This book has two main aims. First, the book will discuss various modes ofstudying and defining the medieval self. This will encompass a wide range ofsource material from Scandinavia,c. 800–1500, such as archaeological, archi-tectural and artistic, documentary and literary sources, and runic inscriptions.The second main aim of the book will be to discuss what processes and practi-ces the self…
Until recently relations among siblings did not attract much interest among scholars studying the history of the early medieval family. They were mentioned primarily in discussions of marriage strategies used to safeguard the interests of family groups and in analyses of relations between families linked by marriage. Fraternal relations appeared as a research topic …
A recent report by the World Meteorological Organization updated to January 2022 showed that around 11% of the world’s population has no access to sufficiently safe sources of water. In addition, drought in some regions of Africa, Central Asia and the American continent is hastening the expansion of the desert belts and is causing serious difficulties in a growing…
This book is devoted to an imposing world map, printed on twelve sheets and rich in detail, that was designed by the Germancartographer Martin Waldseemüller in 1516, whose only surviving exemplar is in the Jay I. Kislak Collection at the Libraryof Congress. This map, theCarta marina, has tended to live in the shadow of Waldseemüller’s earlier world map, thatprinted in 1507, which is famous …
On 15 September 1622, the poet, onetime MP, lawyer and cleric JohnDonne delivered a sermon in the grounds of the old cathedral at St Paul’sCross, in which he argued the importance of religion to the govern-mental success of the Virginia Company (VC). Donne demonstrated,in his inimitable style, that structured religious governance would leadto the company successfully establishing control over…
Early fifteenth-century travellers such as Spanish writer Pero Tafur praised the city of Bruges because of its liveliness and economic activity: ‘Bruges was a large and wealthy city, and one of the greatest markets of the world [...] anyone who has mon-ey, and wished to spend it, will find in this town alone everything which the world produces’.1 Bruges had played an important…
This book examines one of the most significant aspects of popular engagement with the past in twentieth-century Britain. Historical pag-eants began as an Edwardian craze, but persisted as important events in communities and organisations across Britain for much of the next hundred years. Although popular interest in pageantry has undoubtedly declined, re…
Darren Anderton played 30 times for the England men’s national football team and made 299 Premier League appearances for Tottenham Hotspur. To fans of a certain age, he is known by another name: ‘Sicknote’. ‘I had a migraine and was throwing up before a Portsmouth game’, recounted Anderton in 2016, some eight years after his final Football League match…
In 2019, Juha Marttila, the President of the Central Union of Agricultural Pro-ducers and Forest Owners (MTK) in Finland, expressed his astonishment in apress interview about the increasing public criticism of intensive meat and dairyproduction:“The cow has kept us alive for some ten thousand years, so how comeit has now been made a criminal?”1He was quite right about the long interrela-tio…
Schools of art represent one of the building blocks of art history. The notion of a school of art emerged in artistic discourse and disseminated across various countries in Europe during the early modern period. Whilst a school of art essentially denotes a group of artists or artworks, it came to be configured in multiple ways, encompassing different meanings of learning, origin, style, or nati…
In the eighteenth century Russia was a newcomer to the familiar concert of European nations, an exciting or worrying outsider among the established powers. In 1703 Tsar Peter Alekseevich, Peter I, the Great, founded a new city, St Petersburg, at the eastern end of the Baltic Sea. Thereby, in the famous words of Russia’s national poet Aleksandr Pushkin, he …
Humans, represented by members of genus Homo, have been living in Europe for around 1.5 million years. But who were they? How did they survive? In short, what kinds of ‘humans’ were these? These are the fundamental questions addressed, though the lens of the changing seasons, in the pages that follow. But why ask these questions and why should we be interested…
Grand, extravagant, magnificent, scandalous, corrupt, political, personal, fractious; these are terms often associated with the medieval and early modern courts. Moreover, the court constituted a forceful nexus in the social world, which was central to the legitimacy and authority of rulership. As such, courts shaped European politics and culture: architecture, art, fashion, patronage, and cult…
According to one narrative, that received almost canonical status a century ago with Francis Haverfield, the orthogonal grid was the most important development of ancient town planning, embodying values of civilization in contrast to barbarism, diffused in particular by hundreds of Roman colonial foundations, and its main legacy to subsequent urban development was the model of the grid city, sp…
I remember being interested in Dutch football from a young age. The first football match I can remember watching was the Italia 1990 World Cup match between England and the Netherlands – although saying I remember ‘watching’ it is a little inaccurate. To be honest, until I looked up the score, while writing this, I could not remember who had won (actua…