This volume brings together scholarship from many disciplines, including history, heritage studies, archaeology, geography, and political science to provide a nuanced view of life in medieval Ireland and after. Primarily contributing to the fields of settlement and landscape studies, each essay considers the influence of Terence B. Barry of Trinity College Dublin within Ireland and internationally. Barry's long career changed the direction of castle studies and brought the archaeology of medieval Ireland to wider knowledge. These essays, authored by an international team of fifteen scholars, develop many of his original research questions to provide timely and insightful reappraisals of material culture and the built and natural environments. Contributors (in order of appearance) are Robin Glasscock, Kieran O'Conor, Thomas Finan, James G. Schryver, Oliver Creighton, Robert Higham, Mary A. Valante, Margaret Murphy, John Soderberg, Conleth Manning, Victoria McAlister, Jennifer L. Immich, Calder Walton, Christiaan Corlett, Stephen H. Harrison, and Raghnall O Floinn.

In Salvation and Sin, David Aers continues his study of Christian theology in the later Middle Ages. Working at the nexus of theology and literature, he combines formidable theological learning with finely detailed and insightful close readings to explore a cluster of central issues in Christianity as addressed by Saint Augustine and by four fourteenth-century writers of exceptional power. Salvation and Sin explores various modes of displaying the mysterious relations between divine and human agency, together with different accounts of sin and its consequences. Theologies of grace and versions of Christian identity and community are its pervasive concerns. Augustine becomes a major interlocutor in this book: his vocabulary and grammar of divine and human agency are central to Aers' exploration of later writers and their works. After the opening chapter on Augustine, Aers turns to the exploration of these concerns in the work of two major theologians of fourteenth-century England, William of Ockham and Thomas Bradwardine. From their work, Aers moves to his central text, William Langland's Piers Plowman, a long multigeneric poem contributing profoundly to late medieval conversations concerning theology and ecclesiology. In Langland's poem, Aers finds a theology and ethics shaped by Christology where the poem's modes of writing are intrinsic to its doctrine. His thesis will revise the way in which this canonical text is read. Salvation and Sin concludes with a reading of Julian of Norwich's profound, compassionate, and widely admired theology, a reading which brings her Showings into conversation both with Langland and Augustine.

This collection on Byzantine culture in translation, edited by Amelia Brown and Bronwen Neil, examines the practices and theories of translation inside the Byzantine empire and beyond its horizons to the east, north and west. The time span is from Late Antiquity to the present day. Translations studied include hagiography, history, philosophy, poetry, architecture and science, between Greek, Latin, Arabic and other languages. These chapters build upon presentations given at the 18th Biennial Conference of the Australian Association for Byzantine Studies, convened by the editors at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia on 28-30 November 2014. Contributors include: Eva Anagnostou-Laoutides, Amelia Brown, Penelope Buckley, John Burke, Michael Champion, John Duffy, Yvette Hunt, Maria Mavroudi, Ann Moffatt, Bronwen Neil, Roger Scott, Michael Edward Stewart, Rene Van Meeuwen, Alfred Vincent, and Nigel Westbrook.

In The Ottoman Threat and Crusading on the Eastern Border of Christendom during the Fifteenth Century Liviu Pilat and Ovidiu Cristea focus on less-known aspects of the later crusades in Eastern Europe, examining the ideals of holy war and political pragmatism. They analyze the Ottoman threat and crusading as political themes through a unifying vision based in the political realities of the fifteenth century and the complex relationship between crusading, Ottoman expansion, and the political interests of the Christian states in the region. Approaching the relationship between the borders of Christendom and crusading as a highly complex phenomenon, Pilat and Cristea introduce new elements to the image of Latin Christendom's frontier from the perspective of Catholic-Orthodox relations, frontier ideology, and crusading rhetoric in political propaganda.

What does 'performance' mean in Christian culture? How is it connected to rituals, dramatic and visual arts, and the written word? Performing the Sacred: Christian Representation and the Arts explores both the meaning of re-presentation and the role of performance within the Christian tradition between arts and drama. The essays in this book demonstrate that the idea of performance was central to Christian theology and that-from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern era-it became a device through which people saw, prayed, preached, wrote, imagined, officiated rites, celebrated cults, and practiced devotions. Seen that performance is a habitus within Christianity, performing the sacred does not just mean representing it, but rather enacting it in a tangible, visible and involved way.

Saying that horses shaped the medieval world - and the way we see it today - is hardly an exaggeration. Why else do we imagine a medieval knight - or a nomadic warrior - on horseback? Why do we use such metaphors as "unbridled" or "bearing a yoke" in our daily language? Studies of medieval horses and horsemanship are increasingly popular, but they often focus on a single aspect of equestrianism or a single culture. In this book, you will find information about both elite and humble working equines, about the ideology and practicalities of medieval horsemanship across different countries, from Iceland to China. Contributors are Gloria Allaire, Luise Borek, Gail Brownrigg, Agnes Carayon, Gavina Cherchi, John C. Ford, Lois Forster, Jurg Gassmann, Rebecca Henderson, Anna-Lena Lange, Romain Lefebvre, Rena Maguire, Ana Maria S. A. Rodrigues, and Alexia-Foteini Stamouli.

