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Roman wooden writing tablets known in Latin as tabulae ceratae have been found by archaeologists in various locations around the former capital of the civitas/municipium Tungrorum or Roman Tongeren (now the Belgian city of Tongeren-Borgloon). These rare and delicate finds are remarkable not only due to the excellent state of their preservation but also because they are inscribed with the remnants of texts once etched into an overlying wax layer that can to the discerning eye still be deciphered. The tablets not only provide concrete information about religious judicial and administrative practices but they also enhance our understanding of the complex processes of Romanisation and Latinisation in the northwestern civitates and municipia of the Roman Empire.

Unearthed in the first half of the twentieth century with a second group discovered in 2013 the Roman tablets housed in the Gallo-Roman Museum of Tongeren-Borgloon and in the city’s municipal heritage depository became the object of an in-depth study by an international team of specialists piloted by the Gallo-Roman Museum. It is the results of this project that are presented here in this volume for the first time. The painstaking process of deciphering and interpreting the script marks and text fragments is explored via analysis of palaeography philology and onomastics along with key scientific techniques such as wax analysis wood species identification and script visualisation by Multi-Light Reflectance Imaging. Rich detail is also provided about other associated wooden finds that shed light on how and where the tablets were produced.

The result is a beautifully illustrated and insightful volume that introduces the lost world of Roman Tongeren and its writing tablets to professionals and the general public alike.

What different mechanisms did women religious use to interpret the communal and individual aspects of enclosure throughout history? To what extent was enclosure a pivotal feature of Christian spiritual social and cultural life? How did social and political contexts shape the strategies of nuns and beatas in accepting or rejecting strict enclosure?

Within Walls explores the diverse experiences of enclosure within female Christian spiritualities presenting it as a crucial concept for a deep understanding of the history of women religious. The volume primarily aims to show the different ways in which women religious lived negotiated and redefined enclosure in its material and symbolic dimensions. Covering the period from the New Testament era to the late sixteenth century and spanning regions from the Holy Land and Egypt to Western Europe and colonial Mexico it  explores the evolving meanings and uses of the confined life as experienced and shaped by women religious in Christianity.

The case studies presented in this volume—from the strategies of seclusion of early Christian anchoresses to the plethora of voices of Mediaeval and Early Modern female communities and the authority wielded by individual nuns pilgrims prioresses reformers and mystics—argue that there was by no means a single form of enclosure in female Christian religious life. Instead inspired by Philip Sheldrake’s interpretation of sacred spaces as polyphonic this volume stresses the multivocality and multilocality of the term. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach that integrates microhistory human geography the cultural analysis of materiality literary studies feminist and gender studies indigenous methodologies art studies postcolonial anthropology and the philosophy of religion and spirituality Within Walls provides fresh perspectives on the most intricate dimension of religious life in history.

The roles played by women in history and even the very idea of what it is to be female have always been in flux changing over centuries between cultures and in response to diverse social and economic parameters. Even today women’s roles and women’s rights continue to face changes and pressures. In establishing the series Women of the Past: Testimonies from Archaeology and History the ambition is to build on the profound theoretical and empirical developments that have taken place over the last fifty years of gender-focused research and to explore them in a contemporary context.

The aim of this series is to shed light on not just the outstanding and extraordinary women who were trendsetters of their time but also the not quite so outstanding women often overshadowed by outstanding men and the ordinary women those who simply went about their everyday life and kept their world turning in their own quiet way. This edited volume Women of the Past Issues for the Present is the inaugural volume of the series and shows the wide span of the series chronologically geographically and socially in terms of the research presented. From Roman slaves to Viking women and from medieval wet-nurses to the nineteenth-century wives who supported their archaeologist husbands on excavation this groundbreaking volume opens a new vista in our understanding of the past.

The Middle Ages and Medievalism have been used and abused throughout history–and this continues. This narrative deserves a reassessment. But what is Medieval? This is the central question that unifies the contributions in this volume. 

‘Medievalism’ or the study of the Middle Ages in its broadest sense refers to the perception conceptualisation and movement towards the era post the fifteenth century. Its study is therefore not about the period otherwise referred to as the ‘Middle Ages’ but rather the myriad ways it has since been conceived. And the field of medievalism is still in its relative infancy which has led to the emergence of various existential questions about its scope remit theoretico-methodological and pedagogical underpinnings interpretation periodization and its relationship to established disciplines and more emerging subdisciplines and specialised fields—both within and without the academy. 

In turn neomedievalism has allowed insight into and a response to the medieval often dominated by the modern. This has provoked debate over the nature of neomedievalism as a discipline subdiscipline genre field or offshoot in direct or contrasting relation to the more traditional medievalism.

Featuring interdisciplinary contributions from academics educational practitioners as well as museum digital and heritage professionals this volume provides a fresh reflection on past methods to emerging pedagogies as well as new avenues of enquiry into the ways we think about the medieval. It is by reconciling these seemingly disparate forms that we can better understand the continual interconnected and often politicised reinvention of the Middle Ages throughout cultures and study.

In the last few decades the study of women in the arts has largely increased in terms of scholars involved in research and investigation with the reception of the outcomes especially acknowledged by museums which are dedicating part of their mission to organizing exhibitions and/or acquiring the works of women. The Annual International Women in Arts Conference seeks to advance contemporary discussions on how female creativity has helped shape European culture in its heterogeneity since the Middle Ages. This volume collects the proceedings of the first conference organised in Rome in October 2021. It focuses on the role of women in literature art　and architecture. Throughout history these domains were often seen as very masculine. Yet there have been many women who have made their mark as writers illuminators artists and architects or have played a decisive role as patrons and supporters in these arts. This collection of essays aims to bring these women to the fore and sheds a new light on the heritage and legacy of women in the creative arts and architecture from the Middle Ages until the 20th century.

