Where do we go after we die? This book traces how the European Middle Ages offered distinctive answers to this universal question, evolving from Antiquity through to the sixteenth century, to reflect a variety of problems and developments. Focussing on texts describing visions of the afterlife, alongside art and theology, this volume explores heaven, hell, and purgatory as they were imagined across Europe, as well as by noted authors including Gregory the Great and Dante. A cross-disciplinary team of contributors including historians, literary scholars, classicists, art historians and theologians offer not only a fascinating sketch of both medieval perceptions and the wide scholarship on this question: they also provide a much-needed new perspective. Where the twelfth century was once the 'high point' of the medieval afterlife, the essays here show that the afterlives of the early and later Middle Ages were far more important and imaginative than we once thought.

This volume presents contributions to the conference Old English Runes Workshop, organised by the Eichstatt-Munchen Research Unit of the Academy project Runic Writing in the Germanic Languages (RuneS) and held at the Catholic University of Eichstatt-Ingolstadt in March 2012. The conference brought together experts working in an area broadly referred to as Runology. Scholars working with runic objects come from several different fields of specialisation, and the aim was to provide more mutual insight into the various methodologies and theoretical paradigms used in these different approaches to the study of runes or, in the present instance more specifically, runic inscriptions generally assigned to the English and/or the Frisian runic corpora. Success in that aim should automatically bring with it the reciprocal benefit of improving access to and understanding of the runic evidence, expanding and enhancing insights gained within such closely connected areas of study of the Early-Mediaeval past.

Author portraits are the most common type of figural illustration in Greek manuscripts. The vast majority of them depict the evangelists Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Being readily comparable to one another, such images illustrate the stylistic development of Byzantine painting. In addition, they often contain details which throw light on elements of Byzantine material culture such as writing utensils, lamps, domestic furniture, etc. This corpus offers catalogue descriptions of all evangelist portraits that survived from the Middle Byzantine period, i.e. from the mid-ninth to mid-thirteenth century. Items are arranged in roughly chronological order and are grouped according to common compositional types: readers will thus be able to trace iconographic similarities by going through a series of adjacent entries and to distinguish period styles by browsing through larger blocks of entries. The book thus provides, in effect, a selective survey of middle-Byzantine painting. A surprisingly large number of Byzantine evangelists portraits remain unpublished: seventy-five of the miniatures reproduced in this volume have never appeared in print before.