Books in the The Middle Ages Series series

Drawing on medieval accounts of the earliest European journeys to China, India, Mongolia, and southeast Asia, Before Orientalism explores European attitudes toward Asian eating habits, sexual practices, femininities, and civility, reconstructing a precolonial vision of the East that was often neutral or admiring.

A revised edition of Terry's classic Poems of the Vikings, long out of print. This edition has a new preface, updated references, and expanded notes and glossary. The translation itself has been extensively revised.

An English translation of the Anni mundi 6095-6305 (A.D. 602-813), a primary source for the history of medieval Byzantium, with introduction and notes.

To Live Like a Moor traces the many shifts in Christian perceptions of Islam-associated ways of life which took place across the centuries between early Reconquista efforts of the eleventh century and the final expulsions of Spain's converted yet poorly assimilated Morisco population in the seventeenth.

In Ruling the Spirit, Claire Taylor Jones revises the narrative of women's involvement in the German Dominican order arguing that Dominican women did not lose their piety and literacy in the fifteenth century, as is commonly believed but, instead, were encouraged to reframe their practice around the observance of the Divine Office.

"These essays challenge a once-dominant mode of German medieval studies, "constitutional history." In doing so, they reimage a more dynamic and less hierarchical Middle Ages."-Medieval Review

Law and the Imagination in Medieval Wales explores the idea of law as a form of political fiction: a body of literature that blurs the lines generally drawn between the legal and literary genres.

Marcela K. Perett examines the early phases of the so-called Hussite revolution and illustrates how vernacular discourse diverged from Latin debates on the same issues, often appealing to emotion rather than doctrinal positions.

In this engaging biography, Theodore Evergates offers a rounded view of Countess Marie of France as both a cultural patron and a successful ruler of Champagne, one of the wealthiest and most vibrant principalities in medieval France.

Following a long trajectory from late antiquity to the high Middle Ages, Dyan Elliott offers a provocative analysis of the changing religious, emotional, and sexual meanings of the metaphor of the sponsa Christi and of the increasing anxiety surrounding the somatization of female spirituality.

To Muslims the Iberian Peninsula was al-Andalus, to Jews it was Sefarad. Iberian Moorings traces how al-Andalus and Sefarad were invested with political, cultural, and historical significance across the Middle Ages and analyzes the tropes of Andalusi and Sefardi exceptionalism that linger in today's scholarship, literature, and film.

The first study of the poetics of vocational crisis in Langland, Hoccleve, and Audelay, and many unattributed works, The Clerical Proletariat and the Resurgence of Medieval English Poetry discusses class, meritocracy, the gig economy, precarity, and the breaking of intellectual elites, speaking to both past and present employment urgencies.

Medieval felons could take sanctuary from prosecution in any church, but far from static refuge, sanctuary staged dynamic action, even violence. While sanctuary has usually been analyzed as part of legal history, in Uncertain Refuge Elizabeth Allen explores the symbolic consequences of sanctuary seeking in English literary works.

In a work based on a meticulous analysis of sources, many of them previously unexplored, Catherine M. Mooney upends the received account of Clare of Assisi's founding of the Order of San Damiano, or Poor Clares.

Household Goods and Good Households in Late Medieval London looks at how increased consumption in the aftermath of the Black Death reconfigured long-held gender roles and changed the domestic lives of London's merchants and artisans for years to come.

Between 1348 and 1350, Jews throughout Europe were accused of having caused the spread of the Black Death by poisoning the wells from which the entire population drank. Poisoned Wells explains the origin of these allegations, how they gained popularity before and during the Black Death, and why they declined in the fifteenth century.

In After the Black Death, Susan L. Einbinder uncovers Jewish responses to plague and violence in fourteenth-century Provence and Iberia, discovering a fundamental continuity in Jewish worldview and means of expression.

Inventing the Berbers examines the emergence of the Berbers as a distinct category in early Arabic texts and probes the ways in which later Arabic sources, shaped by contemporary events, imagined the Berbers as a people and the Maghrib as their home.

In Cultures of Witnessing, Emma Lipton considers the plays that were performed in the streets of York on the Feast of Corpus Christi from the late fourteenth century until the third quarter of the sixteenth and shows how civic performance and the legal theory and practice of witnessing promoted a shared sense of urban citizenship.

Balaam's Ass attempts the first comprehensive overview of religious writing in early England's vernacular languages-Old English, Insular French, and Middle English-between the ninth and sixteenth centuries. In this first of three volumes, Watson focuses on the first generation of these writings, in Old English and early Middle English.

Embodying the Soul argues that classical medicine was reconfigured as a sacred Christian art across the Carolingian Empire in the ninth century, becoming not simply a method of physical rehabilitation but also a tool of spiritual transformation.