value system. Researching three analytical fields--the legal bonds of peace, the emotional economy of...

This volume is the first comprehensive collection to gather together the records of the medieval Bulgarian centuries in English translation. Stone annals, works of religious instruction, anti-heretical treatises, apocrypha, royal charters, as well as numerous graffiti and marginal notes, shed abundant light onto a major cultural tradition of the European southeast from the seventh to the fifteenth century. Produced by Bulgarians of all walks of life, the evidence testifies, among other things, to the unique features of Bulgarian historical consciousness, political custom, and religious...

In The Anxieties of a Citizen Class: The Miracles of the True Cross of San Giovanni Evangelista, Venice 1370-1480 Kiril Petkov identifies the socio-psychological preoccupations accompanying the formation of the leading commoner group of early Renaissance Venice, the cittadini originarii, as revealed in a cycle of miracles performed by a fragment of the True Cross owned by the brotherhood of San Giovanni Evangelista. The study's principal contention is that the miracles trace the evolution of the citizen elite from members of a large, fluid group of men of affairs to community...

Coriolano Cippico (1425-93) was a Dalmatian nobleman from Trogir (Trau in modern Croatia), then part of the Venetian empire. He was a landowner, civil servant, humanist and military commander. From 1470 to 1474 he served as galley captain for a Venetian naval expedition in the eastern Mediterranean under the command of the future doge of Venice, Pietro Mocenigo. Cippico wrote "The Deeds of Commander Pietro Mocenigo" in 1474/75. Its three books describe the campaign as Mocenigo's fleet engaged in a systematic depredation of the western Anatolian shoreline, helped suppress a political coup in...