This collection explores the intersection of gender and mobility across the Global Middle Ages. Medieval Mobilities questions how medieval people, texts, images, and ideas move across physiological, geographical, literary, and spiritual boundaries. In what ways do these movements afford new configurations of gender, sexuality, and being? Enacting a dialogue between medieval studies, feminist thought, and queer theory, Medieval Mobilities proposes that attending to the undulations of premodern gender and sexuality may help destabilize unstated assumptions about ways of being and loving in the Middle Ages. This volume also brings together emergent and established scholars to challenge an increasingly static academy and instead envision a scholarly practice focused on intergenerational, international, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Drawing upon wide range of primary sources and theoretical frameworks, the resultant essays unsettle the imagined fixity of gender and propose alternative conceptualizations of embodiment, identity, and difference in the medieval world.

This collection of research, which brings together contributions from scholars around the world, reflects the range and variety of work that is currently being undertaken in the field of travel and mobility in the European Middle Ages. The essays draw on diverse methodological approaches, from the archival and literary to the art historical and archaeological. The collection focuses not just on key medieval modes of travel and mobility, but also on themes whose relevance continues to resonate in the modern world. Topics touched upon include religious and diplomatic journeys, migration, mobility and governance, gendered mobilities, material culture and mobility, mobility and disability, travel and status, and notions of home and abroad. Broad themes are approached through case studies of individuals, families, and groups, ranging from kings, queens, and nobles to friars, exiles, and students. The geographical reach of the collection is particularly broad, encompassing travellers from Southern, Western, Northern, Central and Eastern Europe and journeys to destinations as diverse as Scandinavia, the Black Sea, the Mediterranean, and the Indian Ocean. A wide-ranging and detailed introduction situates the collection in its scholarly context.

This volume aims to investigate the complex theme of social mobility in medieval Italy both by comparing Italian research to contemporary international studies in various European contexts, and by analysing a broad range of themes and specific case studies. Medieval social mobility as a European phenomenon, in fact, still awaits a systematic analysis, and has seldom been investigated iuxta propria principia in social, political and economic history. The essays in the book deal with a number of crucial problems: how is social mobility investigated in European and Mediterranean contexts? How did classic mobility channels such as the Church, officialdom, trade, the law, the lordship or diplomacy contribute to shaping the many variables at play in late medieval societies, and to changing – and challenging – inequality? How did movements and changes in social spaces become visible, and what were their markers? What were the dynamics at the heart of the processes of social mobility in the many territorial contexts of the Italian peninsula?

The Mediterranean world is a model that serves the analysis of the dynamic process of cultural identity through approximation and differentiation, through openness and self-assertion, through a constant contact - by way of travel - to foreign regions, cultures and societies. For ancient Greek culture, mobility seems to be a specific characteristic. The same can be said for the Christian, Judaic and Islamic Middle Ages, however, under different or changed circumstances. This publication presents the contributions to an international workshop in cultural analysis, which focused on mobility as a proof of the historical flexibility of Mediterranean cultural systems.

This book offers critical insights into the geographies of the international student higher education experience from initial recruitment, through to the plethora of personal factors which influence their decisions to become mobile and experiences when abroad. From the student perspective these include, but are not limited to, the importance of social networks, desire for a multicultural experience and the attraction to certain locations as discussed in this volume. However, unlike other work, it also reflects on the motivations of the HEIs themselves and their need to continue recruiting students in the face of greater competition from overseas. Recognising this omission, this book also analyses the resulting migration industries and how these are sustained (and even necessitated) by the sector. It is, therefore, the first to bring together these wider institutional narratives with those of the students resulting in a holistic and comprehensive insight into the student mobility process.

Questions about space and the sacred are now central to Byzantine studies. Recent scholarship has addressed issues of embodiment and performance, power and identity, environmental perceptions and territorial imaginations. At the same time, the mobility turn in the humanities prompts new approaches to and understandings of processes of circulation of people, objects and ideas. Drawing together illuminating contributions from scholars in history, art history, literature, geography, architecture and theology, Sacred Mobilities in Byzantium and Beyond sets the stage for further cross-disciplinary dialogue concerning Orthodox Christian spiritual culture and society in the Byzantine Empire and in the centuries after its fall. Contributors are Veronica della Dora, Ekaterine Gedevanishvili, Molly Greene, Mark Guscin, Christos Antonios Kakalis, Chrysovalantis Kyriacou, Maria Litina, Andrew Louth, Mihail Mitrea, Bissera Pentcheva, Rehav Rubin, and David Williams.

The transition zone between Africa, Asia and Europe was the most important intersection of human mobility in the medieval period. The present volume for the first time systematically covers migration histories of the regions between the Mediterranean and Central Asia and between Eastern Europe and the Indian Ocean in the centuries from Late Antiquity up to the early modern era. Within this framework, specialists from Byzantine, Islamic, Medieval and African history provide detailed analyses of specific regions and groups of migrants, both elites and non-elites as well as voluntary and involuntary. Thereby, also current debates of migration studies are enriched with a new dimension of deep historical time. Contributors are: Alexander Beihammer, Lutz Berger, Florin Curta, Charalampos Gasparis, George Hatke, Dirk Hoerder, Johannes Koder, Johannes Preiser-Kapeller, Lucian Reinfandt, Youval Rotman, Yannis Stouraitis, Panayiotis Theodoropoulos, and Myriam Wissa.

Status and gender are two closely associated concepts within medieval society, which tended to view both notions as binary: elite or low status, married or single, holy or cursed, male or female, or as complementary and cohesive as multiple parts of a societal whole. With contributions on topics ranging from medieval leprosy to boyhood behaviors, this interdisciplinary collection highlights the various ways “status” can be interpreted relative to gender, and what these two interlocked concepts can reveal about the construction of gendered identities in the Middle Ages.

Over the past fifteen years or so, there has been a widespread and increasing fascination with the theme of mobility across the social sciences and humanities. Of course, geographers have always had an interest in mobility, but as yet they have not viewed this in the same 'mobility turn' as in other disciplines where it has been used to critique the standard approaches to the subjects. This text brings together leading academics to provide a revitalised 'geography of mobilities' informed by this wider 'mobility turn'. It makes connections between the seemingly disparate sub-disciplinary worlds of migration, transport and tourism, suggesting that each has much to learn from each other through the ontological and epistemological concern for mobility.

The book explores the complex, multi-directional connections of the "mobility/security nexus" in the re-ordering of states, empires, and markets in historical perspective. Contributing to a vivid academic debate, the book offers in-depth studies on how mobility and security interplay in the emergence of order beyond the modern state. While mobilities studies, migration studies and critical security studies have focused on particular aspects of this relationship, such as the construction of mobility as a political threat or the role of infrastructure and security, we still lack comprehensive conceptual frameworks to grasp the mobility/security nexus and its role in social, political, and economic orders. With authors drawn from sociology, International Relations, and various historical disciplines, this transdisciplinary volume historicizes the mobility-security nexus for the first time. In answering calls for more studies that are both empirical and have historical depth, the book presents substantial case studies on the nexus, ranging from the late Middle Ages right up to the present-day, with examples from the British Empire, the Russian Empire, the Habsburg Empire, Papua New Guinea, Rome in the 1980s or the European Union today. By doing so, the volume conceptualizes the mobility/security nexus from a new, innovative perspective and, further, highlights it as a prominent driving force for society and state development in history. This book will be of much interest to researchers and students of critical security studies, mobility studies, sociology, history and political science.