Essays demonstrating the importance and inflence of Italian culture on medieval Britain. Between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, the rise of international trade, the growth of towns and cities, and the politics of diplomacy all helped to foster productive and far-reaching connections and cultural interactionsbetween Britain and Italy; equally, the flourishing of Italian humanism from the late fourteenth century onwards had a major impact on intellectual life in Britain. The aim of this book is to illustrate the continuity andthe variety of these exchanges during the period. Each chapter focuses on a specific area (book collection, historiography, banking, commerce, literary production), highlighting the significance of the productive interchange ofpeople and ideas across diverse cultural communities; it is the lived experience of individuals, substantiated by written evidence, that shapes the book's collective understanding of how two European cultures interacted with eachother so fruitfully. MICHELE CAMPOPIANO is Senior Lecturer in Medieval Latin Literature at the University of York; HELEN FULTON is Professor of Medieval Literature at the University of Bristol. Contributors: Helen Bradley, Margaret Bridges, Michele Campopiano, Carolyn Collette, Victoria Flood, Helen Fulton, Bart Lambert, Ignazio del Punta

The book shows how the Franciscans in Jerusalem in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries wrote works which standardized the cultural memory of the Holy Land. The experience of the late medieval Holy Land was deeply connected to the presence of the Franciscans of the Convent of Mount Zion in Jerusalem, who welcomed and guided pilgrims. This book analyses this construction of a shared memory based on the continuous availability of these texts in the Franciscan library of Mount Zion, where they were copied and adapted to respond to new historical contexts. This book shows how the Franciscans developed a representation of the Holy Land by elaborating on its history and describing its religious groups and the geography of the region. This representation circulated among pilgrims and influenced how contemporaries imagined the Holy Land

New perspectives on and interpretations of the popular medieval genre of the universal chronicle. Found in pre-modern cultures of every era and across the world, from the ancient Near East to medieval Latin Christendom, the universal chronicle is simultaneously one of the most ubiquitous pre-modern cultural forms and one of the most overlooked. Universal chronicles narrate the history of the whole world from the time of its creation up to the then present day, treating the world's affairs as though they were part of a single organic reality, and uniting various strands of history into a unifed, coherent story. They reveal a great deal about how the societies that produced them understood their world and how historical narrative itself can work to produce that understanding. The essays here offer new perspectives on the genre, from a number of different disciplines, demonstrating their vitality, flexibility and cultural importance, They reveal them to be deeply political texts, which allowed history-writers and their audiences to locate themselves in space, time and in the created universe. Several chapters address the manuscript context, looking at the innovative techniques of compilation, structure and layout that placed them at the cutting edge of medieval book technology. Others analyse the background of universal chronicles, and identify their circulation amongst different social groups; there are also investigations into their literary discourse, patronage, authorship and diffusion. Michele Campopiano is Senior Lecturer in Medieval Latin Literature at the University of York; Henry Bainton is Lecturer in High Medieval Literature at the University of York. Contributors:Tobias Andersson, Michele Campopiano, Cornelia Dreer, Catherine Gaullier-Bougassas, Elena Koroleva, Keith Lilley, Andrew Marsham, Rosa M. Rodriguez Porto, Christophe Thierry, Elizabeth M. Tyler, Steven Vanderputten, Bjorn Weiler, Claudia Wittig.

The book shows how the Franciscans in Jerusalem in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries wrote works which standardized the cultural memory of the Holy Land. The experience of the late medieval Holy Land was deeply connected to the presence of the Franciscans of the Convent of Mount Zion in Jerusalem, who welcomed and guided pilgrims. This book analyses this construction of a shared memory based on the continuous availability of these texts in the Franciscan library of Mount Zion, where they were copied and adapted to respond to new historical contexts. This book shows how the Franciscans developed a representation of the Holy Land by elaborating on its history and describing its religious groups and the geography of the region. This representation circulated among pilgrims and influenced how contemporaries imagined the Holy Land