Books in the The Middle Ages Series series

"A fascinating study of the movements and ambivalent meanings of gifts in the political culture of the fifteenth and early sixteenth century... Valentin Groebner's book ... provides us with a new way of understanding the meanings and uses of 'corruption.'"-Natalie Zemon Davis, Sixteenth Century Journal

In 1395, a poor and illiterate French woman began to experience nightly visions of devils and angels. Was she a saint, a witch, an impostor, or a madwoman? Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski looks for answers in the historical and theological context of this troubled woman's life and times.

"Crane's consideration of 'court performances' of later fourteenth- and earlier fifteenth-century English and French literature and culture is both polished and erudite, written both deftly and with clarity throughout. A finely crafted and imaginative study."-Paul Strohm, University of Oxford

By examining periodization together with the two controversial categories of feudalism and secularization, Kathleen Davis exposes the relationship between the constitution of "the Middle Ages" and the history of sovereignty, slavery, and colonialism.

Learning to Die in London, 1380-1540 argues that the educated awareness of death and mortality was a vital aspect of the city's civic culture, critical not only to the shaping of single lives and the management of households but also to practices of cultural memory, building of institutions, and good government of the city itself.

Addressing the ways alliterative poems share concerns with history and the often-dangerous confrontation of the present with the past, Christine Chism shifts her focus away from the emphases on meter, dialect, and provenance that have routinely marked studies of alliterative poetry.

Rejecting the prevalent view of Capgrave as predictably conservative, John Capgrave's Fifteenth Century contributes to a broader appraisal of fifteenth-century culture and offers a fresh view of orthodoxy and dissent in pre-Reformation England.

Alastair Minnis reveals Chaucer's Pardoner and Wife of Bath as interconnected aspects of a radical literary experiment, wherein the relationship between objective authority and subjective fallibility is confronted as never before.

Bryan examines a wide range of devotional and secular texts, from works by Walter Hilton, Julian of Norwich, and Thomas Hoccleve to explore the models of identification and imitation through which they sought to reach the inmost selves of their readers, and the scripts for spiritual desire that they offered for the cultivation of the heart.

In Singing the New Song, Katherine Zieman examines the institutions and practices of the liturgy as central to changes in late medieval English understandings of the written word.

"A provocative study of an intriguing subject... The Romance of Adultery establishes perceptive and tantalizing connections between literature and history while sensibly resisting the teptation to see the former as a reflection of the latter."-Romance Philology

Gender and Jewish Difference from Paul to Shakespeare provides the first extended examination of the linkages of gender and Jewish difference in late medieval and early modern English literature, focusing on representations of Jews and women in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, selections from medieval drama, and Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice.

Mechthild of Magdeburg gained some renown for her extraordinary book of mystical revelations, "The Flowing Light of the Godhead". Yet her writings dropped into obscurity after her death, many assume because of her gender. This seeks to explain this fate by considering Mechthild's own view of female authorship.

Her Life Historical offers a major reconsideration of one of the most popular narrative forms in late medieval England-the lives of female saints-and one of the period's primary modes of interpretation, exemplarity.

Reading through influential texts of the later Middle Ages, Adams shows how specific representations of chess encoded concerns about political organization, civic community, and individual autonomy.

Crossing Borders explores cross-cultural representations of gender and sexual practices in the medieval French and Arabic traditions. Amer demonstrates that the medieval Arabic tradition on eroticism played a determining role in French literary writings on gender and sexuality in the Middle Ages.

Theater historian Jody Enders brings a dozen of the funniest French farces to contemporary English speaking audiences for the first time. This performance-friendly collection includes background information about the plays for medievalists, theater practitioners, and classic comedy lovers alike.

The Medieval Salento explores the visual and material culture of people who lived and died in this region between the ninth and fifteenth centuries, showing the ways Jews, Orthodox Christians, and Roman-rite Christians used images, artifacts, and texts in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin to construct both independent and intersecting identities.

Where else . . . can one learn about Carolingian furniture, medicine, dieting, birth control, astrology, . . . drinking habits, or hygiene? A fine introduction to early medieval Europe."-International Historical Studies

In eighth- and ninth-century Byzantium there arose a heated controversy over religious art, known as the "Iconoclastic Controversy." Analyzing hundreds of pages of art-texts, laws, letters, and poems, this book examines the wider context of the debate by providing the first comprehensive study of the Western response to Byzantine iconoclasm.

Presents a study of Czech society and politics in the High Middle Ages. This work paints a vivid portrait of a flourishing Christian community in the decades between 1050 and 1200. It also reveals the values and strategies that sustained the Czech Lands as a community. It also honors the complexity and dynamism of the medieval exercise of power.

French argues that medieval laywomen both coped with the chaotic changes following the plague and justified their own changing behavior by participating in local religion. Through active engagement in the parish church, the basic unit of public worship, women promoted and validated their own interests and responsibilities.

"A significant addition to the texts of later medieval European law available in English."-Paul Brand, Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and Research Fellow of the Institute of Historical Research, London

In Roads to Health, G. Geltner demonstrates that urban dwellers in medieval Italy had a keen sense of the dangers to their health posed by conditions of overcrowding, shortages of food and clean water, air pollution, and the improper disposal of human and animal waste. He consults scientific, narrative, and normative sources that detailed and consistently denounced the physical and environmental hazards urban communities faced: latrines improperly installed and sewers blocked; animals left to roam free and carcasses left rotting on public byways; and thoroughfares congested by artisanal and commercial activities that impeded circulation, polluted waterways, and raised miasmas. However, as Geltner shows, numerous administrative records also offer ample evidence of the concrete measures cities took to ameliorate unhealthy conditions. Toiling on the frontlines were public functionaries generally known as viarii, or "road-masters," appointed to maintain their community''s infrastructures and police pertinent human and animal behavior. Operating on a parallel track were the camparii, or "field-masters," charged with protecting the city''s hinterlands and thereby the quality of what would reach urban markets, taverns, ovens, and mills.Roads to Health provides a critical overview of the mandates and activities of the viarii and camparii as enforcers of preventive health and safety policies between roughly 1250 and 1500, and offers three extended case studies, for Lucca, Bologna, and the smaller Piedmont town of Pinerolo. In telling their stories, Geltner contends that preventive health practices, while scientifically informed, emerged neither solely from a centralized regime nor as a reaction to the onset of the Black Death. Instead, they were typically negotiated by diverse stakeholders, including neighborhood residents, officials, artisans, and clergymen, and fostered throughout the centuries by a steady concern for people''s greater health.

"Invaluable to those who need to disentangle the complex family relationships of those who controlled much of Europe for so many centuries."-American Historical Review

A History Book Club selection

Szpiech draws on medieval Christian, Jewish, and Muslim polemics to investigate the role of narrative in the representation of conversion. By investigating conversion not as individual experience but as expression of communal visions of history, he shows how the narratives dramatize the conflict of ideas in disputational writing.

Why would the thirteenth-century French prose Lancelot-Grail Cycle have been attributed to Walter Map, a twelfth-century writer from the Anglo-Welsh borderlands? Joshua Byron Smith sets out to answer this and other questions and offers a new explanation for how narratives about the pre-Saxon inhabitants of Britain circulated in England.

An award-winning anatomy of the Fifth Crusade.