The Lingua Ignota, "e;brought forth"e; by the twelfth-century German nun Hildegard of Bingen, provides 1012 neologisms for praise of Church and new expression of the things of her world.
This volume brings together contemporary popular entertainment, current political subjects, and medieval history and culture to investigate the intersecting and often tangled relations between politics, aesthetics, reality and fiction, in relation to issues of morality, identity, social values, power, and justice, both in the past and the present.
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.
Representing Others in Medieval Iberian Literature explores the ways Arabic, Jewish and Christian intellectuals in medieval Iberia (courtiers and clerics) adapt and transform the Andalusi go-between figure in order to represent their own role as cultural intermediaries.
This book examines marvels as tangible objects in the literary, courtly, and artisanal cultures of medieval England, but these clever devices, neither wholly semiotic nor purely positivist objects, are imbued with diverse cultural significance that illuminates in new ways the familiar literature of the Ricardian period.
This study of medieval women as postcolonial writers defines the literary strategies of subversion by which they authorized their alterity within the dominant tradition.
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.
The medieval film genre is not, in general, concerned with constructing a historically accurate past, but much analysis nonetheless centers on highlighting anachronisms.
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 Fifteenth century.
Taking as its starting point two uprisings in England and Germany (Richard Marshal in 1233-4 and Henry (VII) in 1234-5), this book offers a new take on the political culture of high medieval Europe.
Bringing together many of today's key scholars of verbal charming, these essays cover vernacular magical texts and practice from Malaysia to Madagascar, and from England to Estonia.
This collection of essays by European and American scholars addresses the changing nature and appeal of crusading during the period which extended from the battle of Nicopolis in 1396 to the battle of Mohacs in 1526.
King Rene is little known beyond France, yet, through his controversial daughter Margaret of Anjou, he affected events in England during the Wars of the Roses.
This case study of the causes of the Thirty Years' War suggests an alternative framework to that of Absolutism, and views statebuilding as an interactive bargaining process that can engender challenges to political authority.
This book 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.
In Renaissance Europe, when 'leisure classes' used social gathering to define civility and the commercialization of leisure was beginning, the human need for recreation became a cultural topos.
This book is aimed at students coming to the study of western European medieval history for the first time, and also graduate students on interdisciplinary medieval studies programmes.
Heir to an earldom, and wife and widow of William de Valence (half-brother of King Henry III), Joan de Valence was an important actor in the volatile political world of thirteenth-century England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland.
Broadens the perspective of recent work on the discourse of the Muslim Other in medieval Christendom by investigating pertinent texts, art, and artefacts, situating these local discourses of the Muslim Other in the larger cultural context of proto-Eurocentric discourse.
In a rare combination of comprehensive coverage and sustained critical focus, this book examines Japan's progress through its entire history to its current status as an economic, technological, and cultural superpower.
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.
Despite attempts to suppress early women's speech, this study demonstrates that women were still actively engaged in cultural practices and speech strategies that were both complicit with the patriarchal ideology whilst also undermining it.
Based on refractions of earlier beliefs, modern angels - at once terrible and comforting, frighteningly other and reassuringly beneficent - have acquired a powerful symbolic value.
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.
Across history, the ideas and practices of male identity have varied much between time and place: masculinity proves to be a slippery concept, not available to all men, sometimes even applied to women.
This book explores the world of religious thinking on imprisonment, and how images of imprisonment were used in monastic thought, the cult of saints, the early inquisitions, preaching and hagiographical literature and the world of the crusades to describe a conception of inclusion and freedom that was especially meaningful to medieval Christians.
This collection of essays focuses attention on how medieval gender intersects with other categories of difference, particularly religion and ethnicity.
The dominant Mediterranean power in the fifth and sixth centuries, by the time of its demise at the hands of the Ottomans in 1453 the Byzantine empire was a shadow of its former self restricted essentially to the city of Constantinople, modern Istanbul.
A neglected aspect of Byzantium, physical beauty appears as a quality with an unmistakable dark side, relating ambiguously to notions of power, goodness, evil, masculinity, effeminacy, life and death.
Farming to halves is the English version of sharefarming, a system of letting land familiar in Europe and the New World, but thought to never have existed in England.
This innovative book offers an interdisciplinary analysis of Shakespearean theatre, presented in a series of imaginative readings of plays from every period of the playwright's career, from Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Taming of the Shrew to King Lear and The Tempest , mapping a new approach to ideas of the theatre as an institution.
