Browse Items (72 total)

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…

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…

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,…

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…

“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,…

“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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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Inventions of the Skin considers a crucial aspect of the visual field of the early modern stage: the painted body of the actor. Organized as a series of studies, the four chapters of this book examine goldface and divinity in York’s…

One of the greatest scourges of the later medieval period was plague. While there is a considerable scholarly literature tracing the impact of the dread disease on literature and art, the impermanence of performance has rendered the extension of such…

The epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey, attributed to Homer, are among the oldest surviving works of literature derived from oral performance. Deeply embedded in these works is the notion that they were intended to be heard: there is something…

Medieval teachers inherited the grammatical and rhetorical pedagogy of antiquity and adapted it to their own needs. Letters came to replace speeches as the predominant target genre for composition instruction, and the model letters found in most…

The past generation has been an extraordinarily active one in medieval drama scholarship; our appreciation of the range of medieval drama has been significantly broadened, and our understanding of certain medieval genres—most notably, biblical…

What is the force in art, C. Stephen Jaeger asks, that can enter our consciousness, inspire admiration or imitation, and carry a reader or viewer from the world as it is to a world more sublime? We have long recognized the power of individuals to…

The term qing 情 (emotion) has lain at the core of Chinese thinking about literature from antiquity through modern times. It is of profound paradigmatic significance because each major reconceptualization of qing by literary writers and scholars…