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The connections between preaching, politics, and society have been manifold yet varied in the period from Late Antiquity to the end of the Middle Ages. In this multi-lingual volume, these associations are studied within their historical context over twelve new contributions, addressing a wide range of geographical areas and opening up a series of sources which have previously been neglected. Special attention is paid to the cultural and geographical circumstances in which the complex relationship between political thought and preaching should be explored. These contributions reveal the circumstances and the procedures that inspire various preachers to reflect upon political topics, which are often of a sensitive nature. In this way, the powerful and the general public of believers have access to an array of political ideas, allowing opinion-making and political discussion. Furthermore, the collection also shows news ways in which political thought and preaching can be explored, revealing new methods and lines of inquiry allowing insights into the complexities of medieval societies. The international cast of contributors provides a broad perspective on the subject, through six articles in French, and six in English.

Depuis au moins l’Antiquité tardive, les relations entre prédication et société politique ont été nombreuses et variées. Dans le présent volume ont été réunies douze contributions qui, en mettant en œuvre une documentation le plus souvent encore inédite, étudient comment, dans des contextes historiques, culturels et géographiques différents, ces relations complexes se sont déployées. Les contributions permettent ainsi de mieux apprécier dans quelles circonstances et selon quelles modalités plusieurs prédicateurs ont été amenés à proposer dans leurs sermons une réflexion de nature politique censée contribuer à la formation de l’opinion des puissants et des fidèles en général. Elles montrent aussi quelques-unes des voies qui permettent d’explorer un domaine de recherche qui n’a suscité jusqu’ici qu’un nombre limités de travaux, mais dont la connaissance est sans aucun doute indispensable pour mieux comprendre la complexité des sociétés médiévales.

Editing as an academic mode of work has had a variable ‘press’ - it is often seen as just plumbing. But without editions no historian of whatever critical persuasion could operate. Texts that are not edited are effectively invisible.

The advent of electronic means of text production has also raised new possibilities and new problems that need to be openly considered rather than ignored. The papers in this volume reflect those concerns, and explore the ways forward. How do the best editorial procedures of the past get transmitted to the future? A distinguished line-up of experienced editors and younger scholars actively grappling with these issues reflect on their engagement with the challenges of textual theory and editorial practice.

No single solution emerges as applicable to all texts and for all editions; the individual characteristics of each text and its transmission, together with the intended audience of each edition, emerge as primary areas for consideration.

This book gathers new work by scholars who share a common interest not only in the controversial texts of the period between 1378 and 1536, but also in how the use, geographical movement, and manipulation of texts contributed materially to the formation of groups and group identities. The period covered spans the traditional medieval/early modern divide and the concomitant transition from manuscript to print. The years between the eruption of the Great Schism and the outbreak of European reformations witnessed unprecedented rifts in communities, institutions, and alliances. Yet while the crises of this period gave rise to division, they also prompted new groups to coalesce, resulting in realignments of communication networks, readership, and textual circulation in Europe. The Councils of Constance and Basel facilitated the production and dissemination of vast quantities of documents. Movements challenging the Roman Church and efforts to reform the Church from within provoked a torrent of persuasive and polemical writings which gained further momentum with the introduction of printing. These new situations also fostered the development and expression of group identities, defined by doctrine, opposition, vernacularity, and a burgeoning sense of national self-consciousness. Religious Controversy in Europe, 1378-1536 examines the textual and material circumstances of these developments.

Despite their large number and their potential significance for our understanding of the genesis of Christian thought and practice, early medieval sermons have been conspicuously neglected by modern scholarship. Taking their lead from recent studies that transformed our understanding of the post-Roman world, the various contributors to this collection of essays explore a wide range of topics related to the composition, transmission, and dissemination of sermons and homiliaries in the early medieval West. Some papers focus on individual sermons in an attempt to identify their authors and aims; others examine the manuscript evidence for the compilation and transmission of composite homiliaries; and a few question our concept of early medieval sermons as a peculiar genre that merits special attention. By bringing early medieval sermons into the centre of discussion this volume, which is the first book dedicated to early medieval sermons and homiliaries, makes an important contribution to our understanding of the religious culture of the early medieval West. This multi-lingual collection of papers examines a plethora of texts which, in the past, were pushed to the margins of historical research, and offers a fresh look at these works in their own cultural, religious, and social context.

How were identities created in the early Middle Ages and when did they matter? This book explores different types of sources to understand the ways in which they contributed to making ethnic and religious communities meaningful: historiography and hagiography, biblical exegesis and works of theology, sermons and letters. Thus, it sets out to widen the horizon of current debates on ethnicity and identity. The Christianization and dissolution of the Roman Empire had provoked a crisis of traditional identities and opened new spaces for identification. What were the textual resources on which new communities could rely, however precariously? Biblical models and Christian discourses could be used for a variety of aims and identifications, and the volume provides some exemplary analyses of these distinct voices. Barbarian polities developed in a rich and varied framework of textual ‘strategies of identification’. The contributions reconstruct some of this discursive matrix and its development from the age of Augustine to the Carolingians. In the course of this process, ethnicity and religion were amalgamated in a new way that became fundamental for European history, and acquired an important political role in the post-Roman kingdoms. The extensive introduction not only draws together the individual studies, but also addresses fundamental issues of the definition of ethnicity, and of the relationship between discourses and practices of identity. It offers a methodological basis that is valid for studies of identity in general.

