Brepols

Le Grand Miroir du monde, Speculum maius, est la «Grande Encyclopedie» du Moyen Age. Ce livre présente les étapes de son élaboration comme outil du studium, par Frère Vincent de Beauvais, lecteur dominicain au service de son Ordre, et par ailleurs familier du roi Louis IX. Il caractérise la documentation mise en œuvre et son évolution. Conçu d'abord en deux parties, clans un esprit proche de la pensée victorine, ( vers 1244), l'ouvrage fut ensuite remis en avancées de la nouvelle science, tributaire d'Aristote et d'al-Farabi (vers 1260). L'influence naturaliste d'Albert le Grand faisant suite á celle, exégétique, de Hugues de Saint-Cher, le Speculum maius devient ainsi une œuvre en trois parties, Speculum naturale, consacre á l'histoire naturelle selon l'ordre des six jours de la création; Speculum doctrinale, inachevé, exposant toutes les branches du savoir (trivium propédeutique, sciences pratiques, sciences mécaniques, sciences théoriques); Speculum historiale, deroulant les facta et gesta de l'humanité (histoire proprement dite, histoire littéraire et hagiographie) jusqu'au Jugement dernier, selon la vision augustinienne de l'histoire.

Des documents traduits, dont !'important prologue, Libellus apologeticus, illustrent la méthode de composition et le contenu de l'œuvre, la mettent en relation avec d'autres ecrits paralleles du XIIIe siècle et témoignent de son succès au cours des siécles.

This collection of prose vitae of four virgins and scholars - Saints John the Baptist, John the Evangelist, Jerome, and Katherine of Alexandria - was almost certainly copied, and the texts very likely composed, at Syon Abbey or Sheen Charterhouse in the mid-fifteenth century. The lives cover a wide range of hagiographic modes, from hagiographic romance to affective, devotional appreciation to doctrinal treatise in narrative form. From the life of Jerome, composed by a monk for his aristocratic spiritual daughter, to the life of Katherine, reputedly translated for Henry V, to those of John the Baptist and John the Evangelist, which set their subjects in a recognizably Birgittine context, they show the interaction of men and women, lay and monastic, in the production of devotional literature. The diversity of their approaches and sources, moreover, shows the links between English dynastic politics and continental religious literature and spiritual traditions. As examples of translation practices, of monastic politics, and of religious instruction, these lives provide a window onto the devotional culture and literary worlds of fifteenth-century Europe.

Visible English recovers for the first time the experience of reading and writing the English language in the medieval period through the perspectives of littera pedagogy, the basis of medieval learning and teaching of literate skills in Latin. Littera is at the heart of the set of theories and practices that constitute the ‘graphic culture’ of the book’s title. The book shows for the first time that littera pedagogy was an ‘us and them’ discourse that functioned as a vehicle for identity formation. Using littera pedagogy as a framework for understanding the medieval English-language corpus from the point of view of the readers and writers who produced it, Visible English offers new insights on experiences of writing and reading English in communities ranging from those first in contact with Latin literacy to those where print was an alternative to manuscript. Discussing a broad range of materials from so-called ‘pen-trials’ and graffiti to key literary manuscripts, Visible English provides new perspectives on the ways that the alphabet was understood, on genres such as alphabet poems, riddles, and scribal signatures, and on the different ways in which scribes copied Old and Middle English texts. It argues that the graphic culture underpinned and transmitted by littera pedagogy provided frameworks for the development and understanding of English-language literacy practices and new ways of experiencing social belonging and difference. To be literate in English, it proposes, was to inhabit identities marked by Anglophone literate practices.

The North has long attracted attention, not simply as a circumpolar geographical location, but also as an ideological space, a place that is ‘made’ through the understanding, imagination, and interactions of both insiders and outsiders. The envisioning of the North brings it into being, and it is from this starting point that this volume explores how the North was perceived from ancient times up to the early modern period, questioning who, where, and what was defined as North over the course of two millennia.

