This volume examines interdisciplinary boundaries and includes texts focusing on material culture, philological analysis, and historical research. What they all have in common are zones that lie in between, treated not as mere barriers but also as places of exchange in the early Middle Ages. Focusing on borderlands, Continuation or Change uncovers the changing political and military organisations at the time and the significance of the functioning of former borderland areas. The chapters answer how the fiscal and military apparatus were organised, identify the turning points in the division of dynastic power, and assign meaning to the assimilation of certain symbolic and ideological elements of the imperial tradition. Finally, the authors offer answers to what exactly a "statehood without a state" was in regard to semi-peripheral and peripheral areas that were also perceived through the prism of the idea of a world system, network theory, or the concept of so-called negotiating borderlands. Continuation or Change is a useful resource for upper-level undergraduates, postgraduates, and scholars interested in medieval warfare, Eastern European history, medieval border regions, and cross-cultural interaction.

Although the distant origins of medieval Central Europe have enjoyed constant interest among historians, only marginal attention has been paid to the power and political prerequisites for the first Westernization, i.e. the gradual adoption of the values, norms and patterns of behavior of the Latin West by the communities (gentes) around the eastern edge of the Carolingian and subsequently Holy Roman Empires. Such a gap in knowledge, long overlooked, is now being filled by The Making of Medieval Central Europe: Power and Political Prerequisites for the First Westernization, 791-1122. While respecting the state of research and based on an original analysis of the sources, this book offers an informed reflection of a complex dialogue that was initiated after the collapse of the Avar Khaganate at the end of the 8th century and that, by the beginning of the 12th century, gave rise to a Central Europe that was Westernized (i.e. turned toward the West) yet in many ways distinctive. Another and no less important added value of this book is the author's conscious effort to overcome the narrow interpretive matrices defined by the national interests of the time.

This is Volume Two of a two-volume collection that brings together contributions from cultural and military history to offer an examination of religious rites employed in connection with warfare as well as their transformative and power- and identity-building potential across political communities of medieval Northern, Central, and Eastern Europe. Covering the period ca. 900 and 1500, the work takes theoretical, textual and practical approaches to the research on religious warfare, and investigates the connections between, and significance and function of crucial war rituals such as pre-, intra- and postbellum rites, as well as various activities surrounding the military life of individuals, polities, and corporates. Contributors are Robert Antonín, Robert Bubczyk, Dariusz Dąbrowski, Jesse Harrington, Carsten Selch Jensen, Sini Kangas, Radosław Kotecki, Gregory Leighton, Kyle C. Lincoln, Jacek Maciejewski, Yulia Mikhailova, Max Naderer, László Veszprémy, and Dušan Zupka.

The memory of the living and the dead was part of the functioning of monastic and secular communities, dynasties and aristocratic families. The relationship of debitores and fundatores is key to understanding the “mentality” of the era of the formation of Imperium Christianum. The donations made “pro remedio animae nostre et genitoris nostris” indicate the memorial function of transferring the prayer duties of the power elites (or whole groups and communities) to the clergy and illustrate the belief of medieval people in the importance of intercessory prayer. This volume is a memoir of the Piasts and Boleslaw the Brave on the 1000th anniversary of his coronation. It symbolically closes the study of the millennium of the baptism of Poland (966–1966) and opens the study of the early Middle Ages in Poland and Central Europe.

The study of Greco-Roman civilisation is as exciting and innovative today as it has ever been. This intriguing collection of essays by contemporary classicists reveals new discoveries, new interpretations and new ways of exploring the experiences of the ancient world. Through one and a half millennia of literature, politics, philosophy, law, religion and art, the classical world formed the origin of western culture and thought. This book emphasises the many ways in which it continues to engage with contemporary life. Offering a wide variety of authorial style, the chapters range in subject matter from contemporary poets' exploitation of Greek and Latin authors, via newly discovered literary texts and art works, to modern arguments about ancient democracy and slavery, and close readings of the great poets and philosophers of antiquity. This engaging book reflects the current rejuvenation of classical studies and will fascinate anyone with an interest in western history.

The last half century has seen an explosion in the study of late antiquity, which has characterised the period between the third and seventh centuries not as one of catastrophic collapse and ‘decline and fall’, but rather as one of dynamic and positive transformation. Yet research on cities in this period has provoked challenges to this positive picture of late antiquity. This study surveys the nature of this debate, examining problems associated with the sources historians use to examine late antique urbanism, and the discourses and methodological approaches they have constructed from them. It aims to set out the difficulties and opportunities presented by the study of cities in late antiquity in terms of transformations of politics, the economy, and religion, and to show that this period witnessed very real upheaval and dislocation alongside continuity and innovation in cities around the Mediterranean.

In recent years, the 'medieval frontier' has been the subject of extensive research. But the term has been understood in many different ways: political boundaries; fuzzy lines across which trade, religions and ideas cross; attitudes to other peoples and their customs. This book draws attention to the differences between the medieval and modern understanding of frontiers, questioning the traditional use of the concepts of 'frontier' and 'frontier society'. It contributes to the understanding of physical boundaries as well as metaphorical and ideological frontiers, thus providing a background to present-day issues of political and cultural delimitation. In a major introduction, David Abulafia analyses these various ambiguous meanings of the term 'frontier', in political, cultural and religious settings. The articles that follow span Europe from the Baltic to Iberia, from the Canary Islands to central Europe, Byzantium and the Crusader states. The authors ask what was perceived as a frontier during the Middle Ages? What was not seen as a frontier, despite the usage in modern scholarship? The articles focus on a number of themes to elucidate these two main questions. One is medieval ideology. This includes the analysis of medieval formulations of what frontiers should be and how rulers had a duty to defend and/or extend the frontiers; how frontiers were defined (often in a different way in rhetorical-ideological formulations than in practice); and how in certain areas frontier ideologies were created. The other main topic is the emergence of frontiers, how medieval people created frontiers to delimit areas, how they understood and described frontiers. The third theme is that of encounters, and a questioning of medieval attitudes to such encounters. To what extent did medieval observers see a frontier between themselves and other groups, and how does real interaction compare with ideological or narrative formulations of such interaction?