This book addresses works of the European Renaissance as they relate both to the world of their origins and to a modern culture that turns to the early moderns for methodological provocation and renewal.
This is the first book to construct a theoretical framework that not only introduces a new way of reading romance writing at large, but more specifically that generates useful critical readings of the specific functions of fairies in individual romance texts.
Witnesses to the disappearance of a text, palimpsest manuscripts bear the marks of their own genesis, with their original inscription rubbed out and written over on the same parchment.
A study of medieval attitudes towards the ventriloquism of God's and Christ's voices through human media, which reveals 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 divine voice that foreshadows Protestant devotion.
Contrary to the widespread view that women exercised economic autonomy only in widowhood, Hutton argues that marital status was not the chief determinant of women's economic activities in the mid-fourteenth century and that women managed their own wealth to a far greater extent than previously recognized.
Key scholars in the field of lesbian and sexuality studies take part in an innovative conversation that offers a radical new methodology for writing lesbian history and geography, drawing new conclusions on the important and often overlooked work being done on female same-sex desire and identity in relation to premodern cultures.
Drawing on new historical principles, this book examines literary and historical narratives, legal statutes and records, sermons, lyric poetry, and biblical exegesis circulating in medieval England in order to theorize the figure of the outlaw and uncover the legal, ethical, and social assumptions that underlie the practice of outlawry.
This book examines female lordship and the power of the political voice in medieval Northern Europe, focusing on three prominent, foreign-born queens of medieval Scandinavia - Agnes of Denmark (d.
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.
This study explores the relationship between ideology and subjectivity in late medieval literature, documenting the trajectory of antimercantile ideology against major developments in economic theory and practice in the later Middle Ages.
This text analyzes the cultural work of spectacular suffering in contemporary discourse and late-medieval France, reading recent dramatizations of torture and performances of self-mutilating conceptual art against late-medieval saint plays.
Drawing on a close reading of nearly forty years' worth of personal letters and her will, and incorporating new archival material, Margaret Paston emerges from this study as the best example we have of how lay piety was negotiated and integrated into daily medieval life.
Western intellectual tradition has long been viewed as an exclusive male bastion, but Women in Western Intellectual Culture, 600-1500 proves that this thesis is no longer tenable.
An increased awareness of the importance of minority and subjugated voices to the histories and narratives which have previously excluded them has led to a wide-spread interest in the effects of colonization and displacement.
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.
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 women in the family which ruled thirteenth-century Castile used maternity, familial and political strategy, and religious and cultural patronage to secure their personal power as well as to promote their lineage.
The letters of Heloise and Abelard will remain one of the great, romantic and intellectual documents of human civilization while they, themselves, are probably second only to Romeo and Juliet in the fame accrued by tragic lovers.
Strange Beauty provides a new perspective on early Celtic stories of the Otherworld and their relevance to today's ecological concerns, arguing for a contemporary re-reading of the Otherworld trope in relation to physical experience.
In Fragments and Assemblages, Arthur Bahr expands the ways in which we interpret medieval manuscripts, examining the formal characteristics of both physical manuscripts and literary works.
In the West, monastic ideals and scholastic pursuits are complementary; monks are popularly imagined copying classics, preserving learning through the Middle Ages, and establishing the first universities.
A "e;brisk and entertaining"e; (Wall Street Journal) journey into the mystery behind why the forbidden fruit became an apple, upending an explanation that stood for centuries.
There have been numerous studies in recent decades of the medieval inquisitions, most emphasizing larger social and political circumstances and neglecting the role of the inquisitors themselves.
In Machines of the Mind, Katharine Breen proposes that medieval personifications should be understood neither as failed novelistic characters nor as instruments of heavy-handed didacticism.
We think with objects-we conduct our lives surrounded by external devices that help us recall information, calculate, plan, design, make decisions, articulate ideas, and organize the chaos that fills our heads.
Conservative thinkers of the early Middle Ages conceived of sensual gratification as a demonic snare contrived to debase the higher faculties of humanity, and they identified pagan writing as one of the primary conduits of decadence.
People in the Middle Ages had chantry chapels, mortuary rolls, the daily observance of the Office of the Dead, and even purgatory-but they were still unable to talk about death.
"e;Prostitution in Medieval Society, a monograph about Languedoc between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries, is also much more than that: it is a compelling narrative about the social construction of sexuality.
If the vibrancy on display in Thinking in the Past Tense is any indication, the study of intellectual history is enjoying an unusually fertile period in both Europe and North America.
The curious paradox of romance is that, throughout its history, this genre has been dismissed as trivial and unintellectual, yet people have never ceased to flock to it with enthusiasm and even fervor.
Lucrezia Marinella (1571-1653) is, by all accounts, a phenomenon in early modernity: a woman who wrote and published in many genres, whose fame shone brightly within and outside her native Venice, and whose voice is simultaneously original and reflective of her time and culture.
