Books in the The Middle Ages Series series

Provides an analysis of the aristocracy in the county of Champagne under the independent counts. This work argues that three factors, the rise of the comital state, fiefholding, and the conjugal family, were critical to shaping a loose assortment of baronial and knightly families into an aristocracy with shared customs, institutions, and identity.

In From Eden to Eternity, Alastair Minnis argues that Eden afforded an extraordinary amount of creative space to late medieval theologians, painters, and poets as they tried to understand the place that God had deemed worthy of the creature made in His image.

Challenging the traditional conception of medieval Europe as insular and xenophobic, Shirin A. Khanmohamadi's In Light of Another's Word looks to early ethnographic writers who were surprisingly aware of their own otherness, especially when faced with the far-flung peoples and cultures they meant to describe.

Between Christian and Jew pivots around the inquisitorial trial of three Jews who were accused in 1341 of persuading Jewish apostates to return to Judaism and die as martyrs. This cultural history explores the worlds of Jews, Jewish converts, and medieval inquisitors as they intersected in northern Iberia in the Crown of Aragon.

Through hundreds of published and unpublished sources, Alex J. Novikoff traces the evolution of disputation from its ancient origins to its broader influence in the scholastic culture and public sphere of the High Middle Ages.

Joseph O'Callaghan offers the first full and authoritative history of the epic battle for control of the Strait of Gibraltar waged by Castile, Morocco, and Granada in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries-a major, but often overlooked chapter in the Christian reconquest of Spain.

"Writing a book about one of the most complex books ever assembled is no easy task, yet Griffiths rises to the occasion. . . . This work will be widely and warmly received by medievalists everywhere."-Jeffrey Hamburger, Harvard University

Thinking about animals and living with them are vital aspects of medieval experience. Animal Encounters explores saints' lives, hunting treatises, bestiaries, and other genres to discover how various species take part in culture making, revealing that cross-species relationships transform both their animal and their human participants.

Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines investigates the political and cultural significance of marriages and other sexual encounters between Christians and Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula from the Islamic conquest in the early eighth century to the end of Muslim rule in 1492.

"The Feast of Saint Abraham is characterized by originality, profound scholarship (especially with regard to new manuscript sources), and by clarity and felicity of style... A fine book."-Bernard McGinn, University of Chicago

Shows the significance, rather than the irrelevance, of medieval dynastic motifs to projects of national unification, arguing that medieval studies can contribute to our understanding of national formations in part by marking the losses produced by union.

"The unique contribution of Venomous Tongues lies in its interdisciplinary approach and the way it situates scolding within a broader range of issues specific to the legal and social history of the period."-L. R. Poos, The Catholic University of America

No Place of Rest pursues the literary traces of the traumatic expulsion of Jews from France in 1306. Through careful readings of liturgical, philosophical, memorial, and medical texts, Susan Einbinder reveals how medieval Jews asserted their identity in exile.

Drawing on fresh work in the social sciences, Rachel Koopmans offers a new model for understanding how medieval miracle stories were generated, circulated, and replicated within an oral environment. She argues that the miracle collection became a defining genre of the high medieval period.

Jean de Saintre is the intriguing story of a young knight's training, his first love, and his disillusionment. It teems with details of armor, jousting and tournaments, heraldry and crusading-and also with a cheerful, and unexpected, eroticism.

Intended for the undergraduate yet also invaluable for teachers and scholars, this book illustrates how the crusade became crucial for defining and promoting the very concept and boundaries of Latin Christendom. It provides translations of and commentaries on key original sources and up-to-date bibliographic materials.

Traditional marriage was not the only option for couples in medieval Europe. Alternative forms of union could make lives precarious but also provided a degree of flexibility. The study draws on a wide geographical and chronological range of examples in order to illustrate local difference while bringing out broad patterns.

John Van Engen studies the Devotio Moderna, or Modern Devout, within their own time and space, the social and religious conditions that marked towns and parishes in northern Europe during the fifteenth century, and their challenge to received notions of religion within the widespread upheavals in cultural and religious life of the period.

