Past Imperfect

Prussia, Lithuania, and Latvia were among the last places in Europe to be Christianized. Focusing on the deities, sacred places, and sacred rites of the Balts, this book introduces the religious world of some of Europe’s last pagan peoples.

Provides an in-depth analysis of different aspects of Byzantine military culture between the third and the twelfth centuries, looking at Military Manuals, “Grand” Strategy, Military Organization and Battle Tactics, and Military Equipment.

This book argues that when approached as a series of microhistories, medieval archaeology in the East Roman world is the archaeology of complex settlements.

This book looks afresh at a key stage in Japan’s global transformation from medieval to early modern.

The story of Russian imperialism has deep historical roots, and this book shows how Byzantium, the most powerful medieval and Christian empire, is repeatedly presented in Russian history as the source of the empire’s imperial legitimacy.

This book addresses Christendom's eastern frontier, the principality of Moldavia: its political, economic, and cultural history from its formation in 1359 to the early sixteenth century.

A growing number of historians have realized that the terms “Byzantium” and “the Byzantines” distort the reality and identity of the society being studied. Anthony Kaldellis proposes a name change for the field of Byzantine Studies.

Describes the Almoravid transformation of western North Africa through trans-Saharan and trans-Mediterranean commerce, urbanization, and the epic encounter with the Christian, Muslim, and Jewish cultures of Iberia.

Grounds mythologized stories of Desert Ascetics with insights into lived monasticism and monastic archaeology in Egypt.

An insightful account of the medieval Persian Gulf, demonstrating the deep roots of cultural and religious diversity in the region.

"Europe" has become a modern political concept, but it has a long and varied history. This volume analyzes medieval ideas of Europe and their representations by modern historians.

In a clear and accessible form, this book explores everyday relations and interactions between Christians and Muslims in the Levant during the Crusades, demonstrating that it was usually practicality rather than religious scruples that dictated their responses to the religious other.

Using histories, letters, and material culture from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, this book explores how violence was understood and justified during the time of the crusades.

The study of the Middle Ages in every aspect of the modern liberal arts—the humanities, STEM, and the social sciences—has significant importance for society and the individual.

Tom Shippey challenges the view that Beowulf is a fantasy and argues that using the poem as a starting point, historical, archaeological, and legendary sources can provide a plausible and consistent history of the North in the fifth and sixth centuries.

Ground-breaking work showing that endemic and venereal treponematosis (bejel and syphilis) were present in late medieval Europe.

New insights into the experiences of crusaders, pilgrims, and settlers in the crusader states from an experienced archaeologist.

An exploration of how ideas regarding the source and character of supreme political authority—sovereignty—experienced a crucial period of formative development during the thirteenth century.

This book discusses medieval Rome, adorned as it was by “Byzantine” art, monuments, and culture, as a city that defined both East and West.

Why should anyone, aside from specialist historians and philologists, read Beowulf? This book presents a passionate literary argument for Beowulf as a searching and subtle exploration of the human presence. Seamus Heaney praised Beowulf as "a work of the greatest imaginative vitality": how is that true? The poem's current scholarly obsessions and its popular reception have obscured the fact that this untitled and anonymous 3182-line poem from Anglo-Saxon England is a powerful and enduring work of world literature. Beowulf is an early medieval exercise in humanism: it dramatizes, in varied and complex ways, the conflict between human autonomy and the "mind-forg'd manacles" of the world. The poem is as relevant and moving to any reader today as it was during the early Middle Ages. This book serves both as an invitation and introduction to the poem as well as an intervention in its current scholarly context.

Rather than divide the medieval Mediterranean into "Christian Europe" and "Muslim North Africa," this book presents the region as a single, mutually influenced, interconnected whole.

This book reinterprets the place of slavery in the transformation of the Roman Mediterranean into a world of medieval civilizations.

A concise overview of the role of queens, empresses, and other royal women from the ancient and classical period through to nearly the present day on every continent, engaging with current themes and theories of queenship and directions for future research.

