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The church of the Premonstratensian Convent in Kraków is an early brick structure with stone detail, dating to the mid-13th century. One of the most precious elements preserved of the original church is the monumental late-Romanesque portal made of sandstone. In the wake of the accrual of cultural layers outside the church in the following centuries, what used to be the main portal leading into the church found itself sunk in the ground up to half of its height. Additionally, the portal was covered by a baroque tower in the 17th century. That had a highly negative impact on the condition of the portal which currently urgently required undertaking interdisciplinary research and conservation works. The archaeological digs made it possible to uncover the complete portal, while the research aimed at defining the reasons and degree of damage to the stone. The research consisted in petrographic examinations, examination of the structure of decay caused by dampness and salt, and electric conductivity tests of the sandstone. The conclusions from the research provided the foundation for designing and implementing a conservation works strategy to save, preserve, and show this exceptional work to the public.

The Abbey of St Mary and St Nicholas at Beeleigh was founded towards the end of the 12th century for a community of Premon-stratensian canons, named after the mother house of their order, Premontre (Aisne), in north-eastern France. With the support of Robert Mantell (d. 1190), lord of Little Marlow and sheriff of Essex, the canons were settled on the river Chelmer, a short distance upstream from the market town of Maldon. [...]in 1249, William de Fancourt and his wife, Rose, granted the canons a plot of land, in return for which during certain Masses-they were to light a candle 'before the heart of St Roger for ever'. Two of the ground-floor spaces are perfect embodiments of comparatively restrained early 13th-century architecture, namely the chapterhouse and the day room.

This article studies the images and the Latin and French texts in a Book of Hours of Premonstratensian Use held at Memorial University Libraries. While the Annunciation scene in Books of Hours has been the subject of numerous studies, the Pentecost scene representing Mary reading to the Apostles has received limited attention in research. The article assesses the meaning of these images and their possible connection to reading practices in late medieval Europe.

The first modern English translation of The History of the Tartars.The History of the Tartars first appeared in 1307 in the city of Poitiers. Book I is a geographical survey of fourteen countries of Asia and the Near East. Book II is a brief account of Muslim military history, including the rise of the Saljuqs and Khwarazmians. Book III describes the early history of the Mongols and Mongol warfare in the Middle East, Central Asia and the Caucasus. Book IV contains Het'um's suggestions to Pope Clement V on initiating a crusade to retake Jerusalem and parts of Cilician Armenia, Lebanon and Syria. With Book IV, Het'um's History enters the ranks of Crusader literature, but with the difference that its author, rather than being a pious and limited cleric, was instead a successful and influential general and tactician.Het'um, was the son of prince Oshin, lord of Korikos in the Kingdom of Cilician Armenia, and nephew of King Het'um I (1226-69) and the kingdom's Constable, Smbat Sparapet (commander-in-chief).

This article analyses the front flyleaf of the cartulary of Tinselve, a manuscript created at the northern French abbey of Prémontré in the mid-13th century. While the manuscript proper contains acts associated with one of Prémontré’s dependent curtes, Tinselve, the scrap piece of parchment used to create the flyleaf contains brief summaries of five letters to be sent from the abbey to other Premonstratensian houses in France and Germany and to a count of Holland. It is therefore a unique survival of the administrative ephemera which the mother abbey of a major medieval monastic order must once have created in abundance. The authors argue that the Tinselve flyleaf, when viewed within the context of other documents of practice produced at Prémontré, complicates traditional narratives of the Premonstratensian Order’s early years. Rather than supporting a story of harmony among the early followers of Norbert of Xanten, the order’s founder, the flyleaf instead helps us to glimpse the institutional workings of Prémontré and its affiliated communities at a moment in the mid-13th century when its abbots were working hard to assert their primacy over other houses and to implement internal reforms.

The first known reference to it is dated 15 March 1364, when Pope Urban V ordered Bishop Edington of Winchester to inquire into a petition from the inhabitants of Hook proposing the foundation of a chapel there. The problem was that neither Bishop Wykeham nor the abbot of Titchfield to whom the parish church had been appropriated since the abbey's foundation in 1232 supported the construction of a chapel at Hook; and therein lay the origins of the dispute. The contention of the abbot of Titchfield, John de Thorney, supported by Wykeham, was that the chapel at Hook prejudiced the rights of both the abbey and the parish church. At some point during the later fifteenth century, the chapel for which William Maple, John Michol and the villagers had fought so doggedly seems simply to have become surplus to requirements, and by the time Titchfield Abbey was suppressed in 1537 it was barely even a memory.

In 1977, an association was founded to restore the ruins of a medieval monastery located in the small town of Aguilar de Campoo (Palencia, Castile and León, Spain) and turn it into the hub of cultural engagement of a progressively depopulated region with scarce economic resources but a remarkably rich cultural heritage. This original initiative has since led to an enormous wealth of activity, and the Santa María la Real Foundation, heir to that association, has diversified the fields in which it works, extending its activities throughout Spain and other countries. The link with Romanesque art, one of the hallmarks of the Aguilar region, has always remained very much alive, although its reach is now much greater, notably through the publication of an ambitious work, the now benchmark “Enciclopedia del Románico en la Península Ibérica” (Encyclopedia of the Romanesque in the Iberian Peninsula). The international impact of this foundation, in an increasingly globalized world with greater demand for culture and heritage, is growing, with activities in different fields and a wide range of projects. However, the roots and ideological foundations that drove those who, more than forty years ago, with no funds but with a tremendous amount of enthusiasm, decided that the role civil society plays is crucial when raising awareness about and conserving heritage and that this cultural wealth, far from being a burden, should be understood as an enormous resource, have never been forgotten. This is what they believed, and they got right to work.

One of the main features of western religious life in the twelfth century was the emergence of new monastic Orders inspired by the desire either to reform observance of the Rule of Benedict or to create alternative forms of monasticism. One such initiative following the latter approach was the Order of Prémontré founded in northern France in the 1120s. This chapter examines the foundations of the Order made in the Holy Land in the twelfth century and considers their appeal to lay patrons and their distinctive role in religious society.

Since the 19th century, the church of Zsámbék was continuously a focus of scholars' interest. The present paper intends to research the church ruins with a new aspect. Using an accurate terrestrial laser scan survey, the geometry of the plan is analysed in order to find proportions among the dimensions. The main goal of the study is to gather information about the design logic of the first masters of the 13th-century Premonstratensian abbey. In addition, our goal was to detect contributions to the 13th-century construction history of the church, that cannot be found in archives of graphic sources. The latest archaeological excavation achieved excellent results concerning several crucial historical points; however, the periodization of the church is still not entirely clarified. From the 19th century, different scholars have proposed various hypotheses about this topic, without consensus.