How is late medieval literature inflected by spiritual insight and desires? What weaves of literary cloth especially suit religious insight? This collection of seventeen new essays by distinguished scholars of medieval literature on subjects of mindfulness and spirituality in later medieval (especially English) literature is gathered to honor Brown University Professor Emerita Elizabeth D. Kirk.

Hybridity, Identity and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain examines an island made turbulent by conquest and civil war. Focusing upon history writing, ethnography, and saints' lives, this book details how community was imagined in the twelfth century; what role the monsterization of the Welsh, Irish and Jews played in bringing about English unity; and how writers who found the blood of two peoples mixed in their bodies struggled to find a vocabulary to express their identity. Its chapters explores the function and origin of myths like the unity and separateness of the English, the barbarism of...

J.R.R. Tolkien delved into the Middle Ages to create a critique of the modern world in his fantasy, yet did so in a form of modernist literature with postmodern implications and huge commercial success. These essays examine that paradox and its significance in understanding the intersection between traditionalist and counter-culture criticisms of the modern. The approach helps to explain the popularity of his works, the way in which they continue to be brought into dialogue with Twenty-First century issues, and their contested literary significance in the academy.

The first study to juxtapose medieval effigy tombs and personal seals, the two forms of cultural patronage through which royal women crafted a visual imagery for queenship in twelfth- and early thirteenth-century France.

This book explores the Islamic roots of the Western values of tolerance and religious pluralism, and considers Dante from the perspective of the Arab-Islamic philosophical tradition. It examines the relations between Islamic and Western thought, the historical origins of Western values, and the tradition of tolerance in classical Islamic thought.

Guynn offers an innovative new approach to the ethical, cultural, and ideological analysis of medieval allegory. Working between poststructuralism and historical materialism, he considers both the playfulness of allegory and its disciplinary force.

If ours is a cultural moment intensely fascinated with enclosed space-the cubicles of our workplaces, the confessionals of our churches, the bedrooms of reality television, and all the various closets we come out of and retreat into-our fascination isn't entirely new. This book argues that the religious literature of the late Middle Ages articulates with great subtlety and vividness the extent to which all being is to some extent enclosed being. In other words, we're all in the closet, and that might be a good thing. Through extended readings of English, French, and Italian writers of the...

This study traces how medieval audiences judge bodies from Doomsday visions to beauty contests. Employing cultural and formalist approaches, this study breaks new ground on the historical obsession about ends and changes, reflected in different genres spanning several hundred years.

This groundbreaking interdisciplinary collection of essays by American, British, and Iberian scholars examines the literary, historical, and artistic exchanges between England and Iberia from the Twelfth to Fifteenth century.

This study argues that late medieval English 'mystery plays' were about masculinity as much as Christian theology, modes of devotion, or civic self-consciousness. Performed repeatedly by generations of merchants and craftsmen, these Biblical plays produced fantasies and anxieties of middle class, urban masculinity, many of which are familiar today.