Books in the The New Middle Ages series

After establishing a feminist-historicist perspective on the tradition of biblical commentary, Tinkle develops in-depth case studies that situate scholars reading the bible in three distinct historical moments, and in so doing she exposes the cultural pressures that medieval scholars felt as they interpreted the bible.

These essays recover the lively discussions on the topics of 'magnificence' and 'the sublime' in the art and literature of antiquity, the Renaissance, and the ages following, and apply them to the Middle Ages to draw exciting new conlcusions.

Taking the Jewish community as a focal point, this book thoroughly explores the various 'borders' - geographical divides, religious affiliations, gender boundaries, genre divisions - that ruled the lives and intellectual production of late medieval Jews.

This study will significantly further our interpretations of the unique autobiography of Margery Kempe, lay woman turned mystic and visionary. Following the manuscript from a Carthusian monastery through history, Chappell bridges the gaps in our understanding of the transmission of texts from the medieval past to the present.

Key scholars in the field of lesbian and sexuality studies take part in an innovative conversation that offers a radical new methodology for writing lesbian history and geography, drawing new conclusions on the important and often overlooked work being done on female same-sex desire and identity in relation to premodern cultures.

Witnesses to the disappearance of a text, palimpsest manuscripts bear the marks of their own genesis, with their original inscription rubbed out and written over on the same parchment. This collection explores analogies of erasure and rewriting observed in editorial and literary practices underlying the production of texts from medieval England.

Miriamne Ara Krummel challenges the accepted history of the English Middle Ages as a monolithic age of Christian faith. By cataloguing and explicating the complex depictions of semitisms to be found in medieval literature and material culture, this volume argues that Jews were always present in medieval England.

This book argues that Chaucer challenges his culture's mounting obsession with vision, constructing a model of 'manhed' that blurs the distinction between agency and passivity in a traditional gender binary.

This study examines the post-medieval reception of Vienna's women's monastic institutions. Through analysis of the physical and historical place such women's institutions held in an important urban and political center, this book provides a new picture of the ways in which the medieval shapes later understandings of women's role and agency.

Contrary to the widespread view that women exercised economic autonomy only in widowhood, Hutton argues that marital status was not the chief determinant of women's economic activities in the mid-fourteenth century and that women managed their own wealth to a far greater extent than previously recognized.

Little attention has been focused the representation of Muslims in medieval Germany. Proceeding from a grounded use of contemporary cultural theory and close textual analysis, this study focuses Muslims in several core texts representing drama, epic, and lyric written by the most important writers of medieval Germany.

Explores the transformative power of ekphrasis in high and late medieval dream visions and mystical visions. Demonstrates that medieval ekphrases reveal ekphrasis as a process rather than a genre and shows how it works with cultural memory to transform, shift, and revise composition.

Exploration of the emotionologies of several medieval, romance emotional communities through both fictional and non-fictional narratives. The contributors analyze texts from different linguistic traditions and different periods, but they all focus on women characters.

(e.g., Medieval Lives) - and in his published scholarship (e.g., Chaucer's Knight, in original and revised editions, Who Murdered Chaucer?), Jones has applied his unique combination of carefully researched scholarship, keen intelligence, fearless skepticism of establishment thinking, and his broad good humor to challenge, enlighten and reform.

Boccaccio's Decameron and the Ciceronian Renaissance demonstrates that Boccaccio's puzzling masterpiece takes on organic consistency when viewed as an early modern adaptation of a pre-Christian, humanistic vision.

Examines a range of texts commemorating European holy women from the ninth through fifteenth centuries. Explores the relationship between memorial practices and identity formation. Draws upon much of the recent scholarly interest in the nature and uses of memory.

Focusing on works by some of the major literary figures of the period, Faletra argues that the legendary history of Britain that flourished in medieval chronicles and Arthurian romances traces its origins to twelfth-century Anglo-Norman colonial interest in Wales and the Welsh.

The Anglo-Scottish Border and the Shaping of Identity, 1350-1600 explores the roles that Scotland and England play in one another's imaginations. This collection of essays brings together eminent scholars and emerging voices from the frequently divergent fields of English and Scottish medieval studies.

This study of the female members of the Order or Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem in the High Middle Ages analyses their presence in the context of female monasticism and compares their position to the position of women in other religious military orders. Introducing questions of gender into the history of the military orders.

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.

The words 'Listen daughter' (Audi filia, from Psalm 44 in the Latin Vulgate) were frequently used in exhortations to religious women in the twelfth century.

This book studies the way in which medieval ways of knowing the Oriental 'other' were constructed around the idea of a utopic East as located in the legend and Letter of Prester John (c.

Based on an exhaustive and varied study of predominantly unpublished archival material as well as a variety of literary and non-literary sources, this book investigates the relation between patronage, piety and politics in the life and career of one Late Medieval Spain's most intriguing female personalities, Maria De Luna.

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.

The women in the family which ruled 13th-century Castile used various means, strategies and patronages to secure their personal power as well as to promote their lineage. This study focuses on Berenguela of Castile, Queen of Leon through marriage and of Castile by right of inheritance.

This volume brings together a team of leading scholars in Spanish studies to interrogate the contemporary significance of the medieval past, offering a counterbalance to intellectual withdrawal from urgent public debates.

This collection of essays uncovers a wide array of medieval writings on cosmopolitan ethics and politics, writings generally ignored or glossed over in contemporary discourse. Medieval literary fictions and travel accounts provide us with rich contextualizations of the complexities and contradictions of cosmopolitan thought.

Examining French literature from the medieval period, Findley revises our understanding of medieval literary composition as a largely masculine activity, suggesting instead that writing is seen in these texts as problematically gendered and often feminizing.

Old Norse texts offer different ideas about what it is to be female, presenting women in diverse social and economic positions. This book analyzes female characters in medieval Icelandic saga literature, and demonstrates how they engaged with some of the most contested values of the period, revealing the anxieties of both the authors and audiences.

This book is concerned with our ideological, technical and emotional investments in reclaiming medieval for contemporary popular culture. The authors illuminate both medieval and contemporary popular culture in surprising and productive ways while interrogating the many ways in which metamedievalism reinterprets and reconceptualises the medieval.