Bøger i The New Middle Ages serien

Troubled Vision is an interdisciplinary collection of essays that explores the interface between gender, sexuality and vision in medieval culture.

Explores the representation of emotions as psychological concepts and cultural constructs in Geoffrey Chaucer's narrative poetry. McTaggart argues that Chaucer's main works including The Canterbury Tales are united thematically in their positive view of guilt and in their anxiety about the desire for sacrifice and vengeance that shame can provoke.

Building on recent work in critical animal studies and posthumanism, this book challenges past assumptions that animals were only explored as illustrative of humanity, not as interesting in their own right. The contributors combine close reading of Chaucer's texts with insights drawn from cultural or critical animal studies.

This book asks how, in a time of crisis, medieval citizens developed an independent sense of ethics. Witness testimonies from Marseille's court records offer a small window into the neighborhoods of Marseille and reveal how humble people, often women, used the role of witness to become the arbiters of their communities.

This is the first detailed comparative study of patronage as an instrument of power in the relations between kings and bishops in England and Normandy after the Conquest. Esteemed medievalist Everett U. Crosby considers new perspectives of medieval state-building and the vexed relations between secular and ecclesiastical authority.

Margaret, saint and 11th-century Queen of the Scots, remains an often-cited yet little-understood historical figure. Keene's analysis of sources in terms of both time and place - including her Life of Saint Margaret , translated for the first time - allows for an informed understanding of the forces that shaped this captivating woman.

The letters of Heloise and Abelard will remain one of the great, romantic and intellectual documents of human civilization while they, themselves, are probably second only to Romeo and Juliet in the fame accrued by tragic lovers. Here for the first time in Mart Martin McLaughlin's edition is the complete correspendence with commentary.

Twelve medieval scholars from a wide range of disciplines, including law, literature, and religion address the question: What did it mean to possess a voice - or to be without one - during the Middle Ages? This collection reveals how the philosophy, theology, and aesthetics of the voice inhabit some of the most canonical texts of the Middle Ages.

This book offers the first complete English translation of the poems by the late-medieval German (Tyrolean) Oswald von Wolkenstein (1376/1377-1445). German scholarship and musicologists have long recognized the extraordinary strength and power of Oswald s Middle High German songs, both in terms of his poetic imagery and his musical performance.

No study has been carried out examining the gnostic undercurrents in medieval England. For the first time, Natanela Elias investigates the existence of these gnostic traces, using prominent late medieval English literary works such as Piers Plowman and Confessio Amantis and ultimately shedding light on a previously overlooked religious dimension.

The first-of-its-kind, Games and Gaming in Medieval Literature explores the depth and breadth of games in medieval literature and culture. Chapters span from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries, and cover England, France, Denmark, Poland, and Spain, re-examining medieval games in diverse social settings such as the church, court, and household.

The secrets of nature's alchemy captivated both the scientific and literary imagination of the Middle Ages. This book explores Chaucer's fascination with earth's mutability. Gabrovsky reveals that his poetry represents a major contribution to a medieval worldview centered on the philosophy of physics, astronomy, alchemy, and logic.

Although Chaucer is typically labeled as the "Father of English Literature," evidence shows that his work appealed to Europe and specifically European women. Rereading the Canterbury Tales , Thomas argues that Chaucer imagined Anne of Bohemia, wife of famed Richard II, as an ideal reader, an aspect that came to greatly affect his writing.

A literary reading informed by the recent temporal turn in Queer Theory, this book analyzes medieval Biblical drama for themes representing modes of power such as the body, politics, and law. Revitalizing the discussions on medieval drama, Sturges asserts that these dramas were often intended not to teach morality but to resist Christian authority.

Heir to an earldom, and wife and widow of William de Valence (half-brother of King Henry III), Joan de Valence was an important actor in the volatile political world of thirteenth-century England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland.

Exploring medieval literary representations of the Islamic conquest of Spain in 711, Hazbun discusses chronicles, epic and clerical poetry, and early historical novels. While material on the conquest of Spain is substantial, it is understudied and this book works to fill that gap.

Drawing from classical myth, the history of philosophy, literature, film, music, and painting, Workman connects the artistic claims of Chaucer and tests them against similar gestures in the history of philosophy and literature. What results is a radical retake on Chaucer as a philosopher and poet, upending any preconceived views.

The earliest complete morality play in English, The Castle of Perseverance depicts the culture of medieval East Anglia, a region once known for its production of artistic objects. Discussing the spectator experience of this famed play, Young argues that vision is the organizing principle that informs this play's staging, structure, and narrative.

From devotional literature to political narratives, medieval texts propose that sexual violence victims have privileged moral, ethical, and spiritual insight. This book explores these discourses of survival in a wide range of medieval English texts, including letters of spiritual advice, legal cases, romances, and legendary histories.

Geoffrey Chaucer was not a writer, primarily, but a privileged official place-holder. Chaucer's Jobs shows that the servile and disciplinary nature of the daily work Chaucer did was repeated in his poetry, which by turns flatters his aristocratic betters and deals out discipline to malcontent others.

The varied cultural functions of dress, textiles, and clothwork are used in this collection of essays to examine long-standing assumptions about the Middle Ages.

within a culture, robing established a personal link 'from the hand' of the giver - king, pope, head of a sect, ambassador - to the receiver - noble, general, official, nun, or acolyte.

To be a virgin or a widow never promised a stable, uniform status to a woman during the Middle Ages. Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in the Middle Ages addresses many facets of these two female positions in medieval literature: gender constructions;

This book provides a systematic analysis of the innovations that occurred in the display of royal power during John II's four years in English captivity.

The Orientalist romance, in the late medieval period and in modernity, is emblematic of popular attitudes towards the East. This book, the first full-length cross-period comparison of medieval and modern Orientalist romances, offers detailed case studies on how these texts represent sameness and difference in gender, ethnicity, and religion.

Virginia Langum offers anaccount of the medical imagery used to describe feelings and actions inreligious and literary contexts, referencing a variety of behavioraldiscussions within medical contexts.

This study traces the genealogy of Saint Perpetua's story with a straightforward yet previously overlooked question at its center: How was Perpetua remembered and to what uses was that memory put?

This book examines the story of the 'discovery of America' through the prism of the history of the Franciscans, a socio-religious movement with a unique doctrine of voluntary poverty.

These scholarly writings blend with and relate to his fictional writings in various ways depending on the moment at which he began teaching, translating, or editing a specific medieval work and, simultaneously, composing a specific poem, fantasy, or fairy-story.

The Middle English Melusine offers a particularly rich source for such a study, as it presents the story of a powerful fairy/human woman who desires a full human life-and death-within a literary tradition that is more friendly to women's agency than its continental counterparts.