Each of the eleven essays collected here considers ways in which phenomena in medieval history have been distorted by their modern interpreters. At best, as in Peter Biller's homage to Marc Bloch and the pitfalls of translated nomenclature, the effect is to expose the ‘historicist’ or ‘presentist’ agenda that remains not so much a blight but a defining feature of even the most sophisticated explorations of the human past. By focusing on three key terms (‘religion’, ‘popular religion’ and ‘heresy’), Biller reveals what are essentially twentieth-century impulses, in these instances serving to reify faith, to dignify the lives of the laity, and to equate ‘heresy’ with ‘dissent’ and hence with an underlying Marxisant agenda that celebrates popular or local resistance to hegemonic norms. Just as the modern obsession with ‘popular’ religion risks concealing the ‘massive condescension’ with which medieval (and not so medieval) clergy approached the laity, so, Biller argues, the medieval understanding of religio, as ‘worship’ rather than ‘creed’, renders the study of inter-faith relations in the Middle Ages peculiarly vulnerable to ‘epistemological creep’. With likewise broad focus, Jinty Nelson calls for more imagination in our treatment of a Middle Ages in constant dialogue with, indeed defined by its distance from, modernity. Despite its homiletic tone, this is an essay whose practical demonstrations tend towards the now somewhat frayed globalist clichés of migration, plague and climate. Globalism and materialism (both dialectical and otherwise), it might be noted, remain disturbingly close bedfellows. Returning us from the astral plane to the splintering timbers of humanity, Ian Wood probes the medieval fantasies devised by various nineteenth-century novelists (Scott, Chateaubriand, Sismondi, Thierry, Manzoni, Felix Dahn and, more surprisingly, Wilkie Collins), a useful supplement to Wood's Modern origins of the early Middle Ages. Patrick Geary emphasises the significance of ethnicity as a defining feature of post-Roman Europe's departure from the classical past, here restating one of the central themes of his The myth of nations (2002). By attacking the modern ‘Eurocentric’ equation of Christendom with ‘the West’, he also offers an introduction to Michael Borgolte's unashamedly astral plea to set western European culture in broader monotheistic context, extending not just from Ireland to Kiev but from the Sahara to the Ganges. Two complementary essays, by Bastien Schlüter and Joep Leerssen, build upon a rich literature (not least Camilla Kaul on the Kyffhäuser monument) to explore the nineteenth-century manipulation of the myth of Frederick Barbarossa. In neo-Ghibelline circles Barbarossa was inevitably interpreted as forerunner to ‘Barbablanca’ (the Prussian Wilhelm i). Hence, as Leerssen reveals, at the extravagantly redecorated Kaiserpfalz at Goslar (1867–97), not only were the Hapsburgs entirely air-brushed from the German past, but Hanover's failure to support Prussia in the war of 1866 was not so subtly equated with the desertion of Barbarossa by Henry the Lion. German nationalism likewise looms large in Christian Lübke's study of the easternmost parts of the Reich, viewed very differently by German and Polish historians, not least in the DDR's fantasies of a ‘Germania Slavica’ ahistorically purged of anti-Slav prejudice. Turning to an even richer source of myths, Bernhard Jussen suggests that whilst the pictorial image of Charlemagne was manipulated by both sides of the German Kulturkampf, in France he was presented as educational reformer, with less politicised nuance. This is to ignore the highly politicised ambitions of a French educational establishment, after 1870 obsessed with expunging the shame inflicted by a supposedly better-educated Germany. Through their schools, it was hoped, the French might expiate whatever advantage had accrued to German arms. Even before this, it was no coincidence that the principal Jesuit college in Paris should have been refounded in 1802 as Bonaparte's Lycée Charlemagne. In the one essay here dedicated to southern Europe, Richard Hitchcock considers the supposed depopulation of Andalusia's north-western frontier without reference either to the historiographical legacy of the Spanish Civil War or to the surely definitive recent work of Wendy Davies. Just as remarkably, Christine Caldwell Ames contributes an essay on the American study of Inquisition, strong on Henry Charles Lea and the legacy of Civil War, but with never a mention of Senator Joseph McCarthy. The past remains a foreign country. Even so, those who travel there are far from disadvantaged by knowing something of modern as well as of not-so-modern languages.