Böcker i The Middle Ages Series-serien

In Lyric Tactics, Ingrid Nelson argues that the lyric poetry of later medieval England is a distinct genre defined not by its poetic features-rhyme, meter, and stanza forms-but by its modes of writing and performance, which are ad hoc, improvisatory, and situational.

"A fascinating study of the movements and ambivalent meanings of gifts in the political culture of the fifteenth and early sixteenth century... Valentin Groebner's book ... provides us with a new way of understanding the meanings and uses of 'corruption.'"-Natalie Zemon Davis, Sixteenth Century Journal

An award-winning anatomy of the Fifth Crusade.

Intended for the undergraduate yet also invaluable for teachers and scholars, this book illustrates how the crusade became crucial for defining and promoting the very concept and boundaries of Latin Christendom. It provides translations of and commentaries on key original sources and up-to-date bibliographic materials.

Traditional marriage was not the only option for couples in medieval Europe. Alternative forms of union could make lives precarious but also provided a degree of flexibility. The study draws on a wide geographical and chronological range of examples in order to illustrate local difference while bringing out broad patterns.

"Kinoshita has produced a book of major importance. Her command of the Francophone Middle Ages should exert an important critical influence on the greater field of Middle English and should also be recognized as an important contribution to the prehistory of postcolonial studies."-David Wallace, University of Pennsylvania

Hood''s study contends that Aquinas''s writings remain resistant to or skeptical of anti-Jewish trends in thirteenth-century theology. Aquinas sets out simply to clarify and systematize received theological and canonistic teachings on the Jews.

Henry Charles Lea was one of the first American historians to use what would later be termed comparative and anthropological approaches to history. Under his pen, the study of the medieval ordeal becomes a study in cultural history.Reprinted here from the fourth revised edition of 1892, the book begins by tracing the role of the ordeal in non-Western and ancient societies, showing the mental world to which it belongs: a limited trust in the public order and purely human methods of inquiry, and a larger faith in divine intervention and immanent justice. The work then describes the uses of the institution through the European Middle Ages to its final abolition, and in the process offers a rich typology of ordeals. Additional documents included in this edition present formulas and descriptions of some of the ordeals most frequently used: the ordeal by boiling water, by hot water, by cold water, by hot iron and water, by glowing plowshares, by fire, and the ordeal of the cross.

In the late 1320s, Martha de Cabanis was widowed with three young sons, eleven, eight, and four years of age. Her challenges would be many: to raise and train her children to carry on their father''s business; to preserve that business until they were ready to take over; and to look after her own financial well-being. Examining the visible trail Martha left in Montpellier''s notarial registers and other records, Kathryn L. Reyerson reveals a wealth of information about her activities, particularly in the area of business, commerce, and real estate. From these formal, contractual documents, Reyerson gleans something of Martha''s personality and reconstructs what she may have done, and a good deal of what she actually did, in her various roles of daughter, wife, mother, and widow.Mother and Sons, Inc. demonstrates that while women were hardly equal to men in the fourteenth century, under the right conditions afforded by wealth and the status of widowhood, they could do and did more than many have thought. Within the space of twenty years, Martha developed a complex real estate fortune, enlarged a cloth manufacturing business and trading venture, and provided for the support and education of her sons. Just how the widow Martha maneuvered within the legal constraints of her social, economic, and personal status forms the heart of the book''s investigation. Situating Martha''s story within the context of Montpellier and medieval Europe more broadly, Reyerson''s microhistorical approach illuminates the opportunities and the limits of what was possible for elite mercantile women in the urban setting in which Martha lived.

