Haug offers an in-depth look at the frontier zone of the Sassanian, Umayyad, and Abbasid Empires...

According to tradition, on the night of March 15, 1345, a Eucharistic host thrown into a burning fireplace was found intact hours later...

Is “Vedic” fire sacrifice at odds with “Hindu” image worship?

Wilken offers a revisionist history of how the ideas of freedom of conscience and freedom of religion originated in the writings of the Christian fathers of the early Church, such as Tertullian and Lactantius, during the period when Christians were a persecuted sect of the Roman Empire...

The story of the littoral nations of the Baltic Sea is like a saga, that genre perfected by those tenacious inhabitants of the rocky shores of this ancient trading corridor...

Thanks to the international tourism industry most people are familiar with the spectacular ruins of Angkor, the great Cambodian empire that lasted from about the 9th to the early 15th century...

Burchett re-examines what we assume about the rise of devotionalism in North India, tracing its flowering since India’s early medieval “Tantric Age” to present day...

How do peripheral places assert the centrality of their identity?

Gregory Smits makes extensive use of scholarship in archaeology and anthropology and leverages unconventional sources such as the Omoro sōshi(a collection of ancient songs) to present a fundamental rethinking of early Ryukyu...

Guilds were prominent in medieval and early modern Europe, but their economic role has seldom been studied...

Mary Magdalene’s story of conversion from sinner to saint is one of Christianity’s most compelling and controversial stories...

In creating a detailed impression of the medieval race-making that would be reconfigured into the biological racism of the modern era, Heng reaches beyond medievalists and race-studies scholars to anyone interested in the long history of race.

Benoît Majerus uses an impressively wide range of visual sources, from religious images and architectural photographs to neuroleptic advertisements and administrative maps.

Apocalypse and Reform from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages (Routledge, 2018) is a rich, comparative study, drawing on the scholarship of eleven authors who discuss topics in medieval cultural, intellectual, and ecclesial history...

Dr. Philip Lutgendorf is Retired Professor of Hindi and Modern Indian Studies at the University of Iowa. He is currently working on a seven-volume translation of the Hindi devotional text, the Rāmcaritmānas written by the sixteenth-century North Indian...

Anand Taneja’s Jinnealogy: Time, Islam, and Ecological Thought in the Medieval Ruins of Delhi (Stanford University Press, 2017) is a landmark publication that interrogates modes of religious practice and imaginaries of time that disrupt dominant claims...

The tensions found between Reason and Revelation, between the traditions of the Bible and Greek thought, were central to pre-modern philosophy and in a sense remain so today. We live in an age beholden to both the religious and the secular as ways of u...

Recent years have seen new waves of research in Syriac studies, the medieval Middle East, and family history. Combining all three, Lev Weitz’s Between Christ and Caliph: Law, Marriage, and Christian Community in Early Islam (University of Pennsylvania ...

History is only recently opening up to previously marginalized groups: it is only just now that women’s history is being explored across different historical fields. Eve Krakowski in Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt: Women’s Adolescence, Jewish Law,

A sharply observed study of the representations of education found in Anglo-Saxon texts, Irina Dumitrescu’s The Experience of Education in Anglo-Saxon Literature (Cambridge University Press 2018) invites readers to recognize just how often educational ...

What role, if any, do mythological texts play in philosophical discourse?  While modern Hindu Studies scholars are becoming increasingly attuned to the extent to which Indian narratives encode ideology, Sucharita Adluri’s Textual Authority in Classical...

In his sparkling new book, “Mysticism” in Iran: The Safavid Roots of a Modern Concept (University of South Carolina Press, 2017), Ata Anzali, Assistant Professor of Religion at Middlebury College, offers a sweeping and brilliant intellectual history of...

In his thrilling and sparkling new book, Medieval Empires and the Cultures of Competition: Literary Duels at Islamic and Christian Courts (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), Samuel England, Assistant Professor of Arabic at the University of Wisconsin-M...

What sounds like the title of a Hollywood movie is actually a result of meticulous historical research. Frances Courtney Kneupper‘s new book The Empire at the End of Time: Identity and Reform in Late Medieval German Prophecy (Oxford University Press,

In today’s episode, I am joined by Joshua Parens to discuss his innovative and engaging book Leo Strauss and the Recovery of Medieval Political Philosophy (University of Rochester Press, 2016). While one may easily confuse the book with something narro...