Material Culture and the Medieval World

medieval network

New Medieval Book Series ‘Material Culture and the Medieval World’ with I.B. Tauris (Editors: E. Cayley (French - University of  Exeter) and Chris Briggs (History - University of Cambridge).

The new series welcomes all titles across Literature, History, Archaeology, Art History and Visual Culture etc., and also encourages comparative or interdisciplinary approaches. Submissions are to be published in English. The editors will consider proposals that fall roughly in the period 950-1550, and those that extend forwards into the early modern. While they are ideally looking for monographs, we will also consider some edited collections.

This new academic series provides a medium for interdisciplinary medieval history with a strong emphasis on material culture – the physical evidence of a culture in the form of the objects it makes, from art and the built environment to items concerned with everyday life.

Study of the things people make and the ways those things inhabit and act upon the world brings new depth to existing historical narratives. Using methodologies borrowed from archaeology, art history, literary studies and anthropology, the study of material culture can provide information about aspects of social and cultural relations for which documents provide little evidence. While historians of the early Middle Ages have long used material remains to learn about the period, material culture’s influence on the high and late Middle Ages is a more recent phenomenon.

This series supplements student-oriented handbooks on material culture by providing the space for sustained treatment of aspects of the Middle Ages in which material culture contributes to more nuanced interpretation. It acts as a beacon for new researchers and the best new scholarship.

The series publishes a diverse range of work from studies of art and visual culture or literature, to work involving aspects of economic, religious and social history, and the work of those cultural historians who utilise material culture as a source for explorations of intellectual and affective regimes.

Key areas of focus:

• daily life in the Middle Ages
• medicine and the body
• gender and sexualities
• women’s experience
• emotional communities
• religious and ethnic minorities
• travel, migration and cultural exchange
• trade and commerce
• maritime history

 

While the series is open to research from across the medieval period, we are particularly interested in studies focusing on the central and later middle ages, and proposals where the focus extends into the early modern period will also be considered.

Titles in the series are peer-reviewed and initially published in hardback with bespoke full-colour cover, and with simultaneous publication as a competitively priced e-book. Your book will benefit from I.B.Tauris’s global marketing and will be represented at academic conferences around the world.

For further information, or to submit a proposal, please contact: e.j.cayley@exeter.ac.uk or ahenderson@ibtauris.com

 

Oxford Medieval Studies