Brepols is an international academic publisher in the humanities, with a particular focus on history, archaeology, history of the arts, language and literature, and critical editions of historical sources. As a family-owned company since our establishment 230 years ago, we aim to play an active role in the scholarly community whilst remaining independent from any institute or publishing conglomerate. It is our mission to produce high-quality publications that have a lasting scholarly impact. Working closely with our authors, we aim to bring new research to a global readership. Our main office is located in a seventeenth-century building in the historic beguinage of Turnhout, Belgium. We also have an editorial presence in France, the US, and Australia and an office in Greece. We publish around 300 titles each year in several major European languages. All of our publications undergo rigorous peer review, with volumes published in our Brepols, Harvey Miller, and Corpus Christianorum imprints.
Our publishing program serves both the private market, including individual scholars, researchers, and students, and the institutional market, including university libraries and research centers. Many Brepols books are published within established academic series that bring together research on a specific subject, period, or methodology. For readers and libraries, these series provide a reliable way to discover new scholarship in their field; for authors, they offer visibility within a recognized scholarly community and alongside other leading works on related topics.
Selected new series:
Cities and Urbanization in West Asia and North Africa Archives
Urbanized society emerged for the first time in human history in ancient West Asia, and it formed a social structure in which the characteristics of each region were determined and centered on a city — a trait that can still be seen in societies worldwide today. The remains of these earliest cities , preserved through abundant archaeological records and numerous cuneiform texts written on clay tablets, provide voluminous data about the birth of urban culture, while the transformation of these centres can be traced over time, from the Hellenistic and Roman periods, via the Byzantine and Sasanian, to the modern day. This peer-reviewed book series is open to both monographs and collected volumes that focus on cities and urbanization in West Asia and its surroundings from ancient times up to the modern age. Encompassing a number of different disciplines, including archaeology, philology, history, anthropology, sociology, city planning, architecture, geology, and geography, this broadly inclusive forum looks to promote innovative studies into the cities, urban landscapes, and urban culture of West Asia in a way that overcomes both chronological and subject-related divides.
Women in Christianity Archives
This book series aims to make visible, analyse and interpret women religious’ lives, writings and experience along with their influence over the multifaceted aspects of culture and religion in order to modify the gender biased history of Christian Europe and Christianity worldwide, approaching them from the interdisciplinary perspective. The book series invites the reader to delve into the abundance and heterogeneity of materially present yet intellectually overshadowed sources from female convents and monasteries as well as other forms of female spiritual engagement. Its aim is to put into value the diverse spaces of female religious communities, pointing out their permeable and polysemic character. These heterogeneous forms of religious commitment were critical for the development of artistic creation, political agency and literary expression of women in the Late Antiquity, Middle Ages and Early Modernity and played a pivotal role in the history of the Christian World.
Techniques, Imagination, and the Body Archives
Techniques, Imagination and the Body publishes scholarship on historical debates, techniques, and traditions that explore the imagination’s capacity to affect the human body and influence the material world. Although recent research in the humanities has seen a flourishing interest in materiality and embodiment, the imagination is still too often treated as an elusive, disembodied notion. This series proposes to reframe the historiography by re-situating the imagination within its full corporeal dimension, foregrounding its techniques and powers, and highlighting the cultural and intellectual transfers—many rooted in the Middle Ages—that shaped its conceptual evolution. Read more.
Viking and Early Medieval Europe Archives
This series exists to capture and inspire new research on Viking and early medieval Europe c. AD 400–1100. Cultural connections across the continent are explored through contributions based on interdisciplinary research. The broad geographical remit of the series, stretching from the Atlantic to Byzantium, and from the Mediterranean to the Barents Sea, allows the series to fully contemplate the vibrant interconnectivity of the age. Contributions are invited for both monographs and thematic edited volumes, which will be available in both printed and electronic formats. The series seeks research on all early medieval European cultures, from a wide variety of areas, including archaeology, history, onomastics, and studies of languages and of landscape. Volumes taking an interdisciplinary approach are particularly encouraged.
Architecturae Pictae Archives
The series aims to study the representation of buildings and ruins in drawings, paintings and intarsia during modern and contemporary period, in order to deepen its evolution, its meaning and the processes of reception of models in Europe. Reciprocal influences between fictive architecture and praxis will conduct to better understanding of changes and progresses of building types and idioms.
Science Diplomacy Archives
The Science Diplomacy series explores the historical entanglements between the scientific and the diplomatic. It examines not only how diplomacy has drawn upon scientific expertise to navigate global challenges, but also gives due attention to how scientific knowledge, practices, and institutions have been shaped by diplomatic agendas. This series provides a platform for critical reflection on how the entanglement between science and diplomacy has fundamentally shaped political and epistemic orders, both past and present. Read more.