Books in the The New Middle Ages series

Elionor of Sicily, 1325¿1375: A Mediterranean Queen¿s Life of Family, Administration, Diplomacy, and War follows Elionor of Sicily, the third wife of the important Aragonese king, Pere III. Despite the limited amount of personal information about Elionor, the large number of Sicilian, Catalan, and Aragonese chronicles as well as the massive amount of notarial evidence drawn from eastern Spanish archives has allowed Donald Kagay to trace Elionor¿s extremely active life roles as a wife and mother, a queen, a frustrated sovereign, a successful administrator, a supporter of royal war, a diplomat, a feudal lord, a fervent backer of several religious orders, and an energetic builder of royal sites. Drawing from the correspondence between the queen and her husband, official papers and communiques, and a vast array of notarial documents, the book casts light on the many phases of the queen¿s life.

This collection of essays explores the literary legacy of medieval England by examining the writers, editors and exemplars of medieval English texts.

The book shows how the Franciscans in Jerusalem in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries wrote works which standardized the cultural memory of the Holy Land. This book shows how the Franciscans developed a representation of the Holy Land by elaborating on its history and describing its religious groups and the geography of the region.

Reading Illegitimacy in Early Iberian Literature presents illegitimacy as a fluid, creative, and negotiable concept in early literature which challenges society's definition of what is acceptable.

Medieval Considerations of Incest, Marriage, and Penance focuses on the incest motif as used in numerous medieval narratives.

This collection of essays explores the literary legacy of medieval England by examining the writers, editors and exemplars of medieval English texts.

Elionor of Sicily, 1325¿1375: A Mediterranean Queen¿s Life of Family, Administration, Diplomacy, and War follows Elionor of Sicily, the third wife of the important Aragonese king, Pere III. Despite the limited amount of personal information about Elionor, the large number of Sicilian, Catalan, and Aragonese chronicles as well as the massive amount of notarial evidence drawn from eastern Spanish archives has allowed Donald Kagay to trace Elionor¿s extremely active life roles as a wife and mother, a queen, a frustrated sovereign, a successful administrator, a supporter of royal war, a diplomat, a feudal lord, a fervent backer of several religious orders, and an energetic builder of royal sites. Drawing from the correspondence between the queen and her husband, official papers and communiques, and a vast array of notarial documents, the book casts light on the many phases of the queen¿s life.

This concise and unique volume explores the vital relationship between testimony, memory, and the community in medieval society.

This book examines the power held by the French medieval queens during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and their larger roles within the kingdom at a time when women were excluded from succession to the throne.

This book illuminates the connections and interaction among women and between women and men during the medieval period. Agnes was a real estate mogul and a patron of philanthropic institutions that permitted lower strata women to survive and thrive in a mature urban economy of the period before 1350.

Early Christians sought miracles from Michael the Archangel and this enigmatic ecumenical figure was the subject of hagiography, liturgical texts, and relics across Western Europe. Entering contemporary debates about angelology, this fascinating study explores the formation and diffusion of the cult of Saint Michael from c. 300-c.800.

Retracing the contours of a bitter controversy over the meaning of sacred architecture that flared up among some of the leading lights of the Carolingian renaissance, Collins explores how ninth-century authors articulated the relationship of form to function and ideal to reality in the ecclesiastical architecture of the Carolingian empire.

This book examines evolution of medieval patience literature from a focus on male and female sufferers to a focus on female suffers in particular. Using feminist revisions of genre-theory, Waugh analyses the concept of counterfeit consciousness in the works of Margery Kempe and Chaucer among others.

Market Power explores society and economy in medieval Iberia, examining the intersection of regional commercial interests, lordship, and royal authority as part of the evolution of a small village into a rural market town.

In setting English figurations of Wales against the contrasted representations of the Welsh language tradition, this volume seeks to reverse this neglect, insisting on the crucial importance of the English experience in Wales for any understanding of the literary cultures of medieval England and medieval Britain.

The Medieval Fold presents a theory of the medieval subject from 1050-1215, informed by contemporary theories of subjection and power from Freud, Nietzsche, Foucault, Lacan, and Deleuze.

Through close readings of both familiar and obscure medieval texts, the contributors to this volume attempt to read England as a singularly powerful entity within a vast geopolitical network.

Broadens the perspective of recent work on the discourse of the Muslim Other in medieval Christendom by investigating pertinent texts, art, and artefacts, situating these local discourses of the Muslim Other in the larger cultural context of proto-Eurocentric discourse.

Drawing on a close reading of nearly forty years' worth of personal letters and her will, and incorporating new archival material, Margaret Paston emerges from this study as the best example we have of how lay piety was negotiated and integrated into daily medieval life.

Strange Beauty provides a new perspective on early Celtic stories of the Otherworld and their relevance to today's ecological concerns, arguing for a contemporary re-reading of the Otherworld trope in relation to physical experience.

This book breaks new ground by bringing postmodern writings on vision and embodiment into dialogue with medieval texts and images: an interdisciplinary strategy that illuminates and complicates both cultures.

From majestic Celtic crosses to elaborate knotwork designs, visual symbols of Irish identity at its most medieval abound in contemporary culture. Consdering both scholarly and popular perspectives this book offers a commentary on the blending of pasts and presents that finds permanent visualization in these contemporary signs.

This book examines social and medical responses to the disfigured face in early medieval Europe, arguing that the study of head and facial injuries can offer a new contribution to the history of early medieval medicine and culture, as well as exploring the language of violence and social interactions.

This Palgrave Pivot provides the first ever comprehensive consideration of the part played by women in the workings and business of the English Parliament in the later Middle Ages.

From devotional literature to political narratives, medieval texts propose that sexual violence victims have privileged moral, ethical, and spiritual insight. This book explores these discourses of survival in a wide range of medieval English texts, including letters of spiritual advice, legal cases, romances, and legendary histories.

Byzantine Ecocriticism: Women, Nature, and Power in the Medieval Greek Romance applies literary ecocriticism to the imaginative fiction of the Greek world from the twelfth to fifteenth centuries.

Drawing on the philosophical reading and writing practices of medieval author Christine de Pizan and twentieth-century philosopher Luce Irigaray, and through an engagement with Hans-Georg Gadamer's work on tradition and hermeneutics, it develops means to re-write the stories and ideas that shape society.

This book explores the tangled relationship between literary production and epistemological foundation as exemplified in one of the masterpieces of Italian literature.

David Strong argues that where the philosophers John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham revolutionize the view of human potential through their theories of epistemology, ethics, and freedom of the will, Langland vivifies these ideas by contextualizing them in an individual's search for truth and love.