Medieval Paris was not simply a royal capital, a university town or a city of magnificent churches. It was also a crowded and constantly changing urban landscape
Category: Medieval Books
Constructing the Medieval Maritime State of Islamic Denia
How did a small Islamic principality on the eastern coast of Spain - Islamic Denia - become a major maritime power in the eleventh-century Mediterranean? A new study explores how warfare, commerce, slavery and cultural connections helped forge a medieval state
Early Medieval Venice – How a City Emerged from the Lagoons
How did a collection of marshy islands on the northern Adriatic coast become one of medieval Europe's most remarkable cities? A new study challenges the familiar story of Venice's origins
Repentance and Social Welfare in Renaissance Florence
Where did you go if you were a prostitute in Late Medieval Florence? The obvious place was the convent, Sant’Elisabetta delle Convertite, dedicated to enrole you in a life of penitence.
Prostitution, Repentance and Social Welfare in Renaissance Florence: The Monastery of Sant’Elisabetta delle Convertite
By Gillian Jack
University of London Press 2026
ABSTRACT:
From the fourteenth century, Florentine women seeking to leave prostitution could enter Sant’Elisabetta delle Convertite, a monastery dedicated to repentance. Its long life – more than 500 years – made it a meeting point for religious ideals, municipal government and the precarious circumstances of women with limited economic options. The institution cannot be understood simply as a place of private redemption: it also formed part of the city’s response to poverty, sexuality and civic order. Witness the splendid Renaissance art, which was donated to the convent intended to inspire the inmates to lifelong repentance by recounting the life history of St. Mary Magdalene
In this new book, Gillian Jack reconstructs the monastery’s changing relationship with Florentine authorities over several centuries. Financial support, public intervention and efforts to regulate prostitution repeatedly altered the institution’s position. Her account places the women who lived there within larger transformations in charitable practice and urban welfare, without reducing them to illustrations of policy. It is only by uncovering successive governments’ involvement in Sant’Elisabetta that we can fully understand how the city attempted to manage both prostitution and welfare.
This is a study at the boundary between medieval and Renaissance history. It offers a way of following continuities that conventional period labels conceal, especially in the complex relationship between penitential religion, social discipline and the lived experiences of women on the margins of urban society.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Gillian Jack is associate lecturer in history at the Open University, where she teaches history from Greek myth to the 1970s.
FEATURED PHOTO:
Detail of the predella with painted scenes of the story of St. Magdalene. By Botticelli c. 1484-91. Now in the Philadelphia Art Museum. Source: Wikipedia
Late Medieval Parish Churches in England
Who actually paid for, organised and built England's late medieval parish churches? New book enters the discussion with a new contribution focusing on the distinct new design
Chaucer’s England explored by Nicolas Orme
Who were Chaucer’s thirty-three pilgrims, and why were they heading to Canterbury? What do they and their tales tell us about medieval England as a place, and about the daily lives of its people? New book tells the story
Resequencing the Middle Ages through Archaeogenetics
Between 2020 and 2026, Patrick J. Geary has been part of a large research project exploring the Genetic History of the Migration period (c. 400-700).
Transregnal Kingship? Or Regal Kings?
How did medieval rulership over multiple kingdoms and lordships work out? A new book explores the political, but also the practical, challenges of rulership in the fluid territorial reality of the 13th century, while floating a new concept: “transregnal”. What might this mean?
The World of the Angevins
New book on the Angevin World circumvent a touchy English question. Was there ever an "Angevin Empire"?
The Maritime Kingdom of Denia
The Medieval Mediterranean was a contested site crisscrossed by fleets and armies operating in a Maritime world. New book explores the Identities, iolence, and networks in the Mediterranean using both Latin and Arabic primary sources while focusing on the Taifa of Denia in Spain.
Medieval European Embroidery
In 2020, Musée de Cluny organised an exhibition on “The Art of Embroidery in the Middle Ages” (L’art en broderie au Moyen Âge). In connection with the exhibition, a catalogue was published. Now, six years later, the proceeding for the scientific conference in January 2020 have been published.
