The New Middle Ages
Series · 131
books · 1999-2014
Books in series
#1
Absent Narratives, Manuscript Textuality, and Literary Structure In Late Medieva
2002
"Absent Narratives, Manuscript Textuality, and Literary Structure in Late Medieval England" is a book about the defining difference between medieval and modern stories. In chapters devoted to the major writers of the late medieval period—Chaucer, Gower, the "Gawain"-poet and Malory—it presents and then analyzes a set of unique and unnoticed phenomena in medieval narrative, namely the persistent appearance of missing stories: stories implied, alluded to, or fragmented by a larger narrative. Far from being trivial digressions or passing curiosities, these "absent narratives" prove central to the way these medieval works function and to why they have affected readers in particular ways. Traditionally unseen, ignored, or explained away by critics, absent narratives offer a valuable new strategy for reading medieval texts and the historically specific textual culture in which they were written.
#3
Allegory and Sexual Ethics in the High Middle Ages
2007
Guynn offers an innovative new approach to the ethical, cultural, and ideological analysis of medieval allegory. Working between poststructuralism and historical materialism, he considers both the playfulness of allegory and its disciplinary force.
#4
American Chaucers
2007
Soon after their nation's independence, Americans began remaking Chaucer into their own image. In the 1800s, publishers exploited middle-class desires to appear well informed by including bowdlerized Chaucers in parlor-room anthologies. Before WWI, dramatist Percy MacKaye used Chaucer to promote progressive ideals. After the war, James Hall used his reading of Chaucer to refract his prisoner-of-war experience. Until the Depression, women used Chaucer to circumvented educational barriers. Finally, a 2001 film adopted Chaucer to advocate calculated risk-taking, a quintessential American value. All of these popular appropriations have much to tell us about teaching Chaucer.
#5
The Anglo-Scottish Border and the Shaping of Identity, 1300 - 1600
2012
The Anglo-Scottish border in the late medieval and early modern period was a highly contested region; both a militarized zone and a place of cultural contact and exchange. The contributors to this volume explore the role of this borderland in the construction of both Scottish and English identities, seeking insight into the role that Scotland and England played in one another's imaginations. Texts that originated in, pass through, or comment on the Anglo-Scottish border reveal it as a crucial third term in the articulation of Scottish and English national consciousness and cultural identity.
#6
Antimercantilism in Late Medieval English Literature
2010
Antimercantilism in Late Medieval English Literature documents the trajectory of antimercantile ideology under the pressures of the major developments made in economic theory and practice in the later Middle Ages. Roger A. Ladd skillfully explores the relationship between ideology and subjectivity surrounding a single class/estate group and its characteristic sins in the context of literary texts influenced by estates satire. This book focuses in depth on both large works by well-known authors and lesser-studied works, including The Canterbury Tales, Piers Plowman, Mirour de l’Omme, The Book of Margery Kempe, The York Plays, The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye, “The Childe of Bristowe,” and the Pseudo-Chaucerian “Tale of Beryn.”
#8
Battlefronts Real and Imagined
War, Border, and Identity in the Chinese Middle Period
2008
This collection examines the cultural and intellectual dimensions of war and its resolution between Han Chinese and the various ethnically dissimilar peoples surrounding them during the crucial “middle period” of Chinese history.
#9
Political Women in the High Middle Ages
Berenguela of Castile and Her Family
2009
Daughter, wife, and mother of kings, Berenguela of Castile (1180-1246) was a key figure in the formation of medieval Castile-León. Queen of León from 1197-1204, regent for Enrique I of Castile briefly in 1214, and then Queen of Castile in her own right after 1217, she secured the thrones of Castile and León for her son Fernando III and enabled his crusades in al-Andalus. This study examines Berenguela’s use of authority and power, her legitimacy as a female ruler, and her motherhood and patronage in her efforts to maintain the thrones of Castile and León for her family.
#10
Borges the Unacknowledged Medievalist
Old English and Old Norse in His Life and Work
2014
The Argentinian writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) was many things during his life, but what has gone largely unnoticed is that he was a medievalist, and his interest in Germanic medievalism was pervasive throughout his work. This study will consider the medieval elements in Borges creative work and shed new light on his poetry.
#12
Cannibalism in High Medieval English Literature
2007
From Beowulf through the literature of the crusades and beyond, cannibals haunt the texts of medieval England. Cannibal Narratives attempts to explain their presence. It explores the relationship between the literary trope of cannibalism and the emergence of national identity in medieval England. If England suffered three centuries of invasion - beginning with the Vikings and continuing through Danish and Norman conquests of the island - it also developed a unique and uniquely literary response to these circumstances. This book reads the representations cannibalism so common in English medieval literature through cannibalism's metaphoric associations with incorporation, consumption, and violent disruption of the boundaries between self and other. The result uncovers the ways in which these representations articulate a discourse of cannibalism as a privileged mode for thinking about English cultural, and ultimately national, identity in the face of the social crisis.
#13
Capetian Women
2003
Never before have the women of the Capetian royal dynasty in France been the subject of a study in their own right. The new research in Capetian Women challenges old paradigms about the restricted roles of royal women, uncovering their influence in social, religious, cultural and even political spheres. The scholars in the volume consider medieval chroniclers' responses to the independent actions of royal women as well as modern historians' use of them as vehicles for constructing the past. The essays also delineate the creation of reginal identity through cultural practices such as religious patronage and the commissioning of manuscripts, tomb sculpture, and personal seals.
#15
Chaucerian Aesthetics
2008
Chaucerian Aesthetics examines The Canterbury Tale and Troilus and Criseyde from both medieval and post-Kantian vantage points. These sometimes congruent, sometimes divergent perspectives illuminate both the immediate pleasure of encountering beauty and its haunting promise of intelligibility. Although aesthetic reflection has sometimes seemed out of sync with modern approaches to mind and language, Knapp defends its value in general and demonstrates its importance for the analysis of Chaucer s narrative art. Focusing on language games, persons, women, humor, and community, this book ponders what makes art beautiful.
#16
Chaucer's Jobs
2004
Geoffrey Chaucer was not a writer, primarily, but a privileged official place-holder. Prone to violence, including rape, assault, and extortion, the poet was employed first at domestic personal service and subsequently at policework of various sorts, protecting the established order during a period of massive social upset. Chaucer's Jobs shows that the servile and disciplinary nature of the daily work Chaucer did was repeated in his poetry, which by turns flatters his aristocratic betters and deals out discipline to malcontent others. Carlson contends that it was this social and political quality of Chaucer's writings, rathen than artistic merit, that made him the "Father of English Poetry."
#17
Chaucer's Pardoner and Gender Theory
Bodies of Discourse
2000
Chaucer’s Pardoner and Gender Theory, the first book-length treatment of the character, examines the Pardoner in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales from the perspective of both medieval and twentieth-century theories of sex, gender, and erotic practice. Sturges argues for a discontinuous, fragmentary reading of this character and his tale that is genuinely both premodern and postmodern. Drawing on theorists ranging from St. Augustine and Alain de Lille to Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Sturges approaches the Pardoner as a representative of the construction of historical—and sexual—identities in a variety of historically specific discourses, and argues that medieval understandings of gender remain sedimented in postmodern discourse.
#18
Chaucer’s Visions of Manhood
2007
This book argues that Chaucer challenges his culture's mounting obsession with vision through his varied constructions of masculinity. Because medieval theories of vision relied upon distinctions between active and passive seers and viewers, optical discourse had social and moral implications for gender difference in late fourteenth-century England. By exploring ocularity's equal dependence on invisibility, Chaucer offers men and women access to a vision of "manhed," one that fragments a traditional gender binary by blurring its division between agency and passivity.
#19
Claustrophilia
The Erotics of Enclosure in Medieval Literature
2007
If ours is a cultural moment intensely fascinated with enclosed space—the cubicles of our workplaces, the confessionals of our churches, the bedrooms of reality television, and all the various closets we come out of and retreat into—our fascination isn't entirely new. This book argues that the religious literature of the late Middle Ages articulates with great subtlety and vividness the extent to which all being is to some extent enclosed being. In other words, we're all in the closet, and that might be a good thing. Through extended readings of English, French, and Italian writers of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Claustrophilia shows that medieval enclosures actually make room for desires and communities that a poetics of pure openness would exclude. When God holds and confines, revelation is in the boundaries and not beyond them. Accordingly, this book says, love your closet; it is only through what holds and defines us that we can know and love the world.
#20
Communal Discord, Child Abduction, and Rape in the Later Middle Ages
2007
Did medieval women have the power to choose? This is a question at the heart of this book which explores three court cases from Yorkshire in the decades after the Black Death. Alice de Rouclif was a child heiress made to marry the illegitimate son of the local abbot and then abducted by her feudal superior. Agnes Grantham was a successful businesswoman ambushed and assaulted in a forest whilst on her way to dine with the Master of St Leonard’s Hospital. Alice Brathwell was a respectable widow who attracted the attentions of a supposedly aristocratic conman. These are their stories.