As the earliest major monument of the customary law in the region to the south and southwest of the Ile de France, the book known as the Etablissements de Saint Louis greatly amplifies our knowledge of feudal and private law in the French kingdom. Frequently cited by legal historians, it has nonetheless remained inaccessible to readers unable to master its difficult Old French. Now, F. R. P. Akehurst presents the text''s first English translation, making this vital component of the vernacular law of thirteenth century France available to a wide range of scholars.A hybrid text, the Etablissements was probably compiled by a lawyer around the year 1273. The book takes its name from its first part, a set of nine ordinances of Louis IX giving the rules of procedure for the court of the Chatelet in Paris. The second part, made up of one hundred and sixty-six short chapters, is a collection of the customary laws of the Touraine-Anjou region; the thirty-eight chapters of the third section record the laws of the Orleans region. Whereas the Touraine-Anjou material presents a broad treatment of many aspects of the law, the Orleans customary reveals a preoccupation with problems of jurisdiction in a region where the king and local authorities were in sharp competition for power.

Examines a set of five twelfth-century romance texts—complete and fragmentary, canonical and now neglected, long and short—to map out the characteristics and boundaries of the genre in its formative period.

In this book Thomas H. Bestul constructs the literary history of the Latin Passion narratives, placing them within their social, cultural, and historical contexts. He examines the ways in which the Passion is narrated and renarrated in devotional treatises, paying particular attention to the modifications and enlargements of the narrative of the Passion as it is presented in the canonical gospels. Of particular interest to Bestul are the representations of Jews, women, and the body of the crucified Christ. Bestul argues that the greatly enlarged role of the Jews in the Passion narratives of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is connected to the rising anti-Judaism of the period. He explores how the representations of women, particularly the Virgin Mary, express cultural values about the place of women in late medieval society and reveal an increased interest in female subjectivity.

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

At its height in the thirteenth century, an estimated one fourth of the land area of England came under the special jurisdiction of forest law. This book is the first general history of the royal forest system in medieval England.

The Song of Troilus traces the origins of modern authorship in the formal experimentation of medieval writers. Thomas C. Stillinger analyzes a sequence of narrative books that are in some way constructed around lyric poems: Dante''s Vita Nuova, Bocaccio''s Filostrato, and Chaucer''s Troilus and Criseyde. The shared aim of these texts, he argues, is to imagine and achieve an unprecedented auctoritas: a "lyric authority" that combines the expressive subjectivity of courtly love poetry with the impersonal authority of Biblical commentary. Each of the three establishes its own formal and intertextual dynamics; in complex and unexpected ways, the hierarchies of Latin learning are charged with erotic force, allowing the creation of a new vernacular Book of Love.The Song of Troilus is a linked series of incisive close readings. Each chapter defines and investigates a range of philological, intertextual, and theoretical problems; in addition to explicating his three principal texts, Stillinger offers important insights into a range of medieval traditions, from Psalm commentary to Trojan historiography to Ricardian political satire. At the same time, The Song of Troilus is a sophisticated narrative of cultural change and a searching meditation on history, desire, and writing.The Song of Troilus is an original and highly readable study of three major medieval texts; it will be of compelling interest to students and scholars of medieval literature, and to all those exploring the history of authorship and the implications of literary form.

Olster explores Byzantine Christian reactions to the catastrophic Persian and Arab invasions, challenging long-held assumptions that divided "religious" from "secular" literature and exempted religion from contemporary social, political, and intellectual discourse.

Written sometime in the 1170s, Walter of Chatillon's Latin epic on the life of Alexander the Great loomed as large on literary horizons as the works on Jean de Meun, Dante, or Boccaccio. This title provides a translation of this work.

Daniel Hobbins argues for a new understanding of Jean Gerson as a public intellectual and a man of letters and publicist, actively managing the diffusion of his works in a period of rapid expansion in written culture.