Books in the The Middle Ages Series series

In medieval Europe, where theologians saw sin, some natural philosophers saw a phenomenon in need of explanation. They believed some men were born with homosexual inclinations and others acquired them as habits based on early pleasurable experiences.

The Making and Unmaking of a Saint traces the rise and fall of devotion to Gerald of Aurillac through a millennium, from his death in the tenth century to the attempt to reinvigorate his cult in the nineteenth century.

The Last Crusade in the West traces Castilian efforts to conquer Granada from the middle of the fourteenth century until the end of the fifteenth. Although the Castilian kings neglected the reconquest for many years, Fernando and Isabel achieved the capitulation of Granada in 1492.

The Queen's Dumbshows explores the importance of John Lydgate's mummings and entertainments for literary and theatrical history, rethinking what constitutes "drama" in late medieval England and what role it played in public life.

Adam Usk, a fifteenth-century professor, royal advisor, schismatic, and spy, wrote a peculiar book in a reticent, nervous prose better suited to keeping secrets than setting them in writing. Steven Justice sets out to find what Usk wanted to hide and comes to surprising conclusions about the foundations of literary and historical study.

The Secret Faith of Maestre Honoratus explores late medieval Iberian Jewish culture through the figure of Profayt Duran, a rationalist Jewish scholar who was compelled during the riots of 1391 to become a Christian in name, and whose broad-ranging philosophical and scientific education was mustered in defense of his religious convictions.

In New Legends of England, Catherine Sanok examines a significant, albeit previously unrecognized, phenomenon of fifteenth-century literary culture in England: the sudden fascination with the Lives of British, Anglo-Saxon, and other native saints. Embodying a variety of literary forms—from elevated Latinate verse, to popular traditions such as the carol, to translations of earlier verse legends into the medium of prose—the Middle English Lives of England''s saints are rarely discussed in relation to one another or seen as constituting a distinct literary genre. However, Sanok argues, these legends, when grouped together were an important narrative forum for exploring overlapping forms of secular and religious community at local, national, and supranational scales: the monastery, the city, and local cults; the nation and the realm; European Christendom and, at the end of the fifteenth century, a world that was suddenly expanding across the Atlantic.Reading texts such as the South English Legendary, The Life of St. Etheldrede, the Golden Legend, and poems about Saints Wenefrid and Ursula, Sanok focuses especially on the significance of their varied and often experimental forms. She shows how Middle English Lives of native saints revealed, through their literary forms, modes of affinity and difference that, in turn, reflected a diversity in the extent and structure of medieval communities. Taking up key questions about jurisdiction, temporality, and embodiment, New Legends of England presents some of the ways in which the Lives of England''s saints theorized community and explored its constitutive paradox: the irresolvable tension between singular and collective forms of identity.

Modern studies of the religious reform movement of the central Middle Ages have often relied on contemporary accounts penned by Cistercian monks, who routinely exaggerated the importance of their own institutions while paying scant attention to the remarkable expansion of abbeys of Cistercian women. Yet by the end of the thirteenth century, Constance Hoffman Berman contends, there were more houses of Cistercian nuns across Europe than of monks. In The White Nuns, she charts the stages in the nuns'' gradual acceptance by the abbots of the Cistercian Order''s General Chapter and describes the expansion of the nuns'' communities and their adaptation to a variety of economic circumstances in France and throughout Europe. While some sought contemplative lives of prayer, the ambition of many of these religious women was to serve the poor, the sick, and the elderly.Focusing in particular on Cistercian nuns'' abbeys founded between 1190 and 1250 in the northern French archdiocese of Sens, Berman reveals the frequency with which communities of Cistercian nuns were founded by rich and powerful women, including Queen Blanche of Castile, heiresses Countess Matilda of Courtenay and Countess Isabelle of Chartres, and esteemed ladies such as Agnes of Cressonessart. She shows how these founders and early patrons assisted early abbesses, nuns, and lay sisters by using written documents to secure rights and create endowments, and it is on the records of their considerable economic achievements that she centers her analysis.The White Nuns considers Cistercian women and the women who were their patrons in a clear-eyed reading of narrative texts in their contexts. It challenges conventional scholarship that accepts the words of medieval monastic writers as literal truth, as if they were written without rhetorical skill, bias, or self-interest. In its identification of long-accepted misogynies, its search for their origins, and its struggle to reject such misreadings, The White Nuns provides a robust model for historians writing against received traditions.

Covering decades that included the last major crusades, the birth of the Inquisition, and the unexpected invasion of the Mongols, The Two Powers shows how Popes Gregory and Innocent's battles with Emperor Frederick shaped the political circumstances of the thirteenth-century papacy and its role in the public life of medieval Christendom.

In his final book, the distinguished historian John Baldwin argues that the aristocrats who inhabited the region of Paris over the turn of the twelfth century were important not only because they contributed to Philip Augustus's increase of royal power but also for their own establishment as an elite and powerful social class.

