Browse Items (72 total)

The Program in Medieval Studies planned a major conference to celebrate its new global strengths and to further the reach, significance, and meaning of medieval studies. In the first decade since its establishment, our Program has become one of the…

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…

How to Read Chinese Poetry in Context is an introduction to the golden age of Chinese poetry, spanning the earliest times through the Tang dynasty (618–907). It aims to break down barriers—between language and culture, poetry and history—that have…

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…

This singular work presents the most comprehensive and nuanced studies available in any Western language of Chinese aesthetic thought and practice during the Six Dynasties (A.D. 220-589). Despite a succession of dynastic and social upheavals, the…

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…

From the time of their earliest texts in the vernacular, Icelanders were interested in the semioticization of their landscape, the mapping of nature into culture by inscribing it with memories from the settlement of the island during the Viking Age.…

This volume investigates the reception of a small historical fact with wide-ranging social, cultural and imaginative consequences. Inspired by Leif Eiriksson’s visit to Vinland in about the year 1000, novels, poetry, history, politics, arts and…

“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,…

Ibadi Islam is a distinct sect of Islam, neither Sunni nor Shi‘ite, that emerged in the early Islamic period and remains active today in small pockets of North Africa and as the dominant sect of Oman. Despite its antiquity, it has often been…

The future of humanity is urban, and knowledge of urbanism’s deep past is critical for us all to navigate that future. The time has come for archaeologists to rethink this global phenomenon by asking what urbanism is and, more to the point, was. Can…

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,…

An Archaeology of the Cosmos　seeks answers to two fundamental questions of humanity and human history. The first question concerns that which some use as a defining element of humanity: religious beliefs. Why do so many people believe in supreme…

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…

Interest in the intersections of various kinds of discourse provides the basis for a closer look at diverse textual strategies of cultural legitimation. This collection presents an introductory essay and eleven studies (written in English and German)…

This fascinating volume brings together scholars from a wide range of disciplines, including literary studies, history, geography, and archaeology, to investigate questions of space, place, and identity in the medieval city. Using medieval Chester as…

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…

“Didymus the Blind was a celebrated Christian instructor in the second half of the fourth century. He was, according to Evagrius of Pontus, the “great and gnostic teacher.” Out of respect for the blind exegete’s interior vision, Jerome dubbed Didymus…

“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…