#21
Constructing Chaucer
Author and Autofiction in the Critical Tradition
2009
Constructing Chaucer examines the scholarly appropriation and manipulation of Geoffrey Chaucer since his death in 1400 and seeks to enhance the theoretical dialogue on the famous author’s reception history by challenging long-standing assumptions about the “Father of English Poetry.” In response to the academy’s recent disregard for the narrative persona-construct that was especially prominent in medieval literatures, this book offers a new and historically-based version of persona-theory and applies the paradigm to the reception of key texts where Chaucer’s use of the persona is most acute. This method is centered upon the fresh concept of “autofiction,” which is offered in order to recuperate and revitalize the persona as a critical tool. By applying the theory of autofiction to Chaucer’s verse, Gust questions age-old traditions, presents a series of provocative new interpretations, and fosters a more complete understanding of the ideologies of Chaucer criticism.
#22
Contextualizing the Muslim Other in Medieval Christian Discourse
2011
This volume broadens the perspective of recent work on the discourse of the Muslim Other in medieval Christendom by investigating pertinent texts, art, and artifacts in Armenian, Old Irish and Breton, Old Norse, Serbo-Croatian, Middle English, Old French, Middle High German, and Spanish culture. Contributors situate these local discourses of the Muslim Other in the larger cultural context of proto-Eurocentric discourse and make important modifications to the parochial Anglo-Franco-Latin mode of study.
#23
Crafting Jewishness in Medieval England
Legally Absent, Virtually Present
2011
In Crafting Jewishness in Medieval England, Miriamne Ara Krummel complicates the notion of the English Middle Ages as a monolithic age of Christian faith. Cataloguing and explicating the complex depictions of semitisms to be found in medieval literature and material culture, this volume argues that Jews were always present in medieval England, and it is only because of a misreading of the historical record that medieval England has been considered Judenrein—without Jews.
#24
Creating Community With Food and Drink in Merovingian Gaul
2002
Feasting and fasting rituals were a central facet of social interaction in early medieval Gaul. With the adoption of Christianity in the third and fourth centuries in cosmopolitan centers and in the fifth and sixth centuries in rural communities, clerics faced the challenge of guiding recent converts with little understanding of Christianity beyond the rudimentary catechism necessary for baptism. While priests condemned blatantly pagan celebrations, they could not eliminate the powerful networks sustained by food and drink rituals. Accommodation of existing rites did not, however, represent pagan survivals. Using contemporary saints' lives, canonical legislation, penitentials, theological tracts, monastic Rules and cemeterial remains, Bonnie Effros presents five essays addressing the ways in which clerical authors portrayed rites involving food and drink in their attempts to define membership in religious communities, strengthen their relationships with the laity, highlight gender differences, bring about the healing of the sick and maintain ties to deceased ancestors.
#25
Crossing the Bridge
Comparative Essays on Medieval European and Heian Japanese Women Writers
2000
The essays in this collection suggest the similar, and also strikingly dissimilar, strategies of women working within medieval courtly cultures to mitigate traditional patriarchal constraints. Many of the works and authors focus on the courtly aspects of medieval European and Heian culture in which art, literature, and love are the highest pursuits. For both, living is itself art. It supplies instructors and students of world literature, women’s studies, and medieval literature with essential, useful analysis in an area that previously has been the territory of specialists.
#26
Cultural Diversity in the British Middle Ages
Archipelago, Island, England
2008
Through close readings of both familiar and obscure medieval texts, the contributors to this volume attempt to read England as a singularly powerful entity within a vast geopolitical network. This capacious world can be glimpsed in the cultural flows connecting the Normans of Sicily with the rulers of England, or Chaucer with legends arriving from Bohemia. It can also be seen in surprising places in literature, as when green children are discovered in twelfth-century Yorkshire or when Welsh animals begin to speak of the long history of their land s colonization. The contributors to this volume seek moments of cultural admixture and heterogeneity within texts that have often been assumed to belong to a single, national canon, discovering moments when familiar and bounded space erupt into unexpected diversity and infinite realms.
#27
Cultural Studies of the Modern Middle Ages
2007
The essays collected in this volume demonstrate that, when certain medieval and contemporary cultural texts are placed alongside each other, such as a fourteenth-century penitential handbook and the reality television show Survivor, they reveal certain mentalities and social conditions that persist over long durations of time. Several of the essays address overtly political subjects, such as political torture and suicide terrorism, while other essays attend to the various ways in which certain “real-life” fictions and cultural entertainments have always overdetermined our understanding of history, our current moment, and ourselves.
#28
Divine Ventriloquism in Medieval English Literature
Power, Anxiety, Subversion
2011
Divine Ventriloquism in Medieval English Literature studies medieval attitudes towards the human mediation of God’s and Christ’s voices and thus attends to how medieval people resignified a pagan practice. As Mary Hayes demonstrates, the ventriloquized divine voice ultimately permits an exploration of human relationships with God as well as mundane relationships between the divine voice’s designated clerical mediators and their lay audiences. This book demonstrates that the ventriloquized divine voice became a contested site of power as priests acquired more institutional endorsement and, ironically, devotion in some ways became putatively more lay-centered. Taken together, these chapters tell a story, one of a progression from an orthodox view of divine vocal power, to an anxiety over the authority of the priest’s voice, to a subversive take on the ability of lay people not only to mimic the clerical voice but also to generate their own unique performances capable of divine communication.
#29
The Dogaressa of Venice, 1200-1500
Wives and Icons
2006
'Dogaressa' was the title given the wife of the elected leader (doge) in late medieval Venice. This study traces the evolution of the ducal consort's public identity and the limitations placed upon her during Venice's development into an international economic and political power. The book examines the challenges of female proximity to and interaction with Venice's unique and male-dominated political system and considers the tensions between the state, family and gender that met in the person of the ducal consort. Consideration of this unique female office in the context of other political consorts and their civic functions enhances historical understanding of women, family and gendered political environments in late medieval Italy.
#30
The Drama of Masculinity and Medieval English Guild Culture
2007
Introduction Men in the Household, Guild, and City The Domestic Patriarchal Fantasies and Anxieties in the Family and Guild Male Homosocial Communities and Public Life Acting Like a Christ and Masculinity
#31
Ecofeminist Subjectivities
Chaucer's Talking Birds
2011
This book analyzes the interaction between gender and species in Chaucer's poetry and strives to understand his adaptation of medieval discourse through an ecofeminist lens. Works that either speak of animals, or more pertinently those with animals speaking, offer fruitful results in the attempt to understand the medieval textual handling of the 'others' of society.
#32
Ecstatic Transformation
On the Uses of Alterity in the Middle Ages
2005
This book studies the manner in which medieval ways of knowing the Oriental "other" were constructed around the idea of a utopic East as located in the legend and Letter of Prester John (c. 1160). The birth of utopic thinking, it argues, is tied to an understanding of alterity having as much to do with the ways the medieval West understood itself as the manner in which the foreign was mapped. Drawing upon the insights of cultural studies, film studies, and psychoanalysis, this book rethinks the contours of the known and the unknown in the medieval period. It demonstrates how the idea of otherness intersected in intricate ways with other categories of difference (spatial, gender, and religious). Scholars in the fields of history as well as literary and religious studies will be interested in the manner in which the book considers the formal dimensions of how histories of the Oriental "other" were written and lived.
#33
Ekphrastic Medieval Visions
A New Discussion in Interarts Theory
2011
Ekphrasis, a genre of poetry describing a work of art, has traditionally existed on the ideological battleground between the verbal and visual arts. Medieval ekphrases, however, reveal ekphrasis as a process rather than a genre and show how it works with cultural memory to transform, shift, and revise composition. Claire Barbetti explores the high and late medieval dream visions and mystical visions, ending with considerations of contemporary poetry to illustrate how medieval ekphrasis can illuminate current studies in poetics.
#35
Eloquent Virgins
From Thecla to Joan of Arc
2002
The tales of the virgin martyrs inevitably emphasize the torture and mutilation of beautiful young women. To the modern reader, these popular texts seem like exercises in sadism, but while they could be made to function as vehicles for active misogyny, they also provided Medieval women such as Hildegard of Bingen and Joan of Arc with role models who helped them to shape their own extraordinary destinies. This book explores the ability of the virgin body to generate contradictory meanings, both repressive and liberating, depending on who told the tale and how it was told.
#36
Encountering Medieval Textiles and Dress
Objects, Texts, Images
2003
This broad-reaching collection of essays constitutes a thorough introduction to the fields and methodologies concerned with studies of textiles and dress of the Middle Ages. New themes and critical viewpoints from many disciplines are brought to bear on the medieval material in the areas of archaeology, art and architecture, economics, law, history, literature, religion, and textile technology. The contributors address surviving objects and artifacts and interpret representations in texts and images. The articles extend in time from the fifth to the sixteenth centuries, and cover Europe from Scandinavia, England, and Ireland in the north, to Italy and the Mediterranean basin in the south. Emphasis is placed on the significant role of trade and cultural exchanges as they impact appearance and its constituent materials.
