Through interdisciplinary readings of medieval literature and devotional artifacts, The Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary shows how reliquaries shaped ideas about poetry and poetics in late-medieval England.

Strange Beauty provides a new perspective on early Celtic stories of the Otherworld and their relevance to today's ecological concerns, arguing for a contemporary re-reading of the Otherworld trope in relation to physical experience.

Street Scenes offers a theory of late medieval acting and performance through a fresh and original reading of the Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge. The performance theory perspective employed here, along with the examination of actor/character dialectics, paves the way to understanding both religious theatre and the complexity of late medieval theatricalities. Sharon Aronson-Lehavi demonstrates the existence of a late medieval discourse about the double appeal of theatre performance: an artistic medium enacting sacred history while simultaneously referring to the present lives of its creators and...

This collection examines the cultural and intellectual dimensions of war and its resolution between Han Chinese and the various ethnically dissimilar peoples surrounding them during the crucial 'middle period' of Chinese history.

This book explores how Medieval and Early Modern writers reconstructed, and also how readers read, the contradictory meanings of "Lady" Wisdom.

This collection of essays explores consolation and mourning in the varied, sometimes provocative, readings of Boethius and of Stoic consolation by French, English, Italian and German authors, including Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Machaut, Chaucer, Wyatt and Queen Elizabeth I.

This book is an innovative study of humour and the body in Juan Ruiz's Libro de Buen Amor (1330), using modern analytical techniques to examine the place of the Libro's bawdy and grotesque in relation to secular and sacred culture.

This book exposes the ways in which ostensibly normative sexualities depend upon queerness to shore up their claims of privilege. Through readings of such classic texts as The Canterbury Tales and Eger and Grime, Tison Pugh explains how sexual normativity can often be claimed only after queerness has been rejected.

Bringing together memory theory, medieval cognition of images, and the English Corpus Christ drama in an innovative way, this study argues that the relationship of frames or backgrounds to the image has been misunderstood in the study of drama.

These essays take advantage of a new, exciting trend towards interdisciplinary research on the Charlemagne legend. Written by historians, art historians, and literary scholars, these essays focus on the multifaceted ways the Charlemagne legend functioned in the Middle Ages and how central the shared (if nonetheless fictional) memory of the great Frankish ruler was to the medieval West. A gateway to new research on memory, crusading, apocalyptic expectation, Carolingian historiography, and medieval kingship, the contributors demonstrate the fuzzy line separating "fact" and "fiction" in the...