Books in the The New Middle Ages series

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.