First Published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This book examines the relationship between words and images in illustrated texts. The focus is on cultural attitudes toward illustrations and the idea that one might consider graphic material other than writing as text and text as graphics. This aspect of books and manuscripts has often been ignored by literary critics and the vocabulary for discussing it is often inadequate.

The rise and establishment of the theological authority of Thomas Aquinas, something that ran counter to every current running through the late 13th-century Church, is investigated in this work. Unclear about whether propositions drawn from Thomas's teachings had been included in the Condemnations of 1277, a debate raged in the Church culminating in a series of bitter polemical battles between Hervaeus Natalis, the most prominent of Aquinas's early defenders and eventual Master General of the Dominican Order, and Durandus of St. Pourcain, the last major Dominican thinker to openly attack...

In the uniquely urban atmosphere of the 12th and 13th centuries in Northern Italy, the conflict between the evolving commercially-based society and anti-commercial religious dogma created a need among the laity for new spiritual responses with which to justify their changing experience. The Humiliati represent one such lay group who chose to disown all worldly goods but remain within their community and work towards its social and moral improvement. This study examines the contribution of women to the Humiliati movement, providing original archival evidence which indicates that women...

Cannibalism is the breaking of the ultimate taboo. Yet during the later Middle Ages and early years of the Renaissance, mythological, historical and contemporary accounts of cannibalism became particularly popular.

This volume is a close reading of the female cross-dresser in 13th century French romance, examining the interplay between physical and narrative ambiguity.

While a culture may have a dominant way of mapping, its geography is always plural and there is always competition among conceptions of space. Beginning with this understanding, this book traces the map's early development into an emblem of the state, and charts the social and cultural implications of this phenomenon. This book chronicles the specific technologies, both material and epistemological, by which the map shows itself capable of accessing, organizing, and re-orienting a tremendous range of information.

What makes English literature English ? This question inspires Stephen Harris's wide-ranging study of Old English literature. From Bede in the eighth century to Geoffrey of Monmouth in the twelfth, Harris explores the intersections of race and literature before the rise of imagined communities. Harris examines possible configurations of communities, illustrating dominant literary metaphors of race from Old English to its nineteenth-century critical reception. Literary voices in the England of Bede understood the limits of community primarily as racial or tribal, in keeping with the perceived...

Throughout the tales in the Confessio Amantis, John Gower proposes that reciprocal love is the remedy to what ails man and society. This study explores how Gower uses the aspects of love in the Confessio and emphasizes and illustrates a belief that reason much rule man inn all things, including his natural instincts to love.

First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.