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This volume in honour of Mayke De Jong offers twenty-five essays focused upon the importance of religion to Frankish politics, a discourse to which De Jong herself has contributed greatly in her academic career. The prominent and internationally renowned contributors offer fresh perspectives on various themes such as the nature of royal authority, the definition of polity, unity and dissent, ideas of correction and discipline, the power of rhetoric and the rhetoric of power, and the diverse ways in which power was institutionalised and employed by lay and ecclesiastical authorities. As such, this volume offers a uniquely comprehensive and valuable contribution to the field of medieval history, in particular the study of the Frankish world in the eighth and ninth centuries.

Antonio Juan Luis de la Cerda, VII duque de Medinaceli, y Juan Francisco Leiva y de la Cerda, V marqués de Ladrada, son los autores de una carta y de un memorial dirigidos a la reina regente Mariana de Austria, en 1666. En estos manuscritos, «que corren», se da a conocer el asunto del traslado de los restos de los Infantes de Castilla, Alfonso y Mafalda, de Gibraleón al Real Monasterio de Santa María de Huerta. La historiografía ha considerado el entierro del infante Alfonso de la Cerda en el Monasterio de las Huelgas Reales de Burgos, pero estas cartas barrocas, usadas como medio para la forja de la memoria nobiliaria, parecen desmentirlo: ¿realidad o ficción?

En este breve trabajo se analizan las representaciones iconográficas de las Artes Liberales del Trivium y el Quadrivium contenidos los frescos de la bóveda de la Biblioteca del Real Monasterio de San Lorenzo del Escorial. Las Artes Liberales se representan, en forma de matronas, como transición de la Filosofía para llegar a la Teología.  

John II Komnenos was the son of Emperor Alexios I Komnenos and Eirene Doukaina, and brother of Princess Anna Komnene, the author of the Alexiad. Born in 1087, he was crowned soon after his fifth birthday as co-emperor with his father, and in 1105, he was married to Piroska Árpád, daughter of King Ladislaus I of Hungary and Adelaide of Rheinfelden. He is principally known for continuing his father’s work of stabilising Byzantium after the crises of the eleventh century. This included major wars of defence and conquest in both the Balkans and Anatolia, and especially a major eastern expedition in 1137–1139. During this campaign, he conquered Cilicia, but he was recalled to defend his borders against the Turks before he could make further conquests in Syria and bring the crusader states under his aegis. He died in a hunting accident just before he returned to Syria, with intentions to go to Jerusalem as well. His best-known iconographic representation is a mosaic of him and his wife in the Great Church of Sophia. Whilst there is also an image of him in a contemporary ornate gospel book, his most common representations are found on his many coin issues and seals.

Across the River Tisza, there lies a town, Berehove (hereinafter also referred to as Beregszász [Hu]), situated on the north-eastern edge of the Great Hungarian Plain with the wind swaying ears of wheat, on the flatlands surrounded by rustling oak forests, gold-sweating trachyte mountains, and rivers subsiding upon reaching the plain. It is a veritable fairy garden, a small piece of the realm that out foremother, Emese, dreamt of back in the day. Places, just as people, have their own destinies: they emerge, evolve, thrive, and then, if they are destined so, disappear from the stage of history. The very first mention of Berehove dates back to early 1063, recorded under the name Lamperti, as the estate of Prince Lampert, son of Béla I of Hungary. Prince Lampert founded the later town. At the time, a small settlement must have been situated here with the prince’s countryseat inhabited by the garrison and the household servants. Residents of the house were mostly the gamekeepers and huntsmen of Bereg Forest County. To fully uncover the past is not possible – at the very most, some attempts can be made at its reconstruction by drawing on contemporary sources and relying on archaeological research. The mediaeval layout of the settlement is known from the available sources and serves as a basis for the present study in its efforts to reconstruct the settlement image of the historical town centre and to find out why Lampertszásza did not embark on the path of the ‘classic, city wall/fortification’ type of settlement development. The parish church is the only building of the mediaeval townscape that has survived partially, which, however, provides us with indications about the contemporary buildings of the one-time reginal town and the related ‘block of church buildings’.

Unrivalled Influence explores the exceptional roles that women played in the vibrant cultural and political life of medieval Byzantium. Written by one of the world's foremost historians of the Byzantine millennium, this landmark book evokes the complex and exotic world of Byzantium's women, from empresses and saints to uneducated rural widows. Drawing on a diverse range of sources, Judith Herrin sheds light on the importance of marriage in imperial statecraft, the tense coexistence of empresses in the imperial court, and the critical relationships of mothers and daughters. She looks at women's interactions with eunuchs, the in-between gender in Byzantine society, and shows how women defended their rights to hold land. Herrin describes how they controlled their inheritances, participated in urban crowds demanding the dismissal of corrupt officials, followed the processions of holy icons and relics, and marked religious feasts with liturgical celebrations, market activity, and holiday pleasures. The vivid portraits that emerge here reveal how women exerted an unrivalled influence on the patriarchal society of Byzantium, and remained active participants in the many changes that occurred throughout the empire's millennial history. Unrivalled Influence brings together Herrin's finest essays on women and gender written throughout the long span of her esteemed career. This volume includes three new essays published here for the very first time and a new general introduction by Herrin. She also provides a concise introduction to each essay that describes how it came to be written and how it fits into her broader views about women and Byzantium.

