In the Middle Ages, rolls were ubiquitous as a writing support. While scholars have long examined the texts and images on rolls, they have rarely taken the manuscripts themselves into account. This volume readdresses this imbalance by focusing on the materiality and various usages of rolls in late medieval England and France. Researchers from England, France, Germany and Singapore demonstrate in 11 contributions how this approach can increase our understanding of the rolls and their contents, as well as the contexts in which they were produced and used.

In medieval England, women in labor wrapped birth girdles around their abdomens to protect themselves and their unborn children. These parchment or paper rolls replicated the "girdle relics" of the Virgin Mary and other saints loaned to queens and noblewomen, extending childbirth protection to women of all classes. This book examines the texts and images of nine English birth girdles produced between the reigns of Richard II and Henry VIII. Cultural artifacts of lay devotion within the birthing chamber, the birth girdles offered the solace and promise of faith to the parturient woman and her attendants amid religious dissent, political upheaval, recurring epidemics, and the onset of print.

A cross-cultural, comparative view on the transition from a predominant 'culture of handwriting' to a predominant 'culture of print' in the late medieval and early modern periods is provided here, combining research on Christian and Jewish European book culture with findings on East Asian manuscript and print culture. This approach highlights interactions and interdependencies instead of retracing a linear process from the manuscript book to its printed successor. While each chapter is written as a disciplinary study focused on one specific case from the respective field, the volume as a whole allows for transcultural perspectives. It thereby not only focusses on change, but also on simultaneities of manuscript and printing practices as well as on shifts in the perception of media, writing surfaces, and materials: Which values did writers, printers, and readers attribute to the handwritten and printed materials? For which types of texts was handwriting preferred or perceived as suitable? How and under which circumstances could handwritten and printed texts coexist, even within the same document, and which epistemic dynamics emerged from such textual assemblages?

Throughout history, manuscripts have been made and used for religious, artistic, and scientific performances, and this practice continues in most cultures today. By focusing on the role manuscripts have in different kinds of performances, this volume contributes to the evolving field of investigating written artefacts and their functions. The collected essays regard manuscripts as points of intersection where textual, material, and performative aspects converge. The contributors analyse manuscripts in their forms and functions as well as their positioning in the performances for which they were made. These aspects unfold across the volume's three sections, examining how manuscripts are (1) used backstage, for preparing and giving instructions for performances; (2) taken onstage, contributing to the enactment of performances; and (3) performers in their own right, producing an effect on the audience. The diversified, interdisciplinary, and innovative methodologies of the included papers carry great potential to expand the traditional approaches of manuscript studies and find application outside the contributors' respective fields.

From the series examining the development of music in specific places during particular times, this book looks at ancient and medieval music, from Classical and Christian antiquity to the emergence of the Gregorian chant and the medieval town and Court.

The study of medieval chronicles is firmly established as a focus of research in the whole range of disciplines comprising Medieval Studies: literature, history, art history, linguistics, book history, digital humanities, and so forth. Each article in this volume dedicated to Erik Kooper presents a case study, balancing the particulars of the chosen materials with more generalized conclusions about their significance. The resulting collection is an anthology of different approaches in Medieval Chronicle Studies, presenting a rich overview of the geographical, linguistic, chronological and methodological diversity of chronicle research as it has developed in no small part thanks to Erik’s rallying. Contributors are Marie Bláhová, Cristian Bratu, Beth Bryan, Godfried Croenen, Peter Damian-Grint, Kelly DeVries, Isabel Barros Dias, Graeme Dunphy, Márta Font, Chris Given-Wilson, Ryszard Grzesik, Isabelle Guyot-Bachy, Letty Ten Harkel, Michael Hicks, David Hook, Sjoerd Levelt, Julia Marvin, Charles Melville, Firuza Abdullaeva, Martine Meuwese, Sarah Peverley, Jaclyn Rajsic, Lisa Ruch, Françoise Le Saux, Carol Sweetenham, Grischa Vercamer, Alison Williams Lewin, and Jürgen Wolf.