Medieval Matters: Europe’s Premodern Religious Cultures

Medieval Matters: Europe’s Premodern Religious Cultures offers innovative perspectives on Europe's medieval religious landscapes through diverse case studies spanning Livonia to Iberia. This interdisciplinary collection examines the complex interplay of ritual, community, memory, and identity across medieval religious practices, with particular attention to Jewish–Christian relations, gender dynamics, and devotional materiality. Honouring Miri Rubin’s transformative scholarship, the volume brings together emerging scholarly voices who engage with her insights on ritual, narrative, emotion, gender, and devotion. The collection concludes with a roundtable of eminent medievalists reflecting on Rubin’s influence and future directions for studying the premodern past.

Matthew S. Champion is Associate Professor of History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne. His first book The Fullness of Time: Temporalities of the Fifteen-Century Low Countries (Chicago, 2017) was awarded the 2018 Gladstone Prize by the Royal Historical Society. Kati Ihnat is Associate Professor of Medieval History at the Radboud University in Nijmegen. Her first book, Mother of Mercy, Bane of the Jews: Devotion to the Virgin Mary in Anglo-Norman England, appeared with Princeton University Press in 2016. Eyal Poleg is a Professor of Material History in the School of History, Queen Mary University of London. His most recent book, A Material History of the Bible, England 1200–1553, was published by Oxford University Press for the British Academy in 2020.  Milan Žonca is Assistant Professor of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague. He has published articles on the cultural and intellectual history of Jews in the late Middle Ages, especially in Central Europe, and medieval Jewish–Christian polemics.