This volume brings together contributions of teachers, peers, friends and students of Janneke Raaijmakers, who died in 2021 at age 48, to honour her life and academic accomplishments.  Janneke Raaijmakers was an eminent early medieval scholar who studied the history of religious communities, the cult of saints, the veneration of relics and material culture particularly in the Carolingian world. Almost all chapters engage with different aspects of Janneke Raaijmakers’s research. The book is divided in four thematic sections: Saints, Relics, Community, and Memory. 

“The four themes may seem to be familiar ones in medieval studies, but this volume offers new approaches, some radical new perspectives and much fresh thinking throughout. And the themes are not simply deployed mechanically but are critically developed, redefined and challenged.”

“Certainly the chapters reflect the rich scholarship that Raaijmakers produced in her all-too-short lifetime. This collection should aid in carrying her memory forward as it will attract a relatively wide range of readers, especially early medievalists but also historians of late antiquity and the later Middle Ages.”

ALBRECHT DIEM is Professor of Late Antique and Medieval History at Syracuse University (Syracuse, NY). He recently published The Pursuit of Salvation. Community, Space, and Discipline in Early Medieval Monasticism (Turnhout: Brepols 2021). Currently he is working a translation and commentary of the corpus of 6th-century Latin monastic rules and on a newly discovered pastoral handbook for monks from the early 8th century.

MAYKE DE JONG was Professor of Medieval History at Utrecht University from 1987 until her retirement in 2016. Her most recent books are Epitaph for an Era. Politics and Rhetoric in the Carolingian World (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and, with Justin Lake, Confronting Crisis in the Carolingian Empire. Paschasius Radbertus' Funeral Oration for Wala of Corbie (Manchester University Press, 2020).

IRENE VAN RENSWOUDE is Professor of Medieval Manuscripts and Cultural History at Amsterdam University's Department of Book History, and senior researcher in the Department of Knowledge and Art Practices of the Huygens Institute, part of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her research focuses on practices of censorship, reader's traces and tactile engagement with manuscript books.