Bøger i Elements in the Global Middle Ages serien

The typical vision of the Middle Ages western popular culture represents to its global audience is deeply Eurocentric. The Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones imagined entire medievalist worlds, but we see only a fraction of them through the stories and travels of the characters. Organised around the theme of mobility, this Element seeks to deconstruct the Eurocentric orientations of western popular medievalisms which typically position Europe as either the whole world or the centre of it, by making them visible and offering alternative perspectives. How does popular culture represent medievalist worlds as global-connected by the movement of people and objects? How do imagined mobilities allow us to create counterstories that resist Eurocentric norms? This study represents the start of what will hopefully be a fruitful and inclusive conversation of what the Middle Ages did, and should, look like.

In premodern China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, just as in the far less culturally cohesive countries composing the West of the Middle Ages, enslavement was an assumed condition of servitude warranting little examination, as the power and profits it afforded to the slaver made it a convention pursued unreflectively.

The City of Cahokia provides a unique case study to review what draws people to a place and why. This Element examines not only the emergence and decline of this great American city but its intersection with the broader Native American world during this period. Cahokia was not an isolated complex but a place vivid on the landscape where people made pilgrimages to and from Cahokia for trade and religious practices. Cahokia was a centre-place with expansive reach and cultural influence. This Element analyses the social and political processes that helped create this city while also reflecting on the trajectory of Native American history in North America.

Explores the circulation of musical instruments, practices, and thought in pre-modern Eurasia at the crossroads of empires and nomadic cultures. It considers the mechanisms of transmission, appropriation, adaptation, and integration that helped shape musical traditions perceived as culturally and geographically distinct yet are historically linked.

I provide a sense for the texture of the Persian world by discussing what made poetry precious. By focusing on reports on poets' lives, I illuminate the social scene in which poetry was produced and consumed. The discussion elicits poetry's close connections to political and religious authority, economic exchange, and the articulation of gender.

Over a span of 1000 years beginning around 800CE, the people of the Pacific Islands undertook a remarkable period of voyaging, political evolution, and cross-cultural interactions. These histories provide an important cross-cultural perspective for the concept of 'the Middle Ages' from outside of the usual Old World focus.