A historical overview and thematic examination of Polynesia (especially New Zealand and its outlying islands), 900–1600.

Belligerent warmongers or saintly monks? This book surveys the Knights Templar, exploring the controversies that still surround this famous medieval institution.

This book surveys Arianism, a Christian creed of great historical importance, and advances scholarship through an innovative, interdisciplinary approach.

Is it possible to talk about antisemitism in the Middle Ages before the appearance of scientific concepts of "race"? In this work, François Soyer examines the nature of medieval anti-Jewish sentiment and violence. Analysing developments in Europe between 1100 and 1500, he points to the tensions in medieval anti-Jewish thought amongst thinkers who hoped to convert Jews and blamed Talmudic scholarship for their obduracy and yet who also, conversely, often essentialized Judaism to the point that it transformed into the functional equivalent of the modern concept of race. In a nuanced manner, he argues that, just as many historians now refer to "racisms" in the plural, we should not consider antisemitism as a monolithic concept but accept the existence of independent historical meanings and thus of antisemitisms (plural), including "medieval antisemitism" as distinct from anti-Judaism.

The Hussite movement was a historical watershed, in which popular and scholastic theology combined with a nascent Czech nationalism to produce a full-scale social revolution that presaged the Protestant Reformation and the birth of the modern nation state. The Hussites defeated the forces of the Empire and the Pope, and their king George Poděbrady was the first to advocate a trans-national European state. Jan Hus is remembered as a martyr for church reform, but his colleagues formulated a theology that scholars are now recognizing to have had influence on Luther and the birth of Protestantism. Another Bohemian associated with the movement, Petr Chelčický, was the first to advocate a radical pacifist Christian anarchism. This survey introduces the reader to the events, people, and ideas that define this remarkable movement.

This lively and personal book explains some key aspects of how people of the Byzantine Empire perceived gender, enabling readers to understand Byzantine society and its fascinating otherness more fully.

This book presents a fresh overview of the Vikings from both conceptual and material perspectives. The prevailing image of a Viking is frequently that of a fierce male, associated with military expansion and a distinctive material culture. In an engaging survey, Sæbjørg Walaker Nordeide and Kevin J. Edwards analyse Viking religion, economic life and material culture in and beyond the Scandic homelands. Although there is a conventional Viking Age timeframe of ca. AD 800 to 1050 (the Scandinavians are usually associated with hit-and-run attacks beginning with the raid on the Abbey of Lindisfarne in 797), their military expeditions actually started earlier and were directed eastwards. Scandinavians moved beyond the Baltic coast to Constantinople. To the south and west, France, Iberia, and the islands of Great Britain and Ireland witnessed, variously, trade, invasion, and settlement. The essentially unpopulated islands of the North Atlantic Ocean were subjected to a Norse-led diaspora with the Scandinavian settlers perhaps over-reaching themselves in Newfoundland and ultimately abandoning their Greenlandic colonies. The Vikings have maintained a resonance in the popular imagination to the present day.

Most overviews dealing with eastern Vikings have cast the Eastern Baltic peoples in a predominantly passive role during the large-scale Viking movement into the region. This book demonstrates how communication networks over the Baltic Sea and further east were established and how they took different forms in the northern and the southern halves of the Eastern Baltic. Archaeological as well as written sources indicate the impact these networks had on the development of local societies. In particular, areas along the northern Baltic Sea, both on the eastern and the western coasts, were characterized by a shared cultural sphere for warriors. Changes in archaeological evidence along relevant trade routes through these areas suggest that the inhabitants of present-day Finland and the Baltic States were more engaged in Viking eastern movement than is generally believed.

This book explores medieval cityscapes within the modern urban environment, using place as a catalyst to forge connections between past and present, and investigating timely questions concerning theoretical approaches to medieval urban heritage, as well as the presentation and interpretation of that heritage for public audiences. Written by a specialist in literary and cultural history with substantial experience of multi-disciplinary research into medieval towns, Medieval Cityscapes Today teases out stories and strata of meaning from the urban landscape, bringing techniques of close reading to the material fabric of the city, as well as textual artefacts associated with it. Deriving from the author’s own experience in urban regeneration and heritage interpretation projects, case studies – such as the development of a public art installation at a medieval ruin site and the development of a pavement marker trail – provide ways into exploring broader questions about relationships between the medieval and modern city.