Covering historical periods as diverse as Ancient Greece to eighteenth-century France, and drawing on a variety of disciplines including cultural history, literary studies, art history, environmental history, and the history of science, the contributions gathered here combine to shed light on one key question: how was the North constructed as a place and a people? Material such as sagas, the ethnographic work of Olaus Magnus, religious writing, maps, medical texts, and illustrations are drawn on throughout the volume, offering important insights into how these key sources continued to be used over time. Selected texts have been compiled into a useful appendix that will be of considerable value to scholars.

The special position of Jerusalem among the cities of the world stems from a long history shared by the three Abrahamic religions, and the belief that the city reflected a heavenly counterpart. Because of this unique combination, Jerusalem is generally seen as extending along a vertical axis stretching between past, present, and future. However, through its many ‘earthly’ representations, Jerusalem has an equally important horizontal dimension: it is represented elsewhere in all media, from two-dimensional maps to monumental renderings of the architecture and topography of the city’s loca sancta.

In documenting the increasing emphasis on studying the earthly proliferations of the city, the current book witnesses a shift in theoretical and methodological insights since the publication of The Real and Ideal Jerusalem in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Art in 1998. Its main focus is on European translations of Jerusalem in images, objects, places, and spaces that evoke the city through some physical similarity or by denomination and cult - all visual and material aids to commemoration and worship from afar. The book discusses both well-known and long-neglected examples, the forms of cult they generate and the virtual pilgrimages they serve, and calls attention to their written and visual equivalents and companions. In so doing, it opens a whole new vista onto the summa of representations of Jerusalem.

This is the first monograph devoted to manuscripts illuminated by the mid-fifteenth-century artist known as the Wavrin Master, so-called after his chief patron, Jean de Wavrin, chronicler and councillor at the court of Philip the Good of Burgundy. Specializing in the production of pseudo-historical prose romances featuring the putative ancestors of actual Burgundian families, the artist was an attentive interpreter of these texts which were designed to commemorate the chivalric feats of past heroes and to foster their emulation by noble readers of the day. Integral to these heroes’ deeds is the notion of justice, their worth being measured by their ability to remedy criminal acts such as adultery, murder, rape, and usurpation. In a corpus of 10 paper manuscripts containing the texts of 15 romances and over 650 watercolour miniatures, the stylized, expressive images of the Wavrin Master bring out with particular clarity the lessons in justice which these works offered their contemporary audience, many of whom, from the Burgundian dukes downwards, would have been responsible for upholding the law in their territories. Chapters are devoted to issues such as the nature of just war and how it is linked to good rulership; what forms of legal redress the heroines of these tales are able to obtain with or without the help of a male champion; and what responses are available in law to a spouse betrayed by an adulterous partner. The book will be of interest to scholars of medieval art, literature, legal and cultural history, and gender studies.

Fruit des travaux du colloque intitulé «Groupes sociaux et territoires urbains (Moyen Age-16e siècle)» organisé en décembre 2004 à l’Université Libre de Bruxelles, cet ouvrage rassemble douze contributions originales consacrées aux dynamiques sociales de l’espace urbain en Europe de l’ouest durant le bas Moyen Âge.

Dans sa première partie, l’ouvrage montre la structuration à long terme de l’espace urbain par les stratégies d’occupation de groupes dominants: chapitres canoniaux, élites scabinales, métiers (Tours, Namur, Trévise). Il confronte ce processus d’appropriation à la capacité de réagencement matériel ou symbolique déployée par certains acteurs urbains. Accident aléatoire (Tortosa), circonstances politiques (Bruges), modulation des rapports à la ville (Ratisbonne) redessinent les territoires respectifs, rallument sans cesse la lutte pour la maîtrise de l’espace et de ses éléments signifiants.

