This book studies the way in which medieval ways of knowing the Oriental 'other' were constructed around the idea of a utopic East as located in the legend and Letter of Prester John (c. 1160). The birth of utopic thinking, it argues, is tied to an understanding of alterity having as much to do with the ways the medieval West understood itself as the manner in which the foreign was mapped. Drawing upon the insights of cultural studies, film studies, and psychoanalysis, this book rethinks the contours of the known and the unknown in the medieval period. It demonstrates how the idea of...

The twentieth-century discovered the concept of sacred place largely through the work of Martin Heidegger and Mircea Eliade. Their writings on sacred place respond to the modern manipulation of nature and secularization of space, and so may seem distinctively post-modern, but their work has an important and unacknowledged precedent in the Neoplatonism of Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. Sacred Place in Early Medieval Neoplatonism traces the appearance and development of sacred place in the writings of Neoplatonists from the third to ninth centuries, and sets them in the context of...

These essays explore the place, function and meaning of women as characters, authors, constructs and symbols in Medieval epics from Persia, Spain, France, England, Germany and Scandinavia. Usually believed to narrate the deeds of men at war, this book looks at the key roles often played by women and the impact of this on the history of gender.

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...

This collection is the work of scholars on Middle English, Insular French and Medieval Latin writings of the late twelfth century in England and its possessions, when an English-speaking populace was ruled by a French-speaking aristocracy and administered by a Latin-speaking and writing clergy. The political discourses of Henry's reign are acknowledged, developed and ironised within the first real flowering of so many vernacular genres, romance and history in particular. The energetic and intrepid writers of this period are examined in relation to the development of social institutions and...

As sisters and successive countesses of Flanders and Hainaut in the thirteenth century, Jeanne and Marguerite actively shaped the political landscape of northern Europe, and compiled an impressive record of monastic patronage. By examining a significant corpus of secular and monastic charters, this study provides a more complex understanding of the role of religious patronage in medieval society, and illuminates concerns specific to powerful women. It simultaneously illustrates the use of patronage to further their political agendas, offering a glimpse of the experience of female rulers in a...

This book presents the hypothesis that the Bayeux tapestry, long believed to have been made in England, came from the Loire valley in France, from the abbey of St. Florent of Saumur. This is based on a number of different kinds of evidence, the most important of which is signs of a St. Florent/Breton influence in the portrayal of the Breton campaign in the tapestry, about a tenth of the whole.

Necessary Conjunctions is an original study of how regular medieval people created their public social identities. Focusing especially on the world of English townspeople in the later Middle Ages, the book explores the social self, the public face of the individual. It gives special attention to how prevalent norms of honor, fidelity and hierarchy guided and were manipulated by medieval citizens. With variable success, medieval men and women defined themselves and each other by the clothes they work, the goods they cherished, as well as by their alliances and enemies, their sharp tongues and...

This collection explores marginalized figures in medieval and early modern Europe and Mesoamerica, including women, Jews, New Christians, and urban dwellers, drawing from such judicial sources as canonization hearings, the trials of the Inquisition, chancery, criminal, royal, municipal and other courts.

The virtuous pagans who appear in medieval English texts have often been analyzed for their theological significance, but Representing Righteous Heathens argues that such figures also functioned as an innovative resource for framing and thinking about questions of history, difference, and the uses of antiquity, as well as a flexible formal device for structuring a diverse array of vernacular literary fictions. In travel writing, dream visions, hagiographic narrative, chronicle-romances, and sermons, English writers explored the boundaries that divided them from the non-Christian world by...