If you didn’t get the Christmas present you wanted this year, here’s a decent consolation prize: twenty brand-new open access books you can read for free.
Open access publishing has become one of the best things to happen to medieval studies in recent years—especially for readers without easy access to a university library. More and more academic presses and research projects are putting entire monographs online at no cost, meaning you can browse the newest work on the Middle Ages from your laptop, download a chapter for later, or build a reading list without worrying about price tags. The twenty titles below are all recent, fully open access, and aimed squarely at medievalists—whether you’re after fresh scholarship for your own research, ideas for teaching, or simply an excuse to spend the quiet days after Christmas deep in the past.
The Passion and Miracles of St. Thomas Becket by Benedict of Peterborough
Translated by Rachel Koopmans
This book offers the first complete English translation of one of the key sources for Thomas Becket: Benedict of Peterborough’s Passion and Miracles of St Thomas Becket. Written in the immediate aftermath of Becket’s murder in Canterbury Cathedral on 29 December 1170, it recounts the killing and records around 275 early miracles from 1171–1173, showing how Becket’s cult spread with startling speed across Europe. Alongside the translation from the original Latin, the volume includes an introduction, full explanatory notes, and appendices that help readers understand the text, its authorship, and its wider Canterbury context.
Feeding Medieval England: A Long ‘Agricultural Revolution’, 700–1300
By Helena Hamerow, Amy Bogaard, Michael Charles, Emily Forster, Matilda Holmes, Mark McKerracher, Christopher Bronk Ramsey, Elizabeth Stroud and Richard Thomas
Medieval England’s population boomed between the tenth and thirteenth centuries, and this book asks how farmers produced the bigger grain harvests that fed that growth and reshaped the countryside. Drawing on evidence from hundreds of excavations and scientific analysis of crops, weeds, livestock, and pollen, it shows how land use changed from the late Roman period to the Black Death—and argues that England’s “cerealisation” was a long, region-by-region revolution.
By Alice Hicklin, Steffen Patzold, Bastiaan Waagmeester and Charles West
For many people in medieval Europe, the local priest was the Church they actually knew, day to day. By putting these priests at the centre of the story, this book offers a new way to understand the period between the Carolingian and Gregorian reforms—shifting attention away from popes and bishops to the realities of local life. Using evidence from manuscripts, liturgy, and documents, it explores priests’ resources and family ties, and how they worked with (and sometimes pushed against) episcopal authority.
Pas d’armes and Late Medieval Chivalry: A Casebook
Edited by Rosalind Brown-Grant and Mario Damen
This casebook explores the pas d’armes (“passage of arms”)—a highly ritualised style of jousting that became elite entertainment across Anjou, Burgundy, France, and Iberia in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. It combines sixteen translated, contextualised primary sources (including narratives, accounts, and illuminated images) with seven new scholarly essays on how these events travelled between courts and shaped ideas about spectacle, masculinity, heraldry, and chivalric bodies. The volume also includes a map and master table of known pas d’armes (c. 1420–1520), a specialised glossary, and offers two additional newly discovered source sets as downloadable supplements.
The Medieval Womb: Hildegard of Bingen’s Views on the Female Reproductive Body
By Minji Lee
This book explores how the twelfth-century abbess Hildegard of Bingen understood the womb, drawing on her medical text Cause et cure and her visionary work Scivias. While medieval writers often framed female bodies as weak and easily “polluted,” Hildegard flips that script, treating menstruation and reproductive fluids as part of the body’s natural systems of cleansing and healing. It closes by tracing how her idea of beneficial bodily flow still echoes in some modern alternative medical traditions, where porosity and fluid exchange can be seen as regenerative rather than dangerous.
Fatimid Cosmopolitanism: History, Material Culture, Politics and Religion
By Gregory Bilotto, Farhad Daftary and Shainool Jiwa
This volume explores the Fatimid caliphate (909–1171), an Ismaili empire that stretched from North Africa and Egypt to parts of Sicily, Syria, and the Hijaz, where patronage helped the arts, sciences, and Ismaili thought to thrive. Centred on Cairo and powered by wide trade networks, Fatimid rule fostered a strikingly cosmopolitan world of exchange—shaping everything from monumental architecture and decorative arts to commerce and intellectual life. Bringing together new research by 22 scholars, the book examines Fatimid cosmopolitanism through four themes: religion and statecraft, rethinking the Fatimid legacy, ceremony and symbolism, and art and archaeology.
