Books in the The Middle Ages Series series

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.

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.

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.

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.

In Black Metaphors, Cord J. Whitaker argues that rhetoric and theology establish blackness and whiteness as metaphors for sin and purity in medieval English and European writing. Whitaker shows how these metaphors came to guide the development of notions of race in the centuries that followed.

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.

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.

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.

In Inventing William of Norwich Heather Blurton offers a revisionist reading of Thomas Monmouth's account of the saint's life that contains the earliest account of a Christian child ritually murdered by Jews. She demonstrates how innovations in literary forms in the twelfth century shaped the articulation of medieval antisemitism.