Member Anna Dorofeeva has recently published a monograph with Arc Humanities Press entitled ‘Reading Nature in the Early Middle Ages: Writing, Language, and Creation in the Latin Physiologus, ca. 700–1000’.

As the recipient of the 2021 ANZAMEMS–ARC Humanities Award for Original Research, Anna’s book has been made available as open access: https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/85029

This book is a new cultural and intellectual history of the natural world in the early medieval Latin West. It examines the complex relationships between language, texts, and the physical world they describe, focusing on the manuscripts of the Physiologus—the foundation of the medieval bestiary. The Physiologus helped to shape the post-Roman worldview about the role and place of human beings in Creation. This process drew on classical ideas, but in its emphasis on allegory, etymology, and a plurality of readings, it was original and distinctive. This study demonstrates precisely how the early medieval re-contextualization of existing knowledge, together with a substantial amount of new writing, set the course of ideas about faith and nature for centuries to come. In doing so, it establishes the importance of multi-text miscellanies for early medieval written culture.

Member Georgina Pitt has recently published a monograph with Arc Humanities Press entitled ‘The Persuasive Agency of Objects and Practices in Alfred the Great’s Reform Program’.

As the recipient of the 2022 ANZAMEMS–ARC Humanities Award for Original Research, Georgina’s book has been made available as open access: https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/92882

Alfred the Great’s early English kingdom was the only one to resist Viking conquest. His reform program strengthened the kingdom and enabled it to hold fast against the Vikings. But texts are largely silent on the process of reform. There has been a tendency to assume that these reforms would obviously be beneficial, but Alfred’s elites were not to know that in advance. What motivated them to do as their king bid them? This book analyzes how objects and behaviours shaped aristocratic response to the reform program, using assemblage theory and social practice theory. The Alfred Jewel (as shown on the cover) exercised a powerful persuasive agency in Alfredian reform. Broadening the frame of inquiry beyond textual evidence, giving objects and behaviours their due, permits a richer and more nuanced understanding.