Conduct Becoming examines a new genre of late medieval writing that focuses on a wife''s virtuous conduct and ability of such conduct to alter marital and social relations in the world. Considering a range of texts written for women—the journées chrétiennes or daily guides for Christian living, secular counsel from husbands and fathers such as Le Livre du Chevalier de La Tour Landry and Le Menagier de Paris, and literary narratives such as the Griselda story—Glenn D. Burger argues that, over the course of the long fourteenth century, the "invention" of the good wife in discourses of sacramental marriage, private devotion, and personal conduct reconfigured how female embodiment was understood.While the period inherits a strongly antifeminist tradition that views the female body as naturally wayward and sensual, late medieval conduct texts for women outline models of feminine virtue that show the good wife as an identity with positive influence in the world. Because these manuals imagine how to be a good wife as necessarily entangled with how to be a good husband, they also move their readers to consider such gendered and sexed identities in relational terms and to embrace a model of self-restraint significantly different from that of clerical celibacy. Conduct literature addressed to the good wife thus reshapes how late medieval audiences thought about the process of becoming a good person more generally. Burger contends that these texts develop and promulgate a view of sex and gender radically different from previous clerical or aristocratic models—one capable of providing the foundations for the modern forms of heterosexuality that begin to emerge more clearly in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

In Ruling the Spirit, Claire Taylor Jones revises the narrative of women's involvement in the German Dominican order arguing that Dominican women did not lose their piety and literacy in the fifteenth century, as is commonly believed but, instead, were encouraged to reframe their practice around the observance of the Divine Office.

To Live Like a Moor traces the many shifts in Christian perceptions of Islam-associated ways of life which took place across the centuries between early Reconquista efforts of the eleventh century and the final expulsions of Spain's converted yet poorly assimilated Morisco population in the seventeenth.

The life of an aristocratic Carolingian man involved an array of behaviors and duties associated with his gender and rank: an education in arms and letters; training in horsemanship, soldiery, and hunting; betrothal, marriage, and the virile production of heirs; and the masterful command of a prominent household. In Be a Perfect Man, Andrew J. Romig argues that Carolingian masculinity was constituted just as centrally by the performance of caritas, defined by the early medieval scholar Alcuin of York as a complete and all-inclusive love for God and for fellow human beings, flowing from the whole heart, mind, and soul. The authority of the Carolingian man depended not only on his skills in warfare and landholding but also on his performances of empathy, devotion, and asceticism.Romig maps caritas as a concept rooted in a vast body of inherited Judeo-Christian and pagan philosophies, shifting in meaning and association from the patristic era to the central Middle Ages. Carolingian discussions and representations of caritas served as a discourse of power, a means by which early medieval writers made claims, both explicit and implicit, about the hierarchies of power that they believed ought to exist within their world. During the late eighth, ninth, and early tenth centuries, they creatively invoked caritas to link aristocratic men with divine authority. Romig gathers conduct handbooks, theological tracts, poetry, classical philosophy, church legislation, and exegetical texts to outline an associative process of gender ideology in the Carolingian Middle Ages, one that framed masculinity, asceticism, and authority as intimately interdependent. The association of power and empathy remains with us to this day, Romig argues, as a justification for existing hierarchies of authority, privilege, and prestige.

Medieval robots took such forms as talking statues, mechanical animals, or silent metal guardians; some served to entertain or instruct while others performed surveillance or discipline. Medieval Robots explores the forgotten history of real and imagined machines that captivated Europe from the ninth through the fourteenth centuries.

Covert Operations brings the categories and cultural meanings of secrecy in the Middle Ages out into the open. Isolating five broad areas-confession, women's gossip, medieval science and medicine, marriage and the law, and sodomitic discourse-Lochrie examines various types of secrecy and the literary texts in which they are played out.

Translated shortly before 1400, the Bible became the most popular medieval book in English. Prevailing scholarly opinion calls it the Wycliffite Bible, attributing it to followers of the heretic John Wyclif, and claims it was banned in 1407. Henry Ansgar Kelly disagrees, arguing it was a nonpartisan effort and never the object of any prohibition.

