This book shows that childhood was an essential element in the arguments and purposes of authors in medieval Poland from 1050-1300 CE. This role of childhood in medieval mindsets has salient parallels throughout Europe and this is also explored in this volume.

Name Unknown: The Life of a Rusian Queen offers an example of an eastern European queen as a corrective to the western European focus of medieval queenship studies. Through a chronological approach, this book looks beyond the popular biographies of royal women such as Eleanor of Aquitaine and Berengaria of Castile and gathers material from sources throughout Europe. It engages with modern queenship studies literature to create a collective biography of a Rusian queen through the various cycles of her life from the marriage of eight-year-old Verkhuslava to the death of the ruler of Minsk whose generosity is recorded, but not her name. For medievalists interested in women and queens, Name Unknown: The Life of a Rusian Queen provides an entry point to an area of Europe rarely studied in that literature. For Slavists, it presents a way of looking at medieval Rusian women that has not yet appeared in this scholarly tradition. Ultimately, this biography integrates Rus, and eastern Europe, into the medieval world and acts as an important reminder that women are essential to our history and thus to our overall understanding of the past. This book is of great use to students and scholars interested in the history of women, queenship, and medieval Europe.

The Routledge Handbook of East Central and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 500–1300 is the first of its kind to provide a point of reference for the history of the whole of Eastern Europe during the Middle Ages. While historians have recognized the importance of integrating the eastern part of the European continent into surveys of the Middle Ages, few have actually paid attention to the region, its specific features, problems of chronology and historiography. This vast region represents more than two-thirds of the European continent, but its history in general—and its medieval history in particular—is poorly known. This book covers the history of the whole region, from the Balkans to the Carpathian Basin, and the Bohemian Forest to the Finnish Bay. It provides an overview of the current state of research and a route map for navigating an abundant historiography available in more than ten different languages. Chapters cover topics as diverse as religion, architecture, art, state formation, migration, law, trade and the experiences of women and children. This book is an essential reference for scholars and students of medieval history, as well as those interested in the history of Central and Eastern Europe.

The first comparative study of royal childhood and child kingship, revealing the fundamental role they played in medieval rulership.

Drawing on a wide variety of European sources, Childhood in the Middle Ages (1992) examines attitudes towards children, images of childhood, and the concept of the stages of childhood in medieval culture, from the nobility to the peasantry. It makes fascinating and illuminating reading for anyone interested in the social and cultural history of medieval Europe as well as the history of child-rearing and education.

Kids Those Days is a collection of interdisciplinary research into medieval childhood. Contributors investigate abandonment and abuse, fosterage and guardianship, criminal behavior and child-rearing, child bishops and sainthood, disabilities and miracles, and a wide variety of other subjects related to medieval children.

Through crusades and expulsions, Muslim communities survived for over 500 years, thriving in medieval Europe. This comprehensive study explores how the presence of Islamic minorities transformed Europe in everything from architecture to cooking, literature to science, and served as a stimulus for Christian society to define itself. Combining a series of regional studies, Catlos compares the varied experiences of Muslims across Iberia, southern Italy, the Crusader Kingdoms and Hungary to examine those ideologies that informed their experiences, their place in society and their sense of themselves as Muslims. This is a pioneering new narrative of the history of medieval and early modern Europe from the perspective of Islamic minorities; one which is not, as we might first assume, driven by ideology, isolation and decline, but instead one in which successful communities persisted because they remained actively integrated within the larger Christian and Jewish societies in which they lived.