Dans sa seconde partie, l’ouvrage donne à penser la société urbaine dans ses relations avec des horizons plus lointains. Dans un premier temps sont abordées les relations des villes avec leur arrière-pays, sur lequel les groupes citadins dominants réinventent sans cesse les modalités économiques et juridiques de leur contrôle (Bruxelles, Chieri, Dijon). Dans un second temps, sont considérées les armatures urbaines de certains territoires (Brabant, Hainaut, Saint-Empire) dont la vivacité économique dépend de l’intensité des relations marchandes.

Les articles réunis ici éclairent, souvent d’un jour nouveau, non seulement l’histoire singulière des villes concernées mais plus fondamentalement les processus et les logiques à l’œuvre dans l’agencement et le réagencement permanent des espaces urbains.

Bien qu’il soit encore bien trop tôt pour dresser un bilan critique de l’activité scientifique de Carlos Lévy, qui demeure en pleine évolution et qui promet toujours de nouvelles contributions à nos études, il est déjà évident qu’il a laissé une empreinte très importante dans les disciplines classiques au moins à deux égards : du point de vue de la méthode, Carlos Lévy a enseigné combien il est important, à une époque où la recherche se spécialise toujours plus, de ne pas perdre au contraire la capacité de « penser sans frontières », en joignant la sensibilité de l’intuition géniale à la rigueur des principes philologiques et à une compétence dans la discipline aussi solide qu’étendue et complète. C’est dans cette perspective que s’épanouit sa surprenante capacité de travailler à la fois comme historien de la philosophie, spécialiste de la pensée politique classique, expert en rhétorique et en éloquence, autant qu’en linguistique et en sémantique historique ; dans cette perspective encore que se comprend sa volonté d’étudier textes grecs comme textes latins, appartenant à toutes les écoles philosophique de l’Antiquité, et aussi ceux d’auteurs éloignés du domaine de la philosophie ; dans cette perspective enfin que se dessine son ouverture vers la modernité, la permanence de l’époque classique, le dialogue avec la philosophie contemporaine. Du point de vue des contenus, d’autre part, il est évident que l’activité scientifique de Carlos Lévy s’est concentrée surtout - mais certainement pas seulement - sur le sujet fascinant et toujours actuel du rapport entre vérité et apparence, entre dogme et incertitude, entre ontologie et gnoséologie. C’est donc autour du binôme vérité et apparence, envisagé autant d’un point de vue philosophique que d’un point de vue plus proprement rhétorique ou poétique, à travers l’étude d’auteurs de l’Antiquité à la Renaissance, que s’est construit ce volume d’amitié.

Perrine Galand, normalienne, ancien membre junior de l’Institut Universitaire de France, directeur d’études à l’École pratique des Hautes Études, est spécialiste de la poétique de la Renaissance européenne.

Ermanno Malaspina, professeur d’histoire de la langue latine à Turin, s’occupe de Cicéron, de Sénèque et du paysage littéraire en latin.

The abbey of San Sebastiano, which lies not far from the town of Alatri in Southern Lazio, preserves within its walls almost fifteen hundred years of history. This history is unusually bound to a number of important figures, from Saint Benedict to Pope Nicholas V and his circle of humanists. For the past four years a small team has been investigating the extant structures of the abbey, analyzing the stratigraphy of the standing walls and tracing the various building phases. The study has produced some startling discoveries: the plan and preserved walls of one of the oldest monasteries in Europe, and one of the earliest Renaissance villas. The book gives an account of the architecture and the history of the building, showing how each phase relates to the last both structurally and thematically.

The project was initiated at the American Academy in Rome, where Elizabeth Fentress was Andrew Mellon Professor, and Caroline Goodson, Margaret L. Laird and Stephanie C. Leone were Fellows. Margaret Laird and Stephanie Leone are now assistant professors at the University of Washington, Seattle and at Boston College. Other contributors include Caroline Bruzelius, Professor of the History of Art at Duke University, Antonio Manfredi, Vatican Library, Serena Romano, Professor of the History of Art at the University of Lausanne, Marco Rossi, director of the Museum of Alatri, and Ingrid Rowland, Andrew Mellon Professor at the American Academy in Rome.