#38
England and Iberia in the Middle Ages, 12th-15th Century
Cultural, Literary, and Political Exchanges
2007
This groundbreaking interdisciplinary collection of essays by American, British, and Iberian scholars examines the literary, historical, and artistic exchanges between England and Iberia from the twelfth to the fifteenth century. Ranging from analyses of royal marriages and political alliances to examinations of literary, artistic, and religious interactions, these essays demonstrate the importance of Anglo-Iberian relationships both in and of themselves and in the larger context of developments in Medieval Europe. They also suggest further avenues for research in an area of study that deserves greater scholarly attention. Scholars and students interested in England and Iberia or in comparative studies of Medieval Europe will want to read this book.
#40
The Erotics of Consolation
Desire and Distance in the Late Middle Ages
2008
This collection of essays explores consolation and mourning in the varied, sometimes provocative, readings of Boethius and of Stoic consolation by French, English, Italian and German authors, including Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Machaut, Chaucer, Wyatt and Queen Elizabeth I.
#41
Ethics and Eventfulness in Middle English Literature
2009
Medieval writers were fascinated by fortune and misfortune, yet the critical problems raised by such explorations have not been adequately theorized. Allan Mitchell invites us to consider these contingencies in relation to an “ethics of the event.” His book examines how Middle English writers including Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, and Malory treat unpredictable events such as sexual attraction, political disaster, social competition, traumatic accidents, and the textual condition itself—locating in fortune the very potentiality of ethical life. While earlier scholarship has detailed the iconography of Lady Fortune, this book alters and advances the conversation so that we see fortune less as a negative exemplum than as a positive sign of radical phenomena.
![The [European] Other in Medieval Arabic Literature and Culture book cover](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1349015939i/12730183.jpg)
#42
The [European] Other in Medieval Arabic Literature and Culture
Ninth-Twelfth Century AD
2012
Contrary to the monolithic impression left by postcolonial theories of Orientalism, the book makes the case that Orientals did not exist solely to be gazed at. Hermes shows that there was no shortage of medieval Muslims who cast curious eyes towards the European Other and that more than a handful of them were interested in Europe.
#45
False Fables and Exemplary Truth
Poetics and Reception of Medieval Mode
2005
This study charts relationships between moral claims and audience response in medieval exemplary works by such poets as Chaucer, Gower, Robert Henryson, and several anonymous scribes. In late medieval England, exemplary works make one of the strongest possible claims for the social value of poetic fiction. Studying this debate reveals a set of local literary histories, based on both canonical and non-canonical texts, that complicate received notions of the didactic Middle Ages, the sophisticated Renaissance, and the fallow fifteenth century in between.
#46
Finding Saint Francis in Literature and Art
2009
Finding Saint Francis in Literature and Art demonstrates that remembering Saint Francis of Assisi should take place on many levels. The authors in this collection of essays use the tools of various intellectual disciplines to examine what we now know about Saint Francis in his own era and how the story of Il Poverello has been appropriated in our own times. This critical re-discovery of the artistic and textual narratives of Francis of Assisi contributes to our cultural memory by reflecting on the continuities and changes in the way Francis is understood.
#47
The Flight from Desire
Augustine and Ovid to Chaucer
2006
The Flight from Desire revises our understanding of love in literary texts from the high and late Middle Ages. Starting from the traditions of Augustine and Ovid, it traces the interplay of medieval theories about love with the unruly and uncontainable workings of desire. Individual chapters offer fresh readings of the letters of Abelard and Heloise, the Lais of Marie de France, the Roman de la Rose, Dante's Vita nuova, and the Troilus story told by Boccaccio and Chaucer. In these works, desire powerfully affects ideas of selfhood and social identity, the terms of moral judgment, and even the role of authorship.
#48
The Footprints of Michael the Archangel
The Formation and Diffusion of a Saintly Cult, c. 300-c. 800
2013
Early Christians sought miracles from Michael the Archangel and this enigmatic ecumenical figure was the subject of hagiography, liturgical texts, and relics across Western Europe. Entering contemporary debates about angelology, this fascinating study explores the formation and diffusion of the cult of Saint Michael from c. 300-c.800.
#50
Gender and Power in Medieval Exegesis
2010
After establishing a feminist-historicist perspective on the tradition of biblical commentary, Tinkle develops in-depth case studies that situate scholars reading the bible in three distinct historical moments, and in so doing she exposes the cultural pressures that medieval scholars felt as they interpreted the bible.
#51
Gender in Debate From the Early Middle Ages to the Renaissance
2002
This collection takes the view that authors like Chaucer and Christine de Pizan, often presented as unique, iconic promoters of a debate thought to have occurred primarily in England and France in the late medieval years, should in reality be considered participants in a larger conversation that served diverse political, social, and economic interests and took varied, culturally-determined forms; that greater frame and its contents are the emphasis of this volume. By exploring previously ignored areas, many present fresh material and produce reconceptualizations that use new methodologies.
#54
The Grand Inquisitor, A Bishop And The Maid
Joan Of Arc's Nullification Trial And The Reform Of Inquisition
2009
This book traces enlightenment principles concerning the rights of individuals to obey the dictates of their conscience to an unlikely source: Jean Bréhal, a fifteenth-century Dominican friar and Grand Inquisitor of France appointed by Rome to conduct the nullification of Joan of Arc's heresy conviction.
#55
Heloise and the Paraclete
A Twelfth Century Quest
2002
This is the first modern study of Heloise in all of her personal and historical contexts. McLaughlin looks carefully at the importance of the Paraclete itself to determine its place in the innovative intellectual and religious movements of the twelfth century.
#57
Homoeroticism and Chivalry
Discourses of Male Same-Sex Desire in the 14th Century
2003
Richard E. Zeikowitz explores various discourses of male same-sex desire in diverse 14th century chivalric texts and describes the sociopolitical forces motivating those discourses. He attempts to dethrone traditional heteronormative views by drawing attention to culturally normative "queer" desire. Zeikowitz articulates possible homoeroticized interactions in chivalric texts, such as Charny's Book of Chivalry, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Troilus and Criseyde. He also examines how intimate male bonds are rendered as dangerous attachments in chronicle narratives of the reigns of Edward II and Richard II.
#59
Imaginary Worlds in Medieval Books
Exploring the Manuscript Matrix
2007
This book envisions the confines of medieval manuscripts as the potential territory of many virtual worlds: realms that readers call forth through their imaginative interactions with a book's material features. Each component of a medieval manuscript—its alphabetical characters, pages, images, text, gloss—offers an avenue of involvement with the world of books, and with the worlds in books. The explorations presented here follow those paths in a selection of manuscripts and texts produced in late-medieval Britain, tracing the fortunes of characters who become subject to and sometimes subjects in the very books the read and write.
#60
In the Light of Medieval Spain
Islam, the West, and the Relevance of the Past
2008
This volume brings together a team of leading scholars in Spanish studies to interrogate the contemporary significance of the medieval past, offering a counterbalance to intellectual withdrawal from urgent public debates.
#61
The Inner Life of Women in Medieval Romance Literature
Grief, Guilt, and Hypocrisy
2011
Exploration of the emotionologies of several medieval, romance emotional communities through both fictional and non-fictional narratives. The contributors analyze texts from different linguistic traditions and different periods, but they all focus on women characters.
#62
Isabel la Católica, Queen of Castile
Critical Essays
2002
Few historical figures have continued to captivate attention for centuries after their death as has Queen Isabel I of Castile. Yet the realities of Isabel’s life and works are obscured by the legacy of a persona carefully crafted by Isabel and a cadre of historians in her employ or that of her successors, who recognized the benefits of an image of benevolence and piety. This volume includes original essays that examine the world into which Isabel was born; the public and private facets of her marriage and reign; her intervention in the areas of religion, medicine, the arts, and the reform of political, social and economic institutions; and the construction of her image in literary and historical works from the fifteenth century onward.
#64
Joan of Arc and Spirituality
2003
Joan of Arc is an unusual saint. Canonized in 1920 as a virgin, she died in 1431 as a condemned heretic. Uneducated, militant, and youthful, she obeyed 'Voices' that counselled her to pursue an unprecedented vocation. The various trial records provide a wealth of evidence about how Joan and others understood her spiritual life. This collection explores multiple facets of Joan's prayerful life. Two-thirds of the essays focus on Joan in her own time; the later chapters study Joan's formative influence upon modern women. Taken together, these essays offer new perspectives on the heroism of Joan's original way of sanctity.
#65
Julian of Norwich's Legacy
Medieval Mysticism and Post-Medieval Reception
2009
Julian of Norwich the best-known of the medieval mystics today. The text of her Revelation has circulated continually since the fifteenth century, but the twentieth century saw a massive expansion of her popularity. Theological or literary-historical studies of Julian may remark in passing on her popularity, but none have attempted a detailed study of her reception. This collection fills that gap: it outlines the full reception history from the extant manuscripts to the present day, looking at Julian in devotional cultures, in modernist poetry and present-day popular literature, and in her iconography in Norwich, both as a pilgrimage site and a tourist attraction.
