Focusing on visual sources and the cultural landscape, Kersti Markus offers a fresh perspective on the Baltic crusades in Visual Culture and Politics in the Baltic Sea Region, 1100-1250. The book examines how visual propaganda was used by the Danish rulers as an instrument in establishing supremacy in the Baltic Sea region. In recent decades, Danish historians have highlighted the central role of the Valdemar dynasty and the bishops supporting them in the Baltic crusades, but visual sources show how the entire society was mentally prepared for a journey with redemption waiting at the end. A New Jerusalem was being built in Scandinavia, and the crusade to Livonia was conducted under the banner of Christ. See inside the book.

The societies of the lands around the Baltic Sea underwent remarkable changes in the thirteenth century. This book examines aspects of these religious, economical, societal, and institutional innovations, such as the adaption of the Christianity, emergence of urban life, and the development of economic resources.

This book explores coinage and related object types as an important form of material culture that is crucial to interrogating interactions between coloniser and colonised. Money, Coinage and Colonialism is a much overdue treatment of coinage and money in debates around ancient and recent colonial practices. It argues that coinage offers unique opportunities to study interactions and effects of the meeting between colonisers and colonised, as well as the economic, political and ideological interactions between colonial communities and the state of origin. It is argued that the study of coins and other means of exchange may reveal less apparent and under-communicated processes, values and discourses in the study of colonial environments and projects, with commonalities informing a larger "global history" approach. A broad picture is built from numerous case studies, spanning from Classical Greek colonies to European colonial enterprises of the Modern period, exploring colonial histories, settings, ideology and resistance. Particular attention is paid to the role of coins in identity construction; to ambiguity, hybridity and creolisation of monetary objects in colonial contexts; and to specific uses of coins that tell of violence, oppression and resistance as well as of networks, acculturation and globalisation. Composed of chronologically broad and diverse case studies from colonial contexts, this book is for researchers in colonial and post-colonial archaeology as well as archaeological and cultural-historical numismatics.

The region called Livonia (corresponding to modern Estonia and Latvia) emerged out of the rapid transformation caused by the conquest, Christianisation and colonisation on the north-east shore of the Baltic Sea in the late twelfth and the early thirteenth centuries. These radical changes have received increasing scholarly notice over the last few decades. However, less attention has been devoted to the interplay between the new and the old structures and actors in a longer perspective. This volume aims to study these interplays and explores the history of Livonia by concentrating on various actors and networks from the late twelfth to the seventeenth century. But, on a deeper level, the goal is more ambitious: to investigate the foundation of an increasingly complex and heterogeneous society on the medieval and early modern Baltic frontier – ‘the making of Livonia’.

With many excellent books on medieval stained glass available, the reader of this anthology may well ask: “what is the contribution of this collection?” In this book, we have chosen to step away from national, chronological, and regional models. Instead, we started with scholars doing interesting work in stained glass, and called upon colleagues to contribute studies that represent the diversity of approaches to the medium, as well as up-to-date bibliographies for work in the field. Contributors are: Wojciech Balus, Karine Boulanger, Sarah Brown, Elizabeth Carson Pastan, Madeline H. Caviness, Michael W. Cothren, Francesca Dell’Acqua, Uwe Gast, Françoise Gatouillat, Anne Granboulan, Anne F. Harris, Christine Hediger, Michel Hérold, Timothy B. Husband, Alyce A. Jordan, Herbert L. Kessler, David King, Brigitte Kurmann-Schwarz, Claudine Lautier, Ashley J. Laverock, Meredith P. Lillich, Isabelle Pallot-Frossard, Hartmut Scholz, Mary B. Shepard, Ellen M. Shortell, Nancy M. Thompson.

This title is a comprehensive survey of maritime archaeology as seen through the eyes of nearly fifty scholars at a time when maritime archaeology has established itself as a mature branch of archaeology.