Women often appear invisible in what is widely perceived as the male-oriented society of Islam. Women in the Medieval Islamic World seeks to redress the balance with a series of original essays on women in the pre-modern phase of Islamic history. The reader will encounter here a colorful portrait gallery of rulers, politicians, poets and patrons, as well as some larger than life fictitious females from the pages of Arabic, Persian and Turkish literature. No less authentic are the accounts of quiet or troubled lives of ordinary women preserved in the court records of Mamluk Egypt and Ottoman...

Heloise, the twelfth-century French abbess and reformer, emerges from this book as one of history's most extraordinary women, a thinker-writer of profound insight and skill. Her supple and learned mind attracted the most radical philosopher of her time, Peter Abelard. He became her teacher, lover, husband, and finally monastic ally. That relationship has made her fame until now. But Heloise is far more important in her own right. Seventeen experts of international standing collaborate here to reveal and analyze how Heloise's daring achievements shaped normative issues of theology, rhetoric,...

Acts of reading appear everywhere in the late Middle Ages, from the margins of Books of Hours to self-portraits of authors in their studies. What relevance did this image have for the late medieval imagination? Engaging Words is an interdisciplinary study on the conception of reading in late medieval society. Beginning with an examination of the social conditions that produced a viable reading public, the book surveys popular tastes, the interrelationship between manuscript form and content, and the theory and poetry of late medieval authors. Drawing on images from late medieval culture,...

Eleanor's patrilineal descent, from a lineage already prestigious enough to have produced an empress in the eleventh century, gave her the lordship of Aquitaine. But marriage re-emphasized her sex which, in the medieval scheme of gender-power relations relegated her to the position of Lady in relation to her Lordly husbands. In this collection, essays provide a context for Eleanor's life and further an evolving understanding of Eleanor's multifaceted career. A valuable collection on the greatest heiress of the medieval period.

First published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Comprises nine critical essays from prominent and emerging medievalists, exploring the different ways in which French authors of the Middle Ages transgress normative social and cultural gender codes in their literary works. Essays challenge traditional interpretations of gender roles in Old French l

Joan of Arc has long piqued the historical imagination, for it seems impossible that a peasant-maid could have led the French army, crowned her king, and then been burned as a heretic, only later to be found a saint. This volume of essays employs tools of historical analysis, literary criticism, and feminist inquiry to reveal why veterans of her military campaigns found her to have been a remarkable commander; why so many of her contemporaries, churchman and poets alike, found it possible to accept the validity of her mission and her voices; why modern politicians and artists have used her as...

In 19 essays, this study offers a range of approaches to medieval society's understanding of mothering and the uses to which the practice and imagery of mothering could be assumed by females and males alike. The study also focuses on representations of motherhood in Old Norse and Icelandic literatures, and on record evidence for the maternal behaviour of actual mothers in medieval France, England and Spain.

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.