This volume contains nearly twenty essays on obscenity in medieval culture. These essays represent the most wide-ranging attempt ever to probe the natures, origins, and consequences of obscenity in medieval literature, art, theater, and law. Although a core is devoted to obscenity in medieval French literature (where the fabliaux have elicited more previous attempts to come to terms with obscenity than has any other type of medieval literature), other contributions to the volume explore manifestations of obscenity in cultures and languages of Scandinavia, Germany, Ireland, Wales, Byzantium,...

This study of early modern Spain uses parish records to examine the content of religious practice and belief at the parish level and the success of the Catholic Church's attempt to alter those beliefs during the Catholic Reformation.
The first three chapters explore the problems encountered by episcopal Visitors to parishes in the diocese of Ourense in northwestern Spain as they attempted to enforce the ideals of the Catholic Reformation program. The last three chapters use both quantitative and qualitative sources to contrast the expectations of the Catholic Church with parishioner...

This volume deals with shifts and changes that took place during the Middle Ages when things, or ideas, or writings, were transferred from time to time, place to place, or one ideological realm to another. The same objects, ideas, or texts changed their meaning, impact, or symbolic value according to different contexts. The twelve papers, written by leading experts, investigate the authority attributed to texts and their canonization in different contexts; the shifting uses and meanings of gifts, from honorable instruments in the settlement of disputes to corruption and bribery; and the...