Books in the The New Middle Ages series

In thirteen studies of representations of rape in Medieval and Early Modern literature by such authors as Chaucer, Shakespeare and Spenser, this volume argues that some form of sexual violence against women serves as a foundation of Western culture.

This collection of original essays repositions medieval literary studies after an era of historicism. By defining our post-historical moment in medieval English literary studies in terms of new possibilities, this collection will have broad appeal to those interested in the English Middle Ages, history, culture, and reading itself.

His book examines how Middle English writers including Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, and Malory treat unpredictable events such as sexual attraction, political disaster, social competition, traumatic accidents, and the textual condition itself - locating in fortune the very potentiality of ethical life.

The twelve essays in Women and Wealth in Late Medieval Europe re-examine the vexing issue of women, money, wealth, and power from distinctive perspectives - literature, history, architectural history - using new archival sources.

This book examines three aspects of Rolle's thinking used throughout this work: his ontology, phenomenology, and sound ecology. These facets of his work invoke both a way of understanding being in the world, an opening up of the body in queer ways to experience the divine, and a way to consider divine contemplation in terms of singing the body.

This book argues that the traditional relationship between the act of confessing and the act of remembering is manifested through the widespread juxtaposition of confession and memory in Middle English literary texts and, furthermore, that this concept permeates other manifestations of memory as written by authors in a variety of genres.

Situated within a larger discourse on childhood, Ages of Man theories, and debates about the status of the child in the late fourteenth century, Chaucer's literary children-from infant to adolescent-offer a means by which to hear the voices of youth not prominently treated in social history.

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.

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 volume examines the teaching of Jewishness within the context of medieval England. Jews in Medieval England: Teaching Representations of the Other also grounds medieval conceptions of the Other within the contemporary world where we continue to confront the problematic attitudes directed toward alleged social outcasts.

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.

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

The essays in this interdisciplinary volume explore language, broadly construed, as part of the continued interrogation of the boundaries of human and nonhuman animals in the Middle Ages.

Medieval Welsh Pilgrimage, c.1100-1500 examines one of the most popular expressions of religious belief in medieval Europe-from the promotion of particular sites for political, religious, and financial reasons to the experience of pilgrims and their impact on the Welsh landscape.

For decades, medieval scholarship has been dominated by the paradigm that women who wielded power after c.

Medieval Healthcare and the Rise of Charitable Institutions: The History of the Municipal Hospital examines the development of medieval institutions of care, beginning with a survey of the earliest known hospitals in ancient times to the classical period, to the early Middle Ages, and finally to the explosion of hospitals in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. For Western Christian medieval societies, institutional charity was a necessity set forth by the religion's dictums-care for the needy and sick was a tenant of the faith, leading to a unique partnership between Christianity and institutional care that would expand into the fledging hospitals of the early Modern period. In this study, the hospital of Saint John in Brussels serves as an example of the developments. The institution followed the pattern of the establishment of medieval charitable institutions in the high Middle Ages, but diverged to become an archetype for later Christian hospitals.

Vernacular Aesthetics in the Later Middle Ages explores the formal composition, public performance, and popular reception of vernacular poetry, music, and prose within late medieval French and English cultures.

The essays in this interdisciplinary volume explore language, broadly construed, as part of the continued interrogation of the boundaries of human and nonhuman animals in the Middle Ages.

This essay collection studies the Apocalypse and the end of the world, as these themes occupied the minds of biblical scholars, theologians, and ordinary people in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and Early Modernity.

This volume questions the extent to which Medieval studies has emphasized the period as one of change and development through reexamining aspects of the medieval world that remained static.

This exciting collection of essays explores the role of the Other in Tolkien's fiction, his life, and the pertinent criticism. It critically examines issues of gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity, language, and identity in The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, and lesser-known works by Tolkien.

This collection examines gender and Otherness as tools to understand medieval and early modern art as products of their social environments. The essays, uniting up-and-coming and established scholars, explore both iconographic and stylistic similarities deployed to construct gender identity. The text analyzes a vast array of medieval artworks, including Dieric Bouts's Justice of Otto III, Albrecht Dürer's Feast of the Rose Garland, Rembrandt van Rijn's Naked Woman Seated on a Mound, and Renaissance-era transi tombs of French women to illuminate medieval and early modern ideas about gender identity, poverty, religion, honor, virtue, sexuality, and motherhood, among others.

Although numerous general studies of medieval women and a number of biographies of medieval queens have appeared in recent years, there have been comparatively few studies that combine biographical and prosopographical methodologies in order to develop portraits of specific women as case studies of the different life experiences of medieval women.

Vernacular Aesthetics in the Later Middle Ages explores the formal composition, public performance, and popular reception of vernacular poetry, music, and prose within late medieval French and English cultures.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.