Socio-Economic Inequalities during the Conjuncture of the Fourteenth Century: Sources and Methods, Dynamics and Representations (Italy and Europe, c. 1270 – c. 1350)
Edited by Davide Cristoferi
This volume brings together nineteen new essays (in English and Italian) that connect two big debates in medieval economic history: the fourteenth-century “conjuncture” and inequality in pre-industrial societies. Focusing on Central-Northern Italy and Western Europe from about 1270 to 1350, it uses a wide range of sources and methods to explain how inequality worked in the decades before the Black Death—how it was created, experienced, and discussed, and in some cases how it changed after the plague.
Thefts of Relics in Italy: From Late Antiquity to the Central Middle Ages, 300–1150
By Marco Papasidero
As the cult of the saints spread, relics became prized treasures—sources of prestige, protection, and spiritual power—and that made them targets for theft across medieval Europe. This book explores how and why relic-stealing happened in Italy from Late Antiquity to the Central Middle Ages, and how hagiographers crafted stories to prove a relic’s authenticity and justify its removal through miracles, ordeals, and divine approval. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, it reconstructs the cultural world that made “holy theft” thinkable, defensible, and sometimes even celebrated.
Law, Leverage, and Litigation in Late Medieval Bruges: Foreign Merchants in a City of Justice
By Niels Fieremans
Late medieval Bruges was a major trading hub, linking merchants from across northern and southern Europe—but when disputes arose, many visitors found the city’s reputation as a “city of justice” didn’t always match reality. This book examines how Bruges’ aldermen handled conflict resolution and how merchants worked within (and pushed against) the city’s legal system, asking what justice looked like in practice. By tracing the links between customary law, institutions, and commerce, it offers a clear, ground-level view of how a late medieval court functioned and how the legal culture of Flanders evolved.
This essay collection shows how medieval finger rings—humble or luxurious—can reveal big stories about identity, belief, exchange, and the connections they created between people and institutions. Bringing together visual evidence, archaeology, written sources, and museum contexts, nine scholars explore the social lives of rings across Iberia, France, England, Germany, Rus, and Byzantium from roughly 1100 to 1500. With perspectives from art history, history, archaeology, and museum studies, the volume makes the case that these small, sensory objects deserve to be taken seriously.
Lordship, Capitalism, and the State in Flanders (c. 1250–1570)
By Frederik Buylaert and Miet Adriaens
This book takes a fresh look at medieval and early modern rural life by asking a simple question: who did local lordship really serve? In Flanders, seigneuries often worked less as tools of noble power and more as a way for village communities to protect their own interests—so much so that lordship could be just as important in 1567, at the start of the Dutch Revolt, as it was in the mid-thirteenth century. Along the way, it shows how this “middle-class lordship” became the arena where people grappled with the rise of agrarian capitalism, helping explain why relations between lords and peasants could look very different from one region to another.
Mediterranean Connections: The Frankish Kingdoms and the Roman Empire (476–756)
By Laury Sarti
This book argues that Roman imperial authority in the West didn’t simply end in 476, showing instead that the Frankish realm remained closely connected to the empire, with clearer separation only taking shape in the late sixth century. Following diplomacy, shared identities, religious disputes, and trade into the seventh century—and drawing on overlooked sources—it offers a fresh view of Frankish identity and the evolving relationship between Rome, Byzantium, and the Merovingians from the fifth to the eighth century.
Literary Culture in the Medieval Welsh Marches: Networks, Places, Politics
By Matthew Siôn Lampitt
The Welsh Marches are often pictured today as a peaceful, pastoral borderland—but in the Middle Ages they were a much larger, far more turbulent region shaped by conflict, colonisation, and shifting identities. This book explores the Marches as a lively literary crossroads, tracing multilingual writing and manuscript culture in three case studies: Hereford (c. 1170–1210), Ludlow (c. 1310–1350), and Ynysforgan (c. 1380–1410), across Welsh, English, French, and Latin. Using ideas from Bruno Latour and Actor-Network Theory, it shows how these texts connect people, places, and forces in surprising ways—challenging neat divides like centre vs. periphery, local vs. global, and even reality vs. fiction.
