Travels and Mobilities in the Middle Ages: From the Atlantic to the Black Sea. Marianne O’Doherty and Felicitas Schmieder, eds. International Medieval Research 21. Turnhout: Brepols, 2015. xliv + 342 pp. €90.
teract with each other or the general themes of the volume. Despite the introductory emphasis on digital tools (7–9), most contributors do not employ them, with Vannieuwenhuyze being the exception. Finally, and with respect to the notions of “premodernity” and “urban complexity” (14–15), the editors point to “practices,” a term that has become as fashionable these days as it remains ill-defined, yet virtually all research, across the ideological spectrum, points to the evolutionary nature of social change due to the emergence of capitalism from the late Middle Ages to the present, as, e.g., Spencer Dimmock, Steven Marks, and Markus Cerman emphasize. As such, this collection of essays will make you think hard about the individual case studies, but its general implications are, unfortunately, rather limited.