Medieval Art History

This encyclopedia offers a concise, comprehensive overview of many different aspects of the Middle Ages, including its art, science, religions, architecture, and politics. While it primarily emphasizes Europe and Christianity, it also addresses the rise of Islam and other cultures Europe interacted with during this time.

The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium is a three-volume, comprehensive dictionary of Byzantine civilization. The first resource of its kind in the field, it features over 5,000 entries written by an international group of eminent Byzantinists covering all aspects of life in the Byzantine world. Major entries treat such topics as agriculture, art, literature, and politics, while shorter entries examine topics that relate to Byzantium such as the history of Kiev and personalities of ancient and biblical history.

This companion provides an authoritative one-volume reference to the people, places, events, books, institutions, religious belief, and secular influence of the Bible. Ranging far beyond the scope of a traditional Bible dictionary, the Companion features, in addition to its many informative, factual entries, an abundance of interpretive essays; here are extended entries on religious concepts from immortality, sin, and grace, to baptism, ethics, and the Holy Spirit. The contributors also explore biblical views of modern issues such as homosexuality, marriage, and anti-Semitism, and the impact of the Bible on the secular world (including a four-part article on the Bible's influence on literature). The Companion also offers entries that shed light on daily life in ancient Israel and the earliest Christian communities, with fascinating articles on feasts and festivals, clothing, medicine, units of time, houses, and furniture.

The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Christianity takes as its subject the beliefs, practices, and institutions of the Christian Church between 400 and 1500 A.D. It addresses topics ranging from early medieval monasticism to late medieval mysticism, from the material wealth of the Church to the spiritual exercises through which certain believers might attempt to improve their souls. Each chapter tells a story, but seeks also to ask how and why 'Christianity' took particular forms at particular moments in history, paying attention to both the spiritual and otherworldly aspects of religion, and the material and political contexts in which they were often embedded.

This handbook provides a comprehensive overview of the gender rules encountered in Europe in the period between approximately 500 and 1500 C.E. The essays collected in this volume speak to interpretative challenges common to all fields of women's and gender history - that is, how best to uncover the experiences of ordinary people from archives formed mainly by and about elite males, and how to combine social histories of lived experiences with cultural histories of gendered discourses and identities. The collection focuses on Western Europe in the Middle Ages but offers some consideration of medieval Islam and Byzantium, opening these fields for further research.