The Decapolis city of Gerasa has seen occupation since the Bronze Age but reached its zenith in the Roman to early Islamic period as a population centre and trading hub. Located in a fertile valley in the limestone foothills of the Ajlun mountains, the city benefitted from a benign climate and an excellent local water supply from karstic springs and perennial streams. By the Roman-Early Byzantine period, these water sources were harnessed and managed by extensive aqueduct and distribution networks that satisfied the broad range of water needs of both urban and rural dwellers.

This volume offers an up-to-date, comprehensive, and multidisciplinary analysis of the water management system employed in both Gerasa and its hinterland from the time of Roman occupation to the devastating earthquakes that struck the city at the end of the Umayyad period. Drawing on archaeological evidence from the author’s field research, together with a critical and detailed analysis of the evidence of water installations and the results of a radiocarbon dating study, this insightful book offers the first diachronic interpretation of Gerasa’s water distribution, setting the city in its geoarchaeological, historical, and landscape contexts, and contributing to the broader understanding of its archaeological history.

This book sheds new light on old problems of wealth, poverty and material culture in rural societies. Much of the debate has concentrated on north-west Europe and the Atlantic world. This volume widens the geographic range to compare less well known areas, with case studies on the Mediterranean world (Catalonia and Greece), from central Europe (Bohemia and Hungary), and from the Nordic countries (Denmark). Methodologically, several papers link the possession of goods to the use of room space, while others highlight the importance of the channels for the circulation of goods, problems of stocks and flows of goods, and the complexities of urban/rural difference. Finally, this book seeks to stimulate new comparative studies in living standards and lifestyles by providing an overview of achievements up till now.

John Broad is visiting academic at the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, University of Cambridge. He has published on rural society and poverty in England, and his current research interests include a book on English rural housing, and large-scale surveys of population, religion, and landholding in England in the eighteenth century.

Anton Schuurman is associate professor of Rural History at Wageningen University. He has published on the history of material culture and rural transformations in the Netherlands. Currently he is writing a book on the processes of modernisation and democratisation in the Dutch countryside from 1840 till 1920.

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.

This interdisciplinary study takes as its subject the multi-faceted genre of didactic literature (the literature of instruction) which constituted the cornerstone of literary enterprise and social control in medieval and early-modern Europe. Following an introduction that raises questions of didactic meaning, intent, audience, and social effect, nineteen chapters deal with the construction of the individual didactic voice and persona in the premodern period, didactic literature for children, women as the creators, objects, and consumers of didactic literature, the influence of advice literature on adult literacy, piety, and heresy, and the revision of classical didactic forms and motifs in the early-modern period. Attention is paid throughout to the continuities of didactic literature across the medieval and early-modern periods — its intertextuality, reliance on tradition, and self-renewal — and to questions of gender, authority, control, and the socially constructed nature of advice. Contributors particularly explore the intersection of advice literature with real lives, considering the social impact of both individual texts and the didactic genre as a whole. The volume deals with a wide variety of texts from the early Middle Ages to the eighteenth century, written in languages from Latin through the European vernaculars to Byzantine Greek and Russian, offering a comprehensive overview of this pervasive and influential genre.

The British Isles, Scandinavia, Iceland, Greenland, and Eastern Canada, alongside many small islands, form a broken bridge across the northern extremities of the Atlantic Ocean. This ‘North Atlantic World’ is a heterogeneous but culturally intertwined area, ideally suited to the fostering of an interest in all things northern by its people. For the storytellers and writers of the past, each more northerly land was far enough away that it could seem fabulous and even otherworldly, while still being just close enough for myths and travellers’ tales to accrue. This book charts attitudes to the North in the North Atlantic World from the time of the earliest extant sources until the present day. The varied papers within consider a number of key questions which have arisen repeatedly over the centuries: ‘where is the North located?’, ‘what are its characteristics?’, and ‘who, or what lives there?’. They do so from many angles, considering numerous locations and an immense span of time. All are united by their engagement with the North Atlantic World’s relationship with the North.

