Beyond Medieval Europe

This book fundamentally challenges our stereotypes of the Vikings, and interrogates the use of a “rhetoric of reasonableness” (hóf) in medieval Nordic society.

This book explores the origins and diffusion of the Prester John legend and its influence on theology, politics, and the geographic imagination in the Middle Ages. Includes a new translation of the B recension of The Letter of Prester John.

This book is Open Access and available from OAPEN. Fraternal relations in the early Middle Ages were not always based on loyalty, solidarity, and a familial readiness to act in the common interest. This book examines kinship as influenced by the religious and ideological implications of the transformations taking place at the time.

This book is Open Access and available from OAPEN. Reconstructs the rituals of Slavic pre-Christian religion and society through a close examination of written medieval sources.

This book is Open Access and available from OAPEN. The concept of the Rus’ Land became and remained an historical myth of modern Russian nationalism as the equivalent of “Russia.” This book looks at the history of the use of the concept of the Rus’ Land from the tenth to the seventeenth century.

This book is Open Access and available from OAPEN. The first biography of John Vitez, an influential figure of the Early Renaissance, presenting a complex picture of cultural, political, and religious developments in Central Europe.

Architecture is shown to be a reliable “textual” source for understanding dynastic state development in Central Europe in the tenth and eleventh centuries.

This book reevaluates our conception of the Christianization of Scandinavia in the Early Middle Ages in the context of Adam of Bremen's history.

Fresh perspectives on Christianity and the conduct of war in territories that were only integrated into Christendom in the Central Middle Ages.

The Dalmatian coast of the Adriatic and its vast Balkan hinterland were an integral part of medieval Europe, both in a geographical and historical sense. However, due to issues of language and a scarcity of sources, the whole region has largely remained out of sight and overlooked by western historiography. This volume features contributions from an exciting new generation of medievalists who are working to rectify this gap in the narrative. As a small, landlocked country, medieval Bosnia managed to preserve its individuality, characterized by religious plurality and by the persistence of its own ancient customs. But its central position in the region, situated between east and west, and where boundaries between Catholic and Orthodox Christianity were demarcated deep into the Middle Ages, meant it was heavily influenced by both sides of this civilizational divide and politically and culturally shaped by the Venetian Republic, the Hungarian Kingdom, and the Byzantine Empire.

A figure of crucial importance to scholarship on western and eastern Europe alike, King Coloman (1208–1241) here receives long-overdue scholarly treatment as a key figure of the thirteenth century. The Árpád prince ruled over a vast area in Central Europe which remained largely affiliated to the Western Church. Renowned for fighting the Mongol Empire, he had close relations with Pope Gregory IX, and he was a contemporary of Emperor Friedrich II, Philippe Auguste of France, and Henry III of England. Coloman controlled territories that comprise modern-day Hungary, Slovakia, Croatia, and Bosnia and, as a result, he has long featured in various competing national historiographies. This study draws on Hungarian and other research that is inaccessible outside the region and places Coloman at the crossroads of Latin Christendom, Eastern Orthodoxy, and the Mongol Empire. It moves beyond previous national and religious narratives and foregrounds Central Europe in the history of early thirteenth-century Europe.

This study explores the development and function of the Byzantine aristocratic family group, or genos, as a distinct social concept, considering particularly its political and cultural role, in the tenth through twelfth centuries.

In the Viking Age and medieval Scandinavia, social values such as reputation, honour, and friendship, were integral to the development of rituals, customs, religion, literature, and language. Everyday norms are mainly conveyed orally or ritually, and rarely in a written or material shape. Despite this, the Old Norse-Icelandic literary corpus remains the most important source of our present-day knowledge of social development in the medieval North. New research methods allow us to explore how relics of the material culture of the medieval north can confront, corroborate, or disprove the depiction of social norms in medieval Scandinavian literature. This volume considers in depth how social norms affected the creation and functioning of societies in the medieval North, approaching the topic from a range of disciplinary angles including law-making, politics, religion, and literacy.

This book focuses on a key zone within the eastern frontier of medieval Europe: Podillya in modern-day Ukraine. Vitaliy Mykhaylovskiy offers a definitive guide to the region, which experienced great cultural and religious diversity, together with a continuous influx of newcomers. This is where Christian farmers met Muslim nomads. This is where German town residents and Polish nobles met urban Armenians and Tatars serving in the military. The territory emerged in historical narrative when Lithuanian and Polish rulers divided the legacy of the Ruthenian Kingdom and pushed Tatars back to the steppe. For one hundred and fifty years, this territory passed through many dominions – a western part of the Golden Horde, a principality under the Koriatovych brothers, a turf partitioned among the Polish kingdom and the duchy of Lithuania. Podillya offers a unique opportunity to see interaction of so many peoples, principalities, and cultures – the eastern frontier of Europe at its most dynamic.

Based on the material of the Old Norse Icelandic sources written down in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, this book demonstrates how medieval Scandinavians imagined Eastern Europe. It reconstructs the system of medieval Scandinavian perception of space in general, and the eastern part of the oecumene in particular. It also examines the unique information of these sources, of which the Russian chronicles were unaware: namely, the saga and skaldic poetry data concerning the visits of the four Norwegian kings to Old Rus in the late-tenth and mid-eleventh centuries.

This book re-examines the history of the Carpathian-Danubian region during the eighth and the ninth centuries, to provide a synthetic historical overview of the region to the north of the Lower Danube in this period. Based on a critical and comparative analysis of archaeological, narrative and numismatic sources, the study presents a reconstruction of the socio-economic, ethnic, cultural, and political history of the area at a period during which nomadic peoples from the east including the Bulgars, Avars, and Khazars migrated here. The work is based on a comprehensive analysis of narrative and archaeological sources including sites, artefacts, and goods in the basin bordered by the Tisza river in the west, the Danube in the south, and the Dniestr river in the east, covering swathes of modern-day Romania, Moldova, Ukraine, Serbia, and Hungary.

This book intertwines two themes in medieval studies, which so far have never been brought together: comparative studies of Latin and Orthodox Europe and a debate on the "feudal revolution" – the changes that occurred during the transition from Carolingian to post-Carolingian Europe. The book broadens the linguistic and geographical scope of the debate by comparing texts written in "learned" and "vulgar" Latin, Church Slavonic, Anglo-Norman, and East Slavonic, the vernacular of Kievan Rus. From this comparison, the Kingdom of the Rus' – a terra incognita for most medievalists, generally assumed to be profoundly different from the West –emerges as a regional variation of European society. In particular, the finding that contractual relations, traditionally described in scholarly literature as "feudo-vassalic," were present in the Kingdom of the Rus suggests that current explanations for the origins of such relations may overemphasize factors unique to the medieval West and overlook deeper pan-European processes.

This book sets out to answer the question of why Eastern Church writers showed no interest in analytical reasoning - the so-called "intellectual silence" of Rus' culture - while Western Church writers, by the time of the Scholastics, routinely incorporated analytical reasoning into their defences of the faith. Donald Ostrowski suggests that Western, post-Enlightenment- trained, analytical scholars miss the point, not because of an inability to comprehend cultural ideas which seem abstract and ineffable, but because the agenda is different. For the Eastern Church, faith was superior to reason. Eastern Church thinkers did not see any worth in disputation. If God is a mystery, and this world is an emanation from God, then this world is a mystery too. In the Eastern Church, they did not ask “Why” because, for them, any answer, any explanation, was merely a begging of the question. Why divide into categories what is whole and seamless? Why try to articulate what is ineffable?