At the heart of any story of metamorphosis lies the issue of identity and the tales of the werwulf (lit. ‘man-wolf’) are just as much about the wolf as about the man. What are the constituents of the human in general? What symbolic significance do they hold? How do they differ for different types of human? How would it affect the individual if one or more of these elements were to be subtracted?

Focusing on a group of Old Norse-Icelandic werewolf narratives many of which have hitherto been little studied this insightful book sets out to answer these questions by exploring how these texts understood and conceptualized what it means to be human. At the heart of this investigation are five factors key to the werewolf existence - skin clothing food landscape and purpose - and these are innovatively examined through a cross-disciplinary approach that carefully teases apart the interaction between two polarizations: the external and social and the interior and psychological. Through this approach the volume presents a comprehensive new look at the werewolf not only as a supernatural creature and a literary motif but also as a metaphor that bears on the relationship between human and non-human between Self and Other and that is able to situate the Old-Norse texts into a broader intellectual discourse that extends beyond medieval Iceland and Norway.

John Wyclif (d. 1384) famous Oxford philosopher-theologian and controversialist was posthumously condemned as a heretic at the Council of Constance in 1415. Wyclif’s influence was pan-European and had a particular impact on Prague where Jan Hus from Charles University was his avowed disciple and the leader of a dissident reformist movement. Hus condemned to the stake at Constance gathered around him a prolific circle of disciples who changed the landscape of late medieval religion and literature in Bohemia just as Wyclif’s own followers had done in England.

Both thinkers and the movements associated with them played a crucial role in the transformation of later medieval European thought in particular through a radically enlarged role of textual production in the vernaculars (especially Middle English and Old Czech) as well as in Latin in the philosophical theological and ecclesiological realms.

This interdisciplinary volume of essays brings together cutting-edge research from scholars working in these and contiguous fields and asks fundamental questions about the methods that informed Wycliffite and Hussite writings and those by their interlocutors and opponents. Viewing these debates through a methodological lens enables a reassessment of the impact that they had and the responses they elicited across a range of European cultures from England in the west via France and Austria to Bohemia in the east.

On 11 May 1625 Charles I married Henrietta Maria the youngest sister of Louis XIII of France. The match signalled Britain’s firm alignment with France against Habsburg Spain and promised well for future relations between the two countries. However the union between a Protestant king and a Catholic princess was controversial from the start and the marriage celebrations were fraught with tensions. They were further disrupted by the sudden death of James I and an outbreak of the plague which prevented large-scale public celebrations in London. The British weather also played its part. In fact unlike other state occasions the celebrations exposed weaknesses in the display of royal grandeur and national superiority. To a large extent they also failed to hide the tensions in the Stuart-Bourbon alliance. Instead they revealed the conflicting expectations of the two countries each convinced of its own superiority and intent on furthering its own national interests. Less than two years later Britain was effectively in a state of war against France.

In this volume leading scholars from a variety of disciplines explore for the first time the marriage celebrations of 1625 with a view to uncovering the differences and misunderstandings beneath the outward celebration of union and concord. By taking into account the ceremonial political religious and international dimensions of the event the collection paints a rounded portrait of a union that would become personally successful but complicated by the various tensions played out in the marriage celebrations and discussed here.

Contributors: R. Malcolm Smuts Lucinda H. S. Dean J. R. (Ronnie) Mulryne Karen Britland Marie-Claude Canova-Green Erin Griffey Margaret Shewring Sara J. Wolfson Sara Trevisan Kevin Laam Sydney Anglo Margaret M. McGowan John Peacock Gordon Higgott Ella Hawkins .

This book focuses on the city and urban politics because historically towns have been an interesting laboratory for the creation and development of political ideas and practices as they are also today. The contributions in this volume shed light on why how and when citizens participated in the urban political process in late medieval Europe (c. 1300-1500). In other words this book reconsiders the involvement of urban commoners in political matters by studying their claims and wishes their methods of expression and their discursive and ideological strategies. It shows that in order to garner support for and establish the parameters of the most important urban policies medieval urban governments engaged regularly in dialogue with their citizens. While the degree of citizens’ active involvement differed from region to region and even from one town to the next political participation never remained restricted to voting for representatives at set times. This book therefore demonstrates that the making of politics was not the sole prerogative of the government; it was always to some extent a bottom-up process as well.

This collection of essays is a return to words of the Middle Ages in and of themselves uniting philologists historians epigraphers palaeographers and art historians. It probes the intellectual technical and aesthetic principles that underpin their use and social function in medieval graphical practices from epigraphy and inscriptions to poetics ‘mots’ and ‘paroles’. By analysing the material and symbolic properties of a particular medium the conditions in which texts become signs and scribal expertise the contributors address questions that initially seem simple yet which define the very foundations of medieval written culture. What is a word? What are its components? How does it appear in a given medium? What is the relationship between word and text word and letter word and medium word and reader? In a Middle Ages forever torn between economic and extravagant language this volume traces the status of the medieval word from ontology to usage encompassing its visual acoustic linguistic and extralinguistic forms.