In Dead Voice, Jesus R. Velasco explores how the thirteenth-century law code known as Siete Partidas introduced canon and ecclesiastical law in the vernacular for explicitly secular purposes and embraced intellectual disciplines and fictional techniques that normally lie outside legal science.

Inspired by one fascinating and unusual historical case, Conversion, Circumcision, and Ritual Murder in Medieval Europe explores the ways religious conversion fueled Jewish-Christian tensions. In the process, it elucidates how the interplay of fact and fantasy shaped Christian views of Jews as agents of Christian apostasy to Judaism.

Drawing on the perspectives of modern and medieval narratology, medieval multilingualism, and cultural memory, History and the Written Word argues that members of an administrative elite demonstrated their mastery of the rules of literate political behavior by producing and consuming history-writing and its documents.

The Martyrdom of the Franciscans shows how, for Franciscans, martyrdom accounts could at once offer veiled critique of papal policies toward the Order, a substitute for the rigorous pursuit of poverty, and a way to symbolically overcome Islam by denying Muslims the solace of conversion.

Rena N. Lauer shows how Crete's Jews turned not only to their own religious courts but also to the secular Venetian judicial system to address matters as prosaic as taxation and as dramatic as murder. In the process, Lauer contends, Venetian Jews grew more open and flexible, experiencing little of the anti-Judaism common in Western Europe.

To its contemporaries, the First Crusade was a journey and the men who took part in it pilgrims. Only later were those participants dubbed Crusaders. In this greatly expanded second edition to his classic work, Edward Peters brings together the essential Christian, Hebrew, and Arabic Sources that document the events of 1095-1099.

Featuring more than sixty illustrations, In the Manner of the Franks traces the long history of early medieval hunting from the fourth through the tenth centuries. Eric J. Goldberg focuses chiefly on elite men and the changing role that hunting played in articulating kingship, status, and manhood in the post-Roman world.

Dyan Elliott demonstrates how scandal-averse policies in conjunction with the requirement of clerical celibacy resulted in the widespread sexual abuse of boys from late antiquity through the later Middle Ages, and argues that the same clerical prerogatives and strategies for the cover-up of abuse remain in place today.

Stephen A. Mitchell offers the fullest examination available of witchcraft in late medieval Scandinavia, drawing on extensive sources ranging from the Icelandic sagas to those much less familiar to the nonspecialist: legal cases, church frescoes, law codes, ecclesiastical records, and surviving runic spells.

Gender and Christianity in Medieval Europe seeks to explain the convergence of religion and gender in medieval Christendom. Essays in the volume examine how Europeans identified themselves as women, men, and Christians, and how these identities influenced religious belief and practice in everyday life.

A history of village life told through the experiences of Cecilia Penifader, a peasant woman who lived in the early fourteenth century, the second edition of A Medieval Life features an entirely revamped illustration program and sidebars that reveal how medieval historians are able to reconstruct the past from scattered evidence.

In Cistercian Stories for Nuns and Monks, Martha G. Newman shows how Engelhard of Langheim's late twelfth-century tales about Cistercian monks illuminate the religiosity of Cistercian nuns. Engelhard's writings locate a sacramental value in everyday objects and behaviors and teach a spiritual formation that nuns and monks could share.

In The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess, Adrienne Williams Boyarin explores medieval fantasies of Jewish-Christian indistinguishability. Identifying what she calls "polemics of sameness," an essential part of anti-Jewish materials, she shows how the fine line between "saming" and "othering" reveals stereotypes of the unmarked Jewess.

Offers a comprehensive introduction to medieval science, presented in the context of an historical narrative.

Hood''s study contends that Aquinas''s writings remain resistant to or skeptical of anti-Jewish trends in thirteenth-century theology. Aquinas sets out simply to clarify and systematize received theological and canonistic teachings on the Jews.

"This engaging book tackles the contentious issue of categorizing the Christian military campaigns against Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula."-Historian

The author of at least two noteworthy romances of the early thirteenth century, "Le Roman de la Rose or Guillaume de Dole" and "L'Escoufle" (The Kite), as well as "Le Lai de l'Ombre," Jean Renart is today recognized as the most accomplished practitioner of the "realistic romance" in Old French literature.

Barbarian Tides radically subverts the grand narrative of a "Germanic" migration and reinvents the role of barbarians in the Later Roman Empire. Goffart sets out how the fragmented foreign peoples once living on the edges of the Empire participated with the Romans in the larger stirrings of late antiquity.

Assembles evidence from Frankish, Moravian, and Byzantine documents; from archaeological finds; and details of the terrain to buttress the view that the center of the Slavic Moravian empire was in what is now Serbia, much farther southeast than is usually thought. This interpretation explains how the Franks managed otherwise inexplicable military successes against the Moravians.