Ever since Tolkien's famous lecture in 1936, it has been generally accepted that the poem Beowulf is a fantasy, and of no use as a witness to real history. This book challenges that view, and argues that the poem provides a plausible, detailed, and consistent vision of pre-Viking history which is most unlikely to have been the poet's invention, and which has moreover received strong corroboration from archaeology in recent years. Using the poem as a starting point, historical, archaeological, and legendary sources are combined to form a picture of events in the North in the fifth and sixth centuries: at once a Dark and a Heroic Age, and the time of the formation of nations. Among other things, this helps answer two long-unasked questions: why did the Vikings come as such a shock? And what caused the previous 250 years of security from raiders from the sea?

Revising the histories of medievalism--the processes by which the Middle Ages are reimagined in later moments to varied political, social, and cultural ends--is critical to the field's turn away from its oppressive roots and towards a richer conception of the past. Grounded in intersectional feminist interpretive frameworks, Women's Restorative Medievalisms examines how contemporary women writers engage the premodern past to animate intertwined histories of oppression and resistance in service of visionary futures. These medievalisms create temporal dialogue between the past and the present to restore the voices of women who have been overlooked in medieval studies and medievalism studies. The book's contemporary focus will appeal both to students and medieval studies scholars who seek to understand the field's present value amid the backlash of patriarchal, white supremacist power.

Byzantium survived for eight centuries, yet the dominions and power of the beleaguered Byzantine empire fluctuated dramatically during that time. This book provides a detailed analysis of the military organization of this thousand-year empire, its strategies and battle tactics, diplomacy and geo-politics, military equipment and siege warfare, coupled with an explanation of military theory and its application on the battlefield. Georgios Theotokis draws on the latest in academic debate and examines afresh the varied aspects of warfare in the eastern Mediterranean.

In a concise volume, and with supreme clarity, Georgios Theotokis has brought together a large and complex body of material and made it accessible to a modern, English language audience. Matthew Bennett, Fellow of the Royal Historical Society

Japan's transition from medieval to early modern occurred at the time of an emerging global Europe. In the 1540s European traders and missionaries began a century of dynamic cultural and economic interaction with the Japanese Islands. In the midst of civil war, over 300,000 Japanese converted to Christianity and Japan became an influential location in the Counter-Reformation's reinvention of Christianity as the first global religion. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, however, unification of Japan by the Tokugawa shoguns led to persecutions and strict limits on European presence in the country. Examining a range of topics, including the relationship between Christianity and folk religion, the introduction of firearms, new crops and cuisines, and treponemal disease, this book re-evaluates Japan's transformation from medieval to early modern in a global context.

Migration in the Medieval Mediterranean argues that the cross-Mediterranean movement of peoples was a central aspect of the medieval world. Medieval people migrated in search of safety after regime change, secure life amongst coreligionists, and prosperous careers. This kind of travel between Muslim and Christian regions demonstrates the mutual influences, interconnections, and communications linking them, surpassing the differences between the two civilizations.

How did legal, literary, and scientific discourses intersect to define sexual non-consent in the Middle Ages? How did popular cultural assumptions about sexuality and gender influence actual medieval criminal proceedings? And how far have we really come today?

This book explores medieval English understandings of rape, consent, and the assumed mind-body dichotomy of rapists and rape victims. It demonstrates how laws, trial records, popular romance, and ecclesiastic and medical texts defined sexual consent and non-consent, and the consequences of such ideologies. By comparing episodes of rape and consent across diverse primary sources, it considers important medieval English rape myths and victim-blaming stereotypes. Significantly, it also highlights the cultural trepidation associated with believing women's accusations of rape and questions how much progress we have made since then.

