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The interconnected histories of Judaism and Christianity are explored in this compelling volume honouring the influential work of Jeremy Cohen. Cohen’s pioneering studies have reshaped our understanding of these religious traditions emphasizing the crucial role of cross-religious engagements in forming their self-perceptions and identities.

Comprising fifteen chapters the book is organized into four thematic sections. The first section Literary Mirrors and Inter-Religious Representations explores patterns of internalizations (mis)representations and appropriations between competing religious traditions. The second section Physical and Figurative Encounters addresses the roles played by visible and physical markers in setting interreligious boundaries and exchanges. The third section Agents of Anti-Jewish Discourse focuses on Christian thinkers of the late Middle Ages who propagated anti-Jewish measures or prejudices across different genres and causes. The final section The Transformability of the Jews and the Hermeneutics of Inter-Religious Conversion examines the cultural and intellectual impact of different efforts to convert Jews and Jewishness.

This collection of new studies by leading medievalists serves as a fitting tribute to Jeremy Cohen’s groundbreaking contributions and offers readers an insightful look into the complex world of medieval and early modern religious identity.

The Physiologus is the ancestor of the bestiary a collection of chapters describing animal qualities and behaviours usually with an allegorical meaning which proliferated especially in England in the late Middle Ages. While much scholarly attention has been directed to the bestiary the history of the transmission of the Physiologus has hardly been investigated. Evidence of the circulation of this treatise in the early medieval period is certainly scanty since only two brief versions dating from this period have been preserved one in Old English and another one in Latin. However this monograph shows further proof of the knowledge of the Physiologus in Anglo-Saxon England. It also reveals the relationship of the only two surviving texts and their connection to the main Continental recension of the time. This study therefore demonstrates that the popularity of bestiaries in the later Middle Ages was largely due to the prominence that its predecessor the Physiologus enjoyed in the preceding period.

Hoards are among the most enigmatic of archaeological finds. The term ‘hoard’ itself has been applied to different assemblages across space and time from the Stone Age into the modern era with an inventory that typically includes artefacts made of valuable raw materials to which significant symbolic meanings can also be assigned. Archaeologists have been trying to understand this phenomenon for much of the last century sometimes emphasizing the universal nature of hoards but more typically focusing on specific regions chronologies and finds. They have for the most part used results derived from typolo-chronological methods. Contemporary archaeology has however developed a broad spectrum of paradigms and methods and hoardresearch in the twenty-first century draws on an increasingly wide range of approaches.This volume presents examples of research that make use of these multi-faceted approaches through a focus on European hoards of metal objects dating to the Bronze and Iron Ages. The contributors to this volume make use of diverse methods among them archaeometallurgical analyses studies of use- and production-wear destruction patterns and landscape archaeology but together their common denominator is the search for a methodological toolkit that will allow researchers to better understand the phenomenon of hoard-deposition more broadly.

Doreen Waugh was a native Shetlander and a well-renowned scholar of Old Norse and Gaelic place-names in Northern Scotland and the Northern Isles. Not only did Waugh’s research significantly advance scholarly understanding of the ‘Viking’ settlement of the North Atlantic her generosity with both her time and knowledge inspired and motivated a wide range of scholars from a variety of disciplines from archaeology and history to historical geography linguistics and place-name studies.

Based on - and written in tribute to - Waugh’s work this interdisciplinary volume draws together essays covering Northern Scotland the Northern Isles and beyond both during and after the early medieval period. The contributions gathered here draw on Waugh’s wider-ranging research interests to offer a range of novel insights into the many communities cultures and customs that have characterized and connected the Northern Isles and their North Atlantic neighbours.

The formal study of the collection of Jewish and Christian texts transmitted under the name of Sibylline Oracles highlights the continuity of the model of biblical prophecy while underlining the heritage of Greek didactic poetry. The interest of this approach is to situate the Sibylline Oracles as a literary work in the context of contemporary Greek versified literary production which implies on the part of their successive editors a familiarity with Greek poetic forms related to a common scholar background.

The study of the retelling of biblical episodes aims at identifying the passages where the fictitious Sibyl claims to announce the events of the biblical past and confronting these narrative sequences with contemporary rhetorical theories of paraphrase in order to highlight the formal technique that runs through them and the interpretation of the biblical hypotext that it presumes. Most of the rewritings preserved in the corpus are compatible with the prevailing doctrine of the third century ce.

