Böcker av Barbara Newman

The Permeable Self offers medievalists new insight into the appeal and dangers of the erotics of pedagogy; the remarkable influence of courtly romance conventions on hagiography and mysticism; and the unexpected ways that pregnancy-often devalued in mothers-could be positively ascribed to men, virgins, and God.

"Frauenlob" was the stage name of Heinrich von Meissen, a medieval German poet-minstrel. This title introduces the poet to English-speaking readers with a fresh poetic translation of his masterpiece, the "Marienleich" - a virtuosic poem of more than 500 lines in praise of the Virgin Mary. It is accompanied by a CD recording of the "Marienleich".

Barbara Newman reintroduces English-speaking readers to an extraordinary and gifted figure of the twelfth-century renaissance. Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) was mystic and writer, musician and preacher, abbess and scientist who used symbolic theology to explore the meaning of her gender within the divine scheme of things.With a new preface, bibliography, and discography, Sister of Wisdom is a landmark book in women's studies, and it will also be welcomed by readers in religion and history.

In Medieval Crossover: Reading the Secular against the Sacred, Barbara Newman offers a new approach to the many ways that sacred and secular interact in medieval literature, arguing that the sacred was the normative, unmarked default category against which the secular always had to define itself and establish its niche. Newman refers to this dialectical relationship as "e;crossover"e;-which is not a genre in itself, but a mode of interaction, an openness to the meeting or even merger of sacred and secular in a wide variety of forms. Newman sketches a few of the principles that shape their interaction: the hermeneutics of "e;both/and,"e; the principle of double judgment, the confluence of pagan material and Christian meaning in Arthurian romance, the rule of convergent idealism in hagiographic romance, and the double-edged sword in parody. Medieval Crossover explores a wealth of case studies in French, English, and Latin texts that concentrate on instances of paradox, collision, and convergence. Newman convincingly and with great clarity demonstrates the widespread applicability of the crossover concept as an analytical tool, examining some very disparate works.

Explores the idea that the medieval religious imagination did not restrict itself to masculine images of God but envisaged the divine in multiple forms.

"Barbara Newman has written an erudite and wonderful book... From Virile Woman to WomanChrist should be required reading in every university-level women's studies course."-Caroline Walker Bynum, The Catholic Historical Review