Books published by Ohio State University Press

Integrates narrative theory, multimodality studies, cognitive sciences, and disability studies to situate contemporary literature's depiction of thought within current debates about cognition.

This first volume of a two-volume collection of essays provides a comprehensive examination of the idea of social control in the history of Europe. The uniqueness of these volumes lies in two main areas. First, the contributors compare methods of social control on many levels, from police to shaming, church to guilds. Second, they look at these formal and informal institutions as two-way processes. Unlike many studies of social control in the past, the scholars here examine how individuals and groups that are being controlled necessarily participate in and shape the manner in which they are regulated. Hardly passive victims of discipline and control, these folks instead claimed agency in that process, accepting and resisting-and thus molding-the controls under which they functioned. The essays in this volume focus on the interplay of ecclesiastical institutions and the emerging states, examining discipline from a bottom-up perspective.

In Translation Effects: Language, Time, and Community in Medieval England, Mary Kate Hurley reinterprets a well-recognized and central feature of medieval textual production: translation. Medieval texts often leave conspicuous evidence of the translation process. These translation effects are observable traces that show how medieval writers reimagined the nature of the political, cultural, and linguistic communities within which their texts were consumed. Examining translation effects closely, Hurley argues, provides a means of better understanding not only how medieval translations imagine community but also how they help create communities. Through fresh readings of texts such as the Old English Orosius, Ælfric's Lives of the Saints, Ælfric's Homilies, Chaucer, Trevet, Gower, and Beowulf, Translation Effects adds a new dimension to medieval literary history, connecting translation to community in a careful and rigorous way and tracing the lingering outcomes of translation effects through the whole of the medieval period.