Jewish presence in Malabar (also known as Kerala) is attested since the ninth century in various sources and diverse languages. Malabar Jewry emerged out of the medieval Indian Ocean maritime trade networks and in the context of intense inter-cultural contacts between West and South Asia. This book ventures to contextualize Malabar Jewish history in long-distance trade networks and their transition from the medieval Arab maritime trade (900s-1500s).

The comparative or connected study of localized intellectual traditions poses special challenges to the global turn in medieval studies. How can we enable conversations across language groups and intricate cultural formations, as well as disciplines? Practices of commentary offer a compelling opportunity: their visual layouts reveal assumptions about the relative status of text and gloss, while interpretive interlinear or marginal prompts capture the dynamic relationships among generations of teachers, students, and readers. The material traces of manuscript usage—from hastily scrawled marginal notes to vivid rubrication—illuminate the shared didactic and communicative practices developed within scholarly communities. By bringing together researchers working on specific cultures and discourses across Eurasia, this volume moves toward a global account of premodern commentary traditions.

Using the ecosystem concept as his starting point, the author examines the complex relationship between premodern armed forces and their environment at three levels: landscapes, living beings, and diseases. The study focuses on Europe’s Meuse Region, well-known among historians of war as a battleground between France and Germany. By analyzing soldiers’ long-term interactions with nature, this book engages with current debates about the ecological impact of the military, and provides new impetus for contemporary armed forces to make greater effort to reduce their environmental footprint.

The book presents the panorama of social, cultural, and religious changes in the states of the Piast, Přemyslid, and Arpad dynasties. Major change occurred in the tenth century and again at the turn of the eleventh century. Given the scarcity of written sources, the author employs an analysis of architectural forms which she applies to buildings founded by dukes, kings, and nobles at this period. Architecture serves as a reliable source of knowledge and can be successfully read as a text using comparative analysis, iconology, and semiotics. No piece of art appeared without an historical context: forms, functions, and styles are all documents created by its founders and creators. The conclusions of this research help us to understand the era that shaped the foundations of the Polish, Czech, and the Hungarian states.

Edited and with commentary by Joan Greatrex, this book makes available for the first time in printed form the sermon manuscript, MS Q. 18, which survives in its original home in the medieval cathedral library at Worcester. At first glance this small, untidy quarto-size manuscript appears to be merely an unremarkable collection of early fourteenth-century Latin sermons. However, their importance lies in the fact that they appear to be a rare, if not unique, example of working copies of sermons, providing us with a glimpse into daily life in a medieval monastic community.

This ground-breaking book brings together scholars from the humanities and social and physical sciences to address the question of how recent work in the genetics, zoology, and epidemiology of plague's causative organism (Yersinia pestis) can allow a rethinking of the Black Death pandemic and its larger historical significance.

Pictish studies is undergoing significant revision and invigoration, with recent archaeological discoveries and new methodologies in archaeology, cultural geography and art history prompting a re-assessment of Pictish cultural and social development. We can now say more about the cultural and political lives of the Picts than ever before, and these new findings are enabling a fresh perspective on the wider development of Early Medieval polities across the Latin west. This short book provides an exciting and informed synthesis of our current understanding of Pictish history and material remains.

This study features essays from leading scholars highlighting the important Jewish contributions to the popular medieval genre of romance. Writing against strict notions of genre boundaries and canonization, this volume provides a new understanding of medieval and early modern romance through a working definition consisting of variable elements, including language, literary devices, plot, and characters. The contributions in this volume establish that many texts written in the medieval and early modern Jewish communities across Europe and beyond can be classified as "romance.” Each of the nine chapters as well as the afterword by Eli Yassif discusses romance as it relates to the medieval and early modern Jewish world, as well as the greater non-Jewish context. This volume places Jewish texts into the scholarly conversation as sources for forming a new understanding of the genre of romance across religious and cultural boundaries.

This book discusses Adam of Bremen's perceptions and interpretation of the Christianization of Scandinavia in the Early Middle Ages. The views the chronicler presents in the Gesta Hammaburgensis constitute the central element of this analysis. By departing from the historiography—both the older view of the Gesta as trustworthy, and the recent view of the work as unreliable and biased—this book focuses instead on the Christianization of Scandinavia as an authorial concept. What follows is a reevaluation of the Gesta’s significance both to its medieval audience and the modern historian.

In such a wide-ranging, long-standing, and international field of scholarship as Beowulf, one might imagine that everything would long since have been thoroughly investigated. And yet as far as the absolutely crucial question of the poem’s origins is concerned, that is not the case. This cross-disciplinary study by Bo Gräslund argues that the material, geographical, historical, social, and ideological framework of Beowulf cannot be the independent literary product of an Old English Christian poet, but was in all essentials created orally in Scandinavia, which was a fertile seedbed for epic poetry. Through meticulous argument interwoven with an impressive assemblage of data, archaeological and otherwise, Gräslund offers possible answers to the questions of the provenance of the Geats, the location of Heorot, and many more, such as the significance of Sutton Hoo and the signification of the Grendel kin and dragon in the sixth century when the events of the poem, coinciding with cataclysmic events in northern Europe, took place.

<p >Teachers of medieval literature help students bridge thetemporal, contextual, and linguistic gulfs between the Middle Ages and thetwenty-first century. When episodes involving rape are thrown into the mix,that task becomes even more difficult. Students and teachers bring a variety ofexperiences to the classroom. This volume proposes ways educators can helpstudents navigate the divide between in- and out-of-class experiences and offerssuggestions for classroom activities and assignments for a range of medievaltexts, as well as insight into the concerns of students in various settings.</p>

The Almoravid Maghrib uncovers the richness and complexity of a neglected past. A pivotal moment in the history of North Africa, the rise of the Almoravids brought a corner of the Maghrib into closer contact with the world around. From the Cid to the Seljuqs, the Almoravids impressed contemporaries in ways no Maghribi regime had, signalling a transformation of western North Africa through burgeoning trans-Saharan and trans-Mediterranean commerce, urbanization (two of Morocco's four imperial cities were founded), and the epic encounter with the Christian, Muslim, and Jewish cultures of Iberia. The Almoravids witnessed a series of key transformations and beginnings, including the introduction of one of the area's most successful gold currencies, the formulation of a new religious orthodoxy, the parallel rise of counter-movements (popular, messianic, and spiritual), and the inception of pan-Maghribi-Andalusi artistic, literary, and architectural styles.