Based on the material of the Old Norse Icelandic sources written down in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, this book demonstrates how medieval Scandinavians imagined Eastern Europe. It reconstructs the system of medieval Scandinavian perception of space in general, and the eastern part of the <i>oecumene</i> in particular. It also examines the unique information of these sources, of which the Russian chronicles were unaware.

This book studies how the Jewish community of Mantua established, normalized, and maintained interrelations with the Christian community for over 130 years, from 1520 to 1650, by means of theatre performance for the Gonzaga Dukes. Performance is shown to have been a mutually beneficial "currency" that both the Dukes and Jews could use to calibrate their relations with one another. Seen in this light, the author demonstrates that performance was not the consequence of cultural exchange between Jews and Christians, but was one of the means by which the complicated nature of cultural communication and exchange took place. Jewish Theatre Making in Mantua details the performances created by the Jewish community of Mantua and argues that these theatrical events were a crucial component in the ability of Jews to live peacefully within Mantua, which became one of the few refuges left to Jews in the Italian peninsula and Catholic Europe.

This book argues that the impressive range of belongings that can be connected to Duchess Matilda Plantagenet—textiles, illuminated manuscripts, coins, chronicles, charters, and literary texts—allows us to perceive elite women’s performance of power, even when they are largely absent from the official documentary record. It is especially through the visual record of material culture that we can hear female voices, allowing us to forge an alternative way toward rethinking assumptions about power for sparsely-documented elite women.

The shrine of St Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral was one of the most popular pilgrim destinations in medieval Europe, as well as the focal point for the liturgy of the cathedral’s monastic community. In 1428 the keepers of the shrine composed a customary detailing its day-to-day operation, including the opening hours, decoration, maintenance, and staffing. This unique survival offers a rare glimpse into the realities of organizing a pilgrimage site in a major medieval church, and the Latin text with facing English translation is provided for the first time. A comprehensive introduction and extensive notes set the Customary within the context of the cathedral, its liturgy, and pilgrim practice more widely.

In June 1219 Danish crusaders fought a vicious battle against local pagan warriors at the place in northern Estonia where Tallinn now lies. The battle—known then as the Battle of Lyndanise—was a narrow victory for the crusaders and eventually turned out to be a pivotal event in the national histories of both Denmark and Estonia as a milestone in the overall military conquest of the entire region by (mostly) western military powers. The main scope of this book is to present a study of this military conquest of Estonia around 1200 with a special focus on the Scandinavian involvement, enabling us to better understand the intense political, military, and religious changes that came to influence the region and its many people from the early high medieval period onwards.

Difficult as it is to imagine today, in 1937 America’s two leading media companies fought over the right to perform Shakespeare for an American radio audience in an attempt to bring prestige to their networks. The resulting fourteen broadcasts are among the more remarkable recreations of Shakespeare of their time. This lively and engaging book shows the cultural dominance of radio in the 1930s, and tells the story of why the networks each wanted to lord Shakespeare’s prestige over the other, how they put their series together, the critical reception, and the cultural impact and legacies of the broadcasts.