The Song of Troilus traces the origins of modern authorship in the formal experimentation of medieval writers. Thomas C. Stillinger analyzes a sequence of narrative books that are in some way constructed around lyric poems: Dante''s Vita Nuova, Bocaccio''s Filostrato, and Chaucer''s Troilus and Criseyde. The shared aim of these texts, he argues, is to imagine and achieve an unprecedented auctoritas: a "lyric authority" that combines the expressive subjectivity of courtly love poetry with the impersonal authority of Biblical commentary. Each of the three establishes its own formal and intertextual dynamics; in complex and unexpected ways, the hierarchies of Latin learning are charged with erotic force, allowing the creation of a new vernacular Book of Love.The Song of Troilus is a linked series of incisive close readings. Each chapter defines and investigates a range of philological, intertextual, and theoretical problems; in addition to explicating his three principal texts, Stillinger offers important insights into a range of medieval traditions, from Psalm commentary to Trojan historiography to Ricardian political satire. At the same time, The Song of Troilus is a sophisticated narrative of cultural change and a searching meditation on history, desire, and writing.The Song of Troilus is an original and highly readable study of three major medieval texts; it will be of compelling interest to students and scholars of medieval literature, and to all those exploring the history of authorship and the implications of literary form.

In A History of Old English Meter, R. D. Fulk offers a wide-ranging reference on Anglo-Saxon meter. Fulk examines the evidence for chronological and regional variation in the meter of Old English verse, studying such linguistic variables as the treatment of West Germanic parasite vowels, contracted vowels, and short syllables under secondary and tertiary stress, as well as a variety of supposed dialect features. Fulk''s study of such variables points the way to a revised understanding of the role of syllable length in the construction of early Germanic meters and furnishes criteria for distinguishing dialectal from poetic features in the language of the major Old English poetic codices. On this basis, it is possible to draw conclusions about the probable dialect origins of much verse, to delineate the characteristics of at least four discrete periods in the development of Old English meter, and with some probability to assign to them many of the longer poems, such as Genesis A, Beowulf, and the works of Cynewulf.A History of Old English Meter will be of interest to scholars of Anglo-Saxon, historians of the English language, Germanic philologists, and historical linguists.

Examining English, Latin, French, and German texts, The Knight, the Cross, and the Song traces the role of secular chivalric literature in shaping Crusade propaganda across three centuries.

In The Quest for the Christ Child in the Later Middle Ages, Mary Dzon explores the continued transmission and appeal of apocryphal legends throughout the Middle Ages and demonstrates the significant impact that the Christ Child had in shaping the medieval religious imagination.

Crafted with a wit and contemporary sensibility that make them playable half-a-millennium later, Jody Enders's translations of twelve medieval French farces take on the hilariously depressing-and depressingly hilarious-state of holy wedlock.

Nature Speaks recovers the common ground shared between physics-what used to be known as "natural philosophy"-and fiction-writing as ways of representing the natural world. In doing so, it traces how nature gained an authoritative voice in the late medieval period only to lose it at the outset of modernity.

Now for the first time, the entire Old English poetic corpus is rendered into modern strong-stress, alliterative verse in a masterful translation by Craig Williamson. The Complete Old English Poems also features his essay on translation and Tom Shippey's introduction on the literary scope and vision of these timeless poems.

Drawn from two medieval collections of form letters for all manner of business and personal affairs, Lost Letters of Medieval Life depicts early thirteenth-century England through the everyday correspondence of people of all classes, from peasants and shopkeepers to bishops and earls.

Kaeuper argues that chivalric ideology of the high and later Middle Ages selectively appropriated religious ideas to valorize the institution of knighthood. He describes how both elite warriors and clerics contributed to a Christian theology that validated the knights' bloody profession.

Rarely are these works translated by someone who is both a medieval scholar and a poet, and this combination makes for both fidelity to the complexity of the originals and compelling poetry in a modern idiom.

Beginning as a series of scattered rural riots in late 1323, peasant insurrection escalated into a rebellion that dominated public affairs in Flanders. Following their own leaders, peasants defied the authority of the count of Flanders by driving his officials and their aristocratic allies from the countryside.

This is the first English translation of a 13th-century work which set down the customary law of Clermont in the Beauvais region of France as it was practiced and understood. The work covers both procedural and substantive law, including the facts and decisions of nearly 100 cases.