Browse Items (72 total)

Illuminating their breadth and diversity, this book presents a comprehensive and multidisciplinary view of legal documents and their manifold forms, uses, materialities and meanings. In 1951, Suzanne Briet, a librarian at the Bibliotheque Nationale…

Beyond Words accompanies a collaborative exhibition held at the McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College; Harvard University’s Houghton Library; and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Featuring illuminated manuscripts from nineteen Boston-area…

Since the earliest reception of the Orlando Furioso, the episodes Ariosto set in and around the British Isles have fascinated readers and inspired iconic artistic depictions. This chapter explores these episodes, focusing on Ariosto’s manipulation of…

From the time of their earliest texts in the vernacular, Icelanders were interested in the semioticization of their landscape, the mapping of nature into culture by inscribing it with memories from the settlement of the island during the Viking Age.…

The future of humanity is urban, and knowledge of urbanism’s deep past is critical for us all to navigate that future. The time has come for archaeologists to rethink this global phenomenon by asking what urbanism is and, more to the point, was. Can…

This fascinating volume brings together scholars from a wide range of disciplines, including literary studies, history, geography, and archaeology, to investigate questions of space, place, and identity in the medieval city. Using medieval Chester as…

Mesoamerica covers a vast geographic area with its deserts, semi-arid upland, and tropical highlands and lowlands, and includes Mexico, Central America, and parts of the Southwest United States. This chapter discusses the impact of climate change in…

As water availability, management and conservation become global challenges, there is now wide consensus that historical knowledge can provide crucial information to address present crises, offering unique opportunities to appreciate the solutions…

Medieval Arras was a thriving town on the frontier between the kingdom of France and the county of Flanders, and home to Europe's earliest surviving vernacular plays: The Play of St. Nicholas, The Courtly Lad of Arras, The Boy and the Blind Man, The…

Awarded the 2009 J. B. Jackson Book Prize from the Foundation for Landscape Studies "In the course of my research," writes D. Fairchild Ruggles, "I devoured Arabic agricultural manuals from the tenth through the fourteenth centuries. I love…

Sustainable practices in the present are typically designed to mitigate immediate concerns over decadal timespans. In the face of exponential population growth, overuse of resources, and global climate change, this time span is inadequate; longer,…

The Program in Medieval Studies planned a major conference to celebrate its new global strengths and to further the reach, significance, and meaning of medieval studies. In the first decade since its establishment, our Program has become one of the…

The Global Prehumanisms conference, an Interdisciplinary Conference Sponsored by the Program in Medieval Studies, was held on October 18-20, 2018 at the Levis Faculty Center and brought together scholars in a variety of disciplines and institutions…

Trade, Travel, and Exploration: An Encyclopedia is a reference book that covers the peoples, places, technologies, and intellectual concepts that contributed to trade, travel and exploration during the Middle Ages, from the years A.D. 525 to 1492.

Carol Symes is the founding executive editor of The Medieval Globe, the first academic journal to promote a global approach to medieval studies. This biannual publication explores the modes of communication, materials of exchange, and myriad…

Xuanzang (600 - 664 AD) is one of the most important figures of Buddhism, whose travelogue about India and Central Asia (Da Tang Xiyu ji) was widely celebrated. At the same time he is the most important translator of Chinese Buddhism, unique in…

Islamic gardens, with their waterways and beds of plants and trees, are generally regarded as an earthly reflection of paradise. D. Fairchild Ruggles offers a new interpretation, contending that the palace garden was primarily an environmental,…

Through state-backed Catholicism, monolingualism, militarism, and dictatorship, Spain’s fascists earned their reputation for intolerance. It may therefore come as a surprise that 80,000 Moroccans fought at General Franco’s side in the 1930s. What…

The Arthurian legend reached all levels of society in medieval and Renaissance Italy, from princely courts, with their luxury books and frescoed palaces, to the merchant classes and popular audiences in the piazza, who enjoyed shorter retellings in…

This book is an investigation of the foundation and evolution of romance in Iceland. The narrative type arose from the introduction of French narratives into the alien literary environment of Iceland and the acculturation of the import to indigenous…