Why does medieval Rome look so, for lack of a better word, Byzantine? Why do its monuments speak an aesthetic of the medieval East? And just how do we quantify that Byzantine aesthetic or even the word “Byzantine”? This book seeks to consider the ways in which the artistic styles and iconographies generally associated with the eastern medieval tradition had a life in the West and, in many cases, were just as western as they were eastern. Rome’s medieval monuments are a fundamental part of the history of the East, a history that says more about a cross- cultural exchange and interconnected “Romes” than difference and separation. Each chapter follows the political and theological relationships between the East and the West chronologically, exploring the socio-political exchanges as they manifest in the visual language of the monuments that defined the medieval landscape of Rome.

The lack of source material makes it challenging, but this short book uses the available evidence to present facts and debates around Jews in late antiquity and to provide a first step towards the understanding of this little-known period in Jewish history. It focuses on seven different regions: Italy, North Africa (except Egypt), Gaul, Spain, Egypt, the Land of Israel, and Babylonia.

The Hussite movement was a historical watershed – popular and scholastic theology combined with a nascent Czech nationalism to produce a full-scale social revolution that presaged the Reformation and the birth of the modern nation state. The Hussites defeated the Empire and the Pope, and their king George Poděbrady advocated a trans-national European state. Hussite theology influenced Martin Luther and the birth of Protestantism. This survey introduces the reader to the events, people, and ideas that define this remarkable movement.

Law has been a primary locus and vehicle of contact across human history—as a system of ideas embodied in people and enacted on bodies; and also as a material, textual, and sensory "thing." This volume analyzes a variety of legal encounters ranging from South Asia to South and Central America, Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. The seven essays also explore various material expressions of law that reveal the complexity and intensity of cross-cultural contact in this pivotal era.

Through a focused and systematic examination of medieval theologians, philosophers, and jurists, Andrew Latham explores how ideas about supreme political authority—sovereignty—first emerged during the high medieval period. The author provides a new model for understanding the concept of sovereignty, and traces its roots, not to the early modern or late medieval eras as do all other accounts, but to the High Middle Ages. This book aims first to provide an account of a pivotal episode in the historical evolution of the idea of sovereignty—the supreme authority to command, legislate, and judge—in the thirteenth century. It also aims to reconnect early modern theorists of sovereignty to the medieval intellectual tradition out of which they emerged. Latham traces the rise of a “dualist–regnalist” model whereby supreme authority was vested neither in the pope nor the emperor; nor was it divided between coordinate temporal and spiritual powers (kings and popes). Instead, it was vested exclusively in the king, who held it directly from God or (in the case of John of Paris, for example) “the people,” without any papal or imperial mediation.

This historical anthology of Korean poetry, Ancient, Medieval, and Premodern Korean Songs and Poems highlights the evolution of poetic composition in the vernacular. The book is a manifesto of the uniquely Korean poetic tradition, which flourished quite separately along with the literary tradition retained by the men of letters devoted to the scholarship in classical Chinese. The beauty of the Korean language and the tradition of verse-making in it are sumptuously demonstrated by this book, which contains both the original texts in the unique Korean orthography of phonograms and the translator’s English version that runs in parallel with the original poems.

By the end of the twelfth century, the Byzantine <i>genos </I> was a politically effective social group based upon ties of consanguineous kinship, but, importantly, it was also a cultural construct, an idea that held very real power, yet defies easy categorization. This study explores the role and function of the Byzantine aristocratic family group, or <i>genos</i>, as a distinct social entity, particularly its political and cultural role, as it appears in a variety of sources in the tenth through twelfth centuries.

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.

Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, historia septentrional (1617) is Miguel de Cervantes’s last major work. Virtually ignored for the past four hundred years and overshadowed by the acclaim accorded Don Quixote, it is due a revival. As indicated by this new English title, The Perils of Persiles and Sigismunda, a Northern Saga, this challenging saga-like fiction follows an attractive young prince and princess who undertake a perilous pilgrimage by sea and on land from their North Atlantic islands to Rome. This new translation by William Thomas Little takes full account of recent scholars’ ground-breaking research and their new readings. It also includes a selected bibliography, a contextualizing introduction, and footnotes on the text that clarify for contemporary readers cultural issues that were readily known to seventeenth-century readers in Spain, France, Italy, Portugal, and England.

This book combines the history of charitable institutions with the study of power in urban and rural spaces from the late medieval to the early modern era. Focusing on the Ospedale di Santa Maria della Scala in Siena, the book goes beyond examining hospitals in an urban context to also consider the significant impact of charitable institutions in rural spaces. Case studies of Santa Maria della Scala's farms allow an investigation of the relationship between urban institutions and their rural properties, while looking at subject hospitals outside the Sienese state offers a glimpse into the competition for power with non-Sienese entities. As Siena's politics shifted in the sixteenth century, Santa Maria della Scala and its rural spaces became sites where power was negotiated. The book thus demonstrates how geographies of power affected the practice of charity for both urban hospitals and the rural communities they influenced.