Bøger i The Middle Ages Series serien

Early medieval women exercised public roles, rights, and responsibilities. Women contributed through their labor to the welfare of the community. Women played an important part in public affairs. They practiced birth control through abortion and infanticide. Women committed crimes and were indicted. They owned property and administered estates. The drive toward economic growth and expansion abroad rested on the capacity of women to staff and manage economic endeavors at home.In the later Middle Ages, the social position of women altered significantly, and the reasons why the role of women in society tended to become more restrictive are examined in these essays.

E. Jane Burns argues that literary portraits of medieval heroines who produce and decorate silk cloth or otherwise manipulate items of silk outline a metaphorical geography that includes northern France as an important cultural player within the silk economics of the Mediterranean.

Maria Rosa Menocal argues that Arabic culture was a central and shaping phenomenon in medieval Europe.

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."

The King's Other Body: Maria of Castile and the Crown of Aragon is both a biography of Alfonso V's queen and Lieutenant General of Catalunya and an analysis of her political partnership with Alfonso.

This book offers a new history of a major medieval genre, affective meditations on the Passion. It argues that women were instrumental in the creation of this genre, and it illuminates how these scripts for the performance of prayer served to construct compassion itself as an intimate and feminine emotion.

Order and Chivalry explores the role of chivalry in the emergence of the bourgeoisie in fourteenth-century Castile. This book shows how the texts that shaped urban knighthood also transformed the middle class, the idea of the city, and the practice of citizenship in medieval Iberia.

Drawing on hundreds of unpublished court records, Marie Kelleher examines how women in the fourteenth-century Crown of Aragon engaged with patriarchal assumptions to shape their own legal identities, thus playing a crucial role in the formation of a gendered legal culture that shaped women's lives throughout Europe for centuries afterwards.

Reveals the true story behind the growth of the Cistercian order.

In the popular imagination, the Middle Ages are often associated with lawlessness. However, historians have long recognized that medieval culture was characterized by an enormous respect for law and legal procedure. This book makes the case that one cannot understand the era's cultural trends without considering the profound development of law.

A major thirteenth-century Spanish law code whose tenets can still be found in the state laws of California, Texas, and Louisiana.

"A fascinating study of the movements and ambivalent meanings of gifts in the political culture of the fifteenth and early sixteenth century... Valentin Groebner's book ... provides us with a new way of understanding the meanings and uses of 'corruption.'"-Natalie Zemon Davis, Sixteenth Century Journal

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.

Bynum argues that Christ's blood as both object and symbol was central to late medieval art, literature, and religious life. As cult object, blood provided a focus of theological debate about the nature of matter, body, and God and an occasion for Jewish persecution; as motif, blood became a central symbol in popular devotion.

"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

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.

Learning to Die in London, 1380-1540 argues that the educated awareness of death and mortality was a vital aspect of the city's civic culture, critical not only to the shaping of single lives and the management of households but also to practices of cultural memory, building of institutions, and good government of the city itself.

Addressing the ways alliterative poems share concerns with history and the often-dangerous confrontation of the present with the past, Christine Chism shifts her focus away from the emphases on meter, dialect, and provenance that have routinely marked studies of alliterative poetry.

Using extensive evidence from archival documents from both the ecclesiastical court system and the records of city and royal government, as well as advice manuals, chronicles, moral tales, and liturgical texts, McSheffrey examines how marital and sexual relationships were woven into the fabric of late medieval London.

Rejecting the prevalent view of Capgrave as predictably conservative, John Capgrave's Fifteenth Century contributes to a broader appraisal of fifteenth-century culture and offers a fresh view of orthodoxy and dissent in pre-Reformation England.

Alastair Minnis reveals Chaucer's Pardoner and Wife of Bath as interconnected aspects of a radical literary experiment, wherein the relationship between objective authority and subjective fallibility is confronted as never before.

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.

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.

"A provocative study of an intriguing subject... The Romance of Adultery establishes perceptive and tantalizing connections between literature and history while sensibly resisting the teptation to see the former as a reflection of the latter."-Romance Philology

Gender and Jewish Difference from Paul to Shakespeare provides the first extended examination of the linkages of gender and Jewish difference in late medieval and early modern English literature, focusing on representations of Jews and women in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, selections from medieval drama, and Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice.

Mechthild of Magdeburg gained some renown for her extraordinary book of mystical revelations, "The Flowing Light of the Godhead". Yet her writings dropped into obscurity after her death, many assume because of her gender. This seeks to explain this fate by considering Mechthild's own view of female authorship.

Her Life Historical offers a major reconsideration of one of the most popular narrative forms in late medieval England-the lives of female saints-and one of the period's primary modes of interpretation, exemplarity.

"Kinoshita has produced a book of major importance. Her command of the Francophone Middle Ages should exert an important critical influence on the greater field of Middle English and should also be recognized as an important contribution to the prehistory of postcolonial studies."-David Wallace, University of Pennsylvania

Reading through influential texts of the later Middle Ages, Adams shows how specific representations of chess encoded concerns about political organization, civic community, and individual autonomy.

Crossing Borders explores cross-cultural representations of gender and sexual practices in the medieval French and Arabic traditions. Amer demonstrates that the medieval Arabic tradition on eroticism played a determining role in French literary writings on gender and sexuality in the Middle Ages.