Böcker i The Middle Ages Series-serien

"Writing a book about one of the most complex books ever assembled is no easy task, yet Griffiths rises to the occasion. . . . This work will be widely and warmly received by medievalists everywhere."-Jeffrey Hamburger, Harvard University

Challenging the traditional conception of medieval Europe as insular and xenophobic, Shirin A. Khanmohamadi's In Light of Another's Word looks to early ethnographic writers who were surprisingly aware of their own otherness, especially when faced with the far-flung peoples and cultures they meant to describe.

Drawing on medieval accounts of the earliest European journeys to China, India, Mongolia, and southeast Asia, Before Orientalism explores European attitudes toward Asian eating habits, sexual practices, femininities, and civility, reconstructing a precolonial vision of the East that was often neutral or admiring.

Between Christian and Jew pivots around the inquisitorial trial of three Jews who were accused in 1341 of persuading Jewish apostates to return to Judaism and die as martyrs. This cultural history explores the worlds of Jews, Jewish converts, and medieval inquisitors as they intersected in northern Iberia in the Crown of Aragon.

Through hundreds of published and unpublished sources, Alex J. Novikoff traces the evolution of disputation from its ancient origins to its broader influence in the scholastic culture and public sphere of the High Middle Ages.

The Medieval Salento explores the visual and material culture of people who lived and died in this region between the ninth and fifteenth centuries, showing the ways Jews, Orthodox Christians, and Roman-rite Christians used images, artifacts, and texts in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin to construct both independent and intersecting identities.

Learning to Die in London, 1380-1540 argues that the educated awareness of death and mortality was a vital aspect of the city's civic culture, critical not only to the shaping of single lives and the management of households but also to practices of cultural memory, building of institutions, and good government of the city itself.

This groundbreaking work challenges the received history of William Langland's Piers Plowman. Through close textual analysis, Lawrence Warner brings about a fundamental shift in our understanding of the production and transmission of the poem's three versions, establishing an entirely new paradigm for the study of Middle English literature.

Modern studies of the religious reform movement of the central Middle Ages have often relied on contemporary accounts penned by Cistercian monks, who routinely exaggerated the importance of their own institutions while paying scant attention to the remarkable expansion of abbeys of Cistercian women. Yet by the end of the thirteenth century, Constance Hoffman Berman contends, there were more houses of Cistercian nuns across Europe than of monks. In The White Nuns, she charts the stages in the nuns'' gradual acceptance by the abbots of the Cistercian Order''s General Chapter and describes the expansion of the nuns'' communities and their adaptation to a variety of economic circumstances in France and throughout Europe. While some sought contemplative lives of prayer, the ambition of many of these religious women was to serve the poor, the sick, and the elderly.Focusing in particular on Cistercian nuns'' abbeys founded between 1190 and 1250 in the northern French archdiocese of Sens, Berman reveals the frequency with which communities of Cistercian nuns were founded by rich and powerful women, including Queen Blanche of Castile, heiresses Countess Matilda of Courtenay and Countess Isabelle of Chartres, and esteemed ladies such as Agnes of Cressonessart. She shows how these founders and early patrons assisted early abbesses, nuns, and lay sisters by using written documents to secure rights and create endowments, and it is on the records of their considerable economic achievements that she centers her analysis.The White Nuns considers Cistercian women and the women who were their patrons in a clear-eyed reading of narrative texts in their contexts. It challenges conventional scholarship that accepts the words of medieval monastic writers as literal truth, as if they were written without rhetorical skill, bias, or self-interest. In its identification of long-accepted misogynies, its search for their origins, and its struggle to reject such misreadings, The White Nuns provides a robust model for historians writing against received traditions.

The scribes of early medieval England wrote out their vernacular poems using a format that looks primitive to our eyes because it lacks the familiar visual cues of verse lineation, marks of punctuation, and capital letters. The paradox is that scribes had those tools at their disposal, which they deployed in other kinds of writing, but when it came to their vernacular poems they turned to a sparser presentation. How could they afford to be so indifferent? The answer lies in the expertise that Anglo-Saxon readers brought to the task. From a lifelong immersion in a tradition of oral poetics they acquired a sophisticated yet intuitive understanding of verse conventions, such that when their eyes scanned the lines written out margin-to-margin, they could pinpoint with ease such features as alliteration, metrical units, and clause boundaries, because those features are interwoven in the poetic text itself. Such holistic reading practices find a surprising source of support in present-day eye-movement studies, which track the complex choreography between eye and brain and show, for example, how the minimal punctuation in manuscripts snaps into focus when viewed as part of a comprehensive system.How the Anglo-Saxons Read Their Poems uncovers a sophisticated collaboration between scribes and the earliest readers of poems like Beowulf, The Wanderer, and The Dream of the Rood. In addressing a basic question that no previous study has adequately answered, it pursues an ambitious synthesis of a number of fields usually kept separate: oral theory, paleography, syntax, and prosody. To these philological topics Daniel Donoghue adds insights from the growing field of cognitive psychology. According to Donoghue, the earliest readers of Old English poems deployed a unique set of skills that enabled them to navigate a daunting task with apparent ease. For them reading was both a matter of technical proficiency and a social practice.

