Bøger i The Middle Ages Series serien

In From Eden to Eternity, Alastair Minnis argues that Eden afforded an extraordinary amount of creative space to late medieval theologians, painters, and poets as they tried to understand the place that God had deemed worthy of the creature made in His image.

By examining periodization together with the two controversial categories of feudalism and secularization, Kathleen Davis exposes the relationship between the constitution of "the Middle Ages" and the history of sovereignty, slavery, and colonialism.

This book reconstructs the history of beguine communities in Paris, one of medieval Europe's most vibrant and cosmopolitan cities. Drawing on an array of archival sources, Miller illuminates the important role beguines played in the economic, intellectual, and religious life of the city.

In 1395, a poor and illiterate French woman began to experience nightly visions of devils and angels. Was she a saint, a witch, an impostor, or a madwoman? Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski looks for answers in the historical and theological context of this troubled woman's life and times.

Starting from the assumption of a far greater cultural gulf between the learned and the lay in the medieval world than between rich and poor, Elf Queens explores the church's systematic campaign to demonize fairies and infernalize fairyland and the responses this provoked in vernacular romance.

John Van Engen studies the Devotio Moderna, or Modern Devout, within their own time and space, the social and religious conditions that marked towns and parishes in northern Europe during the fifteenth century, and their challenge to received notions of religion within the widespread upheavals in cultural and religious life of the period.

Barbarian Tides radically subverts the grand narrative of a "Germanic" migration and reinvents the role of barbarians in the Later Roman Empire. Goffart sets out how the fragmented foreign peoples once living on the edges of the Empire participated with the Romans in the larger stirrings of late antiquity.

Centering on the streets of this metropolis, Simone Roux peers into the secret lives of people within their homes and the public world of affairs and entertainments, populating the book with laborers, shop keepers, magistrates, thieves, and strollers.

In The Crusades and the Christian World of the East, Christopher MacEvitt marshals an impressive array of literary, legal, artistic, and archeological evidence to demonstrate how crusader ideology and religious difference gave rise to a mode of coexistence he calls "rough tolerance."

"Crane's consideration of 'court performances' of later fourteenth- and earlier fifteenth-century English and French literature and culture is both polished and erudite, written both deftly and with clarity throughout. A finely crafted and imaginative study."-Paul Strohm, University of Oxford

The History of the Counts of Guines and Lords of Ardres, a work made famous by Georges Duby, now appears in an expert translation by Leah Shopkow.

Jean-Claude Schmitt examines a unique and controversial conversion narrative to explore its meaning within the society and culture of its period as well as what it has to tell us about the way historians think and write.

Daniel Hobbins argues for a new understanding of Jean Gerson as a public intellectual and a man of letters and publicist, actively managing the diffusion of his works in a period of rapid expansion in written culture.

The Martyrdom of the Franciscans shows how, for Franciscans, martyrdom accounts could at once offer veiled critique of papal policies toward the Order, a substitute for the rigorous pursuit of poverty, and a way to symbolically overcome Islam by denying Muslims the solace of conversion.

Rena N. Lauer shows how Crete's Jews turned not only to their own religious courts but also to the secular Venetian judicial system to address matters as prosaic as taxation and as dramatic as murder. In the process, Lauer contends, Venetian Jews grew more open and flexible, experiencing little of the anti-Judaism common in Western Europe.

Represents all the major areas of current work on the Romance of the Rose, both in America and in Europe.

Olster explores Byzantine Christian reactions to the catastrophic Persian and Arab invasions, challenging long-held assumptions that divided "religious" from "secular" literature and exempted religion from contemporary social, political, and intellectual discourse.

At its height in the thirteenth century, an estimated one fourth of the land area of England came under the special jurisdiction of forest law. This book is the first general history of the royal forest system in medieval England.

In Dark Speech, Robin Chapman Stacey explores the fascinating interaction between performance and law in Ireland between the seventh and ninth centuries.

