, ed. Chris Jones, Conor Kostick, and Klaus Oschema. Das Mittelalter: Perspektiven mediävistischer Forschung, Beihefte, 6. Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2020, 297 pp.

The question raised here is currently one of the most urgent ones concerning our entire field, and it would be fantastic if the contributors to this volume might indeed provide us with some powerful answers that would satisfy both the general reader, the colleagues in the modern fields, the university administrators, and, above all, educational politicians who often tend to disrespect the Middle Ages and history at large, along with the Humanities, Social Sciences, the Arts, and other related fields. If we accept that we as human beings are historically grounded and form our identity and culture by means of many different sources, many of which go back to the past, then there is no real limit to the various periods and cultures that need to be consulted by every new generation. This position seems to be so self-evident that most scholars leave it at that, and then ignore the great need to justify their discipline much more aggressively today than ever before, especially because the increasingly digitized and robotized world we are living in is painfully focused on the present, and this to the disadvantage both of the past and the future.