Regards sur la Broderie en Occident au Moyen Âge. Production, création et usages, XIIe–XVIe siècle
Eds. Philippe Lorentz, Astrid Castres, Rose-Marie Ferré
Brepols, july 2026
New book brings together the proceedings of two study days held at the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art (INHA), Paris, in January 2020, alongside the Musée de Cluny exhibition “L’art en broderie au Moyen Âge”. The conference sought to foster dialogue among specialists from Germany, England, Spain, France, Switzerland, and the United States in order to assess current research perspectives on medieval embroidery—an art form that remains comparatively little studied in France despite its prominent place within the rich visual culture of the later Middle Ages.
The essays collected here offer fresh insights into the history of both liturgical and secular embroidery in Western Europe between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries. They are organised around three principal themes. The first examines the contexts of production, focusing on three distinct settings: the English royal court, Catalan workshops, and the workshops of Paris. The second explores the dialogue between embroidery and other artistic media during this period, particularly when embroidery functioned as ‘painting with the needle’ or when its sculptural relief rivalled that of sculpture and goldsmiths’ work. Finally, the contributions in the third section present new perspectives on the use of embroidered images and their role within medieval ritual.
More broadly, the volume invites readers to appreciate the richness of this textile heritage, now preserved in museums, church treasuries, and private collections. The book is illustrated with more than one hundred colour plates.
CONTENTS
Medieval Embroidery in France: The Current State of Research — Astrid Castres and Philippe Lorentz
Part I. Contexts of Production
- Secular Embroidery for the English Court, 1300–1461 — Lisa Monnas
- A Corpus of Embroidery in Catalonia during the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries — Guadaira Macías and Cèsar Favà
- Embroidery “of the Work of Paris” at the End of the Middle Ages — Astrid Castres
- The Embroidered Mitre from the Sainte-Chapelle in the Musée de Cluny: A Fresh Perspective — Isabelle Bédat
Part II. Embroidery: Painting with the Needle
- Embroidered Altar Frontals and Other Liturgical Hangings in Catalonia and Valencia during the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries: Imports and Local Production — Rafael Cornudella
- The Embroidered Altarpiece of Pedro de Montoya, Bishop of Osma, in the Art Institute of Chicago — Martha Wolff
- “A Great Banner Beaten with Fine Gold”: Techniques, Practices, and Uses of Gilding on Textiles in the Late Middle Ages — Nadège Gauffre Fayolle
- A Recently Acquired Orphrey in the Musée de Cluny: New Questions concerning the Opus Florentinum — Christine Descatoire
Part III. Images, Rituals, and Uses
- Vision and Embroidery: The Crown of Hildegard of Bingen and its Medallions — Philippe Cordez and Eveline Wetter
- Purity, Adornment, and Performance: Embroidery on Altar Linens and their Cases (1250–1550) — Julie Glodt
- A Rediscovered Masterpiece of the Thirteenth Century: The Embroidered Chasuble of Guillaume de Joinville, Archbishop of Reims
- (Palais du Tau, Treasury of Reims Cathedral) — Maxence Hermant
READ MORE:
Viking Connections:
The Viking Age was a vibrant and complex period of movement and change, not easily grasped inside a set of fixed notions and ideas. A new book presents 32 papers presented at the Nineteenth Viking Congress in 2022
Viking Connections. Proceedings of the Nineteenth Viking Congress
By Clare Downham, Fiona Edmonds, Nancy Edwards and David Griffiths
Liverpool University Press, 2026
ISBN:9781805967422 (Hardback),
eISBN:9781805967439 (PDF)
eISBN:9781805967477 (ePub)
ABSTRACT.
Viking Connections is an edited collection representing the most recent scholarship in the interdisciplinary study of the Viking Age. The 32 papers arise from the Nineteenth Viking Congress which took place in Wales and North-West England in July 2022. They focus on new research from across the Viking World encompassing Archaeology, History, Literature, Language, Place-names, Numismatics, and the History of Art. Themes include Irish Sea connections as well wider connections across the Viking World. There is also a Congress diary.
The title Viking Connections expresses the importance of international networks and long-distance patterns of contact, which underlie both the Viking Age itself and our contemporary community of interdisciplinary scholarship. Contributors include senior academics, early career researchers, and museum and heritage professionals.
