Charlemagne's Mustache presents the reader with seven engaging studies, 'thick descriptions', of cultural life and thought in the Carolingian world. The author begins by asking questions. Why did Charlemagne have a mustache and why did hair matter? Why did the king own peacocks and other exotic animals? Why was he writing in bed and could he write at all? How did medieval kings become stars? How were secrets kept and conveyed in the early Middle Ages? And why did early medieval peoples believe in storm and hailmakers? The answers, he found, are often surprising.

The tenth-century Old English lament and twentieth-century blues song each speak the language of a distinct poetic tradition, yet the voices are remarkably similar in their emotive expression of loneliness. This innovative study juxtaposes the texts of each corpus to explore the features that characterize their vocal poetics

This unique study traces fundamental parallels between medieval European and Middle Eastern cultures. By examining sources in cultural history, literature, and architecture, this book reveals mutual influences evident in the development of the current conception of the Middle Ages.

Queer Love in the Middle Ages points out queer themes in the works of the French canon, including Perceval, the Romance of the Rose and the Roman d'Eneas . It brings out less known works that prominently feature same-sex themes: Yde and Olive, a romance with a cross-dressed heroine who marries a princess; and many others. The book combines an interest in contemporary French theory (Kristeva, Barthes, psychoanalysis) with a close reading of medieval texts. It discusses important recent publications in pre-modern queer studies in the US. It is the first major contribution to queer studies in...

Troubled Vision is an interdisciplinary collection of essays that explores the interface between gender, sexuality and vision in medieval culture. The volume represents an exciting array of scholarship dealing with visual and textual cultures from the Eleventh to the Fifteenth centuries. Bringing together a range of theoretical approaches that address the troubling effects of vision on medieval texts and images, the book mediates between medieval and modern constructions of gender and sexuality. Troubled Vision focuses thematically on four central themes: Desire, looking, representation and...

This book reformulates the master narrative of erotic discourse in medieval literature. Individual chapters offer fresh readings of the nature and claims of erotic attachments in Abelard and Heloise, Marie de France, Jean de Meun, Dante, Boccaccio, and Chaucer - writers profoundly influenced by Augustine and Ovid.

Queering Medieval Genres proposes that, within the historical trajectory of many genres, certain agents are privileged while others are marginalized due to their understanding of heteronormative social codes. Examining the ways in which homosexuality disrupts generic and cultural expectations of heteronormativity, this book demonstrates that the introduction of the queer within medieval literature shatters the audience's expectations of textual pleasure and demands that they reconsider the effects of homosexuality on their constructions of sexual and spiritual identity. Scholars of medieval...

This study provides extensive readings of overlooked American reconstructions of Chaucer and The Canterbury Tales from the colonial to postmodern periods, demonstrating how these repackagings convey uniquely American ideas.

This is an exploration the intellectual consequences of one of the most fundamental shifts in late medieval English society: the first national labour regulation in the wake of the 1348 plague. Bridging the medieval and early modern periods, this book analyzes a wide range of texts and images produced in this initial period of labour regulation.

This book uses the methodologies of cultural studies and the history of the book to show how editors and readers of the Sixteenth through the early Nineteenth century successively remade Piers Plowman and its author according to their own ideologies of the Middle Ages.