The medieval world was full of malicious demons: fallen angels commissioned to tempt humans away from God. From demons disguised as beautiful women to demons that took frightening animal-like forms, this book explores the history of thought about demons: what they were, what they could and could not do, and how they affected human lives. It considers the debates, stories, and writing that eventually gave shape to the witchcraze of the early modern period.

Egypt is revered as the home of the famous Desert Ascetics, who first embraced a monastic life and established homosocial communities on the borders of their urban centres in the Nile Valley. Regarded as angels and warriors, the wisdom of the Desert Ascetics formed part of the oral and literary tradition of wonder-working saints whose commitment to asceticism was legendary and inspirational. This book grounds the mythologized stories of Desert Ascetics in the materiality of the desert, demonstrating the closeness of the desert, the connections between non-monastic and monastic communities, and the exciting insights into lived monasticism through the archaeology of monasticism in Egypt.

In the last decade, the terms “digital scholarship” and “digital humanities” have become commonplace in academia, spurring the creation of fellowships, research centres, and scholarly journals. What, however, does this “digital turn” mean for how you do scholarship as a medievalist? While many of us would never describe ourselves as “DH people,” computer-based tools and resources are central to the work we do every day in offices, libraries, and classrooms. This volume highlights the exciting ways digital methods are expanding and re-defining how we understand, represent, and teach the Middle Ages, and provides a new model for how this work is catalogued and reused within the scholarly community. The work of its contributors offers valuable insights into how “the digital” continues to shape the questions medievalists ask and the ways they answer them, but also into how those questions and answers can lead to new tools, approaches, and points of reference within the field of digital humanities itself.

The study of medieval and early modern geographic space, literary cartography, and spatial thinking at a time of rapid digitization in the Humanities offers new ways to investigate spatial knowledge and world perceptions in pre-modern societies. Digitization of cultural heritage collections, open source databases, and interactive resources utilizing a rich variety of source materials—place names, early modern cadastral maps, medieval literature and art, Viking Age and medieval runic inscriptions—provides opportunities to re-think traditional lines of research on spatiality and worldviews, encourage innovation in methodology, and engage critically with digital outcomes. In this book, Nordic scholars of philology, onomastics, history, geography, literary studies, and digital humanities examine multiple aspects of ten large- and small-scale digital spatial infrastructures from the early stages of development to the practical applications of digital tools for studying spatial thinking and knowledge in pre-modern sources and societies.

In this unique collection the authors present a wide range of interdisciplinary methods to study, document, and conserve material cultural heritage. The methods used serve as exemplars of best practice with a wide variety of cultural heritage objectshaving been recorded, examined, and visualised. The objects range in date, scale, materials, and state of preservation and sopose different research questions and challenges for digitization, conservation, and ontological representation of knowledge. Heritage science and specialist digital technologies are presented in a way approachable to non-scientists, while a separate technical section provides details of methods and techniques, alongside examples of notable applications of spatial and spectral documentation of material cultural heritage, with selected literature and identification of future research. This book is an outcome of interdisciplinary research and debates conducted by the participants of the COST Action TD1201, Colour and Space in Cultural Heritage, 2012–16 and is an Open Access publication available under a CC BY-NC-ND licence.

What does it mean to digitize a medieval manuscript? This book examines this question by exploring a range of advanced imaging technologies. The author focuses on the relationship between digital technologies and the complex materiality of manuscripts and the human bodies that engage them.The chapters explore imaging technologies, interfaces to present digital surrogates, and limitations to and enhancements through the digital, plus historical photographs. Essential reading for all those involved in manuscript digitization projects in both scholarly and cultural heritage contexts.