Medieval archaeology of the East Roman world is key to understanding the populations that are invisible in contemporary political and religious sources. Although scholars have long studied the religious and elite structures of the East Roman world, dedicated analysis of the material remains of ordinary and rural people is relatively new. Yet this work is essential to understanding the people who lived in lands as varied as Italy and northern Mesopotamia between the fourth and fifteenth centuries, as well as the continuity of their communities. This book argues that when approached as a series of microhistories, medieval archaeology in the East Roman world is the archaeology of complex settlements, each of which was forced to react, positively or negatively, to the varied changes of the period. It is the archaeology of landscapes, of households, and of resilience; in recognizing this, we gain a more nuanced view of the East Roman world.

This pioneering monograph provocatively explodes current research paradigms for the modern and the medieval by showing that Twitter shares key similarities with medieval literary forms, texts, and narrative techniques. Analyzing tweets with medieval texts, and vice versa, Spencer-Hall initiates readers into an innovative methodology of interdisciplinary literary criticism, posing vital questions about the politics of medievalism today. Chapters include brand-new readings of The Owl and the Nightingale, the Chastelaine de Vergi, and Marie de France's Laüstic, and arresting insights into troubadour style, Margery Kempe, and #MedievalTwitter. The book culminates in a medieval(ist) reading of Twitter's premature demise, and Elon Musk's medievalism. Throughout, points of contact and divergence are dissected, re-contextualizing the socio-cultural meaning of communication and texts across the temporal divide.

Pilgrimage to shrines and places of particular holiness was a feature of all three major religious traditions in medieval Europe and the eastern Mediterranean. Pilgrims exposed themselves to risk and loss in order to experience the spiritual benefits of devotion to the shrine of a saint or a holy place. This authoritative and comprehensive Companion offers a thematic approach to the experience of the medieval pilgrim, from departure to return. The central focus is on how pilgrims prepared for and negotiated their journeys; what they saw and did at shrines; and how they understood their journeys. The Holy Land stands at the centre of the book, because it was the main site of pilgrimage for Jewish, Christian, and Muslim pilgrims, but pilgrimages to other sites across Europe and the Near East, and to the shrines of local saints, are also explored.

Byzantine Studies has reached a tipping point: a growing number of historians have realized that the terms Byzantium and the Byzantines distort the reality and identity of the society that we study, and encode a series of prejudices that were embedded in western perceptions. The aim of these terms was to exclude the eastern empire from important discussions and historical developments.

It is time to end this exercise in orientalist fiction, but what are the alternatives? In this book, Anthony Kaldellis surveys the pros and cons of a range of possible options and examines the implications of a field name-change also for art history, philology, and the study of Eastern Orthodoxy. The new name he proposes will carry the field into the next phase of its history, renegotiate its relationships with its peers and respect the testimony of our sources.

This book is a new cultural and intellectual history of the natural world in the early medieval Latin West. It examines the complex relationships between language, texts, and the physical world they describe, focusing on the manuscripts of the Physiologus--the foundation of the medieval bestiary. The Physiologus helped to shape the post-Roman worldview about the role and place of human beings in Creation. This process drew on classical ideas, but in its emphasis on allegory, etymology, and a plurality of readings, it was original and distinctive. This study demonstrates precisely how the early medieval re-contextualization of existing knowledge, together with a substantial amount of new writing, set the course of ideas about faith and nature for centuries to come. In doing so, it establishes the importance of multi-text miscellanies for early medieval written culture.

Vladimir Putin justifies his imperialist policy by use of the past. For him, Russia has always been an Empire and must remain so. The story of Russian imperialism has deep historical roots, and this book shows how Byzantium, the most powerful medieval and Christian empire, is repeatedly presented in Russian history as the source of the empire's imperial legitimacy.

The author reflects on the role of art and the humanities (especially history and art history) within the power ambitions of regimes and political parties over the last two centuries as tools for the repeated reinvention of an empire's identity; an identity built on a multitude of invented pasts. Within this self-referential narrative, Byzantium becomes the ultimate authority justifying the aggression of the Russian state, and Orthodox belief becomes the bridge linking the medieval past with the present. One of the paradoxes of this narrative is the use of the same past by regimes as different as those of the last Romanovs, Stalin, and Putin, leading to a fundamental question: does this propaganda image really underlie the core identity of Russia?

