Supernatural phenomena and causalities played an important role in medieval society. Religious practice was relying upon a set of cult images and the sacral status of these depictions of divine or supernatural persons became the object of heated debates and provoked iconoclastic reactions.The miraculous intervention of saints or other divine agents, the wondrous realities beyond understanding, or the manifestations of magic attributed to diabolic forces, were contained by a variety of discourses, described and discussed in religion, philosophy, chronicles, literature and fiction, and also in a large number of pictures and material objects. The nine essays in this collection discusses how supernatural phenomena – especially angels and devils – found visual manifestation in Latin and Eastern Christianity as well as Judaism in the late medieval, early renaissance period.

The volume investigates the registers of fifteenth-century supplications to the Apostolic Penitentiary of the Holy See and presents an analysis of a multiplicity of issues in which a context of the local needs of Western Christians and the central power of the Pope occurred. The contributions make it clear that local and individual factors and the Christian faith and religion in practice must not be seen as separate from the global power of the Roman curia. The latter's influence could become directly important for any individual in any local space, even ...et usque ad ultimum terrae (Acts 1:8), in the utmost peripheries of the Christian world. It is shown that the assistance of the Apostolic Penitentiary was indispensable in a large variety of cases. Such cases were dealt with both in the local, regional space and in the globalized centre of the Holy See.

In the Middles Ages, the edges of one's world could represent different meanings. On the one hand, they might have been situated in far-away regions, mainly in the east and north, that one most often only knew from hearsay and which were inhabited by strange beings: humans with their faces on their chest, without a mouth, or with dog heads. On the other hand, the edges of one's world could just mean the borders of the community where one lived and that one sometimes might not have had the possibility to cross during one's whole life.In this volume specialists from eight European countries offer their ideas about different edges of the medieval world and contribute to a discussion that has been increasing greatly in Medieval Studies in recent times.

The volume contains selected papers from an international workshop in 2005, at the Hungarian Academy in Rome. They aim at investigating the registers of fifteenth-century supplications to the Apostolic Penitentiary of the Holy See and to analyze the multiplicity of issues in which a context of the local needs of Western Christians and the central power of the Pope had been occurring.

The contributions make clear that local and individual factors and practice of Christian faith and religion must not be seen as separated from the global power of the Roman curia. The latter’s influence could become directly important for any individual in any local space, also … et usque ad ultimum terrae (Acts 1:8), in the utmost peripheries of the Christian world. The assistance by the Apostolic Penitentiary was indispensable in a large variety of cases. The occupation with such cases happened in the local and regional space as well as in the globalized centre of the Holy See.

The volume contains selected papers from two conferences in 2003, at the University of Bergen (Norway) and at Central European University in Budapest. They deal comparatively with the communication of the Holy See with Northern Europe and Eastern Central Europe in the Late Middle Ages, both areas at the margins of Western Christendom. Special emphasis is placed on analysis of registers in the Apostolic Penitentiary.

Violence was omnipresent in medieval society and affected all areas of life and the members of all social strata. Surviving sources deal regularly with any issues of violent actions, signs and results of violence, violent people and coping with violence. In such evidence, also the members of the clergy played an important role – as writers about violence and critics of it, but also as perpetrators, victims, and witnesses.