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.
This study of the female members of the Order or Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem in the High Middle Ages analyses their presence in the context of female monasticism and compares their position to the position of women in other religious military orders.
Queer Love in the Middle Ages points out queer themes in the works of the French canon, including Perceval , the Romance of the Rose and the Roman d'Eneas .
This study examines the monsters that haunt twelfth-century British texts, arguing that in these strange bodies are expressed fears and fantasies about community, identity and race during the period.
Skin is a multifarious image in medieval culture: the material basis for forming a sense of self and relation to the world, as well as a powerful literary and visual image.
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.
Modern scholarship generally treats the "e;debate about women"e; (querelle des femmes) as a late medieval phenomenon, perhaps touched upon by canonic authors like Chaucer but truly begun by Christine de Pizan (1364-1429), and therefore primarily of English and French origin.
The words 'Listen daughter' (Audi filia, from Psalm 44 in the Latin Vulgate) were frequently used in exhortations to religious women in the twelfth century.
Considering a wide array of sources, this book reveals the tenacity with which Alfonso II (1162-1196) and his son Peter II (1196-1213) of the Crown of Aragon forged a tighter Mediterranean regional network and augmented their regional success.
This is an exploration the intellectual consequences of one of the most fundamental shifts in late medieval English society: the first national labour regulation in the wake of the 1348 plague.
This book presents a series of narratives that reflect the compelling and sometimes dangerous allure of the world of books - and the world in books - in late-medieval Britain.
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.
In Byzantium there were two overlapping systems of dress: a semiotic one whereby dress was a code for rank and wealth, and a fashion system where dress was based on the desire to look a certain way.
Addressing questions about the musical life in English nunneries in the later Middle Ages, Yardley pieces together a mosaic of nunnery musical life, where even the smallest convents sang the monastic offices on a daily basis and many of the larger houses celebrated the late medieval liturgy in all of its complexity.
Boccaccio's Decameron and the Ciceronian Renaissance demonstrates that Boccaccio's puzzling masterpiece takes on organic consistency when viewed as an early modern adaptation of a pre-Christian, humanistic vision.
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.
As cultural practice, the early modern duel both indicated and shaped the gender assumptions of wealthy young men; it served, in fact, as a nexus for different, often competing, notions of masculinity.
Eleanor's patrilineal descent, from a lineage already prestigious enough to have produced an empress in the eleventh century, gave her the lordship of Aquitaine.
This book is a social history of the ritual and custom of churching, a liturgical rite of purification after childbirth performed on a woman's first visit to church after giving birth.
Erotic Discourse and Early English Religious Writing discusses the role of sexuality in medieval devotional practice, looking in particular at religious writings circulating in England in the tenth to thirteenth centuries.
This interdisciplinary study offers an interpretation of the major logical, philosophical/theological and poetic writings of Boethius, Abelard and Alan of Lille.
For many, the middle ages depicted in Walt Disney movies have come to figure as the middle ages, forming the earliest visions of the medieval past for much of the contemporary Western (and increasingly Eastern) imagination.
This collection of essays uncovers a wide array of medieval writings on cosmopolitan ethics and politics, writings generally ignored or glossed over in contemporary discourse.
The Sefer Yetsirah (the Book of Creation ) is a core text of the early kabbalah, yet scholars have struggled to establish even the most basic facts about the work.
This book is an innovative study of humour and the body in Juan Ruiz's Libro de Buen Amor (1330), using modern analytical techniques to examine the place of the Libro's bawdy and grotesque in relation to secular and sacred culture.
Exploring the relation between sexuality and cosmology in a variety of literary texts from the tenth to the sixteenth centuries, the essays reveal that medieval authors, whether lay or religious, Christian or Jewish, were grappling with the same sets of questions about sexuality as people are today.
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.
