Knowledge Communities
About the Book Series
This series focuses on innovative scholarship in the areas of intellectual history and the history of ideas, particularly as they relate to the communication of knowledge within and among diverse scholarly, literary, religious and social communities across Western Europe. Interdisciplinary in nature, the series especially encourages new methodological outlooks that draw on the disciplines of philosophy, theology, musicology, anthropology, paleography and codicology.
Knowledge Communities addresses the myriad ways in which knowledge was expressed and inculcated, not only focusing upon scholarly texts from the period, but also emphasizing the importance of emotions, ritual, performance, images and gestures as modalities that communicate and acculturate ideas. Knowledge Communities publishes cutting-edge work that explores the nexus between ideas, communities and individuals in medieval and early modern Europe.
Please contact Dorothea Schaefter, Publisher at Routledge ([email protected]) to submit a proposal or to find out more about the series.
Visions of the Cosmos in Honorius Augustodunensis
1st Edition
By Daniel Yingst
July 13, 2026
An intellectual biography of Honorius Augustodunensis, one of the most influential authors during Early Medieval times, this book offers the portrait of an educator and author, whose works set the stage for the intellectual transformations of the twelfth century and beyond. Honorius ...
A History of Medieval Astrology: The Importance of the Kraków School of Astrology (15th-16th centuries)
1st Edition
By Sylwia Konarska-Zimnicka
June 15, 2026
A History of Medieval Astrology analyses the contributions of the Kraków Astronomy and Astrology School, part of the University of Kraków – one of the fastest growing universities in fifteenth-century Europe. Astrology was a science and practiced by the most prominent representatives of the most ...
Feminist Approaches to Early Medieval English Studies
1st Edition
Edited
By Robin Norris, Rebecca Stephenson, Renee Trilling
January 10, 2026
Scholarship on early medieval England has seen an exponential increase in scholarly work by and about women over the past twenty years, but the field has remained peculiarly resistant to the transformative potential of feminist critique. Since 2016, Medieval Studies has been rocked by conversations...
Medieval Saints and Modern Screens: Divine Visions as Cinematic Experience
1st Edition
By Alicia Spencer-Hall
January 10, 2026
This ground-breaking book brings theoretical perspectives from twenty-first century media, film, and cultural studies to medieval hagiography. Medieval Saints and Modern Screens stakes the claim for a provocative new methodological intervention: consideration of hagiography as media. More precisely...
Horizontal Learning in the High Middle Ages: Peer-to-Peer Knowledge Transfer in Religious Communities
1st Edition
Edited
By Micol Long, Tjamke Snijders, Steven Vanderputten
January 09, 2026
The history of medieval learning has traditionally been studied as a vertical transmission of knowledge from a master to one or several disciples. Horizontal Learning in the High Middle Ages: Peer-to-Peer Knowledge Transfer in Religious Communities centres on the ways in which cohabiting peers ...
Virtue Ethics and Education from Late Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century
1st Edition
Edited
By Andreas Hellerstedt
January 09, 2026
This book argues that pre-modern societies were characterized by a common quest for human flourishing or excellence, i.e. virtue. The history of virtue is a particularly fruitful approach when studying pre-modern periods. Systems of moral philosophy and more day-to-day moral ideas and practices in ...
A New Material Interpretation of Twelfth-Century Architecture: Reconstructing the Abbey of Saint-Denis
1st Edition
By Jason Crow
December 01, 2025
Today, we perceive Gothic cathedrals as light-filled forms representing the sacred. The colored light projected from brightly-colored stained glass windows onto the walls and floors of these buildings suggests the presence of divinity. Suger (1081–1151CE), the abbot of the monastery of Saint-Denis,...
Anticipating Sin in Medieval Society: Childhood, Sexuality, and Violence in the Early Penitentials
1st Edition
By Erin Vanessia Abraham
December 01, 2025
Composed between the sixth and ninth centuries, penitentials were little books of penance that address a wide range of human fallibility. But they are far more than mere registers of sin and penance: rather, by revealing the multiple contexts in which their authors anticipated various sins, they ...
Elementary and Grammar Education in Late Medieval France: Lyon, 1285-1530
1st Edition
By Sarah Lynch
December 01, 2025
The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries saw a marked increase in the availability of elementary and grammar education in Europe. In France, that rise took the form of a unique blend of trends also seen elsewhere in Europe, ranging from Church-dominated schools to independent schools and communal ...
Images, Improvisations, Sound, and Silence from 1000 to 1800 - Degree Zero
1st Edition
Edited
By Babette Hellemans, Alissa Jones Nelson
December 01, 2025
The act of drawing a line or uttering a word is often seen as integral to the process of making art. This is especially obvious in music and the visual arts, but applies to literature, performance, and other arts as well. These collected essays, written by scholars from diverse fields, take a ...
The Cistercian Reform and the Art of the Book in Twelfth-Century France
1st Edition
By Diane Reilly
December 01, 2025
This book is a study of the programmatic oral performance of the written word and its impact on art and text. Communal singing and reading of the Latin texts that formed the core of Christian ritual and belief consumed many hours of the Benedictine monk's day. These texts-read and sung out loud, ...
The Intellectual Dynamism of the High Middle Ages
1st Edition
Edited
By Clare Monagle
December 01, 2025
The essays in The Intellectual Dynamism of the High Middle Ages pay tribute to the work and impact of Constant J. Mews, in spirit and in content, revealing a nuanced and integrated vision of the intellectual history of the medieval West. Mews's groundbreaking work has revealed the wide world of ...