The articles in this volume, by scholars all pursuing careers in the United States, concern the theoretical approaches and methods of early medieval studies. Most of the issues examined span the period from roughly 400 to 1000 CE and regions stretching from westernmost Eurasia to the Black Sea and the Baltic. This is the first volume of essays explicitly to reassess the heuristic structures and methodologies of research on "early medieval Europe." Because of its geographic, chronological, thematic, and methodological diversity and scope, the collection also showcases the breadth of early medieval studies currently practiced in the United States.

The eighth-century English missionary and church reformer Boniface was a highly influential figure in early medieval Europe. His career in what is now Germany, France, and the Netherlands is attested in an exceptional number of textual sources: a correspondence of 150 letters, Latin poetry, church council records, and other documents. Numerous saints’ lives and modern devotional materials further reveal how he was and is remembered by the religious communities that claim him as a foundational figure. This volume comprises the latest scholarship on Boniface and his fellow missionaries, examining the written materials associated with Boniface, his impacts on the regions of Europe where he worked (Hessia, Thuringia, Bavaria, Frisia, and Francia), and the development of his cult in the Middle Ages and today. Contributors: Michel Aaij, John-Henry Clay, Michael Glatthaar, Shannon Godlove, Leanne Good, Petra Kehl, Felice Lifshitz, Rob Meens, Michael Edward Moore, Marco Mostert, James Palmer, Janneke Raaijmakers, Rudolf Schieffer, Emily Thornbury, Siegfried Weichlein, and Barbara Yorke.

This richly illustrated study addresses the essential first steps in the development of the new phenomenon of the illuminated book, which innovatively introduced colourful large letters and ornamental frames as guides for the reader's access to the text. Tracing their surprising origins within late Roman reading practices, Lawrence Nees shows how these decorative features stand as ancestors to features of printed and electronic books we take for granted today, including font choice, word spacing, punctuation and sentence capitalisation. Two hundred photographs, nearly all in colour, illustrate and document the decisive change in design from ancient to medieval books. Featuring an extended discussion of the importance of race and ethnicity in twentieth-century historiography, this book argues that the first steps in the development of this new style of book were taken on the European continent within classical practices of reading and writing, and not as, usually presented, among the non-Roman 'barbarians'.

Religious Women in Early Carolingian Francia, a groundbreaking study of the intellectual and monastic culture of the Main Valley during the eighth century, looks closely at a group of manuscripts associated with some of the best-known personalities of the European Middle Ages, including Boniface of Mainz and his “beloved,”abbess Leoba of Tauberbischofsheim. This is the first study of these “Anglo-Saxon missionaries to Germany” to delve into the details of their lives by studying the manuscripts that were produced in their scriptoria and used in their communities. The author explores how one group of religious women helped to shape the culture of medieval Europe through the texts they wrote and copied, as well as through their editorial interventions. Using compelling manuscript evidence, she argues that the content of the women’s books was overwhelmingly gender-egalitarian and frequently feminist (i.e., resistant to patriarchal ideas). This intriguing book provides unprecedented glimpses into the “feminist consciousness” of the women’s and mixed-sex communities that flourished in the early Middle Ages.

This volume brings together a team of leading scholars in Spanish studies to interrogate the contemporary significance of the medieval past, offering a counterbalance to intellectual withdrawal from urgent public debates.

This collection brings together twelve essays published between 1988 and 2014, two of which are here translated into English from (respectively) their original French or German. All the essays use gender as the main category of analysis, whether of late ancient or early medieval texts or of modern medievalist films. The historical studies of medieval Europe emphasize the use of manuscript-level evidence, that is, actual sources from the period in question; arguably, this approach provides a more accurate understanding of the period than does work done on the basis of printed and edited sources. Furthermore, many of the manuscript-based essays specifically exploit liturgical or liturgy-adjacent materials; this is an area of research and a type of manuscript that has rarely been approached through a gendered lens. Meanwhile, the cinematic medievalism essays focus on the processes of remediation and adaptation, searching specifically for points at which filmmaking teams diverged from their sources as evidence for the main goals of the films (while also attending to production contexts and to reception). The juxtaposition in a single collection of scholarship on medieval manuscripts and modern movies illustrates how period specialists can contribute to conversations in the field of (historical) film studies. The book will be of interest to historians of women, gender, Christian liturgy, medieval Europe, medievalism, and historical film. (CS 1110).

Charlemagne's Early Campaigns is the first book-length study of Charlemagne at war and its focus on the period 768-777 makes clear that the topic, for his forty-six year reign, is immense. The neglect of Charlemagne's campaigns and the diplomacy that undergirded them has truncated our understanding of the creation of the Carolingian empire and the great success enjoyed by its leader, who ranks with Frederick the Great and Napoleon among Europe's best. The critical deployment here of the numerous narrative and documentary sources combined with the systematic use of the immense corpus of archaeological evidence, much of which the result of excavations undertaken since World War II, is applied here, in detail, for the first time in order to broaden our understanding of Charlemagne's military strategy and campaign tactics. Charlemagne and his advisers emerge as very careful planners, with a thorough understanding of Roman military thinking, who were dedicated to the use of overwhelming force in order to win whenever possible without undertaking bloody combat. Charlemagne emerges from this study, to paraphrase a observation attributed to Scipio Africanus, as a military commander and not a warrior.