The decade that gave rise to the term ‘the Hungry Forties’ in Europe is often regarded, and rightly so, as one of deprivation, unrest, and revolution. Two events, the Great Irish Famine and the various political events of ‘1848’, stand out. This book is the first to discuss the subsistence crisis of the 1840s in a truly comparative way. This subsistence crisis may be divided into two rather distinct elements. On the one hand, the failure of the potato caused by the new, unfamiliar fungus, phytophthera infestans, which first struck Europe in mid-1845, resulted in a catastrophe in Ireland that killed about one million people, and radically transformed its landscape and economy. Poor potato crops in 1845 and in the following years also resulted in significant excess mortality elsewhere in Europe. On the other hand, this period, and 1846 in particular, was also one of poor wheat and rye harvests throughout much of Europe. Failure of the grain harvest alone rarely resulted in a subsistence crisis, but the combination of poor potato and grain harvests in a single place was a lethal one. Connections between the local and the global, between the economic and the political, and between the rural and the industrial, make the crisis of the late 1840s a multi-layered one.

This book offers a comparative perspective on the causes and the effects of what is sometimes considered as the ‘last’ European subsistence crisis. It begins with an extensive introduction that treats the topic in comparative perspective. The subsistence crisis had its most catastrophic impact in Ireland, and three chapters in the current volume are concerned mainly with that country. A fourth chapter uses price data to shed comparative perspective on the crisis, while the remaining nine chapters are case studies covering countries ranging from Sweden to Spain and from Scotland to Prussia. Throughout, the contributors focus on a range of common themes, such as the extent of harvest deficits, the functioning of food markets, fertility and mortality, and public action at local and national levels.

Cormac Ó Gráda is professor of economics at University College, Dublin. He has worked extensively on the history of famines in Ireland and worldwide.

Richard Paping teaches economic and social history and economics at University of Groningen. He has done extensive research on developments in standard-of-living, economy and demography in the Netherlands.

Eric Vanhaute is professor social and economic history and world history at Ghent University. He has mainly published on the history of the rural society and of labour markets in Flanders and outside.

Table of contents:

Eric Vanhaute, Richard Paping and Cormac Ó Gráda, The European Subsistence Crisis of 1845-1850: a Comparative Perspective

PART I - The Irish Famine in an International Perspective

Cormac Ó Gráda, Ireland’s Great Famine. An overview - Mary E. Daly, Something Old and Something New. Recent Research on the Great Irish Famine - Peter M. Solar, The Crisis of the Late 1840s. What Can Be Learned From Prices? - Peter Gray, The European Food Crisis and the Relief of Irish Famine, 1845-1850

PART II - A Potato Famine Outside Ireland?

Tom M. Devine, Why the Highlands Did Not Starve. Ireland and Highland Scotland During the Potato Famine - Eric Vanhaute, “So Worthy an Example to Ireland”. The Subsistence and Industrial Crisis of 1845-1850 in Flanders - Richard Paping and Vincent Tassenaar, The Consequences of the Potato Disease in the Netherlands 1845-1860: a Regional Approach - Hans H. Bass, The Crisis in Prussia - Gunter Mahlerwein, The Consequences of the Potato Blight in South Germany - Nadine Vivier, The Crisis in France. A Memorable Crisis But Not a Potato Crisis - Jean Michel Chevet and Cormac Ó Gráda, Crisis: What Crisis? Prices and Mortality in Mid-Nineteenth Century France - Pedro Díaz Marín, Subsistence Crisis and Popular Protest in Spain. The Motines of 1847- Ingrid Henriksen, A Disaster Seen From the Periphery. The Case of Denmark - Carl-Johan Gadd, On the Edge of a Crisis: Sweden in the 1840s

This book offers a new and innovative approach to the study of magic and witchcraft in Italy between the late Middle Ages and the early modern period. Unusually, this subject is explored not through inquisitorial trial records or demonological literature, but through the sermons and confession manuals produced by Observant Franciscan friars, focusing on the so-called ‘pastoral’ approach to folklore, superstition, and witchcraft - an approach that appears to have been notably less harsh than that taken by inquisitors and dedicated demonologists.