Cultural Memory in the Icelandic Contemporary Sagas: Constructing Continuity at a Time of Transformation
By Lucie Korecká
This book reads the Old Icelandic sagas about the twelfth to fourteenth centuries—both secular contemporary sagas and bishops’ sagas—through the lens of cultural memory, treating them as key tools for shaping late medieval Icelanders’ shared identity. It argues that the sagas’ intertextual links don’t just connect texts; they shape how the past itself was understood, turning Iceland’s history from settlement to the fourteenth century into a coherent story built around lasting values. A major focus is how these narratives framed Iceland’s gradual integration into the Norwegian kingdom, at a moment when that experience was shifting from living memory into foundational history.
Greek Captives and Mediterranean Slavery, 1260–1460
By Alasdair C. Grant
In the late medieval Mediterranean, many Greek Christians were swept into captivity and enslavement as the Byzantine Empire shrank and rival powers fought and traded across its former world. Drawing on both literary and documentary evidence from places stretching from the Aegean to Egypt and from Cyprus to Catalonia, this book traces how a crisis that began in thirteenth-century Asia Minor became a Mediterranean-wide system of forced movement and unfreedom. Focusing on the lives of ordinary people, it explores how this trade reshaped social life and politics—and what it meant for Greeks’ relationships with both Christian and Muslim neighbours.
Music, Religion and Politics at Worcester Cathedral, 680-1950
By Richard Newsholme
This book traces music and liturgy at Worcester Cathedral from its seventh-century beginnings to the mid-20th century, showing how worship changed with politics, public opinion, and national trends while still shaped by local pressures. It follows cycles of strict ritual, backlash, decline, and revival—from Benedictine practice to Interregnum Non-Conformity—and highlights Worcester’s contributions to British polyphony up to the fourteenth century and the choir’s role during World War I. Drawing on rich evidence like Anglo-Saxon charters, medieval liturgical manuscripts, and rare polyphonic fragments, it uses Worcester as a window onto the wider story of English cathedral life.
Public Engagement in the European Middle Ages: Medieval Solutions for a Modern Crisis
By Christopher D. Fletcher
This practical guide helps medievalists get better at public engagement by pairing a study of how knowledge reached wider audiences in Europe between 1000 and 1500 with the author’s experience working in a public research library. It identifies the main institutional barriers that make outreach difficult today, then offers four “medieval” solutions—drawn from both famous thinkers and everyday people—that scholars can adapt to their own careers. The result is a toolkit for making medieval expertise clearer, more relevant, and more useful to audiences beyond academia.
Aristocratic networks: Elites and social dynamics in Italy in the age of Lothar I
Edited by Giuseppe Albertoni, Manuel Fauliri and Leonardo Sernagiotto
This book brings together papers from a 2022 conference at the University of Trento on how power worked in Carolingian Italy during the age of Lothar. Using close analysis of the language of the sources and focused case studies, the essays map the networks—alliances and rivalries—that linked elites at different levels and shaped control over people and territories, revealing connections that often stay hidden.
Nicholas of Methone, Reader of Proclus in Byzantium: Context and Legacy
Edited by Jonathan Greig, Joshua Robinson and Dragos Calma
This volume offers the first full study of the 12th-century Byzantine philosopher Nicholas of Methone, reassessing his place in a pivotal period of Byzantine thought. Rather than treating him only as a critic of the Neoplatonist Proclus, it highlights his original work in metaphysics and philosophical theology and sets it within wider debates about how Neoplatonism could—or could not—fit with Christian doctrine. It’s an essential resource for anyone interested in how late antique philosophy lived on in Byzantium and shaped later Byzantine traditions and the Renaissance.
In 680 CE, al-Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī—grandson of the Prophet Muḥammad—was killed at Karbala, an event early accounts treated as one battle among many, but which Shiʿite tradition transformed into a sweeping moral drama that came to express the community’s deepest sense of loss and betrayal. This book traces that shift from the seventh to the tenth centuries, comparing the three earliest versions of the Karbala narrative, examining the story of the Penitents who sought revenge, and following how al-Ḥusayn’s image and rituals grew across historiography, poetry, and Shiʿite hadith.
If you didn’t get the Christmas present you wanted this year, here’s a decent consolation prize: twenty brand-new open access books you can read for free.
Open access publishing has become one of the best things to happen to medieval studies in recent years—especially for readers without easy access to a university library. More and more academic presses and research projects are putting entire monographs online at no cost, meaning you can browse the newest work on the Middle Ages from your laptop, download a chapter for later, or build a reading list without worrying about price tags. The twenty titles below are all recent, fully open access, and aimed squarely at medievalists—whether you’re after fresh scholarship for your own research, ideas for teaching, or simply an excuse to spend the quiet days after Christmas deep in the past.