The Mongols emerged from obscurity to establish the largest contiguous empire in history. Although they are now no longer viewed as simply an unbridled force of destruction, it remains unclear as to how they succeeded in ruling a empire that stretched from the Sea of Japan to the Black Sea. This book investigates how the Mongol adopted and adapted different ruling strategies from previous Inner Asian empires as well as Chinese and Islamic Empires to rule an empire in which they were a distinct minority, and also investigates the processes by which this empire fragmented into an increasing number of states, many of which lasted into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

This book asks readers to re-examine their view of the Islamic world and the development of sectarianism in the Middle East by shining a light on the complexity and diversity of early Islamic society. The focus here is on the tenth century, a period in Middle Eastern history that has often been referred to as the “Shiʿi Century,” when two Shiʿi dynasties rose to power: the Fatimids of North Africa and the Buyids of Iraq and Iran. Historians often call the period after the Shiʿi Century the “Sunni Revival” because that was when Sunni control was restored, but these terms present a misleading image of a unified medieval Islam that was predominately Sunni. While Sunni Islam eventually became politically and numerically dominant, Sunni and Shiʿi identities took centuries to develop as independent communities. When modern discussions of sectarianism in the Middle East reduce these identities to a 1400-year war between Sunnis and Shiʿis, we create a false narrative.

The study of medieval liturgy can contribute richly to the discourses of textuality and culture in the Middle Ages. It can tell us a great deal not only about the worship of the church, but also about the people who practised it. However, existing scholarship can be problematic and difficult to use.

This short book aims to unsettle the notion that liturgiology is a mysterious, abstruse, and monolithic discipline. It challenges some scholarly orthodoxies, hints at the complexity of the liturgy as a subject for study and shows that it needs to be examined in ways quite different from the summary treatment it often receives. It also seeks to encourage the reader in his or her own (future) investigations of the topic by introducing some of the key ideas, resources, and methods, and proposes ways in which they might be explored.

Looks at the early medieval origins and development of canon law using a social history framework, with a view to making sense of a rich and complex legal system and culture which influenced and controlled the medieval Church and society.

Saints were powerful role models in the early Middle Ages, capable of defining communities. But what roles did saintly biographies play in shaping the medieval West? Are we any closer to the 'elusive goal' of understanding society and its many post-Roman transformations through them? This book provides a new starting point for the investigation of the early Middle Ages through hagiography. It critically examines the varied nature of hagiography in different societies, from Ireland to Germany via Rome and Spain, to help pave the way for future comparative studies. The book also offers a wide-ranging assessment of different modern methodologies used to interrogate hagiographies, from early twentieth-century source criticism, to the insights gained from gender studies, postmodernism and digital humanities.

The election of fringe political parties on the far and extreme right across Europe since spring 2014 has brought the political discourse of "old Europe" and "tradition" to the foreground. Writers and politicians on the right have called for the reclamation, rediscovery, and return of the spirit of national identities rooted in the medieval past. Though the "medieval" is often deployed as a stigmatic symbol of all that is retrograde, against modernity, and barbaric, the medieval is increasingly being sought as a bedrock of tradition, heritage, and identity. Both characterizations – the medieval as violent other and the medieval as vital foundation – are mined and studied in this book. It examines contemporary political uses of the Middle Ages to ask why the medieval continues to play such a prominent role in the political and historical imagination today.