Central to this research are the writings of a number of friars active at the friary of St Angelo’s in Milan. Among them were preachers and confessors such as Bernardino Busti, who treated superstition as part of a model that categorized the beliefs and behaviours of the faithful, as well as dedicated intellectuals such as Samuele Cassini, who took scepticism towards elements of belief in witchcraft still further, ultimately leading to a clash with groups such as the Dominicans.

By considering the writings of these men in their wider literary and pastoral context, and in the light of the broader reforming aims of the Franciscans, this unique study not only offers new insights into the late medieval understanding of superstition and witchcraft, but also makes an important contribution to the history of pastoral care.

This collection of essays compares and discusses women’s participation and experiences in credit markets in early modern Europe, and highlights the characteristics, common mechanisms, similarities, discrepancies, and differences across various regions in Europe in different time periods, and at all levels of society. The essays focus on the role of women as creditors and debtors (a topic largely ignored in traditional historiography), but also and above all on the development of their roles across time. Were women able to enter the credit market, and if so, how and in what proportion? What was then the meaning of their involvement in this market? What did their involvement mean for the community and for their household? Was credit a vector of female emancipation and empowerment? What were the changes that occurred for them in the transition to capitalism? These essays offer a variety of perspectives on women’s roles in the credit markets of early modern Europe in order to outline and answer these questions as well as analysing and exploring the nature of women, money, credit, and debt in a pre-industrial Europe.

During the English Civil Wars and Revolution (1640-60), the affairs of Church and State came under a crucial new form of comment and critique, in the form of public petitions. Petitioning was a readily available mode of communication for women, and this study explores the ways in which petitioning in seventeenth-century England was adapted out of and differed from pre-Revolutionary modes, whilst also highlighting gendered conventions and innovations of petitioning in that period.

Male petitioning in the seventeenth century did not have to negotiate the cultural assumptions about intellectual inferiority and legal incapacity that constrained women. Yet just because women did not claim separate (and modern) women’s rights does not mean that they were passive, quiescent, or had no political agency. On the contrary, as this study shows, women in the Revolution could use petitioning as a powerful way to address those in power, precisely because it was done from an assumed position of weakness. The petition is not simply a text, authored by a single pen, but a series of social transactions, performed in multiple social and political settings, frequently involving people previously excluded from participation in political discussion or action. To the extent that women participated in collective petitioning, or turned their individual addresses into printed artefacts for public scrutiny, they also participated in the public sphere of political opinion and debate.

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.

There has long been a tendency among monastic historians to ignore or marginalize female participation in monastic life, but recent scholarship has begun to redress the balance, and the great contributions made by women to the religious life of the Middle Ages are now attracting increasing attention. This interdisciplinary volume draws together scholars from Spain, Italy, France, the Low Countries, Germany, Transylvania, Scandinavia, and the British Isles, and offers new insights into the history, art history, and material culture, and the religiosity and culture of medieval religious women.

The different chapters within this book take a comparative approach to the emergence and spread of female monastic communities across different geographical, political, and economic settings, comparing and contrasting houses that ranged from rich, powerful royal abbeys to small, subsistence priories on the margins of society, and exploring the artistic achievements, the interaction with neighbours and secular and ecclesiastical authorities, and the spiritual lives that were led by their inhabitants. The contributors to this volume address issues as diverse as patronage and relationships with the outside world, organizational structures, the nature of Cistercian observance and identity among female houses, and the role of male authority, and in doing so, they seek to shed light on the divergences and commonalities upon which the female religious life was based.

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.