Bøker i Medieval Societies, Religions, and Cultures-serien

Pastoral Care and Community in Late Medieval Germany explores how local religious culture was constructed in medieval European Christian society through close study of a set of neglected, late fourteenth-century manuscripts. The Mirror of Priests is a pastoral work written by Albert, an Augustinian canon from the Bavarian market town of Diessen, to guide local priests in their work with parishioners. Multiple versions of the text in Albert's own hand survive and, by comparing them, Deeana Copeland Klepper shows how ostensibly universal religious ideals and laws were adapted, interpreted, and repurposed by those given responsibility to implement them, thereby crafting distinctive, local expressions of Christianity.The vision of Christian community that emerges from Albert's pastoral guide is one in which the messiness of ordinary life is evident. Albert's imagined parish was marked out by geographic and legal boundaries-property and jurisdictional rights, tithes, and sacramental responsibility-as well as symbolic realities. By situating the Mirror of Priests within Albert's physical and conceptual spaces, Klepper affirms the centrality of the parish and its community for those living under the rubric of Christianity, especially outside of large cities. Pivoting between the materiality of texts and the sociocultural contexts of an overlooked manuscript tradition, Pastoral Care and Community in Late Medieval Germany offers fresh insights into the role of parish priests, the pastoral manual genre, and late medieval religious life.

Dynasties Intertwined traces the turbulent relationship between the Zirids of Ifriqiya and the Normans of Sicily during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. In doing so, it reveals the complex web of economic, political, cultural, and military connections that linked the two dynasties to each other and to other polities across the medieval Mediterranean. Furthermore, despite the contemporary interfaith holy wars happening around the Zirids and Normans, their relationship was never governed by an overarching ideology like jihad or crusade. Instead, both dynasties pursued policies that they thought would expand their power and wealth, either through collaboration or conflict. The relationship between the Zirids and Normans ultimately came to a violent end in the 1140s, when a devastating drought crippled Ifriqiya. The Normans seized this opportunity to conquer lands across the Ifriqiyan coast, bringing an end to the Zirid dynasty and forming the Norman kingdom of Africa, which persisted until the Almohad conquest of Mahdia in 1160.Previous scholarship on medieval North Africa during the reign of the Zirids has depicted the region as one of instability and political anarchy that rendered local lords powerless in the face of foreign conquest. Matt King shows that, to the contrary, the Zirids and other local lords in Ifriqiya were integral parts of the far-reaching political and economic networks across the Mediterranean. Despite the eventual collapse of the Zirid dynasty at the hands of the Normans, Dynasties Intertwined makes clear that its emirs were active and consequential Mediterranean players for much of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, with political agency independent of their Christian neighbors across the Strait of Sicily.