In New Legends of England, Catherine Sanok examines a significant, albeit previously unrecognized, phenomenon of fifteenth-century literary culture in England: the sudden fascination with the Lives of British, Anglo-Saxon, and other native saints. Embodying a variety of literary forms—from elevated Latinate verse, to popular traditions such as the carol, to translations of earlier verse legends into the medium of prose—the Middle English Lives of England''s saints are rarely discussed in relation to one another or seen as constituting a distinct literary genre. However, Sanok argues, these legends, when grouped together were an important narrative forum for exploring overlapping forms of secular and religious community at local, national, and supranational scales: the monastery, the city, and local cults; the nation and the realm; European Christendom and, at the end of the fifteenth century, a world that was suddenly expanding across the Atlantic.Reading texts such as the South English Legendary, The Life of St. Etheldrede, the Golden Legend, and poems about Saints Wenefrid and Ursula, Sanok focuses especially on the significance of their varied and often experimental forms. She shows how Middle English Lives of native saints revealed, through their literary forms, modes of affinity and difference that, in turn, reflected a diversity in the extent and structure of medieval communities. Taking up key questions about jurisdiction, temporality, and embodiment, New Legends of England presents some of the ways in which the Lives of England''s saints theorized community and explored its constitutive paradox: the irresolvable tension between singular and collective forms of identity.

The Secret Faith of Maestre Honoratus explores late medieval Iberian Jewish culture through the figure of Profayt Duran, a rationalist Jewish scholar who was compelled during the riots of 1391 to become a Christian in name, and whose broad-ranging philosophical and scientific education was mustered in defense of his religious convictions.

Adam Usk, a fifteenth-century professor, royal advisor, schismatic, and spy, wrote a peculiar book in a reticent, nervous prose better suited to keeping secrets than setting them in writing. Steven Justice sets out to find what Usk wanted to hide and comes to surprising conclusions about the foundations of literary and historical study.

The Queen's Dumbshows explores the importance of John Lydgate's mummings and entertainments for literary and theatrical history, rethinking what constitutes "drama" in late medieval England and what role it played in public life.

The Last Crusade in the West traces Castilian efforts to conquer Granada from the middle of the fourteenth century until the end of the fifteenth. Although the Castilian kings neglected the reconquest for many years, Fernando and Isabel achieved the capitulation of Granada in 1492.

The Making and Unmaking of a Saint traces the rise and fall of devotion to Gerald of Aurillac through a millennium, from his death in the tenth century to the attempt to reinvigorate his cult in the nineteenth century.

In medieval Europe, where theologians saw sin, some natural philosophers saw a phenomenon in need of explanation. They believed some men were born with homosexual inclinations and others acquired them as habits based on early pleasurable experiences.

Studying the medieval tradition of quoting verbatim from troubadour songs, Sarah Kay explores works produced along the arc of the northern Mediterranean in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, illuminating how this tradition influenced medieval literary history and the development of European subjectivity.

Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia provides a sweeping survey of the many forms of bound labor in Iberia from ancient times to the decline of slavery in the eighteenth century.

Ellen Arnold draws upon a rich archive of charters, property and tax records, correspondence, miracle collections and saints' lives to explore the ways in which interaction with the natural world affected the 'environmental imagination' and identity of the Benedictine monks of Stavelot-Malmedy in the medieval Ardennes.

Poetics of the Incarnation examines fourteenth-century writers whose poetry and narrative explore the intellectual implications of the hypostatic union. The Incarnation inspired a working-through of the philosophical and theological implications of language while Middle English was emerging as a legitimate medium for theological expression.

Lords' Rights and Peasant Stories suggests rethinking master narratives about transitions from oral to literate societies, examining how village laws (Weistumer) were written down.

This book argues that between 1200 and 1400 Ifrīqiya was not an economic or political region. It shows how Emirism, a political ideology that emerged at the end of the fourteenth century, led both medieval sources and modern historians to imagine Ifrīqiya as a region.

Dark Age Bodies reconstructs the gender ideology of monastic masculinity through an investigation of early medieval readings of the body and its parts. It brings together scholarship in architectural history and cultural anthropology to frame an important reconsideration of Carolingian culture.

"These essays challenge a once-dominant mode of German medieval studies, "constitutional history." In doing so, they reimage a more dynamic and less hierarchical Middle Ages."-Medieval Review

In Old Age in Late Medieval England, Joel T. Rosenthal explores the life spans, sustained activities, behaviors, and mentalites of the individuals who approached and who passed the biblically stipulated span of three score and ten in late medieval England. Drawing on a wide variety of documentary and court records (which were, however, more likely to specify with precision an individual's age on reaching majority or inheriting property than on the occasion of his or her death) as well as literary and didactic texts, he examines "old age" as a social construct and web of behavioral patterns woven around a biological phenomenon.Focusing on "lived experience" in late medieval England, Rosenthal uses demographic and quantitative records, family histories, and biographical information to demonstrate that many people lived into their sixth, seventh, and occasionally eighth decades. Those who survived might well live to know their grandchildren. This view of a society composed of the aged as well as of the young and the middle aged is reinforced by an examination of peers, bishops, and members of parliament and urban office holders, for whom demographic and career-length information exists. Many individuals had active careers until near the end of their lives; the aged were neither rarities nor outcasts within their world. Late medieval society recognized the concept of retirement, of old age pensions, and of the welcome release from duty for those who had served over the decades.

Enemies in the Plaza examines medieval personalities, cities, and pageants at the border of Castile and Grenada, illuminating how public spectacle reflected and altered attitudes towards Jews, Muslims, and converts. Although it once helped to dissipate anxieties, pageantry ultimately contributed to the rejection of religious minorities.

Stanbury explores the lost traffic in images in late medieval England and its impact on contemporary authors and artists.

"This book is quite simply the most important, intellectually ambitious, and far-reaching endeavor in recent years."-Stephen G. Nichols, Johns Hopkins University

In The Kingdom of Sicily, 1100-1250, Karla Mallette writes the first literary history of the Kingdom of Sicily in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The study contains an extensive selection of poems and documents translated from the Arabic, Latin, Old French, and Italian.