#66
The King and the Whore
King Roderick and La Cava
2007
This study explores the extraordinary afterlife of the Spanish legend of King Roderick and La Cava in plays, poems, novels and operas from the eighth century to the present day.
#67
The Laborer's Two Bodies
Literary and Legal Productions in Britain, 1350-1500
2006
The Laborer's Two Bodies explores the intellectual, cultural, and political consequences of one of the most fundamental shifts in late medieval English society: the first national labor regulation in the wake of the 1348 plague. Bridging the medieval and early modern periods, this book analyzes a wide range of texts and images produced in this initial period of labor regulation (1349 to 1500), including texts by Chaucer, Gower, Langland, the Paston Family, and Barclay. The Laborer's Two Bodies demonstrates that the category of labor became increasingly problematic for writers who struggled to understand the meaning of work in a world where labor was simultaneously understood as punishment, virtue, and reward.
#68
Langland's Early Modern Identities
2007
This book uses the methodologies of cultural studies and the history of the book to show how editors and readers of the Sixteenth through the early Nineteenth century successively remade Piers Plowman and its author according to their own ideologies of the Middle Ages.
#69
Language as the Site of Revolt in Medieval and Early Modern England
Speaking as a Woman
2011
Language as the Site of Revolt in Medieval and Early Modern England: Speaking as a Woman makes the provocative argument that despite extensive evidence indicating a wholesale suppression of early women’s speech, women were actively engaged in cultural practices and speech strategies. M.C. Bodden ably demonstrates that not only did women have their own epistemologies, but they were also simultaneously complicit with patriarchal ideology and subversive in undermining that ideology.
#70
Late Medieval Jewish Identities
Iberia and Beyond
2010
Medieval Iberia offers one of the few examples of coexistence over an extended period of time between Jews, Muslims, and Christians in pre-modern Europe. Taking the Jewish community as a focal point, this book thoroughly explores the various “borders”—geographical divides, religious affiliations, gender boundaries, genre divisions—that ruled the lives and intellectual production of late medieval Jews. By shedding new light on the ways in which these boundaries generated the Jewish communities’ multiple, overlapping, and conflicting identities, this book breaks new ground in the study of cultural exchange in the Middle Ages.
#71
The Legend of Charlemagne in the Middle Ages
Power, Faith, and Crusade
2008
These essays take advantage of a new, exciting trend towards interdisciplinary research on the Charlemagne legend. Written by historians, art historians, and literary scholars, these essays focus on the multifaceted ways the Charlemagne legend functioned in the Middle Ages and how central the shared (if nonetheless fictional) memory of the great Frankish ruler was to the medieval West. A gateway to new research on memory, crusading, apocalyptic expectation, Carolingian historiography, and medieval kingship, the contributors demonstrate the fuzzy line separating “fact” and “fiction” in the Middle Ages.
#74
Listen Daughter
The Speculum Virginum and the Formation of Religious Women in the Middle Ages
2001
The words “Listen daughter” (Audi filia, from Psalm 44) were frequently used in exhortations to religious women in the 12th century, a period of dramatic growth in the involvement of women in various forms of religious life. This volume looks at the “Mirror for Virgins” (Speculum Virginum ), an illustrated dialogue between a nun and her spiritual mentor written by a monk not long before Hildegard of Bingen started to record her visions. An appendix provides the first English translation, by Barbara Newman, of significant excerpts from the Speculum.
#75
Listening to Heloise
The Voice of a Twelfth-Century Woman
2000
Heloise, the twelfth-century French abbess and reformer, emerges from this book as one of history’s most extraordinary women, a thinker-writer of profound insight and skill. Her learned mind attracted the most radical philosopher of her time, Peter Abelard. He became her teacher, lover, husband, and finally monastic ally. That relationship has made her fame until now. But Heloise is far more important in her own right. Seventeen experts of international standing collaborate here to reveal and analyze how Heloise’s daring achievements shaped normative issues of theology, rhetoric, rational argument, gender, and emotional authenticity. At last we are able to see her for herself, in her moment of history and human awareness.
#76
The Literary Subversions of Medieval Women
2007
Winner of the 2008 SCMLA Book Prize!!
This study of medieval women as postcolonial writers defines the literary strategies of subversion by which they authorized their alterity within the dominant tradition. To dismantle a colonizing culture, they made public the private feminine space allocated by gender difference: they constructed “unhomely” spaces. They inverted gender roles of characters to valorize the female; they created alternate idealized feminist societies and cultures, or utopias, through fantasy; and they legitimized female triviality—the homely female space—to provide autonomy. While these methodologies often overlapped in practice, they illustrate how cultures impinge on languages to create what Deleuze and Guattari have identified as a minor literature, specifically for women as dis-placed. Women writers discussed include Hrotsvit of Gandersheim, Hildegard of Bingen, Marie de France, Marguerite Porete, Catherine of Siena, Margery Kempe, Julian of Norwich, and Christine de Pizan.
#77
Logic, Theology and Poetry in Boethius, Anselm, Abelard, and Alan of Lille
Words in the Absence of Things
2006
This book offers an interpretation of the major logical, philosophical/theological, and poetic writings of Boethius, Abelard, and Alan of Lille. In this interdisciplinary study, Abelard and Alan of Lille are placed with Boethius as creatively reformulating the Boethian methods, vocabulary, and literary forms so influential in the 12th century. The author examines the theories of language of these thinkers and the ways in which those theories form part of their speculative projects and spiritual aspirations. What emerges are significant structural and narrative connections between the problems of how words illuminate things, how the mind comprehends God, and how the individual reaches beatitude.
#78
Lonesome Words
The Vocal Poetics of the Old English Lament and the African-American Blues Song
2006
The tenth-century Old English lament and twentieth-century blues song each speak the language of a distinct poetic tradition, yet the voices are remarkably similar in their emotive expression of loneliness. This innovative study juxtaposes the texts of each corpus to explore the features that characterize their vocal poetics
#80
Lydgate Matters
Poetry and Material Culture in the Fifteenth Century
2007
This collection re-evaluates the work of fifteenth-century poet John Lydgate in light of medieval material culture. Top scholars in the field unite here with critical newcomers to offer fresh perspectives on the function of poetry on the cusp of the modern age, and in particular on the way that poetry speaks to the heightened relevance of material goods and possessions to the formation of late medieval identity and literary taste. Advancing in provocative ways the emerging fields of fifteenth-century literary and cultural study, the volume as a whole explores the role of the aesthetic not only in late medieval society but also in our own.
#81
Magnificence and the Sublime in Medieval Aesthetics
Art, Architecture, Literature, Music
2010
Lively and deeply productive discussions have focused on the topics of “magnificence” and “the sublime” in the art and literature of antiquity, the Renaissance, and the ages following. They have engaged major figures from Ernst Gombrich to Theodore Adorno to Jean-Francois Lyotard. Yet, these discussions have virtually bypassed the Middle Ages. The essays in Magnificence and the Sublime in Medieval Aesthetics reclaim a position for the medieval period in the theoretical discussion of art, architecture, music, and literature. These analyses of an aesthetic of grandeur show an artistic practice in the Middle Ages that strove for and celebrated grand effects.
#82
Maintenance, Meed, and Marriage in Medieval English Literature
2009
Maintenance, Meed, and Marriage in Medieval English Literature deftly interrogates the relationship between lord and man in medieval England. Employing the study of medieval analogies this book is the first to explore how the relationship between lords and retainers was depicted in literature by Chaucer, Gower, Langland, and Lydgate. Kennedy uses close readings and medieval letter collections to provide a documentary look at how lords and men communicated information about their relationships and reveals surprising information about both medieval law and society.
#83
Malory's Morte D'Arthur
Remaking Arthurian Tradition
2002
This study innovatively explores how Malory’s Morte Darthur responds to available literary vernacular Arthurian traditions—the French defined as theoretical in impulse, the English as performative and experimental. Negotiating these influences, Malory transforms constructions of masculine heroism, especially in the presentation of Launcelot, and exposes the tensions and disillusions of the Arthurian project. The Morte poignantly conveys a desire for integrity in narrative and subject-matter, but at the same time tests literary conceptualizations of history, nationalism, gender and selfhood, and considers the failures of social and legal institutionalizations of violence, in a critique of literary form and of social order.
#84
Manmade Marvels in Medieval Culture and Literature
2007
Manmade marvels of the later medieval courts—animated golden birds, mechanical angels, and other fantastic machines—were not merely amusing distractions, but also agents of social negotiation and political import. In Manmade Marvels, the dancing metal peacocks, animated statuary, and spectacular illusions of the romance tradition are disembedded from traditional literary representation as supernatural fictions, and situated in the political culture where mechanical marvels were fashioned to delight courts, garner prestige, and symbolize power. This book provides a synthesis of court politics and technological history, intellectual traditions, and the practices of everyday life. Lightsey restores these marvels to the cultural roles they played as they were created by craftsmen and consumed by elite culture, invigorating our understanding of the role of craft in embellishing noble lives with the marvelous.
