This volume offers the first comprehensive analysis of wills in late medieval Krakow. It presents the origins of testamentary acts in the Kingdom of Poland and its centre, Krakow, and their subsequent transformation from so called ‘canonical wills’ to ‘communal wills’. Wysmułek discusses the socio-cultural role of wills and sets them in their contemporary legal, social, and economic context. In doing so, he uncovers their influence on property ownership and family relations in the city, as well as on the religious practices of the burghers. Ultimately, this work seeks to change the perception of wills by treating the testamentary act itself as an important agent of historical social change – a ‘tool of power’.

Queen of Sorrows takes an original approach to both late-medieval Italian history and the history of Christianity, using quantitative and qualitative analyses of a remarkable archive of 1,904 testaments to determine patterns in giving to the Virgin of Loreto shrine in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Bianca M. Lopez argues that in central Italy, as elsewhere, the cult of the Virgin Mary gained new prominence at this time of unprecedented mortality. Individuals gave to Santa Maria di Loreto, which houses the structure in which Mary is believed to have lived, as an expression of their grief in the hope of strengthening family lineages beyond death and to care for loved ones believed to be languishing in purgatory. Lopez establishes statistical correlations between different social groups and their donations to Loreto over time, uncovering informative new historical patterns such as the prominence of widow and migrant donors in the notarial record. The testaments also provide a social history of Recanati, revealing how its denizens venerated Mary as a saint with unrivaled spiritual power and uniquely sympathetic to grief, having lost her own son, Jesus. In the fourteenth century, plague survivors transformed their anguish into Marian devotion. The devastation of the plague brought the Virgin out of noble courts and monasteries and onto city streets. As Queen of Sorrows details, however, the popularity and growing wealth of Loreto's Marian shrine attracted the attention of the papacy and peninsular seigneurial lords, who eventually brought Santa Maria di Loreto under the control of the Church.

This volume offers the first comprehensive analysis of wills in late medieval Krakow. It presents the origins of testamentary acts in the Kingdom of Poland and its centre, Krakow, and their subsequent transformation from so called ‘canonical wills’ to ‘communal wills’. Wysmułek discusses the socio-cultural role of wills and sets them in their contemporary legal, social, and economic context. In doing so, he uncovers their influence on property ownership and family relations in the city, as well as on the religious practices of the burghers. Ultimately, this work seeks to change the perception of wills by treating the testamentary act itself as an important agent of historical social change – a ‘tool of power’.

The volume Planning for Death: Wills and Death-Related Property Arrangements in Europe, 1200-1600 analyses death-related property transfers in several European regions (England, Poland, Italy, South Tirol, and Sweden). Laws and customary practice provided a legal framework for all post-mortem property devolution. However, personal preference and varied succession strategies meant that individuals could plan for death by various legal means. These individual legal acts could include matrimonial property arrangements (marriage contracts, morning gifts) and legal means of altering heirship by subtracting or adding heirs. Wills and testamentary practice are given special attention, while the volume also discusses the timing of the legal acts, suggesting that while some people made careful and timely arrangements, others only reacted to sudden events. Contributors are Christian Hagen, R.H. Helmholz, Mia Korpiola, Anu Lahtinen, Marko Lamberg, Margareth Lanzinger, Janine Maegraith, Federica Masè, Anthony Musson, Tuula Rantala, Elsa Trolle Önnerfors, and Jakub Wysmułek.

Medieval Arab notions of physical difference can feel singularly arresting for modern audiences. Did you know that blue eyes, baldness, bad breath and boils were all considered bodily 'blights', as were cross eyes, lameness and deafness? What assumptions about bodies influenced this particular vision of physical difference? How did blighted people view their own bodies? Through close analyses of anecdotes, personal letters, (auto)biographies, erotic poetry, non-binding legal opinions, diaristic chronicles and theological tracts, the cultural views and experiences of disability and difference in the medieval Islamic world are brought to life.

In Law’s Dominion, Jay Berkovitz offers a new history of early modern Jewry. Set in the city of Metz, legal sources reveal a robust community able to integrate religion and civic consciousness while navigating competing Jewish and French jurisdictions.

How did people of the past prepare for death, and how were their preparations affected by religious beliefs or social and economic responsibilities? Dying Prepared in Medieval and Early Modern Northern Europe analyses the various ways in which people made preparations for death in medieval and early modern Northern Europe, adapting religious teachings to local circumstances. The articles span the period from the Middle Ages to Early Modernity allowing an analysis over centuries of religious change that are too often artificially separated in historical study. Contributors are Dominika Burdzy, Otfried Czaika, Kirsi Kanerva, Mia Korpiola, Anu Lahtinen, Riikka Miettinen, Bertil Nilsson, and Cindy Wood.

This is the first comprehensive study of the role of women in the Polish Piast dynasty from 965 until c.1144, comparing them with female members of other contemporary medieval dynasties.

This volume shows how families in different contexts – noble, urban, legal, religious - and across different periods of history from the late Middle Ages to the modern era, shaped the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and its successor states, pre-partitioned and post-partitioned Poland. Contributors draw on a diverse range of different sources including rural and urban court registers, church registers, and population surveys to examine the economic bases of families as well as marital and family conflicts. The sources and the applied research methods enable contributors to characterize families led not only by men but also by single women. New research methods employed include approaches to family structures drawn from sociology, such as life-cycle and life-course analysis, as well as anthropological methods to reconstruct kinship in communities. Spanning several centuries, and from the river Oder to the Black Sea, the Baltic, Lithuania, Belarus and the Ukrainian borderlands, this volume is a major contribution to the historiography on East Central Europe, a region still too often omitted from histories of Europe. Framing the Polish Family in the Past will appeal to researchers and students alike in Polish and Lithuanian History and Medieval and Early Modern Society and Culture.

In this volume of 18 essays, leading philosophers address the varied, volatile and novel encounters between contemporary and antique thought. They reconceive and redeploy the problems of ancient metaphysics: one and the many, the potential and the actual, the material and immaterial, the divine and the world itself. Alongside these essays are three original and previously unpublished translations of texts by Gilles Deleuze, Pierre Aubenque and Barbara Cassin.