The Passion and Miracles of St. Thomas Becket by Benedict of Peterborough
Translated by Rachel Koopmans
This book offers the first complete English translation of one of the key sources for Thomas Becket: Benedict of Peterborough’s Passion and Miracles of St Thomas Becket. Written in the immediate aftermath of Becket’s murder in Canterbury Cathedral on 29 December 1170, it recounts the killing and records around 275 early miracles from 1171–1173, showing how Becket’s cult spread with startling speed across Europe. Alongside the translation from the original Latin, the volume includes an introduction, full explanatory notes, and appendices that help readers understand the text, its authorship, and its wider Canterbury context.
Get this book from Boydell & Brewer
Feeding Medieval England: A Long ‘Agricultural Revolution’, 700–1300
By Helena Hamerow, Amy Bogaard, Michael Charles, Emily Forster, Matilda Holmes, Mark McKerracher, Christopher Bronk Ramsey, Elizabeth Stroud and Richard Thomas
Medieval England’s population boomed between the tenth and thirteenth centuries, and this book asks how farmers produced the bigger grain harvests that fed that growth and reshaped the countryside. Drawing on evidence from hundreds of excavations and scientific analysis of crops, weeds, livestock, and pollen, it shows how land use changed from the late Roman period to the Black Death—and argues that England’s “cerealisation” was a long, region-by-region revolution.
Get this book from Oxford University Press
Local Priests in the Latin West, 900–1050
By Alice Hicklin, Steffen Patzold, Bastiaan Waagmeester and Charles West
For many people in medieval Europe, the local priest was the Church they actually knew, day to day. By putting these priests at the centre of the story, this book offers a new way to understand the period between the Carolingian and Gregorian reforms—shifting attention away from popes and bishops to the realities of local life. Using evidence from manuscripts, liturgy, and documents, it explores priests’ resources and family ties, and how they worked with (and sometimes pushed against) episcopal authority.
Get this book from Cambridge University Press
Pas d’armes and Late Medieval Chivalry: A Casebook
Edited by Rosalind Brown-Grant and Mario Damen
This casebook explores the pas d’armes (“passage of arms”)—a highly ritualised style of jousting that became elite entertainment across Anjou, Burgundy, France, and Iberia in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. It combines sixteen translated, contextualised primary sources (including narratives, accounts, and illuminated images) with seven new scholarly essays on how these events travelled between courts and shaped ideas about spectacle, masculinity, heraldry, and chivalric bodies. The volume also includes a map and master table of known pas d’armes (c. 1420–1520), a specialised glossary, and offers two additional newly discovered source sets as downloadable supplements.
Get this book from Liverpool University Press
The Medieval Womb: Hildegard of Bingen’s Views on the Female Reproductive Body
By Minji Lee
This book explores how the twelfth-century abbess Hildegard of Bingen understood the womb, drawing on her medical text Cause et cure and her visionary work Scivias. While medieval writers often framed female bodies as weak and easily “polluted,” Hildegard flips that script, treating menstruation and reproductive fluids as part of the body’s natural systems of cleansing and healing. It closes by tracing how her idea of beneficial bodily flow still echoes in some modern alternative medical traditions, where porosity and fluid exchange can be seen as regenerative rather than dangerous.
Get this book from ARC Humanities Press
Fatimid Cosmopolitanism: History, Material Culture, Politics and Religion
By Gregory Bilotto, Farhad Daftary and Shainool Jiwa
This volume explores the Fatimid caliphate (909–1171), an Ismaili empire that stretched from North Africa and Egypt to parts of Sicily, Syria, and the Hijaz, where patronage helped the arts, sciences, and Ismaili thought to thrive. Centred on Cairo and powered by wide trade networks, Fatimid rule fostered a strikingly cosmopolitan world of exchange—shaping everything from monumental architecture and decorative arts to commerce and intellectual life. Bringing together new research by 22 scholars, the book examines Fatimid cosmopolitanism through four themes: religion and statecraft, rethinking the Fatimid legacy, ceremony and symbolism, and art and archaeology.
