Gender and Sexuality

Shajar al-Durr--known as "Tree of Pearls"--began her remarkable career as a child slave, given as property to the Ayyubid Sultan Salih of Egypt. She became his favorite concubine, was manumitted, became the sultan's wife, served as governing regent,…

Genealogies of Fiction is a study of gender, dynastic politics, and intertextuality in medieval and renaissance chivalric epic, focused on Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso. Relying on the direct study of manuscripts and incunabula, this project…

This volume asks whether there was a common structure, ideology, and image of the household in the medieval Christian West. In the period under examination, noble households often exercised great power in their own right, while even quite humble…

Bridal-quest romance in medieval Iceland surveys a rich genre of prose narratives that has been all but neglected by recent scholarship, especially in the English speaking world. Marianne Kalinke redresses this situation with a thorough exploration…

Conflicting Identities and Multiple Masculinities takes as its focus the construction of masculinity in Western Europe from the early Middle Ages until the fifteenth century, crossing from pre-Christian Scandinavia across western Christendom. The…

The eleventh and early twelfth centuries were a period of intense debate over ecclesiastical reform in western Europe. This book examines the debates from a new perspective, exploring the ways in which contemporary political writers conveyed messages…

“In 1990, Helen Bennett, Clare Lees, and Gillian Overing expressed frustration over early medieval English scholars' reluctance to fully engage with feminist theory. “More is being written about women in Old English”, they write, “but whether or not…

“This chapter review gender in the Middle East from a number of perspectives: Western and Muslim discourses about Muslim women, women’s rights in traditional interpretations of Islamic law, other cultural norms that impact women’s status,…

Public avowals of love between men were common from antiquity through the Middle Ages. What do these expressions leave to interpretation? An extraordinary amount, as Stephen Jaeger demonstrates. Unlike current efforts to read medieval culture through…