Books in the Medieval Cultures series

In this study of popular drama in the period from 1350 to 1520, the author argues that many types of performances during this time represented cultural evasions to the imposition of disciplinary power.

This volume takes a comprehensive look at the many types of city spectacles that entertained the masses and confirmed various messages of power in late medieval Europe. The authors reveal a public cognizant of the power of symbols to express its goals and achievements.

The Medieval Monastery was first published in 1991. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

This work looks at how Christine de Pizan's texts constantly negotiate the hierarchial and repressive discourses of late medieval court culture. It places Christine's work in the context of larger discussions about medieval authorship, identity and categories of difference.

In this book, Marilynn Desmond reveals how a constructed and mediated tradition of reading Virgil has conditioned various interpretations among readers responding to medieval cultural and literary texts.

Strohen's collection of 13 papers, most published here for the first time, aims to reunite literary theory with the text and proposes a form of practical theory' which places the text at the centre of analysis and allows the text a relationship with the outside world.

Late medieval England was obsessed with the myth and legend of Troy, something which is readily reflected in the poetry and prose of the period. Although kings and emperors had frequently lain claim to be the descendants of Troy, Federico argues that in medieval England Trojanism was vital to authorial, regnal, and national identity formation'.

Offered as part of the sexcentenary commemoration of Chaucer's death, this very readable study examines Chaucer's impact on the academic and non-academic worlds of the 19th and 20th centuries. Chronological chapters assess Chaucer's impact on the Pre-Raphaelites, on W B Yeats, on Edwardian children's stories and on post-World War One authors.

Through incisive readings of a range of medieval texts and informed by poststructuralist, queer, and feminist theories, this book traces the Jewish presence in Western Europe to show how the body, gender, and sexuality were at the root of the construction of medieval religious anxieties, inconsistencies, and instabilities.

These ten specially commissioned essays demonstrate that during the Middle Ages the idea of an English nation was not fixed. The contributors examine and contrast the thinking behind the ways in which medieval philosophers and writers imagined or fantasised about an English nation.

Medieval conduct texts provided behavioral guidelines for men, women and children on a wide range of issues, including food, fashion and general behaviour.

Based on a conference held in 1997 by the Centre for Medieval Studies, these ten essays explore the ordering, manipulation, function and meaning of space in the medieval period.

Gower wrote his vernacular poem Confessio Amantis at the same time as Chaucer embarked on The Canterbury Tales . It is therefore not overly surprising that Gower's poem is far less known today than Chaucer's. This study seeks to reinstate Confessio Amantis to its rightful place in the history of English literature by examining its ethics.

The Medieval Castle was first published in 1991. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

This volume details the interdisciplinary impact of Sutton Hoo over the past half-century and reconsiders aspects of the culture of Anglo-Saxon England in the broad context of its connections with Scandinavian and Merovingian Europe.

Taking its titles from an Aristotelian phrase describing the efficient practices of managing a household, Arts of Possession looks at the way in which ways of living, the household and practices of having, became central issues in English medieval literature.

The essays in this text consider the way the human body is subjected to educational discipline, corporate celebration and to the production of gendered identity through the experiences of marriage and childbirth. It includes insights from history, literature, medieval studies and critical theory.

This work brings together the disciplines of history and English literature to present interpretations of late 14th-century English society.

Nothing less than a rethinking of what we mean when we talk about "men" and "women" of the medieval period, this volume demonstrates how the idea of gender -- in the Middle Ages no less than now -- intersected in subtle and complex ways with other categories of difference. Responding to the insights of postcolonial and feminist theory, the authors show that medieval identities emerged through shifting paradigms -- that fluidity, conflict, and contingency characterized not only gender, but also sexuality, social status, and religion. This view emerges through essays that delve into a wide variety of cultures and draw on a broad range of disciplinary and theoretical approaches. Scholars in the fields of history as well as literary and religious studies consider gendered hierarchies in western Christian, Jewish, Byzantine, and Islamic areas of the medieval world.

This collection is devoted entirely to medieval sexuality informed by late 1990s theories of sexuality and gender. It brings together essays from various disciplinary perspectives to consider how the Middle Ages defined, regulated and represented sexual practices and desires.