Liverpool was founded in the Middle Ages, and as the city approaches its eight-hundredth anniversary, this book takes stock of Liverpool’s scholarly contributions to modern understanding of the period. From the eighteenth century to the twenty-first, scholars from Liverpool have made pioneering advances in fields as diverse as Celtic philology and manuscript collecting. By focusing on a local perspective, this volume presents a microcosmic view of the different building blocks of the modern construction of the Middle Ages while offering fresh insights into more universal elements of medieval culture such as pageantry and mystery plays.

For historians centennial commemorations furnish an excellent heuristic tool for gauging late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century attitudes towards the past and the present. Centenary celebrations helped to revive, perpetuate and reinforce public perceptions of historical events and people in collective memory. They were fairly infrequent before 1850 but increased in size and numbers by the end of the long nineteenth century, so much so that a ‘cult of the centenary’ had become established throughout the wider Western world around 1900. At one level, such events were ephemeral affairs. And yet many left a lasting legacy. Above all, as part of the contemporary processes of the ‘invention of traditions’ and the conscious national ‘self-historicization’ of the established nation-states, they offer crucial insights into the social, cultural and political dynamics of the period.