Though Elizabeth I never left England, she wrote extensively to correspondents abroad, and these letters were of central importance to the politics of the period.
This volume investigates the physical evidence for magic in medieval and modern Britain, including ritual mark, concealed objects, amulets, and magical equipment.
Irish scholars who arrived in Continental Europe in the early Middle Ages are often credited with making some of the most important contributions to European culture and learning of the time, from the introduction of a new calendar to monastic reform.
Investigating the impact of Arabic medieval astrological and magical theories on early modern occult philosophy, this book argues that they provided a naturalistic explanation of astral influences and magical efficacy based on Aristotelian notions of causality.
Analyzing the renowned Saint Birgitta of Sweden from the perspectives of power, authority, and gender, this probing study investigates how Birgitta went about establishing her influence during the first ten years of her career as a living saint, in 1340-1349.
Twelve medieval scholars from a wide range of disciplines, including law, literature, and religion address the question: What did it mean to possess a voice - or to be without one - during the Middle Ages?
This book examines magic's generally maleficent effect on humans from ancient Egypt through the Middle Ages, including tales from classical mythology, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim cultures.
An interdisciplinary synthesis that offers a new understanding of childhood in the Middle Ages as a form of master-servant relation embedded in an ancient sense of time as a correspondence between earthly change and eternal order.
Examining Malory's political language, this study offers a revisionary view of Arthur's kingship in the Morte Darthur and the role of the Round Table fellowship.
This is the first detailed comparative study of patronage as an instrument of power in the relations between kings and bishops in England and Normandy after the Conquest.
Leadership an Elizabethan Culture studies the challenges confronted by government and church leaders (local and central), the counsel given them, the consequences of their decisions, and the views of leadership circulating in late Tudor literature and drama.
The five queens of Navarre were the largest group of female sovereigns in one European realm during the Middle Ages, but they are largely unknown beyond a regional audience.
Working at the intersection of medical, theological, cultural, and literary studies, this book offers an innovative approach to understanding maternity, genealogy and social identity as they are represented in popular literature in late-medieval England.
Retracing the contours of a bitter controversy over the meaning of sacred architecture that flared up among some of the leading lights of the Carolingian renaissance, Collins explores how ninth-century authors articulated the relationship of form to function and ideal to reality in the ecclesiastical architecture of the Carolingian empire.
As one of the greatest of the military orders that were generated in the Church, the Order of the Hospital of St John was a major landowner and a significant political presence in most European states.
This study provides extensive readings of overlooked American reconstructions of Chaucer and The Canterbury Tales from the colonial to postmodern periods, demonstrating how these repackagings convey uniquely American ideas.
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.
High and Mighty Queens of Early Modern England is a truly interdisciplinary anthology of essays including articles on such actual queen regnants as Mary I and Elizabeth I, and queen consorts such as Anne Boleyn, Anna of Denmark, and Henrietta Maria.
In thirteen studies of representations of rape in Medieval and Early Modern literature by such authors as Chaucer, Shakespeare and Spenser, this volume argues that some form of sexual violence against women serves as a foundation of Western culture.
A fascinating account of the phenomenon known as the Black Death, this volume offers a wealth of documentary material focused on the initial outbreak of the plague that ravaged the world in the 14th century.
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.
Jeremy Citrome employs the language of contemporary psychoanalysis to explain how surgical metaphors became an important tool of ecclesiastical power in the wake of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215.
The varied cultural functions of dress, textiles, and clothwork are used in this collection of essays to examine long-standing assumptions about the Middle Ages.
Zeikowitz explores both affirming and denigrating discourses of male same-sex desire in diverse fourteenth-century chivalric texts and describes the sociopolitical forces motivating those discourses.
This book is an innovative study offering the first examination of how three fourteenth-century English queens, Margaret of France, Isabella of France, and Philippa of Hainault, exercised power and authority.
The articles in this volume, by scholars all pursuing careers in the United States, concern the theoretical approaches and methods of early medieval studies.
This study addresses the need to learn what medieval thinkers had to say about the concept of work by examining the thought of Peter Damian and numerous other religious leaders and groups of the High Middle Ages for evidence of their contributions, deepening our understanding of this concept.
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 book reads the surprisingly widespread representations of cannibals and cannibalism in medieval English literature as political metaphors that were central to England's on-going process of articulating cultural and national identity.
Examining French literature from the medieval period, Findley revises our understanding of medieval literary composition as a largely masculine activity, suggesting instead that writing is seen in these texts as problematically gendered and often feminizing.
This book studies the way 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.