Get this book from Bloomsbury
Socio-Economic Inequalities during the Conjuncture of the Fourteenth Century: Sources and Methods, Dynamics and Representations (Italy and Europe, c. 1270 – c. 1350)
Edited by Davide Cristoferi
This volume brings together nineteen new essays (in English and Italian) that connect two big debates in medieval economic history: the fourteenth-century “conjuncture” and inequality in pre-industrial societies. Focusing on Central-Northern Italy and Western Europe from about 1270 to 1350, it uses a wide range of sources and methods to explain how inequality worked in the decades before the Black Death—how it was created, experienced, and discussed, and in some cases how it changed after the plague.
Get this book from Firenze University Press
Thefts of Relics in Italy: From Late Antiquity to the Central Middle Ages, 300–1150
By Marco Papasidero
As the cult of the saints spread, relics became prized treasures—sources of prestige, protection, and spiritual power—and that made them targets for theft across medieval Europe. This book explores how and why relic-stealing happened in Italy from Late Antiquity to the Central Middle Ages, and how hagiographers crafted stories to prove a relic’s authenticity and justify its removal through miracles, ordeals, and divine approval. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, it reconstructs the cultural world that made “holy theft” thinkable, defensible, and sometimes even celebrated.
Get this book from Taylor & Francis
Law, Leverage, and Litigation in Late Medieval Bruges: Foreign Merchants in a City of Justice
By Niels Fieremans
Late medieval Bruges was a major trading hub, linking merchants from across northern and southern Europe—but when disputes arose, many visitors found the city’s reputation as a “city of justice” didn’t always match reality. This book examines how Bruges’ aldermen handled conflict resolution and how merchants worked within (and pushed against) the city’s legal system, asking what justice looked like in practice. By tracing the links between customary law, institutions, and commerce, it offers a clear, ground-level view of how a late medieval court functioned and how the legal culture of Flanders evolved.
Get this book from Edinburgh University Press
The Social Lives of Medieval Rings
Edited by Jitske Jasperse
This essay collection shows how medieval finger rings—humble or luxurious—can reveal big stories about identity, belief, exchange, and the connections they created between people and institutions. Bringing together visual evidence, archaeology, written sources, and museum contexts, nine scholars explore the social lives of rings across Iberia, France, England, Germany, Rus, and Byzantium from roughly 1100 to 1500. With perspectives from art history, history, archaeology, and museum studies, the volume makes the case that these small, sensory objects deserve to be taken seriously.
Get this book from ARC Humanities Press
Lordship, Capitalism, and the State in Flanders (c. 1250–1570)
By Frederik Buylaert and Miet Adriaens
This book takes a fresh look at medieval and early modern rural life by asking a simple question: who did local lordship really serve? In Flanders, seigneuries often worked less as tools of noble power and more as a way for village communities to protect their own interests—so much so that lordship could be just as important in 1567, at the start of the Dutch Revolt, as it was in the mid-thirteenth century. Along the way, it shows how this “middle-class lordship” became the arena where people grappled with the rise of agrarian capitalism, helping explain why relations between lords and peasants could look very different from one region to another.
Get this book from Oxford University Press
Mediterranean Connections: The Frankish Kingdoms and the Roman Empire (476–756)
By Laury Sarti
This book argues that Roman imperial authority in the West didn’t simply end in 476, showing instead that the Frankish realm remained closely connected to the empire, with clearer separation only taking shape in the late sixth century. Following diplomacy, shared identities, religious disputes, and trade into the seventh century—and drawing on overlooked sources—it offers a fresh view of Frankish identity and the evolving relationship between Rome, Byzantium, and the Merovingians from the fifth to the eighth century.
Get this book from Brill
Literary Culture in the Medieval Welsh Marches: Networks, Places, Politics
By Matthew Siôn Lampitt
The Welsh Marches are often pictured today as a peaceful, pastoral borderland—but in the Middle Ages they were a much larger, far more turbulent region shaped by conflict, colonisation, and shifting identities. This book explores the Marches as a lively literary crossroads, tracing multilingual writing and manuscript culture in three case studies: Hereford (c. 1170–1210), Ludlow (c. 1310–1350), and Ynysforgan (c. 1380–1410), across Welsh, English, French, and Latin. Using ideas from Bruno Latour and Actor-Network Theory, it shows how these texts connect people, places, and forces in surprising ways—challenging neat divides like centre vs. periphery, local vs. global, and even reality vs. fiction.