In this book Thomas H. Bestul constructs the literary history of the Latin Passion narratives, placing them within their social, cultural, and historical contexts. He examines the ways in which the Passion is narrated and renarrated in devotional treatises, paying particular attention to the modifications and enlargements of the narrative of the Passion as it is presented in the canonical gospels. Of particular interest to Bestul are the representations of Jews, women, and the body of the crucified Christ. Bestul argues that the greatly enlarged role of the Jews in the Passion narratives of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is connected to the rising anti-Judaism of the period. He explores how the representations of women, particularly the Virgin Mary, express cultural values about the place of women in late medieval society and reveal an increased interest in female subjectivity.

Examines a set of five twelfth-century romance texts—complete and fragmentary, canonical and now neglected, long and short—to map out the characteristics and boundaries of the genre in its formative period.

Originally published in 1939 and available here in English, Land and Lordship has been one of the most influential works of the twentieth-century medieval scholarship.

As the earliest major monument of the customary law in the region to the south and southwest of the Ile de France, the book known as the Etablissements de Saint Louis greatly amplifies our knowledge of feudal and private law in the French kingdom. Frequently cited by legal historians, it has nonetheless remained inaccessible to readers unable to master its difficult Old French. Now, F. R. P. Akehurst presents the text''s first English translation, making this vital component of the vernacular law of thirteenth century France available to a wide range of scholars.A hybrid text, the Etablissements was probably compiled by a lawyer around the year 1273. The book takes its name from its first part, a set of nine ordinances of Louis IX giving the rules of procedure for the court of the Chatelet in Paris. The second part, made up of one hundred and sixty-six short chapters, is a collection of the customary laws of the Touraine-Anjou region; the thirty-eight chapters of the third section record the laws of the Orleans region. Whereas the Touraine-Anjou material presents a broad treatment of many aspects of the law, the Orleans customary reveals a preoccupation with problems of jurisdiction in a region where the king and local authorities were in sharp competition for power.

In Roads to Health, G. Geltner demonstrates that urban dwellers in medieval Italy had a keen sense of the dangers to their health posed by conditions of overcrowding, shortages of food and clean water, air pollution, and the improper disposal of human and animal waste. He consults scientific, narrative, and normative sources that detailed and consistently denounced the physical and environmental hazards urban communities faced: latrines improperly installed and sewers blocked; animals left to roam free and carcasses left rotting on public byways; and thoroughfares congested by artisanal and commercial activities that impeded circulation, polluted waterways, and raised miasmas. However, as Geltner shows, numerous administrative records also offer ample evidence of the concrete measures cities took to ameliorate unhealthy conditions. Toiling on the frontlines were public functionaries generally known as viarii, or "road-masters," appointed to maintain their community''s infrastructures and police pertinent human and animal behavior. Operating on a parallel track were the camparii, or "field-masters," charged with protecting the city''s hinterlands and thereby the quality of what would reach urban markets, taverns, ovens, and mills.Roads to Health provides a critical overview of the mandates and activities of the viarii and camparii as enforcers of preventive health and safety policies between roughly 1250 and 1500, and offers three extended case studies, for Lucca, Bologna, and the smaller Piedmont town of Pinerolo. In telling their stories, Geltner contends that preventive health practices, while scientifically informed, emerged neither solely from a centralized regime nor as a reaction to the onset of the Black Death. Instead, they were typically negotiated by diverse stakeholders, including neighborhood residents, officials, artisans, and clergymen, and fostered throughout the centuries by a steady concern for people''s greater health.

"A significant addition to the texts of later medieval European law available in English."-Paul Brand, Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and Research Fellow of the Institute of Historical Research, London

French argues that medieval laywomen both coped with the chaotic changes following the plague and justified their own changing behavior by participating in local religion. Through active engagement in the parish church, the basic unit of public worship, women promoted and validated their own interests and responsibilities.

In Singing the New Song, Katherine Zieman examines the institutions and practices of the liturgy as central to changes in late medieval English understandings of the written word.

Bryan examines a wide range of devotional and secular texts, from works by Walter Hilton, Julian of Norwich, and Thomas Hoccleve to explore the models of identification and imitation through which they sought to reach the inmost selves of their readers, and the scripts for spiritual desire that they offered for the cultivation of the heart.