Some modern commentators welcome the alleged approach of the “post-human” era as a liberation from the constraints of essentialist identity. Others lament it as a harbinger of the death of the soul. But both groups will find it instructive to consider that the nature of humanity has always been a contested topic. The chapters collected here suggest that the emergence of the modern idea of the human was at least as fraught a process as its putative demise.

David Hawkes and Richard G. Newhauser have selected a wide array of contributions for this volume. Renowned scholars from several disciplines have produced a series of fascinating essays, which concentrate on the relation between humanity and nature as it was understood in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The issues they examine range from poaching to flatulence, from Aztec animal symbolism to Jesus’s grandmother, from tulips to the Trinity.

Some chapters examine a wide variety of popular texts, from the bloody legend of Robert the Devil to the sinister magic of the Anglo-Saxon “wen charm”, from Lutheran Books of Nature to Emperor Maximillian’s wedding. The result is a book that raises intriguing implications for the modern struggle over the meaning of mankind.

Translation studies centering on medieval texts have prompted new ways to look at the texts themselves, but also at the exchange and transmission of culture in the European Middle Ages, inside and outside Europe. The present volume reflects, in the range and scope of its essays, the itinerant nature of the Medieval Translator Conference, at the same time inviting readers to reflect on the geography of medieval translation. By dividing the essays presented here into four groups, the volume highlights lines of communication and shifts in areas of interest, connecting the migrating nature of the translated texts to the cultural, political and linguistic factors underlying the translation process. Translation was, in each case under discussion, the result or the by-product of a transnational movement that prompted the circulation of ideas and texts within religious and/or political discussion and exchange.

Thus the volume opens with a group of contributions discussing the cultural exchange between Western Europe and the Middle East, identifying the pivotal role of Church councils, aristocratic courts, and monasteries in the production of translation. The following section concentrates on the literary exchanges between three close geographical and cultural areas, today identifiable with France, Italy and England, allowing us to re-think traditional hypotheses on sites of literary production, and to reflect on the triangulation of language and manuscript exchange. From this triangulation the book moves into a closer discussion of translations produced in England, showing in the variety and chronological span covered by the contributions the development of a rich cultural tradition in constant dialogue with Latin as well as contemporary vernaculars. The final essays offer a liminal view, considering texts translated into non-literary forms, or the role played by the onset of printing in the dissemination of translation, thus highlighting the continuity and closeness of medieval translation with the Renaissance.

Alessandra Petrina is Associate Professor of English Literature at the Università degli Studi di Padova, Italy. She has published extensively on late-medieval and Renaissance literature and intellectual history, as well as on modern children’s literature, and edited a number of volumes on early modern English culture.

The present collection explores a hitherto understudied body of Nordic medieval literature which, although overlooked in traditional, language-based narratives, was in fact crucial in shaping social and religious identities.

By drawing on the ‘performance turn’ in cultural studies, the volume identifies a number of minor and peripheral literary forms and texts that had a vital connection to ritual and ritualized speech. These neglected traditions therefore offer an alternative insight into Nordic literary life and the sets of cultural expression, or storyworlds, underlying Nordic culture.

The collected studies explore different aspects of verbal performances as a primary vehicle for the Nordic storyworlds, with a preference for the Christian over the pagan traditions. Emphasis is placed on Latin, Old Norse, and Finnish traditions that were retold and reproduced over time. These ‘living’ literary forms highlight the importance of non-canonical texts for the interpretation of contact between the peripheries and centres of Nordic culture. Through the focus on the interaction between Latin and the vernacular, between eastern Baltic and western Latin influences, and between ritual and speech in religious practice, this collection demonstrates the importance of ‘minor’ texts for the re-construction of medieval Nordic culture and history.

The studies brought together in this volume provide an important contribution to the history of ḏimmī-s in the medieval dār al-islām, and more generally to the legal history of religious minorities in medieval societies. The central question addressed is the legal status accorded to ḏimmī-s (Jews and Christians) in the Muslim law in the medieval Muslim west (the Maghreb and Muslim Spain). The scholars whose work is brought together in these pages have dealt with a rich and complex variety of legal sources. Many of the texts are from the Mālikī legal tradition; they include fiqh, fatwā-s, ḥisba manuals. These texts function as the building blocks of the legal framework in which jurists and rulers of Maghrebi and Peninsular societies worked. The very richness and complexity of these texts, as well as the variety of responses that they solicited, refute the textbook idea of a monolithic ḏimmī system, supposedly based on the Pact of ‘Umar, applied throughout the Muslim world. In fact when one looks closely at the early legal texts or chronicles from both the Mashreq and the Maghreb, there is little evidence for a standard, uniform ḏimmī system, but rather a wide variety of local adaptations. The articles in this volume provide numerous examples of the richness and complexity of interreligious relations in Medieval Islam and the reactions of jurists to those relations.