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 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 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 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.

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.

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.

How and why does vernacular art become foreign? What does 'Greek manner' mean in regions far beyond the Mediterranean? What stories do images need? How do narratives shape pictures? The study addresses these questions in Byzantine paintings from the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania, contextualized with evidence from Poland, Serbia, Russia, and Italy. The research follows developments in artistic practices and the reception of these images, as well as distinguishing between the Greek manner - based on visual qualities - and the style favoured by the devout, sustained by cults and altered through stories. Following the reception of Byzantine and pseudo-Byzantine art in Lithuania and Poland from the late fourteenth through the early eighteenth centuries, Maniera Greca in Europe's Catholic East argues that tradition is repetitive order achieved through reduction and oblivion, and concludes that the sole persistent understanding of the Greek image has been stereotyped as the icon of the Mother of God.

Marc Bloch was one of the founders of social history, if by that is meant the history of social organization and relations to contrast to the more conventional histories of political elites and diplomatic relations. His great monographs in medieval history are well known, but his original articles have been difficult to obtain. The present collection of essays explores the dimensions of servitude in medieval Europe. The typical political relations of that era were those of feudalism--the hierarchical relations of juridically free men. The feudal superstructure was based on a foundation of unfree masses composed of people of differing degrees of servility. In these articles Marc Bloch focussed on the heterogeneous world of slaves and serfs, concertrating particularly on the causes for its growth in the Carolingian period and its decline in the thirteenth century. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1975.

The Power of Cities focuses on Iberian cities during the lengthy transition from the late Roman to the early modern period, with a particular interest in the change from early Christianity to the Islamic period, and on to the restoration of Christianity. Drawing on case studies from cities such as Toledo, Cordoba, and Seville, it collects for the first time recent research in urban studies using both archaeological and historical sources. Against the common portrayal of these cities characterized by discontinuities due to decadence, decline and invasions, it is instead continuity - that is, a gradual transformation - which emerges as the defining characteristic. The volume argues for a fresh interpretation of Iberian cities across this period, seen as a continuum of structural changes across time, and proposes a new history of the Iberian Peninsula, written from the perspective of the cities. Contributors are Javier Arce, Maria Asenjo Gonzalez, Antonio Irigoyen Lopez, Alberto Leon Munoz, Matthias Maser, Sabine Panzram, Gisela Ripoll, Torsten dos Santos Arnold, Isabel Toral-Niehoff, Fernando Valdes Fernandez, and Klaus Weber.