#85
Margaret Paston’s Piety
2010
The collection of Margaret Paston’s letters and papers from fifteenth century England offer an invaluable example of daily life during that period. Drawing on a close reading of these personal letters, as well as Paston's will, this book reveals how popular religion was integrated into daily life.
#86
Marriage, Property, and Women's Narratives
2012
An interdisciplinary approach to the study of women and property, combining literature, history, and economics. By looking at women's marriage narratives over a long period of time, the book reveals the deep discontent with the institution of property ownership as a unifying thread from the Middle Ages up through the twentieth-century.
#87
Medieval and Early Modern Devotional Objects in Global Perspective
Translations of the Sacred
2010
These fourteen essays create an interdisciplinary conversation about the nature and function of sacred and devotional objects across the globe during the medieval and Early Modern period.
#88
The Medieval Chastity Belt
A Myth-Making Process
2007
The chastity belt is one of those objects people have commonly identified with the 'dark' Middle Ages. This book analyzes the origin of this myth and demonstrates how a convenient misconception, or contorted imagination, of an allegedly historical practice has led to profoundly flawed interpretations of control mechanisms used by jealous husbands.
#90
Medieval Go-betweens and Chaucer's Pandarus
2006
This book offers a compelling portrayal of two contrasting figures who bring couples together for romantic love or sex: elegant aristocrats who serve idealized consensual lovers, and ancient crones who capture women for a price. Via a sweeping tour of 45 medieval works from three centuries—Latin comedies, fabliaux, romances, the Roman de la rose, the Book of Good Love, and many others—Mieszkowski reveals a previously unsuspected dimension of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde. An idealized go-between in every outward respect, Pandarus nevertheless acts the part of a go-between for sexual conquest, trapping the woman for the man. Through Pandarus' simultaneous identification with the go-between tradition's contradictory ideologies of desire, Chaucer suspends Troilus and Criseyde's story irreconcilably between lust and idealized romantic love.
#91
Medieval Paradigms
2 Volume Set: Essays in Honor of Jeremy duQuesnay Adams
2005
This collection of essays in two volumes explores patterns of medieval society and culture, spanning from the close of the late antique period to the beginnings of the Renaissance. In the first volume, the articles unravel the complexities of authority and community, and then turn to the multiple rubrics of behavior which bound and defined medieval societies. Volume 1 thus ends with a discussion of morality, from models of civic virtue (and vice) to Christian prescriptions and prohibitions. Volume 2 continues with analyses of forms of devotion, both popular movements and those practices and ceremonies limited to elite groups. The exploration of medieval paradigms comes to a close with a group of essays which follow the medieval patterns well past the Middle Ages, even into the present.
#92
Medieval Paradigms
Volume I: Essays in Honor of Jeremy duQuesnay Adams
2005
This collection of essays in two volumes explores patterns of medieval society and culture, spanning from the close of the late antique period to the beginnings of the Renaissance. In the first volume, the articles unravel the complexities of authority and community, and then turn to the multiple rubrics of behavior which bound and defined medieval societies. Volume 1 thus ends with a discussion of morality, from models of civic virtue (and vice) to Christian prescriptions and prohibitions.
#93
Medieval Paradigms
Volume II: Essays in Honor of Jeremy duQuesnay Adams
2005
This collection of essays in two volumes explores patterns of medieval society and culture, spanning from the close of the late antique period to the beginnings of the Renaissance. Volume 2 analyzes of forms of devotion, both popular movements and those practices and ceremonies limited to elite groups. The exploration of medieval paradigms comes to a close with a group of essays which follow the medieval patterns well past the Middle Ages, even into the present.
#94
The Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary
Enshrinement, Inscription, Performance
2008
Reliquaries, elaborate containers housing the remains of the holy dead, informed numerous aspects of medieval culture. Incorporated into religious ceremonies, they contributed to the voiced, world-creating work of performance. At the same time, their decoration often included inscription, silent and self-referential. In the reliquary, silent inscription and spoken performance enshrined one another to produce a visual language about representation. Using texts by Chaucer, along with anonymous plays, lyrics, and hagiographic verse, The Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary shows how the reliquary’s visual language explicated the representational processes of late-medieval English poetry.
#95
The Medieval Python
The Purposive and Provocative Work of Terry Jones
2012
This is a collection of essays by diverse hands engaging, interrogating, and honoring the medieval scholarship of Terry Jones. Jones' life-long engagement with the Middle Ages in general, and with the work of Chaucer in particular, has significantly influenced contemporary understanding of the period generally, and Middle English letters in particular. Both in film of all types - full-feature comedy (Monty Python and the Holy Grail) as well as educational television series for BBC, the History Channel, etc. (e.g., Medieval Lives) - and in his published scholarship (e.g., Chaucer's Knight, in original and revised editions, Who Murdered Chaucer?), Jones has applied his unique combination of carefully researched scholarship, keen intelligence, fearless skepticism of establishment thinking, and his broad good humor to challenge, enlighten and reform. No one working today in either Middle English studies or in period-related film and/or documentary can proceed untouched by Jones' purposive, provocative views. Jones, perhaps more than any other medievalist, can be said to be an integral part of what Palgrave deems the "common dialogue."
#97
Medieval Theology of Work
Peter Damian and the Medieval Religious Renewal Movement
2006
Historians have long noted the intense debates nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars had over the concept of work, but few are aware of the medieval debates that set the stage for modern discussions. Indeed, medieval society established the framework within which modern Western ideas about work have grown. It is essential, therefore, that we learn what medieval thinkers had to say on the subject. This study addresses this need by examining the thought of Peter Damian and numerous other religious leaders and groups of the High Middle Ages for evidence of their contributions. The result is a deepening of our historical understanding of the concept of work as well as widening our appreciation of the modern world's debt to medieval society.
#98
The Medieval Wild Man
2012
This book traces the trajectory of the appearance of and developing attitudes toward the mythic social group known to Western medieval Europe as the "Wild People" through literary texts and visual images from the twelfth through sixteenth centuries. Stock argues against the prevailing model of the development of the medieval construction of the Wild People, offering a new and different paradigm that demonstrates Europe's continuous ambivalence about the binary of "nature" versus "culture," as expressed in their ongoing love/hate relationship with the Wild Man.
#100
Medievalism, Multilingualism, and Chaucer
2009
In new readings of medieval language attitudes and identities, this book concludes that multilingualism informed masculinist discourses, which were aligned against the vernacular sentiment traditionally attributed to Langland and Chaucer.
#101
Memory, Images, and the English Corpus Christi Drama
2008
Memory, Images, and the English Corpus Christi Drama uniquely brings together memory theory, medieval and contemporary images, cognition, and the English Corpus Christi drama. Lerud argues that the role of frames or backgrounds is integral to the image and has been underestimated or misunderstood in the study of the drama. Lerud examines the use of doorways, arches, gates, and other significant town spaces in framing or setting off particular pageant images, to achieve a fuller understanding of the longevity of a drama often viewed as “Catholic” that nonetheless survived the dissolution of the monasteries and the turmoil of the early Reformation.
#102
The Middle Ages At Work
2004
This timely volume examines the commitments of historicism in the wake of New Historicism. It contributes to the construction of a materialist historicism while, at the same time, proposing that discussions of work need not be limited to the clash between labor and capital. To this end, the essays offer more than a strictly historical view of the complex terms, social and literary, within which labor was treated in the medieval period. Several of the essays strive to reformulate the very critical language we use to think about the categories of labor and work through a continually doubled engagement with modern theories of labor and medieval theories and practices of labor.
#103
Mindful Spirit in Late Medieval Literature
Essays in Honor of Elizabeth D. Kirk
2006
How is late medieval literature inflected by spiritual insight and desires? What weaves of literary cloth especially suit religious insight? This collection of seventeen new essays by distinguished scholars of medieval literature on subjects of mindfulness and spirituality in later medieval (especially English) literature is gathered to honor Brown University Professor Emerita Elizabeth D. Kirk.
#104
Motherhood and Mothering in Anglo-Saxon England
2000
Motherhood and Mothering in Anglo-Saxon England sifts through the historical evidence to describe and analyze a world of violence and intrigue, where mothers needed to devise their own systems to protect, nurture, and teach their children. Mary Dockray-Miller casts a maternal eye on Bede, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and Beowulf to reveal mothers who created rituals, genealogies, and institutions for their children and themselves. Little-known historical figures—queens, abbesses, and other noblewomen—used their power in court and convent to provide education, medical care, and safety for their children, showing us that mothers of a thousand years ago and mothers of today had many of the same goals and aspirations.
#105
Necessary Conjunctions
The Social Self in Medieval England
2005
Necessary Conjunctions is an original study of how regular medieval people created their public social identities. Focusing especially on the world of English townspeople in the later Middle Ages, the book explores the social self, the public face of the individual. It gives special attention to how prevalent norms of honor, fidelity and hierarchy guided and were manipulated by medieval citizens. With variable success, medieval men and women defined themselves and each other by the clothes they work, the goods they cherished, as well as by their alliances and enemies, their sharp tongues and petty violence. Employing a highly interdisciplinary methodology and an original theory makes it possible to see how personal agency and identity developed within the framework of later medieval power structures.
