In the Middle Ages, rolls were ubiquitous as a writing support. While scholars have long examined the texts and images on rolls, they have rarely taken the manuscripts themselves into account. This volume readdresses this imbalance by focusing on the materiality and various usages of rolls in late medieval England and France. Researchers from England, France, Germany and Singapore demonstrate in 11 contributions how this approach can increase our understanding of the rolls and their contents, as well as the contexts in which they were produced and used.

In the Middle Ages, rolls were ubiquitous as a writing support. While scholars have long examined the texts and images on rolls, they have rarely taken the manuscripts themselves into account. This volume readdresses this imbalance by focusing on the materiality and various usages of rolls in late medieval England and France. Researchers from England, France, Germany and Singapore demonstrate in 11 contributions how this approach can increase our understanding of the rolls and their contents, as well as the contexts in which they were produced and used.

The study of medieval chronicles is firmly established as a focus of research in the whole range of disciplines comprising Medieval Studies: literature, history, art history, linguistics, book history, digital humanities, and so forth. Each article in this volume dedicated to Erik Kooper presents a case study, balancing the particulars of the chosen materials with more generalized conclusions about their significance. The resulting collection is an anthology of different approaches in Medieval Chronicle Studies, presenting a rich overview of the geographical, linguistic, chronological and methodological diversity of chronicle research as it has developed in no small part thanks to Erik’s rallying. Contributors are Marie Bláhová, Cristian Bratu, Beth Bryan, Godfried Croenen, Peter Damian-Grint, Kelly DeVries, Isabel Barros Dias, Graeme Dunphy, Márta Font, Chris Given-Wilson, Ryszard Grzesik, Isabelle Guyot-Bachy, Letty Ten Harkel, Michael Hicks, David Hook, Sjoerd Levelt, Julia Marvin, Charles Melville, Firuza Abdullaeva, Martine Meuwese, Sarah Peverley, Jaclyn Rajsic, Lisa Ruch, Françoise Le Saux, Carol Sweetenham, Grischa Vercamer, Alison Williams Lewin, and Jürgen Wolf.

In medieval England, women in labor wrapped birth girdles around their abdomens to protect themselves and their unborn children. These parchment or paper rolls replicated the "girdle relics" of the Virgin Mary and other saints loaned to queens and noblewomen, extending childbirth protection to women of all classes. This book examines the texts and images of nine English birth girdles produced between the reigns of Richard II and Henry VIII. Cultural artifacts of lay devotion within the birthing chamber, the birth girdles offered the solace and promise of faith to the parturient woman and her attendants amid religious dissent, political upheaval, recurring epidemics, and the onset of print.

The final volume in the series synthesizes the research conducted by the Heidelberg Collaborative Research Center 933 (SFB 933). Systematized into six topic areas (reflecting on writing, layout and text/image, memory and the archive, material transformation, sanctification, and rule and administration), the CRC scholars summarize the knowledge gained from 12 years of interdisciplinary work into 35 theses on a theory of material text cultures.

From the series examining the development of music in specific places during particular times, this book looks at ancient and medieval music, from Classical and Christian antiquity to the emergence of the Gregorian chant and the medieval town and Court.