Mary Erler traces networks of female book ownership and exchange which have so far been obscure, and shows how women were responsible for owning as well as circulating devotional books. Seven narratives of individual women who lived between 1350 and 1550 are enclosed by an overview of nuns' reading and their surviving books, and a survey of women who owned the first printed books in England. An appendix lists a number of books not previously attributed to female ownership.

Gestures and looks played an even more important role in public and private exchanges of medieval society, than they do today. Gestures meant more than words, for example, in ceremonies of homage and fealty. In this compelling study, medievalist Burrow examines the role of non-verbal communication in a range of narrative texts, including Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, the anonymous Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Malory's Morte D'arthur, the romances of Chretien de Troyes, the prose Lancelot, Boccaccio's Il Filostrato, and Dante's Commedia.

Emily Steiner describes the rich intersection between legal documents and English literature in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. She argues that documentary culture (including charters, testaments, patents and seals) enabled writers to think in new ways about the conditions of textual production in late Medieval England.

Shedding new light on the representations of masculinity and same-sex desire in medieval literature, William Burgwinkle offers a historical survey of attitudes towards same-sex love during the Middle Ages. His studies of a wide range of texts reveal that medieval attitudes towards sexual preferences were much broader than usually conceded. Although most texts of the period denounced sodomy, Burgwinkle reveals how some also endorsed it, however inadvertently.

Simon Gilson examines Dante's reception in Florence in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when Dante was represented, commemorated and debated in a variety of ways. Paying particular attention to Dante's influence on major authors such as Boccaccio and Petrarch, Italian humanism, and civic identity and popular culture in Florence, Gilson ranges across literature, philosophy and art, languages and social groups.

Almost all sermons were written in Latin until the Reformation. This scholarly study describes and analyzes such collections of Latin sermons from the golden age of medieval preaching in England--the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Basing his studies on the extant manuscripts, Siegfried Wenzel analyzes their sermons and occasions. He covers many of the broader late medieval debates on preaching, as well as the attitudes of orthodox preachers to Lollardy.

While most Chaucer critics interested in gender and sexuality have used psychoanalytic theory to analyze Chaucer's poetry, Mark Miller re-examines the links between sexuality and the philosophical analysis of agency in medieval texts such as the Canterbury Tales, Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, and the Romance of the Rose. Chaucer's philosophical sophistication provides the basis for a new interpretation of the emerging notions of sexual desire and romantic love in the late Middle Ages.

This interdisciplinary study explores images of Jews and Judaism in late medieval English literature and culture. Using four main categories - history, miracle, cult and Passion - Anthony Bale demonstrates how varied and changing ideas of Judaism coexisted within well-known anti-semitic literary and visual models, depending on context, authorship and audience. He examines the ways in which English writers, artists and readers used and abused the Jewish image in the period following the Jews' expulsion from England in 1290. The texts are analysed in their manuscript and print contexts in order...

Patrick Boyde argues that the way in which Dante represents what he (or his fictional self) saw and felt was profoundly influenced by the thirteenth-century science of psychology. Professor Boyde offers an authoritative account of the way in which vision and the emotions were understood in Dante's lifetime. He rereads many of the most dramatic and moving episodes in the Comedy, and shows how knowledge of Dante's philosophical ideas can help us to understand the meaning of his journey toward the source of goodness and truth.

Patrick Boyde brings Dante's thought and poetry into focus for the modern reader by restoring the Comedy to its intellectual and literary context in 1300. He begins by describing the authorities that Dante acknowledged in the field of ethics and the modes of thought he shared with the great thinkers of his time. Boyde concentrates on the poetic representation of the most important vices and virtues in the Comedy. He stresses the heterogeneity and originality of Dante's treatment, and the challenges posed by his desire to harmonize these divergent value systems.