The picture that emerges from this volume is of the Viking Age as a vibrant and complex period of movement and change. Highlights include James Graham-Campbell’s survey of the metallic wealth of the Isle of Man, Mark Redknap’s comprehensive account of Viking Age finds in Wales, Orri Vésteinsson’s investigation of the effects that the introduction of large amounts of silver had on Viking Age society, Elizabeth Pierce’s study that tracks the tenth- to twelfth-century Scandinavian presence in eastern Scotland whose evidence suggests substantial trading activity, Søren Sindbæk’s demonstration of how radiocarbon calibration curves, when applied to the fine-meshed stratigraphy of Ribe, suggest a new chronological framework for the beginning of the Viking Age, and Christian Cooijmans’ exploration of the idea of viking camps as not just military barracks, but sites where all aspects of everyday life went on, and which formed the basis of the whole viking phenomenon.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
- Paton’s foreword, Introduction and Congress Diary, Council, attendance and contributor lists, and Obituaries
- Máire Ní Mhaonaigh Kin, Allies, Frenemies: the Fragmentary Annals of Ireland and cross-cultural exchange
- Ben Guy Poetry and Taxes: Welsh responses to Viking attacks in the late tenth century
- John Hines Exploitation of the unfree: the impact of the Viking Age on Welsh society and economy
- Mark Redknap Vikings, Places, Silver and Contexts: a Welsh perspective
- Ryan Foster† Scandinavians in Cumberland: elite takeover, mass migration, or something else?
- Steve Dickinson The Viking Age shieling: craft, cues and contexts
- Caroline Paterson The Contribution of Recent Excavations of Furnished Burials to our Understanding of the Scandinavian Settlement of Cumbria
- Danica Ramsey-Brimberg Grave Circumstances: revisiting the influence of location on Viking Age burials in the Irish Sea area
- Erin McGuire Migrant Identities, Mortuary Citations, and New Ancestors in Western Scandinavian Scotland
- Dirk H. Steinforth Pagan Images for a Christian Message: tracing bi-cultural Viking-Age iconography in the Irish Sea region
- Maeve Sikora A Hoard of Vessels from Derreen, Co. Clare: its Irish and Scandinavian context
- Raghnall Ó Floinn† Late and Early Post Viking-Age Insular Ringed Pins (c. 900 – c. 1125): a reassessment
- Griffin Murray The Shrine of St Patrick’s Bell and the Origins of the Hiberno-Urnes Style
- Russell Ó Ríagáin The Viking Age in the Overkingdom of Ulaid
- Caitlin Ellis Um Írlandshaf: presentations of the Irish Sea in Old Norse-Icelandic
- Jane Kershaw and Stephen Merkel Viking Wealth in the Irish Sea Zone: new evidence from lead isotope analyses of Viking-Age rings and ingots
- James Graham-Campbell Wealth in the Isle of Man in the Early 10th Century
- Kristin Bornholdt Collins The 2021 Northern Mixed hoard (c. 1030/35), Isle of Man
- Johanne Porter A Saint from the East and a Hoard in the North: a reassessment of the St Edmund coins from the Cuerdale hoard
- Wendy Scott Copies and Crossing the Water: the implications of the unusual elements in the Lenborough Hoard for coin circulation in Anglo-Danish England.
- Fedir Androschchuk Viking-Age Silver Hoards in Norrland: find places, content and origin
- Jens Christian Moesgaard Who Controlled the Minting in Lund in the 11th Century?
- Orri Vésteinsson Silver and Social Change in the Viking Age
- Søren M. Sindbæk Ribe and the Beginning of the Viking Age
- Thorsten Lemm All Roads Lead to Hedeby: communication routes, local markets and mercantile interaction in the hinterland of a trading town
- Lene B. Frandsen Nybro: a road connection in south-west Jutland from the early Viking Age
Christian Cooijmans A Place of Contact and Contradiction: the socially constructed space(s) of viking encampment - Lesley Abrams Defining the Danelaw
- Elizabeth Pierce Identifying a Scandinavian Presence in Eastern Scotland in the Viking Age
- Mari Arentz Østmo and Marianne Moen Connecting Death: interpersonal and other affiliations in burial monuments with multiple individuals from Norway
- Cassidy Croci Building Bridges: visualizing the Role of Women in Sturlubók
- Judith Jesch Afterword
ABOUT THE EDITORS:
Clare Downham is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Liverpool. Her publications include Medieval Ireland (Cambridge University Press 2017) and Medieval Kings of Britain and Ireland: The Dynasty of Ivarr to A.D. 1014 (Liverpool University Press 2007).