Get this book from Oxford University Press
Cultural Memory in the Icelandic Contemporary Sagas: Constructing Continuity at a Time of Transformation
By Lucie Korecká
This book reads the Old Icelandic sagas about the twelfth to fourteenth centuries—both secular contemporary sagas and bishops’ sagas—through the lens of cultural memory, treating them as key tools for shaping late medieval Icelanders’ shared identity. It argues that the sagas’ intertextual links don’t just connect texts; they shape how the past itself was understood, turning Iceland’s history from settlement to the fourteenth century into a coherent story built around lasting values. A major focus is how these narratives framed Iceland’s gradual integration into the Norwegian kingdom, at a moment when that experience was shifting from living memory into foundational history.
Get this book from DeGruyterBrill
Greek Captives and Mediterranean Slavery, 1260–1460
By Alasdair C. Grant
In the late medieval Mediterranean, many Greek Christians were swept into captivity and enslavement as the Byzantine Empire shrank and rival powers fought and traded across its former world. Drawing on both literary and documentary evidence from places stretching from the Aegean to Egypt and from Cyprus to Catalonia, this book traces how a crisis that began in thirteenth-century Asia Minor became a Mediterranean-wide system of forced movement and unfreedom. Focusing on the lives of ordinary people, it explores how this trade reshaped social life and politics—and what it meant for Greeks’ relationships with both Christian and Muslim neighbours.
Get this book from Edinburgh University Press
Music, Religion and Politics at Worcester Cathedral, 680-1950
By Richard Newsholme
This book traces music and liturgy at Worcester Cathedral from its seventh-century beginnings to the mid-20th century, showing how worship changed with politics, public opinion, and national trends while still shaped by local pressures. It follows cycles of strict ritual, backlash, decline, and revival—from Benedictine practice to Interregnum Non-Conformity—and highlights Worcester’s contributions to British polyphony up to the fourteenth century and the choir’s role during World War I. Drawing on rich evidence like Anglo-Saxon charters, medieval liturgical manuscripts, and rare polyphonic fragments, it uses Worcester as a window onto the wider story of English cathedral life.
Get this book from Open Book Publishers
Public Engagement in the European Middle Ages: Medieval Solutions for a Modern Crisis
By Christopher D. Fletcher
This practical guide helps medievalists get better at public engagement by pairing a study of how knowledge reached wider audiences in Europe between 1000 and 1500 with the author’s experience working in a public research library. It identifies the main institutional barriers that make outreach difficult today, then offers four “medieval” solutions—drawn from both famous thinkers and everyday people—that scholars can adapt to their own careers. The result is a toolkit for making medieval expertise clearer, more relevant, and more useful to audiences beyond academia.
Get this book from Arc Humanities Press
Aristocratic networks: Elites and social dynamics in Italy in the age of Lothar I
Edited by Giuseppe Albertoni, Manuel Fauliri and Leonardo Sernagiotto
This book brings together papers from a 2022 conference at the University of Trento on how power worked in Carolingian Italy during the age of Lothar. Using close analysis of the language of the sources and focused case studies, the essays map the networks—alliances and rivalries—that linked elites at different levels and shaped control over people and territories, revealing connections that often stay hidden.
Get this book from Firenze University Press
Nicholas of Methone, Reader of Proclus in Byzantium: Context and Legacy
Edited by Jonathan Greig, Joshua Robinson and Dragos Calma
This volume offers the first full study of the 12th-century Byzantine philosopher Nicholas of Methone, reassessing his place in a pivotal period of Byzantine thought. Rather than treating him only as a critic of the Neoplatonist Proclus, it highlights his original work in metaphysics and philosophical theology and sets it within wider debates about how Neoplatonism could—or could not—fit with Christian doctrine. It’s an essential resource for anyone interested in how late antique philosophy lived on in Byzantium and shaped later Byzantine traditions and the Renaissance.
Get this book from Brill
The Karbala Story and Early Shi’ite Identity
By Torsten Hylén
In 680 CE, al-Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī—grandson of the Prophet Muḥammad—was killed at Karbala, an event early accounts treated as one battle among many, but which Shiʿite tradition transformed into a sweeping moral drama that came to express the community’s deepest sense of loss and betrayal. This book traces that shift from the seventh to the tenth centuries, comparing the three earliest versions of the Karbala narrative, examining the story of the Penitents who sought revenge, and following how al-Ḥusayn’s image and rituals grew across historiography, poetry, and Shiʿite hadith.
Get this book from Edinburgh University Press
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