Our Mission
The Medieval Globe (TMG) is a peer-reviewed journal launched in November 2014 with a special issue on the Black Death as a global pandemic. It explores the modes of communication, materials of exchange, and myriad interconnections among regions, communities, and individuals in an era central to human history. TMG promotes scholarship in three related areas of study:
- the direct and indirect means by which peoples, goods, and ideas came into contact
- the deep roots of global developments
- the ways in which perceptions of the medieval past have been (and are) constructed around the world.
The Medieval Globe is published biannually, in both print and digital formats. Thematic issues usually alternate with miscellanies of select articles submitted for consideration on a rolling basis. Future thematic issues might address such topics as: pilgrimage, diasporas, race and racializing technologies, maritime cultures and ports-of-call, piracy and crime, knowledge networks, markets and consumerism, entertainment, spoils and spolia, global localities, comparative cosmographies, sites of translation and acculturation, slavery and social mobility.
For a more comprehensive introduction to TMG’s mission, please read the executive editor’s introduction.
Submissions
TMG‘s Editorial Board is currently seeking submissions.
It encourages innovative and collaborative work in a variety of academic genres:
Full-length articles
Scholarly dialogues
Multi-authored discussions
Review essays
Editions or translations of source materials
Published Issues
Issues of the Journal
Thematic Volumes
TMG 2.1 | Winter 2016
View TMG 2.1 Online
TMG 1 (double issue) | Spring 2015
Book version of the special issue (Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World, ed. Green)
View TMG 1 Online
View Book version as Open Access
Upcoming Issues
TMG 6.2 | Winter 2019
“Agricultural Treatises in Eurasia before ca. 1500: The Iceberg Method, a Survey, and a Grand Hypothesis,” by Janken Myrdal
“Biblical Apocrypha as Medieval World Literature,” by Brandon Hawk
Alterity and Occidentalism in Fourteenth-Century Icelandic Texts: Narratives of Travel, Conversion, and Dehumanization,” by Arngrímur Vídalín
“Medievalism, Misogyny, and Orientalism: The Representation of Queen Sibylla in Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven,” by Elizabeth Lapina
TMG 6.1 | Summer 2019
Special issue: Medieval Re-Creation: Acts of Recycling, Revision, and Relocation, edited by Joseph Shack and Hannah Weaver
“Introduction,” by Joseph Shack and Hannah Weaver
“Self-Revision and the Arabic Historical Tradition: Identifying Textual Reuse and Reorganization in the Works of al-Balādhurī,” by Ryan J. Lynch
“When Curtains Fall: A Shape-Shifting Silk of the Late Abbasid Period,” by Meredyth Lynn Winter
“Salvaging Meaning: The Art of Recycling in Sino-Mongol Quanzhou, ca. 1276-1408,” by Jennifer Purtle
“Recontextualizing Indigenous Knowledge on the Prussian-Lithuanian Frontier, ca. 1380-1410,” by Patrick Meehan
“Meubles: The Ever Mobile Middle Ages,” by Elizabeth Emery
“Reflection,” by Daniel Lord Smail.
Editorial Board
Executive Editor: Carol Symes
Carol Symes is the Lynn M. Martin Professorial Scholar at the University of Illinois, where she is associate professor of History, Global Studies, Medieval Studies, and Theatre. Educated at Yale and Oxford, she received professional theatre training at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School and pursued an acting career while earning the Ph.D in history at Harvard. The founding executive editor of TMG, she has served on the editorial boards of the American Historical Review, Speculum, and French Historical Studies. She has published widely on medieval manuscript cultures; the relationships among writing, orality, and performance as media of communication; the textual history of pre-modern theatre; and the modern construction and uses of the medieval past. Her first book, A Common Stage: Theater and Public Life in Medieval Arras (Cornell, 2007) was honored with four prestigious awards, including the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize of the American Historical Association and the John Nicholas Brown Prize of the Medieval Academy of America. Her current book project is provisionally entitled “Mediated Texts: The Work of Documentation in Medieval Europe.” In 2013-14, it was supported by a Burkhardt Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies and a residency at the National Humanities Center. For more information on her research and publications, please click here.
James Barrett
Reader in Medieval Archaeology & Deputy Director of the McDonald Institute, University of Cambridge
Viking diaspora and the North Sea world
Kathleen Davis
Professor of English, University of Rhode Island
history and politics of periodization, medievalism, and postcolonial studies
Felipe Fernández-Armesto
William P. Reynolds Professor of History, University of Notre Dame
the Atlantic world, global environmental history, the early Americas
Monica Green
Independent scholar
global history of health, history of medicine and science, women’s history and gender studies
Robert Hymes
Carpentier Professor of Chinese History, Columbia University
middle-period China, social and kinship networks, intellectual and cultural history, medicine and religion
Elizabeth Lambourn
Reader in South Asian and Indian Ocean Studies & Leverhulme Major Research Fellow, DeMontfort University
history and material culture of the South Asian and Indian Ocean world
Yuen-Gen Liang
Academia Sinica, Taiwan & Founding Executive Director of the Spain-North Africa Project
Spain and the Mediterranean world
Victor Lieberman
Marvin B. Becker Collegiate Professor of Southeast Asian History, University of Michigan
premodern and early modern global Southeast Asia
Elizabeth Oyler
Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Pittsburgh
medieval Japanese theatre and the performing arts in a global context
Christian Raffensperger
Associate Professor of History, Wittenberg University
medieval Rus’ and its neighbors, transnational kinship networks
Rein Raud
Professor of Japanese and World Cultures, Tallinn University & Freie Universität Berlin
medieval Japanese literature in a global perspective
D. Fairchild Ruggles
Professor of Landscape Architecture and Art History, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
the Islamic Mediterranean and South Asia
Julia Verkholantsev
Associate Professor of Russian and East European Studies, University of Pennsylvania
cultural and intellectual history of Central and Eastern Europe
Alicia Walker
Associate Professor of Medieval Art and Architecture, Bryn Mawr College
cross-cultural artistic interaction, art and the material culture of Byzantium
Our Emblem
The mark of The Medieval Globe was designed by Matthew Peterson, Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Each graphic element is derived from a different contemporary vision of the medieval world.
