Böcker i The Middle Ages Series-serien

"A wonderful introduction to those new to the subject as well as a welcome contribution to the debate on the nature of the medieval nobility."-Medieval Review

Public avowals of love between men were common from antiquity through the Middle Ages. What do these expressions leave to interpretation? This title charts the social constructions of passion and sexuality in our own times, no less than in the Middle Ages.

"Katherine French puts a human face on the history of the English medieval parish between the end of the fourteenth century and the Reformation."-Carol Davidson-Cragoe, TMR

Includes the first readable English translation of the Laws of Edward the Confessor and a much-needed critical edition of its Latin text.

Drawing on the perspectives of modern and medieval narratology, medieval multilingualism, and cultural memory, History and the Written Word argues that members of an administrative elite demonstrated their mastery of the rules of literate political behavior by producing and consuming history-writing and its documents.

Inspired by one fascinating and unusual historical case, Conversion, Circumcision, and Ritual Murder in Medieval Europe explores the ways religious conversion fueled Jewish-Christian tensions. In the process, it elucidates how the interplay of fact and fantasy shaped Christian views of Jews as agents of Christian apostasy to Judaism.

In Dead Voice, Jesus R. Velasco explores how the thirteenth-century law code known as Siete Partidas introduced canon and ecclesiastical law in the vernacular for explicitly secular purposes and embraced intellectual disciplines and fictional techniques that normally lie outside legal science.

In Pure Filth, Noah D. Guynn argues that the superficial crudeness and predictability of late medieval French farce conceal finely drawn, and sometimes quite radical, perspectives on ethics, politics, and religion.

Bonds of Secrecy illuminates the relationship between human experiences of secrecy and early medieval beliefs about divine omniscience. Benjamin A. Saltzman argues that this relationship was fundamental to early English legal and monastic culture and profoundly shaped the practices of literary interpretation in the Middle Ages.

In his final book, the distinguished historian John Baldwin argues that the aristocrats who inhabited the region of Paris over the turn of the twelfth century were important not only because they contributed to Philip Augustus's increase of royal power but also for their own establishment as an elite and powerful social class.

Covering decades that included the last major crusades, the birth of the Inquisition, and the unexpected invasion of the Mongols, The Two Powers shows how Popes Gregory and Innocent's battles with Emperor Frederick shaped the political circumstances of the thirteenth-century papacy and its role in the public life of medieval Christendom.

Nuns' Priests Tales explores the spiritual ideas that motivated priestly service to nuns across Europe and throughout the medieval period, revealing the central role that women played in male spiritual life, and thus moving beyond the reductionist assumption that celibacy defined male spirituality in the age of reform.

A History Book Club selection

Marcela K. Perett examines the early phases of the so-called Hussite revolution and illustrates how vernacular discourse diverged from Latin debates on the same issues, often appealing to emotion rather than doctrinal positions.

Law and the Imagination in Medieval Wales explores the idea of law as a form of political fiction: a body of literature that blurs the lines generally drawn between the legal and literary genres.

In this engaging biography, Theodore Evergates offers a rounded view of Countess Marie of France as both a cultural patron and a successful ruler of Champagne, one of the wealthiest and most vibrant principalities in medieval France.

The Manly Priest examines the clerical celibacy movement in medieval England and Normandy, which produced a new model of religious masculinity for the priesthood and resulted in social tension and conflict as traditional norms of masculine behavior were radically altered for this group of men.

In Translating "Clergie," Claire M. Waters explores medieval texts in French verse and prose from England and the Continent that perform and represent the process of teaching as a shared lay and clerical endeavor.

In Indecent Exposure, Nicole Nolan Sidhu explores obscene comedy in the literary and visual culture of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England. She proposes that Middle English writers used obscene comedy to grapple with the disturbances their society experienced in the century and a half following the Black Death.

Can the Letters of Two Lovers be the previously lost love letters of Abelard and Heloise? Making Love in the Twelfth Century presents a new literary translation of the collection, along with a full commentary and two extended essays that parse its literary and intellectual contexts and chart the course of the doomed affair.

Sharon Farmer analyzes the evidence concerning the medieval silk industry, adding new perspectives to our understanding of medieval French history, luxury trade, labor migration, intercultural exchange, and gendered work.

Henry the Liberal was celebrated for balancing the arts of governance with learning and for his generosity and inquisitive mind, but his enduring achievement, Evergates makes clear, was to transform the county of Champagne into a dynamic principality within the emerging French state.

Contrary to the common conception of the Middle Ages as an era opposed to innovation, The Medieval New demonstrates that medieval caution about the new was generated not by the blind appeal of tradition in a religiously conservative age, but as a response to radical expansions of possibility in realms of art and science.

In Nowhere in the Middle Ages, Lochrie reveals how utopian thinking was, in fact, "somewhere" in the Middle Ages. In the process, she transforms conventional readings of More's Utopia and challenges the very practice of literary history today.

Rewriting Saints and Ancestors examines the ways medieval French writers re-remembered and rewrote the lives of saints and dynastic ancestors, reconceptualizing the past in order to make sense of the present.

In Dark Speech, Robin Chapman Stacey explores the fascinating interaction between performance and law in Ireland between the seventh and ninth centuries.

Jean de Saintre is the intriguing story of a young knight's training, his first love, and his disillusionment. It teems with details of armor, jousting and tournaments, heraldry and crusading-and also with a cheerful, and unexpected, eroticism.

Drawing on fresh work in the social sciences, Rachel Koopmans offers a new model for understanding how medieval miracle stories were generated, circulated, and replicated within an oral environment. She argues that the miracle collection became a defining genre of the high medieval period.

Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines investigates the political and cultural significance of marriages and other sexual encounters between Christians and Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula from the Islamic conquest in the early eighth century to the end of Muslim rule in 1492.

Thinking about animals and living with them are vital aspects of medieval experience. Animal Encounters explores saints' lives, hunting treatises, bestiaries, and other genres to discover how various species take part in culture making, revealing that cross-species relationships transform both their animal and their human participants.