This book is called a manifesto because it has an unapologetically political objective. Richard Utz wants to help reform the way we think about and practice our academic engagement with medieval culture, and he uses his own observations as a medievalist and medievalism-ist over the last 25 years to offer ways in which we might reconnect with the general public that has allowed us to become, since the late nineteenth century, a rather exclusive clan of specialists who communicate mostly with each other.

This is a somewhat polemical, and very passionate, plea for more work not only about the house that scholasticism built, but those who were excluded from it. This book is the story of how scholastic theology defined this universal subject in terms of the reasonable white man and a catalogue of the exclusions which ensued. The categories of woman, Jew and heretic were core others against which ideal Christian subjectivity was implicitly defined, and this book shows just how constitutive these 'others' were for the production of orthodoxy in the Middle Ages.

Just how medieval is the modern university? From their medieval beginnings in Western Europe, universities have remained monolithic and static entities, renovating themselves just enough to avoid massive interventions by the state or the church. Like parliamentary democracies, they function just well enough that while feelings of despair are frequent, and anticipation of imminent collapse constant, they continue. In the modern era, as universities face a new set of challenges, this book asks if there is not some value in pondering the medieval university, and the continuities that exist as...

Alfred the Great is a rare historical figure from the early Middle Ages, in that he retains a popular image. Because this image increasingly suffers from the "dead white male syndrome," exacerbated by Alfred's association with British imperialism and colonialism, this book provides an accessible reassessment of the famous ruler of Wessex, informed by current scholarship, both on the king as a man in history, and the king as a subsequent legendary construct. Alfred the Great (ca. 849 - 899), king of Wessex, lived in a time of intense and violent national crisis. His was the only English...

As scholarship continues to expand the idea of medieval Europe beyond 'the West, ' the Rus' remain the final frontier relegated to the European periphery. The Kingdom of Rus' challenges the perception of Rus' as an eastern 'other' - advancing the idea of the Rus' as a kingdom deeply integrated with medieval Europe, through an innovative analysis of medieval titles. Examining a wide range of medieval sources, this book exposes the common practice in scholarship of referring to Rusian rulers as princes as a relic of early modern attempts to diminish the Rus'. Not only was Rus' part and parcel...

Geoffrey Koziol argues for the validity of a range of contradictory interpretations of the Medieval Peace of God movement.

This concise and effective synthesis investigates the role of the institution of the Church in the transformation of the Roman West from the fourth to seventh centuries.

Daniel Wollenberg examines how and why the medieval past is manipulated and deployed as a means to certain political ends today, especially by writers and politicians on the far right.