Alphonse II King of Aragon (1164–1196). He was the first king of the Crown of Aragon and son of the Queen Petronila of Aragon (1157–1164) and the count of Barcelona, Ramon Berenguer IV (1137–1162). Aware of the new political reality that he embodied as King of Aragon and Count of Barcelona, Alphonse II made significant changes to his iconography. Among the most important of these is the binomial that he incorporated to his pendent seals; that is, a portrayal of Alphonse enthroned as king on the obverse and Alphonse as count and mounted on a horse on the reverse. As a known bibliophile and as a result of his desire to reorganise his chancellery following the union of various political entities, he ordered the compilation of the Liber Feudorum Maior, the folios of which demonstrate his potestas regia through their lavish iconography. He was no less innovative in his coinage, on which he included, for the first time, the image of his head wearing the crown.

Based on Yang Xuanzhi’s account of the burned-down Luoyang city during the Northern Wei dynasty and contemporary archeological discoveries, this paper tries to decipher the pre-Luoyang memory and imperial identity of the Northern Wei royal family that are embedded in the urban planning of Luoyang city by understanding the reformation of Buddhist politico-religious policy through both a historical approach and literary analysis. Buddhism played a crucial role in the Northern Wei’s campaign of establishing their rulership as a legitimate one from the Chinese perspective. Buddhist temples became structures where commoners interacted on a daily basis, and, in these interactions, the Xianbei rulers managed to bring multiple factors into balance: Northern Wei imperial and Chinese identities and the tension between preserving the ancestral memory and merging the Northern Wei regime into a Chinese political context.

Although the two parallel architectural forms, Han Buddhists and the Cistercian monasteries, seem, on the surface, to be very different—belonging to different religions, different cultural backgrounds, and different ways of construction—they share many similarities in the internal institutional model of monks’ lives and the corresponding architectural core values. The worship space plays the most significant role in both monastic life and layout. In this study, the Three Temples of Guoqing Si and the Church of the Royal Abbey of Santa Maria de Poblet are used as examples to elucidate the connotations behind the architectural forms, in order to further explore how worship spaces serve as an intermediary between deities, monks, and pilgrims. Based on field research and experience of monastic life, this comparative study highlights two fundamental similarities between the Three Temples and the Church: First, both worship spaces are derived from imperial prototypes, have a similar priority of construction, occupy the most important place in both sacred venues, and both serve as a reference for the development of monastic layout. Second, both worship spaces are composed of a similar programmed functional layout, including similar space dominators as well as itineraries. Beyond the surface similarities, this article further analyzes the reasons behind the three differences found. Due to their different understanding of deities, both worship spaces show different ways of worship, images of deities, and distances towards them.

This paper considers the limitations of the Śaivas' prescriptive literature as evidence of the reality of their religion and stresses the benefits of reading it in the light of inscriptions and other forms of non-prescriptive evidence. It utilizes these other sources to address a number of questions that the prescriptive texts do not or cannot address. The first is that of the early history of Śaivism between the Mauryas and the Guptas. It concludes that when initiatory Śaivism achieved its dominance, as it did after the Gupta period, it did so on the basis of a widespread tradition of popular devotion that goes back at least to the second century bc, and that while the ingenuity and adaptability of the emerging Śaiva traditions were instrumental in this rise, a more fundamental cause may have been that in investing in these traditions their patrons were adopting an idiom of self-promotion that would be efficacious in the eyes of an already predominantly Śaiva population. It then presents evidence of this rise to dominance, explains the contradiction between the power and wealth of the Atimārga's pontiffs seen in inscriptions and the ascetic disciplines prescribed in its literature, shows that the Āmardakamaṭha, the Mantramārga's earliest monastic centre, at Auṇḍhā, was already active in the sixth century, argues that it was the initiation of rulers, seen in inscriptions from the seventh century on, that enabled the Mantramārga to spread throughout the subcontinent, and demonstrates that already in the seventh century Śaiva initiation had become routinized as a calendrically fixed duty imposed on temple-attached officiants as a condition of their tenure, thus illustrating how inscriptions can reveal mundane realities that the high-minded prescriptive literature is designed to conceal and transcend.