Böcker utgivna av Arc Humanities Press

Presents a collection of the Faroese ballads about the Volsung hero Sigurðr fafnisbani, the pre-eminent dragon slaying hero of the Germanic Middle Ages, in English translation and with an in-depth introduction.

This book explores shared religious practices among Jews, Christians, and Muslims, focusing primarily on the medieval Mediterranean.

A new cultural history of the natural world in the early medieval Latin West, focusing on the manuscripts of the Physiologus, the foundation of the medieval bestiary.

A study of Jewish-Christian interaction in the Middle Ages in the eastern Mediterranean, Central Asia, the Red Sea, and India through material culture.

This book explores the origins and diffusion of the Prester John legend and its influence on theology, politics, and the geographic imagination in the Middle Ages. Includes a new translation of the B recension of The Letter of Prester John.

An empirical study on construction of identity by members of "monastic" communities across a plurality of religious traditions in pre-modern Europe and Asia.

This pioneering monograph provocatively explodes current research paradigms for the modern and the medieval by showing that Twitter shares key similarities with medieval literary forms, texts, and narrative techniques. Analyzing tweets with medieval texts, and vice versa, Spencer-Hall initiates readers into an innovative methodology of interdisciplinary literary criticism, posing vital questions about the politics of medievalism today. Chapters include brand-new readings of The Owl and the Nightingale, the Chastelaine de Vergi, and Marie de France's Laüstic, and arresting insights into troubadour style, Margery Kempe, and #MedievalTwitter. The book culminates in a medieval(ist) reading of Twitter's premature demise, and Elon Musk's medievalism. Throughout, points of contact and divergence are dissected, re-contextualizing the socio-cultural meaning of communication and texts across the temporal divide.

Grounded in intersectional feminist interpretive frameworks, Women's Restorative Medievalisms examines how contemporary women writers engage the premodern past to animate intertwined histories of oppression and resistance in service of visionary futures.

This book looks afresh at a key stage in Japan's global transformation from medieval to early modern.

This volume focuses on female participation--as performers, scribes, composers, and patrons--in ceremonial performances at Barking Abbey, east of London, in the late Middle Ages and in 21st-century revival.

A comprehensive and up-to-date re-examination of over 500 Norse-derived terms in the Ormulum, building on the Gersum typology, exploring the impact of Anglo-Scandinavian on early English.

Translated from German, this book examines diverse narratives of infertility and childlessness in vernacular stories, legends, and romances from the Middle Ages.

Medievalism in Slavic culture is inherently political. This volume addresses a range of popular medievalisms in Central and Eastern Europe, including the lived medievalism of historical reenactments, the political medievalism of governance and dissent, and the medievalist creativity of texts, music, and film.

While the tale of Roberto Busa and the Index Thomisticus has become an origin myth for Digital Medieval Studies, less attention has been paid to the critical role of the World Wide Web as a platform and impetus for this digital turn. This volume focuses on early Medieval Studies research created with, operating through, and dependent upon the internet itself, profiling ground-breaking projects that define the genres of internet-based scholarship we now take for granted, including sourcebooks, searchable databases, digital editions and corpora, and born-digital medieval scholarship. The collection reveals how internet-based products rely upon and support a more collaborative model of research, teaching, and learning in Medieval Studies than the more individualistic, discrete one that defined earlier work in the field.

Power in the Choson dynasty of Korea (1392-1910) was shared amongst various political actors, often including female heads of royal households, namely queen dowagers. Following a diachronic approach, several case studies are examined to illustrate the extent and limits of the queen dowagers' authority. Evidence shows that queen dowagers grew more confident and more influential over the course of the dynasty, especially as more precedents concerning their exercise of power were added to the dynasty's Veritable Records. While queen dowagers usually refrained from getting involved in day-to-day politics, some had the power to order the dethronement of not one, but two Korean kings and, by the nineteenth century, often ruled themselves during extensive periods of regency.

This volume in The Medieval Globe Books series surveys the distinctive but also shared rhetorical practices that characterize written requests for intercession, support, and patronage across many languages, cultures, and forms of interaction. Examples range from mundane requests to diplomatic negotiations, preserved in a variety of material media: potsherds, papyrus, paper, administrative handbooks, chronicles, and letter collections. Each contribution focuses on one textual sample or corpus of letters, providing new English translations as well as editions of the original texts in cases where no previous edition is available. Together, they represent the textual conventions and innovations of learned and vernacular epistolary traditions from many regions of North Africa and Eurasia, from the eighth to the fifteenth centuries CE.

This collection brings together current research into the development of the market for pre-modern manuscripts. Between 1890 and 1945 thousands of manuscripts made in Europe before 1600 appeared on the market. Many entered the collections in which they have remained, shaping where and how we encounter the books today. These collections included libraries that bear their founders' names, as well as national and regional public libraries. The choices of the super-rich shaped their collections and determined what was available to those with fewer resources. In addition, wealthy collectors sponsored scholarship on their manuscripts and participated in exhibitions, raising the profile of some books. This volume examines the collectors, dealers, and scholars who engaged with pre-modern books, and the cultural context of the manuscript trade in this era.

