Thābit b. Qurra (d. 288/901), a Sabian of Ḥarrān, and his descendants remained in their ancestral religion for six generations. Why did they persist despite pressure to convert? This article argues that religious self-identification as a Sabian could be a distinct advantage in Baghdad’s elite circles. It focuses on Thābit’s great-grandson Abū…[Read more]

In this paper I outline a historical materialist framework for the transhistorical critique of ethnicity, providing a case study in the shaape of Armenian settlements in medieval New Rome. This is necessary since constructivism – the dominant theoretical tradition of the last forty years or so – has failed to dethrone common sense, met…[Read more]

Review of the collected volume Court Ceremonies and Rituals of Power in Byzantium and the Eastern Mediterranean.

From Constantinople to the Frontier: The City and the Cities provides twenty-five articles addressing the concept of centres and peripheries in the late antique and Byzantine worlds, focusing specifically on urban aspects of this paradigm. Spanning from the fourth to thirteenth centuries, and ranging from the later Roman empires to the early…[Read more]

Review of a collection of essays on classical literature and medieval Irish narrative.

Review of a collection of essays on classical literature and medieval Irish narrative.

Edition des ‘Kommunionverbots der Diözese Eichstätt’ des Johann von Eych aus dem Jahre 1456 nach dem Erstdruck in den ‘Statuta synodalia Eystettensia et provincialia Maguntina’ (Eichstätt Michael Reyser 15.03.1484).

Marco Heiles, Johann von Eych: Kommunionverbot für die Diözese Eichstätt. Edition und Kommentar, in: Mittelalter. Inter…[Read more]

Front matter and introduction from my monograph Popular Romance in Iceland

Introduction to a late medieval Icelandic romance along with a normalized Old Norse text and facing page modern English translation.

Overview of the relationships between the older manuscripts preserving the medieval Icelandic romance Nítíða saga, with a rough stemma

Bibliography on late medieval and early modern book production in the German speaking areas.

In The Burns Antiphoner – From manuscript to interactive resource, Anna Kijas reports on a new project based around a 14th-century source, the Burns Antiphoner. In this project they focus on integrating and delivering images, metadata, and recorded audio and video to provide an in-depth look at the contents and experience of this particular s…[Read more]

Using the postmodern theory of Jean Baudrillard I will argue that Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, especially the relationship between Chaucer the poet and Chaucer the pilgrim, follows Baudrillard’s order of simulacra as put forward in his book Simulacra and Simulation. Applying Baudrillard’s theory of the simulacra to Chaucer’s poem, I will an…[Read more]

The use of water as an expressive trope of spiritual hygiene was widespread among monastic writers of the twelfth century, adapted for different uses in different genres. Aqueous imagery was particularly frequent within allegories or didactic figurae exploring the care of the soul as if it were a material body, with a constitution that could be…[Read more]

This paper proposes that we can reimagine insular literatures and medieval islescapes as commodious seas of cultural and intellectual loci that span time, culture, and text alike. By moving beyond the rhetoric of insular separation or connectivity, we can see that islands connect even when medieval minds saw separation. The essay focuses on the…[Read more]

This essay argues that understanding both the process by which medievalism tropes feature in the formation of moral panics and the manner in which medievalists are drawn into the debate reveals much about the imagination of the medieval in the shaping of the modern, and also some salient points relating to role of scholars in public discourse.

This article explores the diagram found on the recto side of Pierpont Morgan, M. 982, a single leaf from a twelfth-century manuscript held by the Morgan Library and Museum in New York, and believed to originate in the scriptorium of Saint Peter’s Abbey in Salzburg, Austria. The diagram represents knowledge as an ‘ecodiagrammatic’ pattern, depic…[Read more]

Gathering into lively conversation scholars in medieval, early modern and object studies, Inhuman Nature explores the activity of the things, forces, and relations that enable, sustain and operate indifferently to us. Enamored by fictions of environmental sovereignty, we too often imagine “human” to be a solitary category of being. This col…[Read more]

This article explores the representation of hunger and thirst as faculties within medieval spiritual allegory that existed at two forms. In their bodily form, hunger and thirst represented a feeling of lack indicating the need for sustenance. In their figurative moralised form these needs came to represent a longing for that which was missing…[Read more]

Following the voyages of Christopher Columbus, John Cabot, Alonso de Ojeda and Amerigo Vespucci in the last decade of the fifteenth century, the New World of the Americas entered the cartographic and moral consciousness of Europe. In the 1500 mappa mundi of Juan de la Cosa, navigator and map-maker, we see Europe as a hybrid moral entity, a…[Read more]