Books in the The New Middle Ages series

Chaucerotics examines the erotic language in Chaucerian literature through a unique lens, utilizing the tools of "pornographic literary theory" to open up Chaucer's ribald poetry to fresh modes of analysis.

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.

The Black Middle Ages examines the influence of medieval studies on African-American thought. Vernon focuses on nineteenth century uses of medieval texts to structure racial identity, but also considers the flexibility of medieval narratives more broadly in the medieval period, twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

This text combines ecocriticism with reading techniques associated with deconstruction, to provide innovative interpretations of the General Prologue, the Knight's Tale, the Miller's Tale, the Reeve's Tale, the Franklin's Tale, the Physician's Tale, and the Monk's Tale.

Whereas traditional scholarship assumed that William Shakespeare used the medieval past as a negative foil to legitimate the present, Shakespeare, Catholicism, and the Middle Ages offers a revisionist perspective, arguing that the playwright valorizes the Middle Ages in order to critique the oppressive nature of the Tudor-Stuart state. In examining Shakespeare's Richard II, The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, and The Winter's Tale, the text explores how Shakespeare repossessed the medieval past to articulate political and religious dissent. By comparing these and other plays by Shakespeare's contemporaries with their medieval analogues, Alfred Thomas argues that Shakespeare was an ecumenical writer concerned with promoting tolerance in a highly intolerant and partisan age.

Chaucerotics examines the erotic language in Chaucerian literature through a unique lens, utilizing the tools of "pornographic literary theory" to open up Chaucer's ribald poetry to fresh modes of analysis.

The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were times of tumultuous change in medieval Europe; Few figures were as widely and as intimately involved in late medieval Europe's struggles as Saint Vincent Ferrer.

Drawing on a rich variety of material, this collection of essays demonstrates that the spaces in which reading took place (or in which reading could take place) in later medieval England directly influenced how and why reading happened.

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.

The Sefer Yetsirah (the Book of Creation ) is a core text of the early kabbalah, yet scholars have struggled to establish even the most basic facts about the work. This project attempts to discover the ways in which diagrams accompanying the text and its commentaries show trends in the development of the kabbalistic tradition as a whole.

This book illuminates the pervasive interplay of 'sacred' and 'secular' phenomena in the literature, history, politics, and religion of the Middle Ages and Early Modern periods. The essays gathered here constitute a new way of applying a classic dichotomy to major cultural phenomena of the pre-modern era.

Written by historians, art historians, and literary scholars, these essays focus on the multifaceted ways the Charlemagne legend functioned in the Middle Ages and how central the shared (if nonetheless fictional) memory of the great Frankish ruler was to the medieval West.

In the context of current preoccupations with gender and sexuality, and consent in rape cases, this study is of interest to scholars investigating language and sexuality as well as those researching and teaching medieval literature and culture.

This book is first in its field to analyze how disability and gender both thematically and formally operate within late medieval popular literature. Reading romance, conduct manuals, and spiritual autobiography, it proposes a 'gendered model' for exploring the processes by which differences like gender and disability get coded as deviant.

This collection makes the compelling argument that Chaucer, the Perle -poet, and The Cloud of Unknowing author, exploited analogue and metaphor for marking out the pedagogical gap between science and the imagination. Here, respected contributors add definition to arguments that have our attention and energies in the twenty-first century.

A collection of essays representing the growing variety of approaches used to write the history of medieval women. They reflect the European medieval world socially, geographically and across religious boundaries, engaging directly with how the medieval women's experience wa reconstructed, as well as what the experience was.

For many, the middle ages depicted in Walt Disney movies have come to figure as the middle ages, forming the earliest visions of the medieval past for much of the contemporary Western (and increasingly Eastern) imagination.

Providing new ways of reading Boccaccio's masterpiece, Decameron , Ferme analyzes the dynamics between the women who rule the first half of the story. Peeling back the many narrative layers within and outside of the framework, this book unearths the complications and trickery surrounding gender and death in Boccaccio's world and culture.

A period of great change for Europe, the thirteenth-century was a time of both animosity and intimacy for Jewish and Christian communities. In this wide-ranging collection, scholars discuss the changing paradigms in the research and history of Jews and Christians in medieval Europe, discussing law, scholarly pursuits, art, culture, and poetry.

Ovid's Metamorphoses played an irrefutably important role in the integration of pagan mythology in Christian texts during the Middle Ages. This book is the only study to consider this Ovidian revival as part of a cultural shift disintegrating the boundaries between not only sacred and profane literacy but also between academic and secular politics.

Representations of the Body in Middle English Biblical Drama combines epistemological enquiry, gender theory and Foucauldian concepts to investigate the body as a useful site for studying power, knowledge and truth.

The origins of present-day Ibero-American racialization can be traced to the period when Europe straddled the boundary between the Middle Ages and the era of New World exploration. Focusing on themes of race, caste, and indigeneity in travel narratives, Harney explores this already internationalized world of late-medieval and early-modern Europe.

Street Scenes offers a theory of late medieval acting and performance through a fresh and original reading of the Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge.

This study explores the relationship between ideology and subjectivity in late medieval literature, documenting the trajectory of antimercantile ideology against major developments in economic theory and practice in the later Middle Ages.

Analyzing the renowned Saint Birgitta of Sweden from the perspectives of power, authority, and gender, this probing study investigates how Birgitta went about establishing her influence during the first ten years of her career as a living saint, in 1340-1349.

The Lingua Ignota, "brought forth" by the twelfth-century German nun Hildegard of Bingen, provides 1012 neologisms for praise of Church and new expression of the things of her world. Noting her visionary metaphors, her music, and various medieval linguistic philosophies, Higley examines how the "Unknown Language" makes arid signifiers green again. This text, however, is too often seen in too narrow a context: glossolalia, angelic language, secret code. Higley provides an edition and English translation of its glosses in the Riesencodex (with assistance from the Berlin MS) , but also places it within a history of imaginary language making from medieval times to the most contemporary projects in efforts to uncover this woman s bold involvement in an intellectual and creative endeavor that spans centuries.

This text combines ecocriticism with reading techniques associated with deconstruction, to provide innovative interpretations of the General Prologue, the Knight's Tale, the Miller's Tale, the Reeve's Tale, the Franklin's Tale, the Physician's Tale, and the Monk's Tale.

Analyzing Medieval and Early Modern art and literature replete with images of non-normative bodies, these essays consider the pernicious history of defining people with distinctly non-normative bodies or non-normative cognition as monsters.

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.

Collectively, these papers argue that both medieval and modern economic thought are key to valuable historical contextualization of medieval literary texts, but that this criticism can be advanced only if we also recognize the specificity of the economic and social conditions of late-medieval England.