Constance of France: Womanhood and Agency in Twelfth-Century Europe is a biography of Constance of France, sister of King Louis VII of France. Myra Bom recovers Constance’s life story and puts it in its medieval context by examining the historical evidence of chronicles, charters, seal imprints and letters. The countess’s long and interesting life makes for women’s history with a large geographical scope, including France, England, Toulouse and the Latin East. It touches on many aspects of life during the Middle Ages such as birth, marriage and...
Constance of France: Womanhood and Agency in Twelfth-Century Europe is a biography of Constance of France, sister of King Louis VII of ...
This book argues that literary and historiographical works written by Iberian Christians between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries promoted contradictory representations of Muslims in order to advocate for their colonization through the affirmation of Christian supremacy. Ambivalent depictions of cultural difference are essential for colonizers to promote their own superiority, as explained by postcolonial critics and observed in medieval and early modern texts in Castilian, Catalan, and Portuguese, such as the Cantar de mio Cid, Cantigas de Santa Maria, Llibre dels...
This book argues that literary and historiographical works written by Iberian Christians between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries promoted contradi...
Fictions of Witness in the Confessio Amantis details the first years of the Confessio’s material history and offers a major revision to a century’s old narrative of political revision and conversion around the trauma of 1400. Joel Fredell argues for “late stage” revisions by Gower to his great poem in Middle English from the late 1390s up to Gower’s death in 1408. This approach, new to scholarship for Ricardian and Lancastrian literature, demands profound re-evaluation of Gower's poetic persona and its entanglement in the opening and closing books of...
Fictions of Witness in the Confessio Amantis details the first years of the Confessio’s material history and offers a major revision ...
Micro Middle Ages brings together five microhistorical case studies focusing on small or seemingly inconsequential evidence that leads to broader conclusions about medieval history and the way we do and understand history in general. Paul Dutton provides an overview of microhistorical approaches and theorizes about its use in pre-modern history. As opposed to studying history “from above” or history “from below,” Dutton shows the advantages for historians of doing history “from the inside out,” starting from some single, overlooked, but potentially knowable...
Micro Middle Ages brings together five microhistorical case studies focusing on small or seemingly inconsequential evidence that lead...
This book explores the different functions and metaphorical concepts of alchemy in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Middle English poetry and bridges them together with the exempla tradition in late medieval English literature. Such poetic narratives function as exemplary models which directly address the ambiguity of medieval English alchemical practice. This book examines the foundation of this relationship between alchemical narrative and exemplum in the poetry of Gower and Chaucer in the fourteenth century before exploring its diffusion in lesser-known...
This book explores the different functions and metaphorical concepts of alchemy in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Middle English poetry and bridges...
Hybridity in the Literature of Medieval England offers a wide-ranging exploration of hybridity in medieval English literature. Anxiety about hybridity surfaces in characters of mixed ethnic identity in the romances. But anxiety is found also in the intersection of the natural and the supernatural and its site can be located inside the human body’s unstable physical frame, living and dead, as much as in the cultural and social forces at work upon the human body politic at large. Hybridity is unlike other constructs of difference in that, while it is grounded in...
Hybridity in the Literature of Medieval England offers a wide-ranging exploration of hybridity in medieval English literature. Anxiet...
Two of the most notable figures from the Middle Ages–the volatile, brilliant Abelard and the equally brilliant Heloise–became the parents of their son Astralabe before Abelard’s infamous, brutal castration. The couple spent the rest of their lives as monastics, in each other’s orbits if not in shared presence, as they became movers in the glittering monastic world of the early twelfth-century France. What happened to their strangely named Astralabe? Astralabe: The Life and Times of the Son of Heloise and Abelard rescues the “lost son” from footnotes and fiction and attempts...
Two of the most notable figures from the Middle Ages–the volatile, brilliant Abelard and the equally brilliant Heloise–became the parents of their...
This book argues that literary and historiographical works written by Iberian Christians between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries promoted contradictory representations of Muslims in order to advocate for their colonization through the affirmation of Christian supremacy. Ambivalent depictions of cultural difference are essential for colonizers to promote their own superiority, as explained by postcolonial critics and observed in medieval and early modern texts in Castilian, Catalan, and Portuguese, such as the Cantar de mio Cid, Cantigas de Santa Maria, Llibre dels...
This book argues that literary and historiographical works written by Iberian Christians between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries promoted contradi...
Micro Middle Ages brings together five microhistorical case studies focusing on small or seemingly inconsequential evidence that leads to broader conclusions about medieval history and the way we do and understand history in general. Paul Dutton provides an overview of microhistorical approaches and theorizes about its use in pre-modern history. As opposed to studying history "from above" or history "from below," Dutton shows the advantages for historians of doing history "from the inside out," starting from some single, overlooked, but potentially knowable thing, delving deep...
Micro Middle Ages brings together five microhistorical case studies focusing on small or seemingly inconsequential evidence that leads to...
Authors, Factions, and Courts in Angevin England: A Literature of Personal Ambition (12th-13th Century) advances a model for historical study of courtly literature by foregrounding the personal aims, networks, and careers as the impetus for much of the period’s literature. The book takes two authors as case studies – Gerald of Wales and Walter Map – to show how authors not only built their own stories but also used popular narratives and the tools of propaganda to achieve their own, personal goals. The purpose of this study is to overturn the top-down model of...
Authors, Factions, and Courts in Angevin England: A Literature of Personal Ambition (12th-13th Century) advances a model for histo...