In the study of the ancient world Babylon can be considered as the most impressive representation historically archaeologically and in literature of urbanism in the Near East. This first example of an urban centre and its cultural heritage - both tangible and intangible - provides a focal point for discussions of historical and cultural memory in the region. The eleven contributions gathered here draw together multidisciplinary research into Babylonian culture exploring the epistemic foundations contacts resilience and cultural transmission of the city and its milieu from ancient times up until the modern day. Through this approach this volume is able to support conversations concerning the historical and cultural memory of Babylon and promote a dialogue that cuts across and unites both cultures and academic disciplines.

The sixteenth century was a time of great religious turmoil in Europe during which the critical positions within the Catholic Church led to a definitive break between Christians. One of the major controversies pertained to the cult of the saints since in 1523 Martin Luther denied the mediating role of the saints and repudiated what he considered excesses in their devotions.

The studies presented in this volume examine the impact of the Reformation on hagiography in the Hispanic sphere. They investigate how theological positions and controversy were projected onto literature and how literature incorporated theological discourse explicitly or implicitly. Unsurprisingly the Catholic Church reaffirmed the hagiographical tradition but to what extent was hagiographical literature specifically Hispanic literature affected by reformist approaches? This book explores issues less evident and hitherto neglected: for example Hispanic Catholic authorities and authors influenced by the denunciations of the excesses of the cult of saints and hagiographical “fables” publicly declared the purging of apocryphal elements in saints’ lives; in practice however they grappled with the difficulty of applying theoretical criteria to such an enormous subject. As a result certain contradictions arose between these criteria and the commitment to the hagiographical tradition which some even sought to expand and update. This complex tension is brought out by the studies gathered here in the fields of hagiographical prose in Catalan Portuguese and Spanish in Iberia and in America without neglecting the role of the theater in the dissemination of saints’ legends.

The closure of religious houses in varying circumstances affected all of Europe at some point between the sixteenth and nineteenth century. At different times and in different countries the consequences were widely varied in some cases preserving medieval and early modern collections intact in others abandoning books to their fate or transferring them piecemeal into new ownership to serve different cultural purposes. Integral preservation or dispersal may each be viewed in positive or negative terms. For religious and political history there are many and bigger factors involved and the effects of secularization worked on many things beside libraries and books. None the less by focusing on books and libraries through these changes a particular narrative emerges of great cultural importance. It is the most important book-historical story for the survival and accessibility of Europe's heritage of the written word one that interacts with major historical themes and still connects with future issues for the continuing role of books and libraries in the European heritage.

A conference held in Oxford in 2012 brought together thirty experts in different aspects of this process or with knowledge of its impact in different countries and at different periods. The result was to bring together and share for the first time the similar and different experiences of different European countries from Portugal and Spain in the west to Poland and Ukraine in the east from Finland and Sweden in the north to Naples in the south with ramifications stretching to North and South America. While reading this volume of collected essays the reader may notice a disparity in the evidence that each author has been able to bring to bear upon their subject. Provenance research is well advanced in some territories less so in others. In the decade since the conference and this publication there have been some attempts to bridge certain gaps. But in general there has been little new work in the years since the conference took place. The editors anticipate that this publication will stimulate further research bridging some of the gaps visible in the evidence presented in this volume. Multiple avenues for further investigation open up indeed in historical and cultural studies such as the impact of the secularization on nonreligious libraries and the change in attitude with respect to certain disciplines and even to erudition itself.

This volume explores the extent to which the reinstitution of the Empire in Western Europe brought about new ways of reconciling the multitude of post-Roman identities with the way the past was shaped in historiographical narratives. From universal histories to local chronicles and from narratives that support Carolingian rule to histories with a more local focus the centralization of power and authority in the course of the eighth and ninth centuries forced those who engaged with their own past and that of their community to acknowledge the new situation and situate themselves in it. The contributions in this volume each depart from a single source event or community and relate their findings to the broader issue of whether the rise of the multi-ethnic Carolingian court allowed for more inclusive narratives to be created or if their self-proclaimed place at the centre of the Frankish world actually created a context in which local communities were given new tools to assert themselves.

Historical writing has shaped identities in various ways and to different extents. This volume explores this multiplicity by looking at case studies from Europe Byzantium the Islamic World and China around the turn of the first millennium. The chapters in this volume address official histories and polemical critique traditional genres and experimental forms ancient traditions and emerging territories empires and barbarians. The authors do not take the identities highlighted in the texts for granted but examine the complex strategies of identification that they employ. This volume thus explores how historiographical works in diverse contexts construct and shape identities as well as legitimate political claims and communicate ‘visions of community’.