Saints were powerful role models in the early Middle Ages, capable of defining communities. But what roles did saintly biographies play in shaping the medieval West? Can we understand society and its many post-Roman transformations through them? This short book takes readers from the creation of medieval hagiography, through the ways in which it circulated, to a wide-ranging assessment of different modern methodologies used to interrogate hagiographies, from early twentieth-century source criticism, to the insights gained from gender studies, postmodernism and digital humanities.

This book explores the spatial organization and vernacular architecture of the Early Neolithic village of Beidha in southern Jordan. This is a case study rigorously investigating changes in community organization associated with early sedentism and food production in Southwest Asia. Diana Kirkbride-Helbæk's extensive fieldwork at Beidha yielded a considerable occupation span, extensive horizontal exposure, numerous excavated buildings with well preserved architecture and features, and a relative abundance of in situ artefacts. These broad horizontal excavations revealed a moderately sized early farming community dating to the middle of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B period, primarily after 7000 BC. The first three chapters of the book place the early village of Beidha within the context of the origins of sedentism and food production; provide an overview of the site and the excavations; and present the analytical approach and the methods used in this study, as well as the final phasing model for the history of the settlement. The subsequent two chapters detail the stratigraphy and chronology of the early Neolithic village, and examine the built environment and architecture, focusing on the construction, remodeling, and use life of individual buildings. The next two chapters explore, by phase, architectural patterning, continuity and change, and then community organization and the utilization of space. The book concludes with a broader consideration of emerging organizational trends expressed in the remarkable built environment of early Neolithic settlements in Southwest Asia. The results reveal that the successful establishment of sedentary food-producing villages was marked by novel social and economic developments, and the autonomization of households and formalization of corporate bodies represented important trends during this transition. These two organizational trends then formed the foundation upon which later, more complex social constructions were built.

Essays about ruination, resilience, reading, and religion generated by a reflection on a fourth-century hagiography.
 
In Jerome’s Life of Saint Hilarion, a fourth-century saint briefly encounters the ruins of an earthquake-toppled city and a haunted garden in Cyprus. From these two fragmentary passages, Virginia Burrus delivers a series of sweeping meditations on our experience of place and the more-than-human worlds—the earth and its gods—that surround us. Moving between the personal and geological, Earthquakes and Gardens ruminates on destruction and resilience, ruination and resurgence, grief and consolation in times of disaster and loss. Ultimately, Burrus’s close readings reimagine religion as a practice that unsettles certainty and develops mutual flourishing.

With spears and arrows, atl-atls and slings, the people of the New World fought to defend themselves against European invasion and conquest. Over a century of scholarship on warfare has substantially enhanced our understanding of the scope and scale of violent conflict in Pre-Columbian America. Yet we still struggle to understand the nuances of indigenous warfare and its importance for native politics and society. This volume sheds new light on the nature of war in Mesoamerica and the Andes. Relying on methodological and theoretical developments in anthropological archaeology, bioarchaeology, and ethnohistory, contributors highlight the particularities of warfare in indigenous societies and examine the commonalities of warfare in cross-cultural perspective. Their essays focus on place and the body, as they explore the importance of captive-taking, sacrifice, performance, and political history in the conduct of war. Observers have debated whether the indigenous peoples of the Americas were distinctly noble or frightfully savage in their way of war. This volume shows that such polarized positions are unfounded. By focusing on the nuances of indigenous violent conflict, the contributors demonstrate that war in the Americas was much like war elsewhere in the ancient and modern world: strategic, political, bloody, socially productive, yet terribly destructive.

Renaissance humanists believed that the origins of peoples could reveal crucial facts about their modern political character. Margaret Meserve explores what happened when European historians turned to study the political history of a faith other than their own.

Meserve investigates the methods and illuminates the motives of scholars negotiating shifting boundaries—between scholarly research and political propaganda, between a commitment to critical historical inquiry and the pressure of centuries of classical and Christian prejudice, between the academic ideals of humanism and the everyday demands of political patronage. Drawing on political oratory, diplomatic correspondence, crusade propaganda, and historical treatises, Meserve shows how research into the origins of Islamic empires sprang from—and contributed to—contemporary debates over the threat of Islamic expansion in the Mediterranean. Humanist histories of the Turks were sharply polemical, portraying the Ottomans as a rogue power. But writings on other Muslim polities include some of the first positive appraisals of Muslim statecraft in the European tradition.

This groundbreaking book offers new insights into Renaissance humanist scholarship and the longstanding European debates over the relationship between Christianity and Islam.

Peter Linehan (+2020) followed his survey of original papal letters in Portugal, Portugalia pontifica 1198-1417 (2013) with the present volume, España Pontifica, that covers papal letters to Spanish recipients from Pope Innocent II (1198-1216) to Pope Boniface VIII (+1303). This volume will provide students of the medieval papacy and the Spanish church with an invaluable research tool to explore the relationship between Rome and Spain during the crucial period of the Spanish Reconquistà after the battles of Navas de Tolosa (1212) to the capture of Seville (1248). Linehan spent his career cataloguing papal letters from more than sixty Spanish repositories. For the past sixty years the Vatican has also been engaged in publishing surveys of original papal letters preserved from various European archives. However, this volume includes material that has not been included in these surveys.

This book sets out to answer the question of why Eastern Church writers showed no interest in analytical reasoning - the so-called "intellectual silence" of Rus' culture - while Western Church writers, by the time of the Scholastics, routinely incorporated analytical reasoning into their defences of the faith.Donald Ostrowski suggests that Western, post-Enlightenment- trained, analytical scholars often miss the point, not because of an inability to comprehend cultural ideas which seem abstract and ineffable, but because the agenda is different.