#106
Odd Bodies and Visible Ends in Medieval Literature
2006
This study traces how medieval audiences judge bodies (as saved or damned, human or monstrous) from Doomsday visions to beauty contests. It exposes how medieval texts manipulate narrative time and its visual evidence, like marked bodies. Anxieties about time, death, and Doomsday transform bodies (magically or literally) even in romances. Employing cultural and formalist approaches, this study breaks new ground on the historical obsession about ends and changes, reflected in different genres spanning several hundred years. It lays crucial foundations for the study of bodies—judged by deformity, gender, and other viewed perspectives—in medieval narrative and beyond.
#108
On the Purification of Women
Churching in Northern France, 1100-1500
2006
Honorable Mention for the SMFS First Book Prize!
On the Purification of Women examines the medieval ritual of churching, a rite of purification after childbirth performed on a woman’s first visit to church after giving birth. The book describes the development of the rite from its original meaning as a response to blood pollution to its redefinition as a rite honoring marriage. This redefinition, accomplished within the heated context of twelfth-century Church reforms, promoted lay conformity with the Church’s understanding of marriage and allowed the Church to use the ritual as a disciplinary tool with important consequences for the lives of women and men in late medieval France.
#109
Outlawry in Medieval Literature
2010
Drawing on new historicist principles, this book examines literary and historical narratives, legal statutes and records, sermons, lyric poetry, and biblical exegesis circulating in England between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries. Timothy Scott Jones theorizes the figure of the outlaw in medieval England and uncovers the legal, ethical, and social assumptions that underlie the practice of outlawry.
#111
Paradigms and Methods in Early Medieval Studies
2007
The articles in this volume, by scholars all pursuing careers in the United States, concern the theoretical approaches and methods of early medieval studies. Most of the issues examined span the period from roughly 400 to 1000 CE and regions stretching from westernmost Eurasia to the Black Sea and the Baltic. This is the first volume of essays explicitly to reassess the heuristic structures and methodologies of research on “early medieval Europe.” Because of its geographic, chronological, thematic, and methodological diversity and scope, the collection also showcases the breadth of early medieval studies currently practiced in the United States.
#112
Performing Piety
Musical Culture in Medieval English Nunneries
2006
Honorable Mention for the SMFS First Book Prize!
What did nuns sing? How did they learn about music? How did the music affect their piety? This book answers these and many other questions about the musical life in English nunneries in the later Middle Ages. Drawing upon a wide range of historical sources, Yardley pieces together a mosaic of nunnery musical life. Formal monastic rules, medieval liturgical manuscripts, records from bishops’ visitations to nunneries and other medieval documents provide evidence that even the smallest convents sang the monastic offices on a daily basis and that many of the larger houses celebrated the late medieval liturgy in all of its complexity.
#113
Performing Women in the Middle Ages
Sex, Gender, and the Medieval Iberian Lyric
2005
Performing Women in the Middle Ages approaches medieval lyric poetry through the lens of gender and performance theory and demonstrates how comic-obscene and comic-erotic songs put identity into play, including sex/sexuality, gender, rank, and social status. Denise Filios draws on modern ethnographic and performance studies to fill gaps in the medieval written record, reconstructing lyric performances, exploring how women performed themselves as poetic characters ventriloquized by male poets, and examining how men impersonated female characters. Many of the Galician-Portuguese and Castilian poems she analyzes are available here in English for the first time. This study also explores the cultural context of these songs, including the sites within which they were sung/set and the underlying erotic associations that inform these comic-obscene and comic-erotic songs.
#114
Perilous Passages
The Book of Margery Kempe, 1534–1934
2013
This study will significantly further our interpretations of the unique autobiography of Margery Kempe, lay woman turned mystic and visionary. Following the manuscript from a Carthusian monastery through history, Chappell bridges the gaps in our understanding of the transmission of texts from the medieval past to the present.
#115
The Persistence of Medievalism
Narrative Adventures in Public Discourse
2002
This book seeks to examine the ways medieval genre shapes contemporary public culture. Through an exploration of several contemporary cultural phenomena, this book reveals the narrative underpinnings of public discourse. The ways these particular forms of storytelling shape our assumptions are examined by Angela Jane Weisl through a series of examples that demonstrate the intrinsic ways medievalism persists in the modern world, thus perpetuating archaic ideas of gender, ideology, and doctrine.
#118
Portraits of Medieval Women
Family, Marriage and Social Relationships in Thirteenth Century England
2003
Although numerous studies of medieval women and a number of biographies of medieval queens and noblewomen have appeared in recent years, comparatively few studies have sought to combine biographical and prosopographical approaches in order to develop portraits of specific women in order to highlight different life experiences of medieval women. The individual chapters can be read as separate histories of their specific subjects as well as case studies which together provide a coherent picture of the medieval English noblewoman.
#120
The Post-Historical Middle Ages
2009
This collection of original essays repositions medieval literary studies after an era of historicism. Analyzing the legacy of Marxist and materialist theory on medieval literary criticism, the collection offers new ways of reading texts historically. Drawing upon aesthetic, ethical, and cultural vantage points and methods, these essays demonstrate that a variety of approaches and theories are “historical” and can change what it means to historicize medieval literature. By defining our post-historical moment in medieval English literary studies in terms of new possibilities, this collection will have broad appeal to those interested in the English Middle Ages, history, culture, and reading itself.
#122
Queens in Stone and Silver
The Creation of a Visual Imagery of Queenship in Capetian France
2009
Queens in Stone and Silver makes the intriguing argument that royal women from the early twelfth through the mid-thirteenth centuries exercised cultural patronage to craft a visual imagery for queenship. Kathleen Nolan’s study is the first to juxtapose medieval effigy tombs and personal seals, the two main forms of self-representation. This study considers the meaning of art both through the dialogue between semiotic and iconographic methodologies and the study of lost medieval monuments through the eyes of witnesses from the past. By extricating the artistic meaning of the seals and tombs, Nolan’s uncovers the true agency of royal women and adds a new angle to the way we look at the past.
#123
Queer Love in the Middle Ages
2005
Queer Love in the Middle Ages points out queer themes in the works of the French canon, including Perceval, Romance of the Rose, and Roman d'Eneas. It brings out less known works that prominently feature same-sex themes: Yde and Olive, a romance with a cross-dressed heroine who marries a princess; and many others. The book combines an interest in contemporary French theory (Kristeva, Barthes, psychoanalysis) with a close reading of medieval texts. It discusses important recent publications in pre-modern queer studies in the US. It is the first major contribution to queer studies in medieval French literature.
#125
Race, Class, and Gender in "Medieval" Cinema
2007
The medieval film genre is not, in general, concerned with constructing a historically accurate past, but much analysis nonetheless centers on highlighting anachronisms. This book aims to help scholars and aficionados of medieval film think about how the re-creation of an often mythical past performs important cultural work for modern directors and viewers. The essays in this collection demonstrate that directors intentionally insert modern preoccupations into a setting that would normally be considered incompatible with these concepts. The Middle Ages provide an imaginary space far enough removed from the present day to explore modern preoccupations with human identity.
#126
Reason and Imagination in Chaucer, the Perle-Poet, and the Cloud-Author
Seeing from the Center
2011
This collection makes the compelling argument that Chaucer, the "Perle"-poet, and "The Cloud of Unknowing" author, exploited analogue and metaphor for marking out the pedagogical gap between science and the imagination. Here, respected contributors add definition to arguments that have our attention and energies in the twenty-first century.
#127
Received Medievalisms
A Cognitive Geography of Viennese Women’s Convents
2013
This study examines the post-medieval reception of Vienna's women's monastic institutions. Through analysis of the physical and historical place such women's institutions held in an important urban and political center, this book provides a new picture of the ways in which the medieval shapes later understandings of women's role and agency.
#128
The Repentant Abelard
2002
Abelard was one of the greatest thinkers of the twelfth century, a man of towering brilliance and arrogance, but his poetic works written late in life for his wife Heloise and son Astrolabe reveal a different and more humble man. In the Planctus and the Carmen ad Astralabium we see a man newly coming to terms with the life around him, expressing a simple but heartfelt piety, raging against social injustices and the exploitation of the poor, and re-evaluating the importance of rhetoric and education. Most significantly, we find a man struggling to comprehend, through poems written to the wife and child he abandoned, the divine mysteries of love, relationships, and family.
#129
Representations of Early Byzantine Empresses
Image and Empire
2002
This book reconsiders a wide array of images of Byzantine empresses on media as diverse as bronze coins and gold mosaic from the fifth through seventh centuries A.D. The representations have often been viewed in terms of individual personas, but strong typological currents frame their medieval context. Empress Theodora, the target of political pornography, has consumed the bulk of past interest, but even her representations fit these patterns. Methodological tools from fields as disparate as numismatics as well as cultural and gender studies help clarify the broader cultural significance of female imperial representation and patronage at this time.
