Medieval history

People, Texts and Artefacts
Edited by David Bates, Edoardo D'Angelo, and Elisabeth Houts
January 31, 2018

This volume is based on two international conferences held in 2013 and 2014 at Ariano Irpino, and at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. It contains essays by leading scholars in the field. Like the conferences, the volume seeks to enhance interdisciplinary and international dialogue between those who work on the Normans and their conquests in northern and southern Europe in an original way. It has as its central theme issues related to cultural transfer, treated as being of a pan-European kind across the societies that the Normans conquered and as occurring within the distinct societies of the northern and southern conquests. These issues are also shown to be an aspect of the interaction between the Normans and the peoples they...

Ravenna
Volume editor Judith Herrin and Jinty Nelson
June 24, 2016
In the long-debated transition from late antiquity to the early middle ages, the city of Ravenna presents a story rich and strange. From the fourth century onwards it suffered decline in economic terms. Yet its geographical position, its status as an imperial capital, and above all its role as a connecting point between East and West, ensured that it remained an intermittent attraction for early medieval kings and emperors throughout the period from the late fifth to the eleventh century. Ravenna’s story is all the more interesting because it was complicated and unpredictable: discontinuous and continuous, sometimes obscure, sometimes including bursts of energetic activity. Throughout the early medieval centuries its flame sometimes flared...
Medieval Merchants and Money
Edited by Matthew Davies
June 10, 2016
This volume contains selected essays in celebration of the scholarship of the medieval historian Professor James L. Bolton. The essays address a number of different questions in medieval economic and social history, as the volume looks at the activities of merchants, their trade, legal interactions and identities, and on the importance of money and credit in the rural and urban economies. Other essays look more widely at patterns of immigration to London, trade and royal policy, and the role that merchants played in the Hundred Years War.
Rashid Al-Din: Agent and Mediator of Cultural Exchanges in Ilkhanid Iran
Anna Ayse Akasoy and edited by Charles Burnett and Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim
November 1, 2013

Rashid al-Din (1274-1318), physician and powerful minister at the court of the Ilkhans, was a key figure in the cosmopolitan milieu in Iran under Mongol rule. He set up an area in the vicinity of the court where philosophers, doctors, astronomers, and historians from different parts of Eurasia lived together, exchanged ideas and produced books. He was himself involved in collecting, collating and editing these materials, and the substantial oeuvre that resulted is a gold-mine for anyone studying the transmission of knowledge across cultures. By bringing together contributions from the fields of the history of religion, medicine, science and art, this book examines the cultural dynamics of Rashid al-Din’s circle. It addresses questions...

Gender and Historiography: Studies in the earlier middle ages in honour of Pauline Stafford
Janet L. Nelson, Susan Reynolds, and Susan M. Johns
September 2, 2012
The chapters in this volume celebrate the work of Pauline Stafford, highlighting the ways in which it has advanced research in the fields of both Anglo-Saxon history and the history of medieval women and gender. Ranging across the period, and over much of the old Carolingian world as well as Anglo-Saxon England, they deal with such questions as the nature of kingship and queenship, fatherhood, elite gender relations, the transmission of property, the participation of women in lordship, slavery and warfare, and the nature of assemblies. Gender and historiography presents the fruits of groundbreaking research, inspired by Pauline Stafford’s own interests over a long and influential career.