Fiona Edmonds is Professor in Regional History, Lancaster University. Her publications include Gaelic Influence in the Northumbrian Kingdom: the Golden Age and the Viking Age (Boydell & Brewer 2019).
Nancy Edwards is Professor Emerita in Medieval Archaeology, Prifysgol Bangor, Bangor University. Her publications include Life in Early Medieval Wales (Oxford University Press 2023).
David Griffiths is Professor of Archaeology, University of Oxford. His publications include Vikings of the Irish Sea (History Press 2010, new edition 2025).
Ibn al-Jawzi’s Political Thought in 12th-Century Baghdad
New book studies the relationship between political thought, preaching and emotions through the writings of Ibn al-Jawzi (d. 1201), a celebrated hortatory preacher in late Abbasid Baghdad.
Late Medieval Female Subject Consciousness
Autobiographical writings was the inroad to identity formation among female mystics and authors.
Late Medieval Female Subject Consciousness. Italian and English Mystics, Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Beyond
By Stephanie Amsel
Palgrave 2026 
Late Medieval Female Subject Consciousness: Italian and English Mystics brings together disparate feminist theoretical approaches to explore the formation of medieval female subject consciousness in writings by female mystics including Angela of Foligno, Catherine of Siena, and Margery Kempe, as well as secular writings of Christine de Pizan, and powerful female characters of Giovanni Boccaccio and Geoffrey Chaucer. The rise of what Amsel calls “medieval female subject consciousness” shows that increased self-awareness and sense of self relates to how the authorship of texts reconstructs traditional female roles, particularly in Italian and English. These writing women challenged prevailing norms as they forged literal and figurative spaces to self-actualize through writing, even if the act of writing was performed by male amanuenses. This book explores how Boccaccio and Chaucer serve as witnesses by creating female characters who reflect changes in women’s writing in late medieval society in Italy and England.
FEATURED PHOTO:
A miniature of the Erythrean Sibyl, writing. British Library, Royal 16 G V f. 23., CC BY-SA
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
- Lo Specchio Spaccato
- From Subaltern to Self-Actualization: Defining Medieval Female Subject Consciousness
- Medieval Women’s Work: Women’s Writing as Intellectual, Productive Work
- Writing the Body in Medieval Texts: Autobiography and Testimonio
- Witnessing Medieval Female Subject Consciousness in Works of Giovanni Boccaccio and Geoffrey Chaucer
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Stephanie Amsel is professor at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, USA
The Kingdom of the Isles – and the Lords at Finlaggan
Excavated since 1987, Finlaggan on Islay, demonstrates how the medieval Kingdom of the Isles was on par with the rest of Europe in terms of political and cultural sophistication.
Burgundy 450-535
A new book gathers together the results of Ian Wood’s life-long immersion into the events in Burgundy AD 450-535
Burgundy, 450-535.Politics and religion in the Gibichung Province.
By Ian Wood
Series: Saggi di Storia Antica vol 38
“L’Erma” di Bretschneider 2026
This book examines the early medieval Burgundian polity, which attempted in the 5th and 6th centuries to establish itself less than a successor kingdom and more as a Roman province; and did not succeed.
In the final years of the Western Roman Empire and during the following half-century, the valleys of the Rhône and Saône were governed by members of a royal Burgundian family, the Gibichungs. They ruled not as barbarian kings but as Roman magistri militum. Their prominence derived from their association with the magister militum praesentalis Ricimer, and they operated in close cooperation with members of the late Roman senatorial aristocracy, including Sidonius Apollinaris and some of his contemporaries.
This region under their control was a centre of religious and cultural life, distinguished by the works of Sidonius, Claudianus Mamertus, Faustus of Riez, and Avitus of Vienne. The interaction of politics and religion culminated in the foundation of the monastery of Agaune, a major episcopal gathering at Épaone, and the promulgation of an important body of legislation issued by King Sigismund, before collapsing dramatically in the wake of a political crisis caused by the ruler himself. The failure of the Gibichung state in AD 534 marked the end of a remarkable experiment in governmental continuity in post-Roman Gaul.
