This is the first volume fully dedicated to Iberoamerican neomedievalisms. It examines “the Middle Ages” and its uses in Iberoamerica: the Spanish and Portuguese American postcolonies. It is an especially timely topic as scholars in neomedievalism studies become increasingly conscious that the field has different trajectories outside Europe and beyond the English-speaking world. The collection provides needed alternatives to the by-now standardized understanding of neomedievalism as allied to nationalism, nostalgia, xenophobia, origin stories, elitism, and white Christian identity. It dislocates the field from its established trends and finds generative, yet unexplored examples of neomedievalism: political, religious, literary, and gendered. The volume will be of interest to established scholars of neomedievalism studies, to scholars of Latin America, and to the new and growing generation of students and colleagues interested in truly global neomedievalist studies.

Iceland’s uncommon proclivity towards storytelling, its robust tradition of medieval manuscripts, and the “re-oralization” of those narratives after the medieval period, create a body of folktales and legends that have encoded a hidden account of how orthodox and heterodox beliefs (sometimes pagan in origin) intermingled as Christianity, and later Reformation, spread through the North. This volume unlocks that secret story by placing Icelandic folktales in a context of religious doctrine, social history, and Old Norse sagas and poetry. The analysis herein reveals a cultural memory of belief.

This book places identity at the centre of a project to better understand medieval society. By exploring the multiplicity of personal identities, the ways in which these were expressed within particular social structures (such as feudalism), and their evolution into formal expressions of collective identity (municipalities, guilds, nations, and so on) we can shed new light on the Middle Ages. A specific legacy of such developments was that by the end of the Middle Ages, a sense of national identity, supported by the late medieval socio-economic structure, backed in law and by theological, philosophical, and political thought, defined society. What is more, social structures coalesced across diverse elements, including language, group solidarities, and a set of assumed values.

This book examines how the military orders and the ideology of crusading gave rise to a new sacred landscape in the medieval Baltic region, an outpost of Latin Christianity. Drawing on a wide variety of sources and international scholarship, the book discusses the paganism of the landscape in written sources pre-dating the crusades, in addition to the narrative, legal, and visual evidence of the crusade period. It draws out the key sacralizing elements as expressed in those sources, which structure the definition of sacred landscape, particularly martyrdom, the manifestation of the sacred, and use of relics in battle. By analyzing these aspects with Geographical Information Systems (GIS), a map of the Baltic campaigns emerges that provides a fresh approach to studying contemporary views of holy war in a region with no initial links to the loca sancta of Jerusalem or Europe.

<div>This interdisciplinary volume sets out to illuminate medieval thought, and to consider how the underlying values of the Middle Ages exerted significant influence in medieval society in the West.</div><div>The book situates the Christian Church in the West as a framing ideology of the Middle Ages, and considers ideology from four angles: as a means of defining power; as a way of managing power; ideology as an influence on daily living and societies; and the ways in which ideology associated with the Middle Ages continues to influence understandings of past and present. A focus on southern European case studies has been chosen as a means of enriching and complicating study of the Middle Ages.</div>

Recent decades have witnessed concerns over representation, inclusion, and social justice move from the margins to the centre of museum practice. While a growing number of institutions seek to reflect the diversity of their communities in exhibition-making, gaps remain in understanding applied approaches and practices. This book presents the inclusion of new voices and perspectives into the museum via "inclusive curating," a facilitated process empowering a wide demographic of people to become curators. Grounded in a case study, this book offers guidance in putting inclusive curating into action alongside a range of practical resources and key debates. Curating is often considered an exclusive job for a privileged few. But, by breaking it down using methods demonstrated throughout this book, not only does curating become more usable for more people, it also contributes to understanding the process and practices by which our cultural spaces can become democratized.

As digital humanities has expanded in scopeand content, questions of how to negotiatethe overlapping influences of race, class,gender, sexuality, nation, and otherdimensions that shape data, archives, andmethodologies have come to the fore. Takingup these concerns, the authors in this volumeexplore their effects on the methodological,political, and ethical practices of digitalhumanities.

From the seventh century onwards the population of the Near East gradually became Muslim. Nevertheless, other religious communities continued to exist, maintaining an enduring presence in the region, despite being surrounded by Muslims and by people becoming Muslims. This book argues that the causes that led to the conversion of most of the Holy Land's population, as well as the survival of some religious communities, are essentially social and geographic in nature, rather than theological, and that two parallel processes were the main catalysts of Islamization: de-urbanization and urbanization.