As a tribute to Felicitas Schmieder, the volume reflects essential lines of development towards a culturally orientated approach in medieval studies closely linked to her academic biography. The authors contributing to the volume further advance her work in the thematic fields of pre-modern cartography, social communities and urban history, cultural encounters, prophecy as a political language and the perception of pre-modern history. The contributions presented here delineate a modern, interdisciplinary approach to medival studies by covering a broad spectrum, ranging chronologically from late antiquity to modernity, spatially from the Indian Ocean to Eastern Central Europe to the Iberian Peninsula, and methodologically from source- to theory-based studies.