This book is written by one of the most authoritative scholars of the Early Middle Ages, Ian Wood, Professor Emeritus at the University of Leeds. Renowned for his long-standing engagement with the cultural history and historical anthropology of the Early Middle Ages, Wood here offers a long-awaited full account of events in a region that, during the fifth and early sixth centuries, became entangled in conflicts between the Romans, the Huns, the Franks, the Visigoths, and finally the Ostrogoths. None of these powers appears to have been willing to allow this political gatekeeper to establish itself permanently at the threshold of one of the principal Alpine passes through what is now western Switzerland. Not least, perhaps, because the so-called Burgundian realm represented a genuine experiment in the fusion of Roman and Germanic cultural forms. The realm—if it was ever truly a kingdom, which this book argues it was not—came to an end when it was absorbed into the Frankish Empire in AD 534. As Ian Wood states in his introduction, this is therefore a history written “primarily through the eyes of late Roman aristocrats and those who interacted with them, and not through the perspective of the Völkerwanderung and the Germanic kingdoms”.
READ ALSO:
Les Burgondes: un royaume oublié au coeur de l’Europe
Favrod, Justin
Pu Polytechnique, Lausanne 2002
French Edition.
The Burgundians, the people of the Nibelungen, left the Rhine at the command of the Romans. They settled around Geneva, where their kings were charged with ensuring military control of the Alpine passes. However, between the fifth and sixth centuries, the Empire they were meant to defend collapsed. In a political movement that transformed Europe, the Burgundian kingdom expanded across parts of what are now France and French-speaking Switzerland and began to exercise independence. This is a fascinating and little-known period, in which the author, through a critical analysis of historical knowledge and a remarkable contribution of his own research, describes the coexistence in this first “Burgundy” of a people from the North and the Gallo-Romans.
Interethnic harmony was regulated by a law issued by King Gundobad. Gradually, the linguistic boundary between French and German took shape and has endured to the present day. Here the past takes on the face of a royal family whose tribulations—marked by bloodshed, wisdom or fury, success or disaster—are inscribed in the broader transition from Antiquity to the Middle Ages
Les Burgondes: Ier – VIe siècles apr. J.-C.
By Katalin Escher
Errance, Paris 2021
French edition
A Germanic people originating in what is now Poland, later settled on the Rhine and then in the Rhône valley of Gaul, the Burgundians inscribed their name both in the geography of Europe—where a “Burgundy” still exists today as the heir to several kingdoms—and in its great epic traditions, such as that of the Nibelungen. They were among the principal actors in the period of the Great Invasions in the West. This book takes stock of current knowledge concerning this people.
Drawing on ancient sources, it reconstructs the three major phases of Burgundian history: a kind of “preface” extending from their origins to their settlement on the Rhine (established by no later than the beginning of the fifth century); the “first” Rhine kingdom, whose destruction by the Huns in 436 inspired the Nibelungen cycle and certain Scandinavian sagas; and finally the “second” Rhône kingdom, which marked the apogee of Burgundian power before being incorporated into the Frankish kingdom in 534. For each of these periods, the archaeological remains that constitute the material traces of the Burgundian people are presented, with particular emphasis on the second kingdom. Consideration is also given to linguistic and toponymic evidence.
This study makes it possible to sketch as faithful a portrait as possible of the Burgundian people, who, at the end of their historical trajectory, became a constituent element of the French and Swiss populations. At the same time, it highlights the importance of their interactions with other major actors of Late Antiquity: the Huns, destroyers of the first kingdom; the Goths; the Alamanni; the Alans; and the late Roman world, which the second kingdom both extended and replaced. The composite culture of Burgundian Gaul in the fifth and sixth centuries, shaped by these various influences, reflects a period of intense interaction and the formation of new identities.
FEATURED PHOTO:
Vase of St. Martin at St. Maurice d’Agaune. Source: Wikipedia.The myth is, the vases was gifted to the Monastry at Agaune by St. Martin of Tours. Likely, hoever it was a gift from Sigismund while king to his new abbey. The core of the vase is from the 2. century BC, while the setting is likely to have been worked at the end of the 5th century. Thus, the vase illustrates the point made by Ian Wood that the Burgundian politi was a cultural patchwork.