This study presents the first full history of Old English poetic mise-en-page, drawing its approach from the fields of literary criticism, art history, metrics, palaeography, and the history of the book. Paying special attention to lineation, this book surveys the layout of poetry from the earliest Latin writings in England, to modern editions of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It argues that the vernacular verse page is not, as has often been assumed, merely constrained by linguistic status. Rather, the layout of Old English poetry is shown to be the result of engaged scribal and editorial choices, and one of a set of tools used to meets readers' needs and to express identities. Old English verse is not laid out like prose, but like Old English verse.

Medieval women were active in many performative activities, including plays and ceremonies performed in nunneries. This volume focuses on monastic performances and, in particular, on performances given in the English abbey of Barking. The Barking ceremonies, commonly referred to as the Elevatio and Visitatio sepulchri, display complex ties with both drama and liturgy. The book uses historical and archaeological evidence to propose a discussion of the nuns' participation in these ceremonies--as performers, but also as scribes, composers, and patrons--and of the Elevatio and Visitatio's potential effects on their performers and spectators. It goes on to address related questions through the lens of a modern performance of the ceremonies, considering their relevance today. Discussion is presented within the context of a general overview of female performance in the Middle Ages.

Rather than being the lawless barbarian society that history and popular culture have painted it, medieval Scandinavian culture was complex and nuanced. This book fundamentally challenges our stereotypes of the Vikings, and interrogates the use of a rhetoric of reasonableness (hóf) in medieval Nordic society to give voice to this hitherto silenced tradition.

Civic rhetoric relied heavily on hóf to keep community customs manageable. In small towns and villages without central bureaucracies, reasonableness became important to the peaceful functioning of civil society.

Legal rhetoric was also based on hóf. If civic actions became potentially violent, then the courts needed means of redress, and a way to maintain the peace in the locality. The Scandinavian tradition of court cases appears both in the early laws and in several sagas, allowing a picture of the rhetorical stance of hóf to emerge through Nordic legal processes.

This study uses a series of medieval texts to address a set of urgent critical issues in Humanities centring on categories of L/literature, history, periodization, languages, and descriptions of script. These categories are inherited from the foundation of modern disciplines and fields of study, superimposed on what could be more flexible modes of scholarship. They are reinforced by modern academics in ways that hinder nuance, intellectual nimbleness, and new interpretative possibilities. Readers and researchers of English Language, Literature, Book Historical/Media Studies, and History are obliged by delimiting labels to navigate problematic foundational approaches and sources that confine and frustrate scholarly investigation. Through a series of cogent case studies, all situated from 1050 to 1250, the book highlights how restrictive and hierarchical modern scholarly categories can sometimes be.

Egypt is revered as the home of the famous Desert Ascetics, who first embraced a monastic life and established homosocial communities on the borders of their urban centres in the Nile Valley. Regarded as angels and warriors, the wisdom of the Desert Ascetics formed part of the oral and literary tradition of wonder-working saints whose commitment to asceticism was legendary and inspirational. This book grounds the mythologized stories of Desert Ascetics in the materiality of the desert, demonstrating the closeness of the desert, the connections between non-monastic and monastic communities, and the exciting insights into lived monasticism through the archaeology of monasticism in Egypt.

Performing Disability is a landmark examination of performance history in the medieval and early modern era. Seeking to provide a fact-based assessment of disabled performance, this survey examines the nature and socialization of disabled performers in the medieval and early Tudor periods. Using Records of Early English Drama, literary representations, and targeted histories of disability in the medieval period, this study takes a new and welcome look at the evidence for, and the conceptualization of, impairment as a performative act in the premodern era.

It features discussions on the different societal constructions pertaining to disability (mental incapacity, blindness and deafness, dwarfism, gigantism, etc.), and how the evidence for such conditions was socialized through performance.

Taking an evidence-based and multidisciplinary approach to perceptions of identity and othering in premodern society, this study is certain to appeal to a wide audience, including historians of theatre and performance, disability advocates and theorists, and social historians.