E37 - Christian Raffensperger, "Authorship, Worldview, and Identity in Medieval Europe" (Routledge, 2022)

What did medieval authors know about their world? Were they parochial and focused on just their monastery, town, or kingdom? Or were they aware of the broader, medieval Europe that modern historians write about? 

Christian Raffensperger's edited volume Authorship, Worldview, and Identity in Medieval Europe (Routledge, 2022) brings the focus back to medieval authors to see how they describe their world. While we see in these essays that each author certainly had their own biases, the vast majority of them did not view the world as constrained to their small piece of it. Instead, they talked about the wide...