Books in the The Middle Ages Series series

Drawn from two medieval collections of form letters for all manner of business and personal affairs, Lost Letters of Medieval Life depicts early thirteenth-century England through the everyday correspondence of people of all classes, from peasants and shopkeepers to bishops and earls.

Represents all the major areas of current work on the Romance of the Rose, both in America and in Europe.

This is the first English translation of a 13th-century work which set down the customary law of Clermont in the Beauvais region of France as it was practiced and understood. The work covers both procedural and substantive law, including the facts and decisions of nearly 100 cases.

Proffers diverse perspectives on the prehistory of government in Northern France, Spain, Germany, the Low Countries, and England. This book brings political, social, ecclesiastical, and cultural history to bear on topics such as aristocracies, women, rituals, commemoration, and manifestations of power through literary, legal, and scriptural means.

"The History of the Lombards constitutes one of the most important literary sources for the early history of Europe, and the vision and energy of its author make it ... the most complex of the histories of the Germanic peoples between the sixth and the ninth centuries."-from the Introduction

In Dark Speech, Robin Chapman Stacey explores the fascinating interaction between performance and law in Ireland between the seventh and ninth centuries.

Applies approaches to literacy, legal studies, memory, ritual, and the manorial economy to reexamine the transformation of medieval power. This book opens up perspectives on problems of power, in particular the idea and practice of accountability.

This first full-length treatment of the Barons' Crusade examines the call for holy war and its consequences in Hungary, France, England, Constantinople, and the Holy Land.

The Hystoria Constantinopolitana relates the adventures of Martin of Pairis, an abbot of the Cistercian Order who participated in the plunder of the city, as recorded by his monk Gunther. Alfred Andrea has captured the full flavor of the original with its alternating sections of prose and poetry.

Explores the use of allegory in the writing of the renowned eleventh-century Muslim philosopher known in the West as Avicenna, paying special attention to the ways he influenced theological, mystical, and literary thought in subsequent Islamic-and Western-intellectual and religious history.

"Katherine French puts a human face on the history of the English medieval parish between the end of the fourteenth century and the Reformation."-Carol Davidson-Cragoe, TMR

Jean-Claude Schmitt examines a unique and controversial conversion narrative to explore its meaning within the society and culture of its period as well as what it has to tell us about the way historians think and write.

This groundbreaking work challenges the received history of William Langland's Piers Plowman. Through close textual analysis, Lawrence Warner brings about a fundamental shift in our understanding of the production and transmission of the poem's three versions, establishing an entirely new paradigm for the study of Middle English literature.

Late antique and early medieval hagiographic texts present holy women as simultaneously pious and corrupt, hideous and beautiful, exemplars of depravity and models of sanctity. In Sacred Fictions Lynda Coon unpacks these paradoxical representations to reveal the construction and circumscription of women''s roles in the early Christian centuries.Coon discerns three distinct paradigms for female sanctity in saints'' lives and patristic and monastic writings. Women are recurrently figured as repentant desert hermits, wealthy widows, or cloistered ascetic nuns, and biblical discourse informs the narrative content, rhetorical strategies, and symbolic meanings of these texts in complex and multivalent ways. If hagiographers made their women saints walk on water, resurrect the dead, or consecrate the Eucharist, they also curbed the power of women by teaching that the daughters of Eve must make their bodies impenetrable through militant chastity or spiritual exile and must eradicate self-indulgence through ascetic attire or philanthropy. The windows the sacred fiction of holy women open on the past are far from transparent; driven by both literary invention and moral imperative, the stories they tell helped shape Western gender constructs that have survived into modern times.

"A remarkable analysis of an important medieval text... This work will surely initiate new studies of the precolonial frame of mind and the role of distinct versions of medieval manuscripts in the shaping of medieval understanding."-Sixteenth Century Journal

Describing in detail weaponry and armor, daily life on the march or in camp, clothing, food, medical care, military law, and titles of the Byzantine army of the seventh century, this text offers insights into the Byzantine military ethos. It also provides data for the historian, and even for the ethnologist.

"A gifted poet has given us an astute, adroit, vigorous, inviting, eminently readable translation... The challenging gamut of Langland's language ... has here been rendered with blessed energy and precision. Economou has indeed Done-Best."-Allen Mandelbaum

Explored in this book are women''s contributions to letter writing in western Europe from the sixth to the sixteenth centuries. The essays represent the first attempt to chart medieval women''s achievements in epistolarity, and the contributions to this volume situate the women writers in a historical context and employ a variety of feminist approaches.

"This elegantly written volume turns upside down prejudices and idees recues concerning society, family, and women in the Middle Ages."-The Medieval Review

Rewriting Saints and Ancestors examines the ways medieval French writers re-remembered and rewrote the lives of saints and dynastic ancestors, reconceptualizing the past in order to make sense of the present.

Composed at the height of the Hundred Years War by Geoffroi de Charny, one of the most respected knights of his age, A Knight's Own Book of Chivalry is an invaluable guide to fourteenth-century knighthood.

The Trotula was the most influential compendium on women's medicine in medieval Europe. Green here presents the first modern English translation of the so-called standardized Trotula ensemble, a composite form of the texts that was produced in the mid-thirteenth century and circulated widely in learned circles.

In The Kingdom of Sicily, 1100-1250, Karla Mallette writes the first literary history of the Kingdom of Sicily in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The study contains an extensive selection of poems and documents translated from the Arabic, Latin, Old French, and Italian.

Includes the first readable English translation of the Laws of Edward the Confessor and a much-needed critical edition of its Latin text.

Using sermons, exorcisms, letters, biographies of the saints, inscriptions, autobiographical and legal documents—some of which are translated nowhere else—J. N. Hillgarth shows how the Christian church went about the formidable task of converting western Europe. The book covers such topics as the relationship between the Church and the Roman state, Christian attitudes toward the barbarians, and the missions to northern Europe. It documents as well the cult of relics in popular Christianity and the emergence of consciously Christian monarchies.