Medieval Boundaries Rethinking Difference in Old French Literature Sharon Kinoshita "From beginning to end, Kinoshita drives home her innovative thesis: that the formation of French literary texts between 1150 and 1225 cannot adequately be understood without reference to various types of cross-cultural contact between French-speaking nobles and those perceived by them as cultural, religious, and linguistic 'others.'"--E. Jane Burns, University of North Carolina "Kinoshita has produced a book of major importance. Her command of the Francophone Middle Ages should exert an important critical...
Medieval Boundaries Rethinking Difference in Old French Literature Sharon Kinoshita "From beginning to end, Kinoshita drives home her innovative thesi...
Sandy Bardsley examines the complex relationship between speech and gender in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and engages debates on the static nature of women's status after the Black Death. Focusing on England, Venomous Tongues uses a combination of legal, literary, and artistic sources to show how deviant speech was increasingly feminized in the later Middle Ages. Women of all social classes and marital statuses ran the risk of being charged as scolds, and local jurisdictions interpreted the label "scold" in a way that best fit their particular circumstances. Indeed, Bardsley...
Sandy Bardsley examines the complex relationship between speech and gender in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and engages debates on the static...
Marriage, Sex, and Civic Culture in Late Medieval London Shannon McSheffrey "A superb book, not only in terms of its sympathy with the evidence and concern for context but in showing us that our knowledge of how the church courts interacted with society must be based on more local case-studies of this kind."--EHR Awarded honorable mention for the 2007 Wallace K. Ferguson Prize sponsored by the Canadian Historical Association How were marital and sexual relationships woven into the fabric of late medieval society, and what form did these relationships take? Using extensive documentary...
Marriage, Sex, and Civic Culture in Late Medieval London Shannon McSheffrey "A superb book, not only in terms of its sympathy with the evidence and co...
Power Play The Literature and Politics of Chess in the Late Middle Ages Jenny Adams The game of chess reached western Europe by the year 1000, and within several generations it had become one of the most popular pastimes ever. Both men and women, and even priests played the game despite the Catholic Church's repeated prohibitions. Characters in countless romances, chansons de geste, and moral tales of the eleventh through twelfth centuries also played chess, which often symbolized romantic attraction or sexual consummation. In Power Play, Jenny Adams looks to medieval literary...
Power Play The Literature and Politics of Chess in the Late Middle Ages Jenny Adams The game of chess reached western Europe by the year 1000, and wit...
Her Life Historical Exemplarity and Female Saints' Lives in Late Medieval England Catherine Sanok "This is a wonderful book. The argument is original and compelling, and the research thorough and convincing. It will make an important contribution both to the specific studies of medieval hagiography and medieval women's literary culture and to the broader field of medieval studies."--Jennifer Summit, Stanford University "Elegantly written and learned."--Choice "Sanok's impeccably researched volume . . . should definitely put an end to the fiction that late medieval hagiographic...
Her Life Historical Exemplarity and Female Saints' Lives in Late Medieval England Catherine Sanok "This is a wonderful book. The argument is original ...
What does it mean to talk about law as theater, to speak about the "performance" of transactions as mundane as the sale of a pig or as agonizing as receiving compensation for a dead kinsman? In Dark Speech, Robin Chapman Stacey explores such questions by examining the interaction between performance and law in Ireland between the seventh and ninth centuries.
Exposing the inner workings of the Irish legal system, Stacey examines the manner in which publicly enacted words and silences were used to construct legal and political relationships in a society where traditional...
What does it mean to talk about law as theater, to speak about the "performance" of transactions as mundane as the sale of a pig or as agonizing as...
From Jean de Meun in the late thirteenth century to Christine de Pizan in the early fifteenth, medieval French poets often aimed to impart theological, philosophical, or moral ideas. To unify their thought, and to make its outline visible to readers, the poets created vivid images of place, such as gardens, paths, idyllic landscapes, cities, trees, and fountains. For Sarah Kay, these spatial images are a prop of "monologism," helping to communicate (or impose) unity of meaning and interpretation by summoning readers to occupy the same "place" in their thinking as the authors. Because of...
From Jean de Meun in the late thirteenth century to Christine de Pizan in the early fifteenth, medieval French poets often aimed to impart theologi...
The Aristocracy in the County of Champagne, 1100-1300 Theodore Evergates "A remarkable achievement."--The Medieval Review "Magisterial. Evergates makes historical documents come alive with an assurance and ease. Ever alert to the telling detail, the vivifying anecdote, he serves up a feast supremely valuable for the expert and accessible and fascinating for the generalist."--William Chester Jordan, Princeton University "Every now and again a book appears that challenges older assumptions and historiographical constructions in such persuasive terms that it is able to redefine the way we...
The Aristocracy in the County of Champagne, 1100-1300 Theodore Evergates "A remarkable achievement."--The Medieval Review "Magisterial. Evergat...
Fallible Authors Chaucer's Pardoner and Wife of Bath Alastair Minnis "In pages rich with explication of scholastic, literary, and historical material, Minnis recovers a medieval notion of authorial fallibility."--Seth Lerer, TimesOnline Can an outrageously immoral man or a scandalous woman teach morality or lead people to virtue? Does personal fallibility devalue one's words and deeds? Is it possible to separate the private from the public, to segregate individual failing from official function? Chaucer addressed these perennial issues through two problematic authority figures, the...
Fallible Authors Chaucer's Pardoner and Wife of Bath Alastair Minnis "In pages rich with explication of scholastic, literary, and historical material,...
Little remains of the rich visual culture of late medieval English piety. The century and a half leading up to the Reformation had seen an unparalleled growth of devotional arts, as chapels, parish churches, and cathedrals came to be filled with images in stone, wood, alabaster, glass, embroidery, and paint of newly personalized saints, angels, and the Holy Family. But much of this fell victim to the Royal Injunctions of September 1538, when parish officials were ordered to remove images from their churches.
In this highly insightful book Sarah Stanbury explores the lost traffic in...
Little remains of the rich visual culture of late medieval English piety. The century and a half leading up to the Reformation had seen an unparall...
