Humanities Chapter 5

• The days of the week are derived from the names of the Saxon gods

  • Tuesday-Tiw

  • Wednesday-Woden

  • Thursday-Thir

  • Friday-Frigg, Woden's wife

• The Saxon word “bury” can be translated as “fort”

• The Saxon word “chester” can be translated as “camp”

• Churls were free men who owned farms of 90-100 acres

• Anglo-Saxon law was based on the idea of the wergeld, or “life-price” of an individual

11-12-24

• The epic poem, Beowulf, provides an account of a Scandinavian warrior who rids a community of monsters that have ravaged the land

• One of its most notable literary features, common to Old English literature, is its reliance on compound phrases, or kennings, substituted for the usual name of a person or thing

11-14-24

• Around 563, an Irish monk, Columba, founded a monastery on the Scottish island of Iona

• Augustine is credited with building a cathedral at Canterbury and a church dedicated to St. Paul in London

• Bishop Eadfrith designed the Lindisfarne Gospels

• The first Celtic cross was made by St. Patrick who made the mark of the Latin cross through the circle on an ancient standing stone monument

• On Christmas day, 800 CE, Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne emperor of the Roman Empire

• Roland’s horn was made from the ivory of an elephant tusk

• The strict and unwritten code of conduct that guided a knight consisted of:

  • Courage in battle

  • Loyalty to his lord and peers

  • A courtesy verging on reverence toward women

11-18-24

• The rule of Benedict of Nursia was imposed on all monasteries throughout Charlemagne’s Frankish kingdom

• The dining hall where monks ate their meals was known as the refectory

• Hilda, abbess of Whitby, ran one of the most prominent Anglo-Saxon monasteries, a community of both monks and nuns

• A neum refers to a musical note used in Gregorian chants

• The Bayeux Tapestry documents the Norman invasion of England in 1066

• The Domesday Book resulted from a call by Willaim I of Normandy for a complete survey of England so that he could more accurately determine how much tax he could raise to provide a new army

• Chartes claimed as its relic the tunic that the Virgin Mary wore when she gave birth to Christ

• Vezelay claimed as its relic the bones of Mary Magdalene

• The barrel vault is the elongated arched masonry structure spanning an interior space and shaped like a half-cylinder

• The voussoir refers to wedge-shaped stones that form the arch in a Romanesque church

• The mandorla refers to an almond-shape oval of light signifying divinity, imported from the Far East through Byzantium and commonly used by Romanesque artists

12-3-24

• Pope Innocent III was the author of On the Misery of the Human Condition, whose message was adopted as the official doctrine of the Western Catholic Church

• The translation for memento mori is the reminder of death

• Odo of Cluny is often credited with developing one of the first effective systems of musical notation a method which used the letters A through G to name the seven notes of the Western scale

• Guido of Arezzo introduced the idea of depicting notes on a staff of lines so that the same note always appears on the same line

• Venice manipulated the Fourth Crusade to its advantage, resulting in its becoming one of the most powerful city-states in the Eastern Mediterranean

• In the decade that she lived at Poiter, Eleanor and her daughter, countess of Champagne, established that city as the center of secular culture and literary movement that celebrated the art of courtly love

• Beatriz de Dia composed “Cruel Art the Pains I’ve Suffered”

• Chretien de Troyes composed Lancelot, which centered on the adventures of a knight in King Aurthur’s court

• Lancelot is considered an example of the “medieval romance”