Places and Spaces, Medieval to Modern – serie

The St. Thomas Way is a new heritage route from Swansea to Hereford that invites visitors to step into the rich and complex history of the medieval March of Wales. This volume brings together studies and reflections by those involved in the project, explores the St. Thomas Way as a visitor experience, and offers new insights into commemoration, "sense of place," and pilgrimage today. This book is for readers interested in medieval cults of the saints and pilgrimage traditions, especially those of St. Thomas of Hereford; medieval and modern day pilgrimage; those with a professional interest in heritage, tourism, and regional development; and scholars interested in the process of developing research into public-facing projects and in the application of digital methods and tools in heritage contexts.

This book combines the history of charitable institutions with the study of power in urban and rural spaces from the late medieval to the early modern era. Focusing on the Ospedale di Santa Maria della Scala in Siena, the book goes beyond examining hospitals in an urban context to also consider the significant impact of charitable institutions in rural spaces. Case studies of Santa Maria della Scala's farms allow an investigation of the relationship between urban institutions and their rural properties, while looking at subject hospitals outside the Sienese state offers a glimpse into the competition for power with non-Sienese entities. As Siena's politics shifted in the sixteenth century, Santa Maria della Scala and its rural spaces became sites where power was negotiated. The book thus demonstrates how geographies of power affected the practice of charity for both urban hospitals and the rural communities they influenced.

Exploring the work of writers, illuminators, and craftspeople, this volume demonstrates the pervasive nature of architecture as a category of medieval thought. The architectural remnants of the past—from castles and cathedrals to the lowliest village church—provide many people with their first point of contact with the medieval period and its culture. Such concrete survivals provide a direct link to both the material experience of medieval people and the ideological and imaginative worldview which framed their lives. The studies collected in this volume show how attention to architectural representation can contribute to our understanding of not only the history of architectural thought but also the history of art, the intersection between textual and material culture, and the medieval experience of space and place.