Browse Items (72 total)

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…

Medieval Mississippians, the eighth volume in the award-winning Popular Archaeology Series, introduces a key historical period in pre-Columbian eastern North America--the "Mississippian" era--via a series of colorful chapters on places, practices,…

In The Arthur of the North, Marianne E. Kalinke offers the first book-length study of the Arthurian literature translated from French and Latin into Old Norse-Icelandic in the thirteenth century. Preserved mostly in Icelandic manuscripts, in early…

Spaces and their boundaries—geographical and otherwise—are socially constructed. Travel is a major means for the engendering of geographical spaces. Humans travel for a great variety of reasons, producing different types of spaces, and corresponding…

This book is an investigation of the foundation and evolution of romance in Iceland. The narrative type arose from the introduction of French narratives into the alien literary environment of Iceland and the acculturation of the import to indigenous…

The Arthurian legend reached all levels of society in medieval and Renaissance Italy, from princely courts, with their luxury books and frescoed palaces, to the merchant classes and popular audiences in the piazza, who enjoyed shorter retellings in…

Through state-backed Catholicism, monolingualism, militarism, and dictatorship, Spain’s fascists earned their reputation for intolerance. It may therefore come as a surprise that 80,000 Moroccans fought at General Franco’s side in the 1930s. What…

Islamic gardens, with their waterways and beds of plants and trees, are generally regarded as an earthly reflection of paradise. D. Fairchild Ruggles offers a new interpretation, contending that the palace garden was primarily an environmental,…

Xuanzang (600 - 664 AD) is one of the most important figures of Buddhism, whose travelogue about India and Central Asia (Da Tang Xiyu ji) was widely celebrated. At the same time he is the most important translator of Chinese Buddhism, unique in…

Carol Symes is the founding executive editor of The Medieval Globe, the first academic journal to promote a global approach to medieval studies. This biannual publication explores the modes of communication, materials of exchange, and myriad…

Trade, Travel, and Exploration: An Encyclopedia is a reference book that covers the peoples, places, technologies, and intellectual concepts that contributed to trade, travel and exploration during the Middle Ages, from the years A.D. 525 to 1492.

The Global Prehumanisms conference, an Interdisciplinary Conference Sponsored by the Program in Medieval Studies, was held on October 18-20, 2018 at the Levis Faculty Center and brought together scholars in a variety of disciplines and institutions…