The Book of Roger is a twelfth-century Arabic geographical treatise commissioned by King Roger II of Sicily and compiled by the Muslim polymath al-Idrisi. On its completion in around 1157 it was the most detailed description of the known world produced up to that point. This translation covers Sicily, the seat of King Roger's government, along with the other parts of the Norman kingdom in the South: southern Italy, the Adriatic, and Ifriqiya, as well as the book's preface. Presented in English translation for the first time this text offers insight into Roger's motivation in commissioning such an endeavour, and the relationship between king and scholar. A comprehensive introduction explores what this important work tells us about the Norman kingdom in the South in the Middle Ages, while a series of detailed maps will enhance the reader's appreciation of the richness of al-Idrisi's data.

This book explores the profound impact the Battle of Lyndanise in 1219 (on the site of Tallinn today) had on both Denmark and Estonia from the thirteenth century to the present day.

This facing-page Latin and English edition of the customary for the shrine of St. Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral, provides valuable insights into the management of one of the most popular pilgrimage sites in Europe.

The Battle of Manzikert on August 26, 1071 is widely regarded as one of the most significant turning points in medieval history, frequently presented as the culmination of a Turco-Islamic assault upon the Byzantine bulwark of a Christian world struggling for survival. Emperor Romanus IV's campaigns between 1068 and 1071 do, in many ways, represent the empire's fightback against an enemy that for decades had penetrated deep into Asia Minor, its heartland and strategic bulwark. Yet Manzikert was not a disaster. This book examines the geopolitical background and the origins of the campaign that led to the battle, the main protagonists, and their strategies and battle tactics. It also evaluates the primary sources and the enduring legacy of the battle, for both the Greek and Turkish historiography of the twentieth century.

Jewish presence in the Malabar Coast of southwestern India is attested since the ninth century in various sources and diverse languages. Malabar Jewry emerged out of the Indian Ocean maritime trade networks that connected people and communities in West and South Asia forging kinship alliances and cross-cultural exchange. This book traces the evolution of Malabar Jewry in the history of contact and exchange that gave rise to Indo-Arab coastal communities in the period between 849 and 1489.

Caroline Bergvall's celebrated trilogy of interdisciplinary medievalist texts and projects--Meddle English (2011), Drift (2014), and Alisoun Sings (2019)--documents methods of reading and making that are poetically and politically alert, critically and culturally aware, linguistically attuned, and historically engaged. Drawing on the wide-ranging body of criticism dedicated to Bergvall's work and material from Bergvall's archive, together with newly commissioned texts by scholars, theorists, linguists, translators, and poets, this book situates the trilogy in relation to key themes including mixed temporalities; interdisciplinarity and performance; art and activism; and the geopolitical, psychosexual, and social complexities of subjectivity. It follows routes laid down by the trilogy to move between the medieval past and our contemporary moment to uncover new forms of encounter and exchange.

This book addresses Christendom's eastern frontier, the principality of Moldavia: its political, economic, and cultural history from its formation in 1359 to the early sixteenth century.

In a young American republic seeking to define itself in relation to European cultural and political models past and present, it was assumed that the history of Europe's peoples could be tracked across time over the longue durée. From this perspective, even the barbarous long-haired kings of the distant Merovingian era helped to define the political and cultural identity of a France--and, indeed, a Europe--whose actions Americans recognized as relevant to their own republic. Americans saw medieval parallels not only in the actions of successive French regimes, but in contemporary transatlantic issues of anxiety, including the adjudication of claims of political legitimacy and the debate over the perpetuation of racial slavery. That early American writers located their own meanings in the history of Merovingian Francia is indicative of a less linear, and more diverse and transnational, historiography than previously recognized.

This book explores the ways in which contemporary authors respond to and rework key aspects of Old Norse history and viking culture for young twenty-first-century audiences. Why are contemporary authors and audiences so manifestly attracted to the viking past? In what ways do writers respond to Norse sources? How do the narratives they tell reflect our beliefs about and desires for the past, our constructions of childhood and adolescence, our anxieties around gender, sexuality, and ethnicity? How do these texts engage with a future occluded by apocalyptic ecological threat? David Clark explores these questions through readings of a rich body of diverse material which retells, updates, and transforms Norse culture. The volume contextualizes Norse medievalism and explores how thematic foci on gender, sexuality, disability, and ethnicity relate to contemporary concerns around these topics, and the construction of childhood.

This book examines feminist textual and cinematic engagements with the idea of the Middle Ages in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, arguing that the idea of the medieval past is central to the work of novelists and directors interested in embodiment and vulnerability. Careful and illuminating analysis of particular moments in fiction, film, and political discourse dismantles the false binary between popular and intellectual medievalisms, which rests on gendered understandings of genre and audience, while demonstrating that masculinist or patriarchal medievalisms have an equal but understudied counterpart. The book's first three chapters cover Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey and its afterlives, the final works of Virginia Woolf, and late twentieth-century film and music videos from the United States. The final chapter examines the treatment of women's bodies and vulnerability in both political theory and recent electoral politics, arguing that they share a common thread of misogyny rooted in the idea of the medieval past, and that one way to challenge that misogyny is by looking at complex feminist engagements with that same past, both real and imagined.

This monograph examines how Korean women and men came to engage with Catholic missions during Europe's late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a profoundly volatile period in East Asian history during which political, cultural, and social disruption created opportunities for new interactions in the region. It analyzes the nature of that engagement, as women and men became both subjects for, and agents of, catechizing practices. As their evangelization, experience of faith, proselytizing, and suffering were recorded in mission archives, the monograph explores contact between Catholic Christianity and Korean women in particular. Broomhall demonstrates how gender ideologies shaped interactions between missionary men and Korean women, and how women's experiences would come to be narrated, circulated, and memorialized.