As Cardinal Hugo and as pope, Gregory was one of the dominant figures in the history of the papacy of the High Middle Ages. Coming to prominence under Pope Innocent III, Hugo played an important political role, particularly as legate on various occasions, as well as being a major promoter of the new religious orders. As pope, his battle with Emperor Frederick II is one of medieval history's most absorbing conflicts. But he also acted as peacemaker, promoter of the Crusades, instigator of mission for the sake of conversion, refomer of the Curia, patron of arts and liturgy, and as a passionate advocate of Church reform. His decretal collection, the Liber Extra, was the most influential of the Middle Ages. A full examination of Gregory's pontificate is very long overdue. The current volume brings together a team of international scholars, each of them expert in dealing with a particular aspect of the pontificate, and provides what will be a collection of studies of lasting scholarly value on a central figure of the medieval papacy.

European and Arab versions of the Crusades have little in common. For Arabs, the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were years of strenuous efforts to repel a brutal and destructive invasion by barbarian hordes. In "The Crusades Through Arab Eyes", Amin Maalouf has sifted through the works of a score of contemporary Arab chroniclers of the Crusades, eyewitnesses and often participants in the events. He retells their stories in their own vivacious style, giving us a vivid portrait of a society rent by internal conflicts, and shaken by a traumatic encounter with an alien culture. He retraces two critical centuries of Middle Eastern history, and offers fascinating insights into some of the forces that shape Arab and Islamic consciousness today.

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.

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 study contributes to the history of social changes in Iran during the Abbasid Caliphate (AH 132-656, AD 750-1258) by foregrounding the perspective of Persian language historians - from Abu Ali Bal'ami (AH 363, AD 974), the first known Persian historian, to Atamelak Joveyni (AH 623-681, AD 1226-1283), the great historian of the Mongol Era. By applying the insights of Anthony Giddens and the theory of structuration to address the interactions of social agents and structures, this book provides a coherent narrative of social transformation in medieval Iran.

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.

This volume showcases a range of different approaches to strangers and strangeness across medieval western Europe. It focuses on how communities responded to the arrival of strangers and to different ways in which individuals and groups were constructed as estranged. Further, it reflects on different forms of border-crossing, from lived experience to literary imagination and from specific journeys in precise contexts to the conceptualisation of the shift from life to death. In the range of its contributions - applying linguistic, historical, archaeological, architectural, archival, literary, and theological analyses - it seeks to bring together disciplines and geographical areas of study that are too often strangers to one another in medieval studies. Contributors are Sherif Abdelkarim, Anna Adamska, Adrien Carbonnet, Wim De Clercq, Florian Dolberg, Joshua S. Easterling, Susan Irvine, Marco Mostert, Richard North, James Plumtree, Euan McCartney Robson, Beatrice Saletti, Simon C. Thomson and Gerben Verbrugghe.

The replacement of the Roman Empire in the West with emerging kingdoms like Visigothic Spain and Merovingian Gaul resulted in new societies, but without major population displacement. Societies changed because identities shifted and new points of cohesion formed under different leaders and leadership structures. This volume examines two kingdoms in the post-Roman west to understand how this process took shape. Though exhibiting striking continuities with the Roman past, Gaul and Spain emerged as distinctive, but not isolated, political entities that forged different strategies and drew upon different resources to strengthen their unity, shape social ties, and consolidate their political status.

An examination of French to English translation in medieval England, through the genre of the prologue. The prologue to Layamon's Brut recounts its author's extensive travels "wide yond thas leode" (far and wide across the land) to gather the French, Latin and English books he used as source material. The first Middle English writer to discuss his methods of translating French into English, Layamon voices ideas about the creation of a new English tradition by translation that proved very durable. This book considers the practice of translation from French into English in medieval England, and how the translators themselves viewed their task. At its core is a corpus of French to English translations containing translator's prologues written between c.1189 and c.1450; this remarkable body of Middle English literary theory provides a useful map by which to chart the movement from a literary culture rooted in Anglo-Norman at the end of the thirteenth century to what, in the fifteenth, is regarded as an established "English" tradition. Considering earlier Romance and Germanic models of translation, wider historical evidence about translation practice, the acquisition of French, the possible role of women translators, and the manuscript tradition of prologues, in addition to offering a broader, pan-European perspective through an examination of Middle Dutch prologues, the book uses translators' prologues as a lens through which to view a period of critical growth and development for English as a literary language. Elizabeth Dearnley gained her PhD from the University of Cambridge.

The World of St. Francis of Assisi: Essays in Honor of William R. Cook seeks to enrich our collective understanding of the world in which Francis lived and the ways in which Francis, together with his followers, has shaped the world ever since. Composed of thirteen essays by scholars from diverse academic disciplines, The World of St. Francis of Assisi considers Francis's legacy in art, literature, and spirituality, and many of the contributions to the volume focus on the perennial application of Francis's insights to the ills of contemporary society. Contributors are Greg Ahlquist, William R. Cook, Alexandra Dodson, John K. Downey, Bradley R. Franco, John Hart, Ronald Herzman, Weston L. Kennison, Mary R. McHugh, Beth A. Mulvaney, Sara Ritchey and Daniel J. Schultz.