This collection examines the intersection of the discourses of “disability” and “monstrosity” in a timely and necessary intervention in the scholarly fields of Disability Studies and Monster Studies. Analyzing Medieval and Early Modern art and literature replete with images of non-normative bodies, these essays consider the pernicious history of defining people with distinctly non-normative bodies or non-normative cognition as monsters. In many cases throughout Western history, a figure marked by what Rosemarie Garland-Thomson has termed “the extraordinary body” is labeled...
This collection examines the intersection of the discourses of “disability” and “monstrosity” in a timely and necessary intervention i...
This collection of essays explores the literary legacy of medieval England by examining the writers, editors and exemplars of medieval English texts. In order to better understand the human agency, creativity and forms of sanctity of medieval England, these essays investigate both the production of medieval texts and the people whose hands and minds created, altered and/or published them. The chapters consider the writings of major authors such as Chaucer, Gower and Wyclif in relation to texts, authors and ideals less well-known today, and in light of the translation and...
This collection of essays explores the literary legacy of medieval England by examining the writers, editors and exemplars of medieval Engli...
Writing Plague: Language and Violence from the Black Death to COVID-19 brings a holistic and comparative perspective to “plague writing” from the later Middle Ages to the twenty-first century. It argues that while the human “hardware” has changed enormously between the medieval past and the present (urbanization, technology, mass warfare, and advances in medical science), the human “software” (emotional and psychological reactions to the shock of pandemic) has remained remarkably similar across time. Through close readings of works by medieval writers like Guillaume de...
Writing Plague: Language and Violence from the Black Death to COVID-19 brings a holistic and comparative perspective to “plague writing...
Elionor of Sicily, 1325–1375: A Mediterranean Queen’s Life of Family, Administration, Diplomacy, and War follows Elionor of Sicily, the third wife of the important Aragonese king, Pere III. Despite the limited amount of personal information about Elionor, the large number of Sicilian, Catalan, and Aragonese chronicles as well as the massive amount of notarial evidence drawn from eastern Spanish archives has allowed Donald Kagay to trace Elionor’s extremely active life roles as a wife and mother, a queen, a frustrated sovereign, a successful administrator, a supporter of...
Elionor of Sicily, 1325–1375: A Mediterranean Queen’s Life of Family, Administration, Diplomacy, and War follows Elionor of Sicily,...
This book offers a comparative study of emotion in Arabic Islamic and English Christian contemplative texts, c. 1110-1250, contributing to the emerging interest in ‘globalization’ in medieval studies. A.S.Lazikani argues for the necessity of placing medieval English devotional texts in a more global context and seeks to modify influential narratives on the ‘history of emotions’ to enable this more wide-ranging critical outlook. Across eight chapters, the book examines the dialogic encounters generated by comparative readings of Muhyddin Ibn ‘Arabi...
This book offers a comparative study of emotion in Arabic Islamic and English Christian contemplative texts, c. 1110-1250, contributing to the emer...
Beer and Brewing in Medieval Culture and Contemporary Medievalism is a cross-cultural analysis of the role that alcohol consumption played in literature, social and cultural history, and gender roles in the Middle Ages. The volume also seeks to correct or offer new insights into historical beer production. By drawing on the expertise of scholars of history, archaeology, Old and Middle English, Old Norse, and Medieval and Early Modern literature, the book shows how historical medieval beer and brewing has influenced nostalgic post-medieval nationalism and romanticized...
Beer and Brewing in Medieval Culture and Contemporary Medievalism is a cross-cultural analysis of the role that alcohol consumption pla...
In recent decades the concept of Mediterranean has been cited with increasing frequency in relation to the study of medieval literatures. And yet, in what sense would Dante’s Comedy be ‘Mediterranean’? Is it because of its Greek-Arabic and Islamic sources? Dante and the Mediterranean Comedy analyzes the ideological function of references to the sea in the study of the Comedy undertaken by Enrico Cerulli, a scholar of Somali-Ethiopian languages, and a colonial governor of ‘Italian East Africa.’ Then it presents novel lines of inquiry on the reception and appropriation of...
In recent decades the concept of Mediterranean has been cited with increasing frequency in relation to the study of medieval literatures. And yet, ...