#131
Representing Others in Medieval Iberian Literature
2007
This book focuses on the ways exiled medieval Iberian intellectuals—Jewish, Arabic, and Christian—used canonical discourses to shape/create cultural models that "go against the grain," i.e. that differ significantly from official European and Eastern discourses. Representing Others examines how Iberian authors used the fictional go-between to reflect on their role as cultural intermediaries and to open up spaces in the dominant discourse for the variety of voices that characterizes medieval Iberian culture. Representing Others explores the processes of identity formation in a society/geographical region often excluded from discussions of both European and Middle Eastern histories and literatures.
#132
Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature
2001
In 13 studies of representations of rape in medieval and early modern literature by such authors as Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Spenser, this innovative book argues that some form of sexual violence against women has always served as a foundation of Western culture. The book has two purposes: to explore the resistance these pervasive representations generate for readers—especially for female readers—and to explore what these representations tell us about the relationships between men and women. Rose and Robertson focus in particular on the way depictions of rape make manifest a culture’s understanding of the female subject in society.
#133
Representing Righteous Heathens in Late Medieval England
2005
The virtuous pagans who appear in medieval English texts have often been analyzed for their theological significance, but Representing Righteous Heathens argues that such figures also functioned as an innovative resource for framing and thinking about questions of history, difference, and the uses of antiquity, as well as a flexible formal device for structuring a diverse array of vernacular literary fictions. In travel writing, dream visions, hagiographic narrative, chronicle-romances, and sermons, English writers explored the boundaries that divided them from the non-Christian world by making pagan figures speak for themselves in experiments that often strikingly anticipate our own modern critical and pedagogical uses of the Middle Ages.
#134
Robes and Honor
The Medieval World of Investiture
2001
Robes and Honor is a fascinating exploration of the possible common origin and subsequent developments of investiture across medieval Christianity and medieval Islam. The ceremony in all of its cultural variety was much more than the public adoption of a high-value textile as symbol of office; within a culture, robing established a personal link "from the hand" of the giver—king, pope, head of a sect, ambassador—to the receiver—noble, general, official, nun, or acolyte. This volume challenges current thinking on religious and regional boundaries of "cultures," raises semiotic issues about imagined communities, and addresses problems of kingship.
#135
Sacred and Secular in Medieval and Early Modern Cultures
New Essays
2006
This book illuminates the pervasive interplay of "sacred" and "secular" phenomena in the literature, history, politics, and religion of the Middle Ages and Early Modern periods. Following an introduction that examines methodological questions in the study of the sacred and the secular, the other essays treat (among other topics): Old English poetry, troubadour lyrics, twelfth-century romance, the Gregorian Reform, Middle English lyrics and the work of the Pearl-poet, Luther, and Shakespeare. The essays gathered here constitute a new way of applying a classic dichotomy to major cultural phenomena of the pre-modern era.
#136
Sacred Place in Early Medieval Neoplatonism
2004
The twentieth century discovered the concept of sacred place largely through the work of Martin Heidegger and Mircea Eliade. Their writings on sacred place respond to the modern manipulation of nature and secularization of space, and so may seem distinctively postmodern, but their work has an important and unacknowledged precedent in the Neoplatonism of Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. Sacred Place in Early Medieval Neoplatonism traces the appearance and development of sacred place in the writings of Neoplatonists from the third to ninth centuries, and sets them in the context of present-day debates over place and the sacred.
#138
Science, the Singular, and the Question of Theology
2002
Science, the Singular, and the Question of Theology explores the role that the singular plays in the theories of science of Robert Grosseteste, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, Marsilius of Inghen, and Pierre d’Ailly. Confronting the scientific status of theology, Lee argues that the main issue is how to provide a “rational ground” for existing singulars. The book exposes how, on the eve of modernity, existing singulars were freed from the constraints of rational ground.
#139
Sex, Scandal, and Celebrity in Late Eighteenth-Century England
2007
This book tells the story of the bitter feud between the Duchess of Kingston and the actor, Samuel Foote, which resulted in a pair of scandalous trials in London in the revolutionary year of 1776. Set against the backdrop of the American Revolution, the duchess' state trial for bigamy and Foote's criminal trial for attempted sodomy engrossed the attention of Londoners, including George III, Parliament, and the nobility. Sex, Scandal, and Celebrity offers specialists and general readers a meticulously researched and dramatic narrative that relates the fortunes and misfortunes of its protagonists and exposes the social and legal hypocrisies about love, sex, and marriage in the age of George III.
#140
Sex, Scandal, and Sermon in Fourteenth-Century Spain
Juan Ruiz's Libro de Buen Amor
2008
Juan Ruiz's Libro de Buen Amor (1330/1343) is a lively and challenging medieval classic that ranks alongside the works of Dante and Chaucer. This volume is the first to systematically approach the role of humor in the Libro de Buen Amor through the treatment of the body, the visual, and the representation of first-person protagonist as lover. Haywood examines the place of the bawdy and the grotesque in the Libro de Buen Amor in relation to secular and sacred culture. This innovative study will be of interest to scholars and students interested in humor, cultural domains, medieval studies, and Spanish studies.
#141
Sexuality and its Queer Discontents in Middle English Literature
2008
Sexuality and Its Queer Discontents in Middle English Literature exposes the ways in which ostensibly normative sexualities depend upon queerness to shore up their claims of privilege. Through readings of such classic texts as The Canterbury Tales, Pearl, Amis and Amiloun, and Eger and Grime, Tison Pugh explains how sexual normativity can often be claimed only after queerness has been rejected, no matter how appealing such queerness might remain at the story’s end. Masculinity itself is thus revealed to be a queer performance, one which heroic protagonists of medieval narratives embody while nonetheless highlighting its constricting limitations.
#142
Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages
2002
Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages breaks new ground by bringing postmodern writings on vision and embodiment into dialogue with medieval texts and images: an interdisciplinary strategy that illuminates and complicates both cultures. This is an invaluable reference work for anyone interested in the history and theory of visuality, and it is essential reading or scholars of art, science, or spirituality in the medieval period.
#145
Studies in the Medieval Atlantic
2012
This collection of essays offers fresh analysis of topics in the exciting area of Atlantic World studies. Challenging standard assumptions, the essays advance the argument that the Atlantic Ocean was a region that encompassed ethnic and political boundaries, in which a sub-community shaped by culture and commerce arose.
#146
The Surgeon in Medieval English Literature
2006
The medieval English surgeon was subject to a huge variety of cultural perceptions, ranging from that of pitiless butcher to sanctified healer. The bloody craft of surgery served as a uniquely encompassing metaphor for later medieval Christian identity, as defined by the urgent struggle between damnation and salvation articulated so vividly in Middle English poetry and prose. Citrome employs a variety of critical approaches to explain how surgical metaphors became an important tool of ecclesiastical power in the wake of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. Pastoral, theological, recreational, and medical writings are among the texts discussed in this wide-ranging study.
#147
Temporal Circumstances
Form and History in the Canterbury Tales
2006
Temporal Circumstances provides powerful and detailed interpretations of the most important and challenging of the Canterbury Tales. Well-informed and clearly written, this book will interest both those familiar with Chaucer's masterpiece and readers new to it.
#148
The Texture of Society
Medieval Women in the Southern Low Countries
2002
The articles in this collection contribute new information to the ongoing discussion of the history of medieval women. Written by both American and European scholars, and focusing primarily on the medieval Southern Low Countries, these essays demonstrate that women of the region were publicly visible and well-integrated into their society. Topics include concepts of criminality; traveling women; the comparison of testamentary practices in Ghent and Venice; women rulers' art and propaganda; and new paradigms for understanding religious women's visions, music, and their public religious performances. These essays thus shed new light upon women's public leadership roles within their communities. The emphasis on discovering women's agency within Northern European culture makes a valuable contribution among studies of its kind.
#150
Troubled Vision
Gender, Sexuality and Sight in Medieval Text and Image
2004
Troubled Vision is an interdisciplinary collection of essays that explores the interface between gender, sexuality and vision in medieval culture. The volume represents an exciting array of scholarship dealing with visual and textual cultures from the 11th to the 15th centuries. Bringing together a range of theoretical approaches that address the troubling effects of vision on medieval texts and images, the book mediates between medieval and modern constructions of gender and sexuality.
#151
Understanding Scholastic Thought with Foucault
1999
In Understanding Scholastic Thought with Foucault, Philipp Rosemann provides a new introduction to Scholastic thought written from a contemporary and, notably, Foucauldian perspective. In taking inspiration from the methodology of historical research developed by Foucault, the book places the intellectual achievements of the thirteenth century, especially Thomas Aquinas, in a larger cultural and institutional framework. Rosemann’s analysis sees the Scholastic tradition as the process of the gradual reinscription of the Greek intellectual heritage into the center of Christian culture. This process culminated in the thirteenth century, when new intellectual techniques facilitated the creation of a culture of dialogue. Rosemann argues that the witch-hunt can be seen as the result of a subtle but crucial transformation of the Scholastic episteme.
