Documents found
-
-
1442.
-
1443.More information
Ceramic evidence, both that of the containers of foodstuffs, amphorae, and that of fine red slip tableware which was sold throughout the Roman empire, testifies to the scale, complexity and intensity of commercial exchange in antiquity. Economic historians have gone on to infer that the state, through its organization of the bulk transport of foodstuffs to population centres, shaped the pattern of exchange of other goods, adducing in support the limited body of documentary evidence which focusses on the state’s role. A few texts point rather to the leading role of merchants, and highlight the scale and range of manufacturing production. The seventh and eighth-century struggle for survival promoted a quasi-command economy, but did not extinguish private enterprise in the Aegean-centred heartlands of Byzantium. Only a few isolated texts document trade in the following centuries. But a picture of a commercially active Byzantium can be pieced together, in which the role of the state was limited to managing the free market, in partnership with recognized guilds. The regulatory mechanisms varied but aimed at breaking up the process of production into distinct phases overseen by specialist guilds, setting up cartels to negotiate import prices, and imposing a bazaar system on much of the retail trade. Manufacturing and active trading can then be followed into the era of Italian hegemony, fine wares once again coming to the fore as evidence of complex patterns of exchange.
-
-
1445.More information
The Viking Age was a patriarchal time when men dominated the social and political world. However, due to the shamanistic practice known as seiðr, women of this time had access to unique roles as spiritual leaders. This essay discusses the impact seiðr had on Viking Age women’s agency and self-empowerment. Seiðr has close ties to textile arts, with seiðr rituals taking influence from repetitive spinning and weaving circles. The relationship between seiðr and textile art is seen throughout Norse mythology, and women who practice seiðr (called völur) are agential characters throughout many Icelandic sagas—most notably Thorbjörg from Eirik the Red’s Saga and Gunnhildr in Njal’s Saga. The rise of Christianity in Scandinavia and its subsequent anti-witchcraft laws soon led to the dissipation of seiðr.
Keywords: Scandinavia, gender, Viking Age, witchcraft, Icelandic Sagas
-
1446.
-
1447.
-
-
1450.