This collection explores multiple artefactual, visual, textual and conceptual adaptations, developments and exchanges across the medieval world in the context of their contemporary and subsequent re-appropriations.

Women’s Lives presents essays on the ways in which the lives and voices of women permeated medieval literature and culture. The ubiquity of women amongst the medieval canon provides an opportunity for considering a different sphere of medieval culture and power that is frequently not given the attention it requires. The reception and use of female figures from this period has proven influential as subjects in literary, political, and social writings; the lives of medieval women may be read as models of positive transgression, and their representation and reception make powerful arguments for equality, agency and authority on behalf of the writers who employed them. The volume includes essays on well-known medieval women, such as Hildegard of Bingen and Teresa of Cartagena, as well as women less-known to scholars of the European Middle Ages, such as Al-Kāhina and Liang Hongyu. Each essay is directly related to the work of Elizabeth Petroff, a scholar of Medieval Women Mystics who helped recover texts written by medieval women.

In Anglophone literature, historical questions about urban, socio-economic, political, religious, and cultural development have often been answered using Anglo-French, Anglo-Low Countries, and Anglo-Italian paradigms and sources. Medieval Germany has been largely overlooked, seen as a peripheral and irrelevant anomaly. Conversely, scholars from the German Rhineland have mostly remained within the traditions of civic public history and Landesgeschichte. As a result, they rarely engage with the historical questions raised in wider European discourses. This volume challenges these historiographical propensities by offering a fresh perspective on medieval urban Germany. It aims to integrate Cologne and the Rhineland more accurately and equitably into the wider histories of medieval Europe. The book engages with historical questions of wider relevance across both German and European medieval histories. It invites all scholars and students of medieval Europe to utilize Cologne as a key source for their research and writing.

In this volume the McGill University Research Group on Transmission, Translation, and Transformation in Medieval Cultures and their collaborators initiate a new reflection on the dynamics involved in receiving texts and ideas from antiquity or from other contemporary cultures. For all their historic specificity, the western European, Arab/Islamic and Jewish civilizations of the Middle Ages were nonetheless co-participants in a complex web of cultural transmission that operated via translation and inevitably involved the transformation of what had been received. This three-fold process is what defines medieval intellectual history. Every act of transmission presumes the existence of some 'efficient cause' - a translation, a commentary, a book, a library, etc. Such vehicles of transmission, however, are not passive containers in which cultural products are transported. On the contrary: the vehicles themselves select, shape, and transform the material transmitted, making ancient or alien cultural products usable and attractive in another milieu. The case studies contained in this volume attempt to bring these larger processes into the foreground.They lay the groundwork for a new intellectual history of medieval civilizations in all their variety, based on the core premise that these shared not only a cultural heritage from antiquity but, more importantly, a broadly comparable 'operating system' for engaging with that heritage.Each was a culture of transmission, claiming ownership over the prestigious knowledge inherited from the past. Each depended on translation. Finally, each transformed what it appropriated.

Scholarship often treats the post-Roman art produced in central and north-western Europe as representative of the pagan identities of the new 'Germanic' rulers of the early medieval world. In this book, Matthias Friedrich offers a critical reevaluation of the ethnic and religious categories of art that still inform our understanding of early medieval art and archaeology. He scrutinises early medieval visual culture by combining archaeological approaches with art historical methods based on contemporary theory. Friedrich examines the transformation of Roman imperial images, together with the contemporary, highly ornamented material culture that is epitomized by 'animal art.' Through a rigorous analysis of a range of objects, he demonstrates how these pathways produced an aesthetic that promoted variety (varietas), a cross-cultural concept that bridged the various ethnic and religious identities of post-Roman Europe and the Mediterranean worlds.

The medieval treasure house, consisting of sacristy, vestry and treasure rooms was the depository for the ecclesiastical treasure belonging to a church, holy vessels, vestments, altar hangings, candlesticks and priceless liturgical books and reliquaries. It was carefully designed to convey the message of its status and function. A book devoted to these medieval museums which housed such precious materials is long overdue. Ironically, the interest in the objects that they conserved has often resulted in ecclesiastical treasure being removed to new museums, leaving their former places of protection in need of protection themselves.

A reappraisal of the Vikings. The ultimate goal of Forgotten Vikings is to add to the corpus of popular history/overview books of the Viking Age.