This is a substantial and readable volume, and it is supplied with a rich array of documentation in the notes and bibliography. It deals with a question of critical importance for current research on medieval literature': namely, the relationship between this literature and us...This is an important collection, and one may congratulate the editors of their ambitious undertaking.--Paul Zumthor, 'Speculum.'

This distinctive collection explores the construction of genealogies--in both the biological sense of procreation and the metaphorical sense of heritage and cultural patrimony. Focusing specifically on the discourses that inform such genealogies, "Generation and Degeneration" moves from Greco-Roman times to the recent past to retrace generational fantasies and discords in a variety of related contexts, from the medical to the theological, and from the literary to the historical.
The discourses on reproduction, biology, degeneration, legacy, and lineage that this book broaches not only...

Exploring the construction of genealogies, this work retraces generational fantasies and discords in a variety of related contexts, from the medical to the theological, and from the literary to the historical. It brings to the forefront concepts of sexual identity and gender politics and is for those in history of medicine, and religious studies.

The Romance of the Rose has been a controversial text since it was written in the thirteenth century. There is evidence for radically different readings as as early as the first half of the fourteenth century. The text provided inspiration for both courtly and didactic poets. Some read it as a celebration of human love; others as an erudite philosophical work; still others as a satirical representation of social and sexual follies. On one hand it was praised as an edifying treatise, on the other condemned as lascivious and misogynistic. Kevin Brownlee and Sylvia Huot and the...