This title is an introduction to Western liturgical resources and a synthesis of their history for more than a millennium. It provides a historical summary, examines the relationship between medieval history and liturgy, suggests new methods of research, and underscores the fruitfulness of an interdisciplinary approach.

In Liturgy, Books and Franciscan Identity in Medieval Umbria, Anna Welch explores how Franciscan friars engaged with manuscript production networks operating in Umbria in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries to produce the missals essential to their liturgical lives. A micro-history of Franciscan liturgical activity, this study reassesses methodologies pertinent to manuscript studies and reflects on both the construction of communal identity through ritual activity and historiographic trends regarding this process. Welch focuses on manuscripts decorated by the ateliers of the Maestro di Deruta-Salerno (active c. 1280) and Maestro Venturella di Pietro (active c. 1317), in particular the Codex Sancti Paschalis, a missal now owned by the Australian Province of the Order of Friars Minor.

This book is the first detailed analysis of an exquisitely illuminated thirteenth-century Parisian manuscript (The Royal Library, Copenhagen) which was owned by Christina of Norway (1234-1262), daughter of Håkon IV and wife of Philip of Castile and León. New information is provided about the Psalter?'s medieval and later components, its liturgical and other functions, missing illuminations and texts, as well as its provenance and date. Furthermore, the stylistic and iconographic similarities between the Psalter and some of the most important manuscripts illuminated in Paris in the Period, like the three-volume Moralized Bibles, are discussed. Suggestions also are made about the meanings the texts and images might have had for their intended audience.

The story of the mitre began during the 11th-century church reform movements and was, surprisingly, inspired by a popular pastime. After a thousand years of bare heads, the Church finally had an official hat, signaling newly-structured internal dynamics, an increase in power and influence in society, and greater parity with secular leaders.

This title addresses the issue of women in the mediaeval church and their role in the rise of reform movements in the 13th century.

The first major study of the relationship between liturgy and historiography in early medieval Rus.