Essayists in this collection break down the vital relationship between reading and space in medieval culture. A variety of approaches are employed to discuss the topic including literary analysis and contemporary film and architectural theory, in turn, complicating the notion of the stable, fixed text and reader.

From devotional literature to political narratives, medieval texts propose that survivors of sexual violence have privileged moral, ethical, and spiritual insight. The Afterlives of Rape in Medieval English Literature explores these discourses of survival in a wide range of texts, including letters of spiritual advice, legal statutes and cases, saints' lives, romances, theological summae, and legendary histories. Edwards argues that understanding the literary history of survival as distinct from the history of rape highlights the ethical importance of attending to violence against women as...

Eleanor's patrilineal descent, from a lineage already prestigious enough to have produced an empress in the eleventh century, gave her the lordship of Aquitaine. But marriage re-emphasized her sex which, in the medieval scheme of gender-power relations relegated her to the position of Lady in relation to her Lordly husbands. In this collection, essays provide a context for Eleanor's life and further an evolving understanding of Eleanor's multifaceted career. A valuable collection on the greatest heiress of the medieval period.

Geoffrey Chaucer was not a writer, primarily, but a privileged official place-holder. Prone to violence, including rape, assault, and extortion, the poet was employed first at domestic personal service and subsequently at police-work of various sorts, protecting the established order during a period of massive social upset. Chaucer's Jobs shows that the servile and disciplinary nature of the daily work Chaucer did was repeated in his poetry, which by turns flatters his aristocratic betters and deals out discipline to malcontent others. Carlson contends that it was this social-political...

Contributors demonstrate how the tools of various intellectual disciplines can be used to examine what we now know about the story of Saint Francis in his own era and how that story has been appropriated in our period.

This volume examines the common medieval notion of life experience as a source of wisdom and traces that theme through different texts and genres to uncover the fabric of experience woven into the writings by, for, and about women.

Did medieval women have the power to choose? This is a question at the heart of this book which explores three court cases from Yorkshire in the decades after the Black Death. Alice de Rouclif was a child heiress made to marry the illegitimate son of the local abbot and then abducted by her feudal superior. Agnes Grantham was a successful businesswoman ambushed and assaulted in a forest whilst on her way to dine with the Master of St Leonard's Hospital. Alice Brathwell was a respectable widow who attracted the attentions of a supposedly aristocratic conman. These are their stories.

The conquest of Wales by the medieval English throne produced a fiercely contested territory, both militarily and culturally. Wales was left fissured by frontiers of language, jurisdiction and loyalty - a reluctant meeting place of literary traditions and political cultures. But the profound consequences of this first colonial adventure on the development of medieval English culture have been disregarded. In setting English figurations of Wales against the contrasted representations of the Welsh language tradition, this volume seeks to reverse this neglect, insisting on the crucial importance...

Medievalism, Multilingualism, and Chaucer examines multilingual identity in the writing of Gower, Langland, and Chaucer. Mary Catherine Davidson traces monolingual habits of inquiry to nineteenth-century attitudes toward French, which had first influenced popular constructions of medieval English in such historical novels as Walter Scott's Ivanhoe. In re-reading medieval traditions in the origins of English from Geoffrey of Monmouth, this book describes how multilingual practices reflected attitudes toward English in the age of Chaucer.

Through close readings of both familiar and obscure medieval texts, the contributors to this volume attempt to read England as a singularly powerful entity within a vast geopolitical network. This capacious world can be glimpsed in the cultural flows connecting the Normans of Sicily with the rulers of England, or Chaucer with legends arriving from Bohemia. It can also be seen in surprising places in literature, as when green children are discovered in twelfth-century Yorkshire or when Welsh animals begin to speak of the long history of their land's colonization. The contributors to this...