#152
Vernacular and Latin Literary Discourses of the Muslim Other in Medieval Germany
2011
Little attention has been focused on the representation of Muslims in medieval Germany. Proceeding from a grounded use of contemporary cultural theory and close textual analysis, this study analyzes the role of Muslims in several core texts representing drama, epic, and lyric written by the most important writers of medieval Germany. Far from simply adding medieval Germany to the growing scholarly list of the ‘pre-post-colonializing’ European cultures, this study provides important new perspectives.
#153
The Vernacular Mystic Poetry of Islam Spain
Sufi Songs of Andalusia
2008
This book explores the Andalusian mystic popular songs used to resist the Islamic fundamentalists heterodoxy advanced in response to the Christian reconquista.
#154
The Vernacular Spirit
Essays on Medieval Religious Literature
2002
The late-medieval movement into “vernacular theology,” as it has come to be called, inspired many forms of literary expression in all the languages of Europe. Juxtaposing a rich variety of texts, the contributors to this volume consider hagiography, translations of and commentaries on scripture, accounts of visionary experiences, and devotional literature. Their essays illuminate encounters with the divine mediated through language, bringing into play a diversity of national cultures and disciplinary points of view. They also engage vital social and political issues connected with religious experience, including challenges to authority, reinterpretations of texts, and renegotiations of gender roles.
#155
Visual Culture and the German Middle Ages
2005
This multi-disciplinary collection of essays draws on various theoretical approaches to explore the highly visual nature of the Middle Ages and expose new facets of old texts and artefacts. The term 'visual culture' has been used in recent years to refer to modern media theory, film, modern art and other contemporary representational forms and functions. But this emphasis on visuality is not only a modern phenomenon. Discourses on visual processes pervade the works of medieval secular poets, theologians, and scholastics alike. The Middle Ages was a highly visual society in which images, objects, and performance played a dominant communicative and representational role in both secular and religious areas of society. The essays in this volume, which present various perspectives on medieval visual culture, provide a critical historical basis for the study of visuality and visual processes.
#156
Visual Power and Fame in René d'Anjou, Geoffrey Chaucer, and the Black Prince
2009
Reading semiotically against the backdrop of medieval mirrors of princes, Arthurian narratives, and chronicles, this study examines how René d’Anjou (1409-1480), Geoffrey Chaucer’s House of Fame (ca. 1375-1380), and Edward the Black Prince (1330-1376) explore fame’s visual power. While very different in approach, all three individuals reject the classical suggestion that fame is bestowed and understand that particularly in positions of leadership, it is necessary to communicate effectively with audiences in order to secure fame. This sweeping study sheds light on fame’s intoxicating but deceptively simple promise of elite glory.
#157
Voices from the Bench
The Narratives of Lesser Folk in Medieval Trials
2006
Voices from the Bench is a collection of microhistorical essays written by an internationally-known group of scholars specializing in medieval and early modern social history, covering Europe and Mesoamerica. Each essay focuses on formerly anonymous folk by providing a microhistorical portrait drawn from such judicial sources as canonization hearings, the trials of the Inquisition, chancery, criminal, royal, municipal and other courts. Women, Jews, New Christians, witches, servants, midwives, children, the possessed, peasants, shepherds and urban-dwellers are among the often marginalized figures whose daily lives, struggles, mores, and popular beliefs are brought to life through a close reading of these sources.
#158
Was the Bayeux Tapestry Made in France?
The Case for St. Florent of Saumur
2005
This book presents the hypothesis that the Bayeux tapestry, long believed to have been made in England, came from the Loire valley in France, from the abbey of St. Florent of Saumur. This is based on a number of different kinds of evidence, the most important of which is signs of a St. Florent/Breton influence in the portrayal of the Breton campaign in the tapestry, about a tenth of the whole.
#159
Wisdom and Her Lovers in Medieval and Early Modern Hispanic Literature
2008
This book explores how Medieval and Early Modern writers reconstructed, and also how readers read, the contradictory meanings of Lady Wisdom.
#161
Women and Disability in Medieval Literature
2010
This book serves as the first in its field to analyze how disability and gender both thematically and formally operate within late medieval popular literature. Reading romance, conduct manuals, and spiritual autobiography, the study proposes a “gendered model” for exploring the processes by which differences like gender and disability get coded as deviant.
#164
Women and the Medieval Epic
Gender, Genre, and the Limits of Epic Masculinity
2006
This collection of essays explores the place, function, and meaning of women as characters, authors, constructs, and cultural symbols in a variety of epics from the Middle Ages, including those of Persia, Spain, France, England, Germany, and Scandinavia. Medieval epics are traditionally believed to narrate the deeds of men at war. This volume draws our attention not only to the key roles women often play in these narratives, but also to the larger implications they might have for the history of gender. Rather than invite simple cross-cultural generalizations about epic women, however, this book bears witness to the complex gender configurations molded by the rich epic literature of the medieval period.
#165
Women and Wealth in Late Medieval Europe
2009
The twelve essays in Women and Wealth in Late Medieval Europe re-examine the vexing issue of women, money, wealth, and power from distinctive perspectives—literature, history, architectural history—using new archival sources. The contributors examine how money and changing attitudes toward wealth affected power relations between women and men of all ranks, especially the patriarchal social forces that constrained the range of women’s economic choices. Employing theories on gender, culture, and power, this volume reveals wealth as both the motive force in gender relations and a precise indicator of other, more subtle, forms of power and influence mediated by gender.
#168
Women, Power, and Religious Patronage in the Middle Ages
2006
As sisters and successive countesses of Flanders and Hainaut in the thirteenth century, Jeanne and Marguerite actively shaped the political landscape of northern Europe, and compiled an impressive record of monastic patronage. By examining a significant corpus of secular and monastic charters, this study provides a more complex understanding of the role of religious patronage in medieval society, and illuminates concerns specific to powerful women. It simultaneously illustrates the use of patronage to further their political agendas, offering a glimpse of the experience of female rulers in a period when their actions were often constrained and obscured by gender bias.
#169
Writers of the Reign of Henry II
Twelve Essays
2006
This collection is the work of scholars on Middle English, Insular French and Medieval Latin writings of the late twelfth century in England and its possessions, when an English-speaking populace was ruled by a French-speaking aristocracy and administered by a Latin-speaking and writing clergy. The political discourses of Henry's reign are acknowledged, developed and ironised within the first real flowering of so many vernacular genres, romance and history in particular. The energetic and intrepid writers of this period are examined in relation to the development of social institutions and emergent ideas of 'nationhood', as the literature of Henry's court is shown to act as an echo-chamber within which anxieties about the proper exercise of power in a legal order founded on martial conquest could be reflected and soothed.
Authors
Albrecht Classen
Author · 1 books
Albrecht Classen, University of Arizona, Tucson, USA.
Holly S. Hurlburt
Author · 2 books
Holly Hurlburt is professor of history at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. She earned her Ph.D. from Syracuse University in 2000. Her research focuses on women, gender, and power in early modern Venice and the larger Mediterranean region.
Tison Pugh
Author · 7 books
Tison Pugh is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Central Florida. He is the author of Queering Medieval Genres and Sexuality and Its Queer Discontents in Middle English Literature and has published on children’s literature in such journals as Children’s Literature, The Lion and the Unicorn, and Marvels and Tales.
Robert S. Sturges
Author · 2 books
Robert Sturges is a professor of English at ASU. He has taught at M.I.T., Wesleyan University, and the University of New Orleans. His doctorate in comparative literature is from Brown University.
Michelle M. Hamilton
Author · 1 books
Michelle M. Hamilton, Ph.D. (Spanish & Arabic Languages and Literatures, UC Berkeley, 2001; M.A., Hispanic Languages & Literatures, University of California, Davis, 1995; B.A., Spanish Language & Literature, University of Texas, Austin, 1991), is Director of Medieval Studies and Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.
George T. Beech
Author · 1 books
Dr. George Beech is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of History at Western Michigan University. His research interests are around Medieval Europe, especially 11th and 12th Century France. Ph.D., Johns Hopkins
Joel T. Rosenthal
Author · 2 books
Joel T. Rosenthal is Professor Emeritus in the Dept of History at Stony Brook University, USA. He is the author of Old Age in Late Medieval England (1996).
Bonnie Wheeler
Author · 5 books
Bonnie Wheeler is associate professor and Director of Medieval Studies at the Southern Methodist University, Dedman College of Humanities & Sciences (Dallas, Texas).
Kellie Robertson
Author · 1 books
KELLIE ROBERTSON is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Maryland
John Charles Arnold
Author · 1 books
Dr. John Charles Arnold is an Associate Professor at the University of New York at Fredonia, in the USA. He teaches on ancient and medieval Europe. His research has looked at the cultus of Saint Michael the Archangel, and the monastery of Mont Saint-Michel in France.
