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How is it that walls, borders, boundaries-and their material and symbolic architectures of division and exclusion-engender their very opposite? This edited volume explores the crossings, permeations, and constructions of cultural and political borders between peoples and territories, examining how walls, borders, and boundaries signify both interdependence and contact within sites of conflict and separation. Topics addressed range from the geopolitics of Europe's historical and contemporary city walls to conceptual reflections on the intersection of human rights and separating walls, the memory politics generated in historically disputed border areas, theatrical explorations of border crossings, and the mapping of boundaries within migrant communities.

Gregory of Tours, the sixth-century Merovingian bishop, composed extensive historiographical and hagiographical corpora during the twenty years of his episcopacy in Tours. These works serve as important sources for the cultural, social, political and religious history of Merovingian Gaul. This book focuses on Gregory's hagiographical collections, especially the Glory of the Martyrs, Glory of the Confessors, and Life of the Fathers, which contain accounts of saints and their miracles from across the Mediterranean world. It analyses these accounts from literary and historical perspectives, examining them through the lens of relations between the Merovingians and their Mediterranean counterparts, and contextualizing them within the identity crisis that followed the disintegration of the Roman world. This approach leads to groundbreaking conclusions about Gregory's hagiographies, which this study argues were designed as an \"ecclesiastical history\" (of the Merovingian Church) that enabled him to craft a specific Gallo-Christian identity for his audience.

Borderlands are complex spaces that can involve military, religious, economic, political, and cultural interactions-all of which may vary by region and over time. John W. I. Lee and Michael North bring together interdisciplinary scholars to analyze a wide range of border issues and to encourage a nuanced dialogue addressing the concepts and processes of borderlands.Gathering the voices of a diverse range of international scholars,Globalizing Borderlands Studies in Europe and North Americapresents case studies from ancient to modern times, highlighting topics ranging from religious conflicts to medical frontiers to petty trade. Spanning geographical regions of Europe, the Baltics, North Africa, the American West, and Mexico, these essays shed new light on the complex processes of boundary construction, maintenance, and crossing, as well as on the importance of economic, political, social, ethnic, and religious interactions in the borderlands.Globalizing Borderlands Studies in Europe and North Americanot only forges links between past and present scholarship but also paves the way for new models and approaches in future borderlands research.

This book explores the geographies of the Holocaust at every scale of human experience, from the European continent to the experiences of individual human bodies. Built on six innovative case studies, it brings together historians and geographers to interrogate the places and spaces of the genocide. The cases encompass the landscapes of particular places (the killing zones in the East, deportations from sites in Italy, the camps of Auschwitz, the ghettos of Budapest) and the intimate spaces of bodies on evacuation marches. Geographies of the Holocaust puts forward models and a research agenda for different ways of visualizing and thinking about the Holocaust by examining the spaces and places where it was enacted and experienced.

This book combines perspectives from political science, history and geography to provide a comprehensive introduction to the notion of European space. It introduces students to the traditional structures and institutions of local government and shows how these have been transformed in response to increased economic and political competition, new ideas, institutional reform and the Europeanization of public policy. At the book′s core is the perceived transition from local government to local governance. The book traces this key development thematically across a wide range of West European states including: Belgium, France, Greece, Italy, Germany, The Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain and the United Kingdom.

In recent years, the 'medieval frontier' has been the subject of extensive research. But the term has been understood in many different ways: political boundaries; fuzzy lines across which trade, religions and ideas cross; attitudes to other peoples and their customs. This book draws attention to the differences between the medieval and modern understanding of frontiers, questioning the traditional use of the concepts of 'frontier' and 'frontier society'. It contributes to the understanding of physical boundaries as well as metaphorical and ideological frontiers, thus providing a background to present-day issues of political and cultural delimitation. In a major introduction, David Abulafia analyses these various ambiguous meanings of the term 'frontier', in political, cultural and religious settings. The articles that follow span Europe from the Baltic to Iberia, from the Canary Islands to central Europe, Byzantium and the Crusader states. The authors ask what was perceived as a frontier during the Middle Ages? What was not seen as a frontier, despite the usage in modern scholarship? The articles focus on a number of themes to elucidate these two main questions. One is medieval ideology. This includes the analysis of medieval formulations of what frontiers should be and how rulers had a duty to defend and/or extend the frontiers; how frontiers were defined (often in a different way in rhetorical-ideological formulations than in practice); and how in certain areas frontier ideologies were created. The other main topic is the emergence of frontiers, how medieval people created frontiers to delimit areas, how they understood and described frontiers. The third theme is that of encounters, and a questioning of medieval attitudes to such encounters. To what extent did medieval observers see a frontier between themselves and other groups, and how does real interaction compare with ideological or narrative formulations of such interaction? Contents: Preface, Nora Berend; Introduction: Seven types of ambiguity c.1100-c.1500, David Abulafia; Crossing the frontier of 9th-century Hispania, Ann Christys; Emperors and expansionism: from Rome to Middle Byzantium, Jonathan Shepard; Byzantium's eastern frontier in the 10th and 11th centuries, Catherine Holmes; Were there borders and borderlines in the Middle Ages? The example of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, Ronnie Ellenblum; Government and the indigenous in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, Jonathan Riley-Smith; Latins and Greeks on Crusader Cyprus, Peter W. Edbury; Genuensis civitas in extremo Europae: Caffa from the 14th to the 15th century, Michel Balard; Granting power to enemy Gods in the chronicles of the Baltic Crusades, Raza Mazeika; The Blue Baltic border of Denmark in the High Middle Ages: Danes, Wends and Saxo Grammaticus, Kurt Villads Jensen; Hungary, the 'Gate of Christendom', Nora Berend; Boundaries and men in Poland from the 12th to the 16th century: the case of Masovia, Grzegorz Mysliwski; The frontiers of Church reform in the British Isles,1170-1230, Brendan Smith; Neolithic meets medieval: first encounters in the Canary Islands, David Abulafia; Index.

This text draws on research carried out since 1989/1991 to describe, interpret and explain the place and spatial order of modernities in Central and Eastern Europe since 1920, to give a theoretically underpinned, regional geography of the area

This text draws on research carried out since 1989/1991 to describe, interpret and explain the place and spatial order of modernities in Central and Eastern Europe since 1920, to give a theoretically underpinned, regional geography of the area

Both the Christian Bible and Aristotle's works suggest that water should entirely flood the earth. Though many ancient, medieval, and early modern Europeans relied on these works to understand and explore the relationships between water and earth, sixteenth-century Europeans particularly were especially concerned with why dry land existed. This book investigates why they were so interested in water's failure to submerge the earth when their predecessors had not been. Analyzing biblical commentaries as well as natural philosophical, geographical, and cosmographical texts from these periods, Lindsay Starkey shows that European sea voyages to the southern hemisphere combined with the traditional methods of European scholarship and religious reformations led sixteenth-century Europeans to reinterpret water and earth's ontological and spatial relationships. The manner in which they did so also sheds light on how we can respond to our current water crisis before it is too late.

Arguably more than any other world regions, the area known as Eastern Europe has been defined by its location on the map. Rather than expound on borders and neighbors, Eastern Europe Unmapped raises questions about the meaning and relevance of the area's non-contiguous, frequently global or extraterritorial, entanglements.