Favor of Friends is a new book about intercession and aristocratic politics in Carolingian and Ottonian Europe by Sean Gilsdorf, lecturer in History at Harvard University.
ABSTRACT
In the book Gilsdorf explores the role of intercession (third-party advocacy) within early medieval political culture, analyzing how the interpersonal and inter-group relationships between rulers, intercessors, and petitioners were depicted in iconography, historical accounts, letters, and official documents. Drawing upon a variety of disciplines and historiographical traditions, Sean Gilsdorf demonstrates how this process operated, and how it was ideologically elaborated, in Carolingian and Ottonian Europe, allowing individuals and groups to leverage their own, limited interpersonal networks to the fullest, produce new relationships, gain access to previously closed spaces, and generate interest in their agendas from those able to effect change. The Favor of Friends enriches our understanding of early medieval politics and ruler-ship, offering a model of political interaction in which hierarchy and comity do not stand in ideological and pragmatic tension, but instead work in integrated and mutually-reinforcing ways.
In the book he argues that intercession was not simply a tool of “feudal” politics (as many scholars have assumed), but a fundamental expression of early medieval rulership, not only because of its practical benefits to its participants, but because it offered a compelling model of political interaction in which hierarchy and comity worked in integrated, connected, and mutually-reinforcing ways. The visual manifestation of these relationships is the focus of a recent article “Deēsis Deconstructed: Imagining Intercession in the Medieval West,” (Viator, 2012, Vol. 43, 1) which explores the adoption and re-configuration of a Byzantine iconographic theme within early medieval Western European culture.
The Favor of Friends offers the first book-length exploration of intercession—aid and advocacy by one individual or group in behalf of another—within early medieval aristocratic societies.
CONTENT
Figures and Tables
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Chapter 1: Understanding Intercession Sources and Approaches
Chapter 2: Courting Intercession Amici, Allies, and Advocacy
Chapter 3: Making Intercession Companions, Kin, and Consorts
Chapter 4: Embodying Intercession The Mediatory Politics of the Episcopacy
Chapter 5: The End(s) of Intercession Consolidations and Conclusions
Appendix 1: Diplomatic intercession, Conrad I to Conrad II (911-1039)
Appendix 2: Excluded diplomata, Conrad I to Conrad II
Bibliography
Index
AUTHOR
Sean Gilsdorf (Ph.D. University of Chicago, 2007) is Lecturer in History and Literature at Harvard University and Visiting Assistant Professor in History at Mt. Holyoke College. He is the author of Queenship and Sanctity (Catholic University Press, 2004).
Favor of Friends. Intercession and Aristocratic Politics in Carolingian and Ottonian Europe
By Sean Gilsdorf
In: Brill’s Series on the Early Middle Ages Vol 23
Brill 2014
ISBN: 9789004264588