The series focuses on Central Europe – a region located at the geographical heart of the European continent, and also a region representing various historically charged and changing meanings and concepts. To modern medievalists, Central Europe was a periphery to the medieval “West”, a border between barbarity and civilization; an area of the lively convergence of different ethnic groups and a socially and culturally framed common space; a point where different “Others” met, as well as an intermediary “bridge” between Roman Catholicism and Latinity in the West and Slavic Orthodoxy and Hellenism in the Byzantine East (including the spread of Islam). Recently, the region and its medieval past have often been misinterpreted as the location of a historical clash between antagonistic political and religious forces.

This series yields the latest interdisciplinary scholarly research on the region’s past, its “construction,” its dynamics, and its perception during the Middle Ages (c. 500–1500 CE). Importantly, this series not only focuses on the “core” area of Central Europe (present-day Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, and Poland), but also on its history and the relationships this area developed and maintained with other regions of medieval Europe and its global entanglements, with particular attention to the European West and North, the Mediterranean, the Balkans, the Black Sea and beyond.