Download PDF | Richard K. Emmerson - Key Figures in Medieval Europe_ An Encyclopedia- (2006).
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INTRODUCTION
Key Figures in Medieval Europe: An Encyclopedia provides a broad introduction to the biographical knowledge collected and investigated by modern scholarship over the past several decades regarding the persons whose actions, beliefs, creations, and writings shaped the Middle Ages, roughly that period in European history stretching from about 500 to 1500.
The geographic and chronological range of this volume is therefore extensive and impressive, as are the lives and accomplishments of the 587 fi gures it discusses. Although the historical record tends to favor persons born into or achieving the higher estates of the Middle Ages, such as the princes of church and state, these entries include a wide range of individuals, from emperors and queens to businessmen and traveling performers, from popes and university scholars to visionary women and heretics, from one of the greatest poets of all times, Dante, who during the later Middle Ages was known internationally, to Caedmon, a little known oral poet living on the edge of civilized Europe during the early Middle Ages. These are the people who infl uenced, motivated, and were shaped by the artistic, economic, intellectual, literary, political, religious, and social history of one of the most fascinating periods of world history, the Middle Ages.
It is worth noting that the Islamic world receives attention in Key Figures in Medieval Europe, most of all because of its important place in medieval Iberia. The 587 entries included in Key Figures in Medieval Europe are drawn from the following eight previously published volumes in the Routledge Encyclopedias of the Middle Ages series, initiated by Garland. • Medieval Scandinavia: An Encyclopedia, edited by Phillip Pulsiano and Kirsten Wolf (Garland, 1993) • Medieval France: An Encyclopedia, edited by William W. Kibler, Grover A. Zinn, John Bell Henneman, Jr., and Lawrence Earp (Garland, 1995) • Medieval England: An Encyclopedia, edited by Paul E. Szarmach, M. Teresa Tavormina, and Joel T. Rosenthal (Garland, 1998) • Trade, Travel, and Exploration in the Middle Ages: An Encyclopedia, edited by John Block Friedman and Kristen Mossler Figg (Garland, 2000) • Medieval Germany: An Encyclopedia, edited by John M. Jeep (Garland, 2001) • Medieval Jewish Civilization: An Encyclopedia, edited by Norman Roth (Routledge, 2002) • Medieval Iberia: An Encyclopedia, edited by E. Michael Gerli (Routledge, 2003) • Medieval Italy: An Encyclopedia, edited by Christopher Kleinhenz (Routledge, 2003). The entries comprising Key Figures in Medieval Europe were carefully selected amongst the biographical entries found in the above volumes to provide a source for quick and ready information.
The present volume is intended not only for students, librarians, teachers, and the general public, who may be interested in the Middle Ages but do not wish to purchase or sift through numerous individual encyclopedias, but also for medievalists and other scholars who want to have a reliable reference work easily at hand. By drawing on previously published entries, the volume gathers the best of scholarship scattered over eight volumes into one easy to use biographical resource. To preserve the integrity of the scholarship, the entries are published as they originally appeared. The strength of the entries is evident in the quality of the scholarship that informed the original volumes and that drew on the wide knowledge of hundreds of scholars selected by the editors of the volumes for their expertise in the areas of medieval studies assigned to them. The entries, therefore, are reliable accounts of the medieval fi gures discussed and can be used with confi dence by all readers.
A compilation that seeks to combine entries from several geographically-based volumes into a single Europe-wide volume is bound to have slight inconsistencies. The entries are arranged alphabetically according to the spelling of the name in the source volume, but entries drawn from other volumes may refer to these individuals by somewhat different names or spellings.
There is also some variation in length. Readers should not assume that the length of an entry represents the importance of a subject, because the source volumes vary in the size of their entries. Given the thousands of individuals included in the eight encyclopedias, it was necessary to establish some reasonably consistent criteria for selecting the entries included in Key Figures in Medieval Europe. Obviously, word length could not be the primary criterion. However, within individual encyclopedias length could be used as a rough gauge of importance, especially within certain categories, such as political fi gures. But such distinctions in length within a single volume could not be used as an absolute, because of the nature of historical knowledge and available evidence.
We simply know much more about political fi gures (particularly members of the nobility) than we know about commoners, which means that entries on emperors, kings, and caliphs, for example, will, with a very few exceptions (e.g., Dante), be longer than entries on musicians, painters, and poets. Similarly, because of the international nature of the Christian church and its omnipresence, we often know much more about religious fi gures than secular ones, even when they were attached to courts and cathedrals. As in the modern world, gender structures also affected the status of men and women during the Middle Ages, so that the historical record is generally much fuller when dealing with men than with women.
Therefore, to provide some balance to Key Figures in Medieval Europe and to ensure that it represents the wide range of cultural practices, as well as political events and religious thought, the selection privileges secular and artistic fi gures by including several individuals whose entries in the source volumes are relatively short. Since these individuals often worked outside the corridors of power and left few biographical records, there is little biographical detail to explore, yet their accomplishments are signifi cant. The selection of entries, in other words, is ultimately driven by the editorial sense of long-term importance and infl uence, as well as by what the reader may fi nd interesting about the Middle Ages.
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