The Greek commentary tradition devoted to explicating Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics (NE) was extensive. It began in antiquity with Aspasius and reached a point of immense sophistication in the twelfth century with the commentaries of Eustratius of Nicaea and Michael of Ephesus, which primarily served educational purposes. The use of Aristotle's ethics in the classroom continued into the late Byzantine period, but until recently scholastic use of the NE was known mostly through George Pachymeres' epitome of the NE (Book 11 of his Philosophia). This volume radically changes the landscape by providing the editio princeps of the last surviving exegetical commentary on the NE stricto sensu, also penned by Pachymeres. This represents a new witness to the importance of Aristotelian studies in the cultural revival of late Byzantium. The editio princeps is accompanied by an English translation and a thorough introduction, which offers an informed reading of the commentary's genre and layout, relationship to its sources, exegetical strategies, and philosophical originality. This book also includes the edition of diagrams and scholia accompanying Pachymeres' exegesis, whose paratextual function is key to a full understanding of the work.

Games can act as invaluable tools for the teaching of the Middle Ages. The learning potential of physical and digital games is increasingly undeniable at every level of historical study. These games can provide a foundation of information through their stories and worlds. They can foster understanding of complex systems through their mechanics and rules. Their very nature requires the player to learn to progress. The educational power of games is particularly potent within the study of the Middle Ages. These games act as the first or most substantial introduction to the period for many students and can strongly influence their understanding of the era. Within the classroom, they can be deployed to introduce new and alien themes to students typically unfamiliar with the subject matter swiftly and effectively. They can foster an interest in and understanding of the medieval world through various innovative means and hence act as a key educational tool. This volume presents a series of essays addressing the practical use of games of all varieties as teaching tools within Medieval Studies and related fields. In doing so it provides examples of the use of games at pre-university, undergraduate, and postgraduate levels of study, and considers the application of commercial games, development of bespoke historical games, use of game design as a learning process, and use of games outside the classroom. As such, the book is a flexible and diverse pedagogical resource and its methods may be readily adapted to the teaching of different medieval themes or other periods of history.

Trends and Turning Points presents sixteen articles, examining the discursive construction of the late antique and Byzantine world, focusing specifically on the utilisation of trends and turning points to make stuff from the past, whether texts, matter, or action, meaningful. Contributions are divided into four complementary strands, Scholarly Constructions, Literary Trends, Constructing Politics, and Turning Points in Religious Landscapes. Each strand cuts across traditional disciplinary boundaries and periodisation, placing historical, archaeological, literary, and architectural concerns in discourse, whilst drawing on examples from the full range of the medieval Roman past. While its individual articles offer numerous important insights, together the volume collectively rethinks fundamental assumptions about how late antique and Byzantine studies has and continues to be discursively constructed. Contributors are: David Barritt, Laura Borghetti, Nikolas Churik, Elif Demirtiken, Alasdair C. Grant, Stephen Humphreys, Mirela Ivanova, Hugh Jeffery, Valeria Flavia Lovato, Francesco Lovino, Kosuke Nakada, Jonas Nilsson, Theresia Raum, Maria Rukavichnikova, and Milan Vukasinovic.

This volume deals with the transformative force of Observant reforms during the long fifteenth century, and with the massive literary output by Observant religious, a token of a profound pastoral professionalization that provided religious and lay people alike with encompassing models of religious perfection, as well as with new tools to shape their religious identity. The essays in this work contend that these models and tools had an ongoing effect far into the sixteenth century (on all sides of the emerging confessional divide). At the same time, the controversies surrounding Observant reforms resulted in new sensibilities with regard to religious practices and religious nomenclature, which would fuel many of the early sixteenth-century controversies. Contributors are Michele Camaioni, Anna Campbell, Fabrizio Conti, Anna Dlabacova, Sylvie Duval, Koen Goudriaan, Emily Michelson, Alison More, Bert Roest, Anne Thayer, Johanneke Uphoff, Alessandro Vanoli, Ludovic Viallet, and Martina Wehrli-Johns.

Nasrin Askari explores the medieval reception of Firdausi's Shahnama, or Book of Kings (completed in 1010 CE) as a mirror for princes. Through her examination of a wide range of medieval sources, Askari demonstrates that Firdausi's oeuvre was primarily understood as a book of wisdom and advice for kings and courtly elites. In order to illustrate the ways in which the Shahnama functions as a mirror for princes, Askari analyses the account about Ardashir, the founder of the Sasanian dynasty, as an ideal king in the Shahnama. Within this context, she explains why the idea of the union of kingship and religion, a major topic in almost all medieval Persian mirrors for princes, has often been attributed to Ardashir.

The first modern edition of a text which shows the suspicion with which Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain was received two decades after it first appeared. The history of the Yorkshire secular clerk, Alfred of Beverley (c.1148 x c.1151), an important primary source in Anglo-Norman historiography, supplies a history of Britain from its supposed foundation by Brutus down to the death of Henry I in 1135. Alfred's history is of particular interest in that it is the first Insular Latin chronicle to incorporate the legendary British history of Geoffrey of Monmouth (published c.mid 1130s) within a continuous account of the island's past. In attempting to fuse the radically new Galfridian account of the past with that of the conventional twelfth-century (Bedan) view, Alfred's use and manipulation of his sources is highly revealing and suggests a quite critical reception of Geoffrey's history, a mindset which by the end of the twelfth century appears almost entirely to have disappeared amongst chroniclers. Alfred's history is also an important, and presently undervalued, witness to the reception and dissemination of three of the most important Anglo-Norman histories: Symeon of Durham Historia Regum, The Chronicle of John of Worcester and Henry of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum, from which works it borrows extensively. In the manner of use of these sources, the author tells us much about the ecclesiastical and intellectual interests and outlook of the period.