The history of the Late Roman Empire in the West has been divided into two parallel worlds, analysed either as a political and economic transformation or as a religious and cultural one. But how do these relate one to another? In this concise and effective synthesis, Ian Wood considers some ways in which religion and the Church can be reintegrated into what has become a largely secular discourse. The Church was at the heart of the changes that look place at the end of the Western Empire, not only regarding religion, but indeed every aspect of politics and society. Wood contends that the institutionalisation of the Church on a huge scale was a key factor in the transformation which began in the early fourth century with an incipiently Christian Roman Empire and ended three hundred years later in a world of thoroughly Christianised kingdoms.

The Peace of God was one of the most important, and one of the most contested, movements of the entire Middle Ages. It has been seen as either radically innovative or fundamentally traditional; as strongly millenarian or not millenarian at all; as the first great popular movement in European history or as an instrument by which elites consolidated their power. In this book, Geoffrey Koziol argues that all such differing viewpoints have some basis in fact, partly because specific instantiations of the Peace of God varied greatly, but also because from its very beginning the movement brought to the fore the contradictions inherent in earlier ideas and rituals of peace and peace-making.

Demons—evil angels or fallen angels—form an inescapable part of the religious and cultural landscape of the European Middle Ages. This book explores their significance across fifteen hundred years of European history, from the North African desert homes of the eremites in the Late Antique period, to the miracle tales of the medieval monasteries of Western Europe, the academic disputes of the Scholastics, and conjuring of necromancers in the later Middle Ages. It argues that for all these groups, demons constituted a necessary part of the cosmic structure, whether by defining a monastic calling, fulfilling a role in God's properly ordered universe, or holding out the promise of untold wealth and knowledge. By the end of the Middle Ages, however, concern about the impact of demons and their connection with heresy would lead to the witch hunts that would sweep Europe and the New World in the early modern era.

As scholarship continues to expand the idea of medieval Europe beyond "the West," the Rus' remain the final frontier relegated to the European periphery. The Kingdom of Rus' challenges the perception of Rus' as an eastern "other" – advancing the idea of the Rus' as a kingdom deeply integrated with medieval Europe, through an innovative analysis of medieval titles. Examining a wide range of medieval sources, this book exposes the common practice in scholarship of referring to Rusian rulers as princes as a relic of early modern attempts to diminish the Rus'. Not only was Rus' part and parcel of medieval Europe, but in the eleventh and twelfth centuries Rus' was the largest kingdom in Christendom.

Alfred the Great is a rare historical figure from the early Middle Ages, in that he retains a popular image. This image increasingly suffers from the dead white male syndrome, exacerbated by Alfred's association with British imperialism and colonialism, so this book provides an accessible reassessment of the famous ruler of Wessex, informed by current scholarship, both on the king as a man in history, and the king as a subsequent legendary construct. Daniel Anlezark presents Alfred in his historical context, seen through Asser's Life, the Anglo Saxon Chronicle, and other texts associated with the king. The book engages with current discussions about the authenticity of attributions to Alfred of works such as the Old English Boethius and Soliloquies, and explores how this ninth-century king of Wessex came to be considered the Great king of legend.

Just how medieval is the modern university? Rarely do even scholars of medievalism employ its methods and approaches to thinking about institutions. Universities arose out of concerns of the church and the state in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in Western Europe. From the beginning, they were fixtures, and from the beginning, they needed extensive renovation. And yet, universities have remained monolithic and static entities, renovating themselves just enough – but never more than enough – to avoid massive interventions by the state or the church or other elements in the system. Like parliamentary democracies, they function just well enough that while feelings of despair are frequent, and anticipation of imminent collapse constant, they continue. In the modern era, as universities face a new set of challenges, this book asks if there is not some value in pondering the medieval university, the origin stories for the modern university, and the continuities that exist as much as do the fractures. Universities offer a fascinating lens on what society considers important. Not only should we consider the role of the university in every society, we should consider how that role has instantiated itself over many generations, and even over nearly one millennium. The extent to which the modern university is medieval offers, the author suggests, both cause for hope and cause for concern.

Richard Utz’s manifesto calls on the academy to reconnect with the general public in order to build a sustainable future for medievalism.

This is a somewhat polemical, and very passionate, consideration of the house that scholasticism built, and those who were excluded from it.