Bøger i The New Middle Ages serien

¿Authors, Factions, and Courts in Angevin England: A Literature of Personal Ambition (12th-13th Century) advances a model for historical study of courtly literature by foregrounding the personal aims, networks, and careers as the impetus for much of the period¿s literature. The book takes two authors as case studies ¿ Gerald of Wales and Walter Map ¿ to show how authors not only built their own stories but also used popular narratives and the tools of propaganda to achieve their own, personal goals. The purpose of this study is to overturn the top-down model of political patronage, in which patrons ¿ and particularly royal patrons ¿ set the cultural agenda and dictate literary tastes. Rather, Fabrizio De Falco argues that authors were often representative of many different interests expressed by local groups. To pursue those interests, they targeted specific political factions in the changeable political scenario of Angevin England. Their texts reveal a polycentric view of cultural production and its reception. The study aims to model a heuristic process which is applicable to other courtly texts besides the chosen case-studies.

Constance of France: Womanhood and Agency in Twelfth-Century Europe is a biography of Constance of France, sister of King Louis VII of France. Myra Bom recovers Constance's life story and puts it in its medieval context by examining the historical evidence of chronicles, charters, seal imprints and letters. The countess's long and interesting life makes for women's history with a large geographical scope, including France, England, Toulouse and the Latin East. It touches on many aspects of life during the Middle Ages such as birth, marriage and divorce, gender roles, experience of time, and expectation for the afterlife. Bom demonstrates how and to what extent medieval women could, and did, take control of their own lives. This book is an account of the interplay of historical context and agency. 

This book argues that literary and historiographical works written by Iberian Christians between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries promoted contradictory representations of Muslims in order to advocate for their colonization through the affirmation of Christian supremacy. Ambivalent depictions of cultural difference are essential for colonizers to promote their own superiority, as explained by postcolonial critics and observed in medieval and early modern texts in Castilian, Catalan, and Portuguese, such as the Cantar de mio Cid, Cantigas de Santa Maria, Llibre dels fets, Estoria de España, Crónica geral de 1344, Tirant lo Blanch, and Os Lusíadas. In all these works, the contradictions of Muslim enemies, allies, and subjects allow Christian leaders to prevail and profit through their opposition and collaboration with them. Such colonial dynamics of simultaneous belligerence and assimilation determined the ways in which Portugal, Spain, and later European powers interacted with non-Christians in Africa, Asia, and even the Americas.

Fictions of Witness in the Confessio Amantis details the first years of the Confessiös material history and offers a major revision to a century¿s old narrative of political revision and conversion around the trauma of 1400. Joel Fredell argues for ¿late stage¿ revisions by Gower to his great poem in Middle English from the late 1390s up to Gower¿s death in 1408. This approach, new to scholarship for Ricardian and Lancastrian literature, demands profound re-evaluation of Gower's poetic persona and its entanglement in the opening and closing books of the Confessio. It offers a reassessment of the political and literary relationships between versions dedicated to Richard II and Henry IV. It repositions Gower's laureate status in a London world of deluxe book production that created a canon of Ricardian poets linked to their fifteenth-century inheritors. Finally, it identifies for the first time how late medieval authors designed their poetry as fictional artifacts that witness history from quasi-chronicles like Maidstone¿s Concordia or Richard the Redeless, quasi-petitions like the Lollard ¿Petition to the King and Parliament,¿ quasi-epistles that begin so many texts, quasi-transcripts such as the Record and Process of the Deposition of Richard II, and so on.

This book explores the different functions and metaphorical concepts of alchemy in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Middle English poetry and bridges them together with the exempla tradition in late medieval English literature. Such poetic narratives function as exemplary models which directly address the ambiguity of medieval English alchemical practice. This book examines the foundation of this relationship between alchemical narrative and exemplum in the poetry of Gower and Chaucer in the fourteenth century before exploring its diffusion in lesser-known anonymous poems and recipes in the fifteenth century, namely alchemical dialogues between Morienus and Merlin, Albertus Magnus and the Queen of Elves, and an alchemical version of John Lydgate¿s poem The Churl and the Bird. It investigates how this exemplarity can be read as inherent to understanding poetic narratives containing alchemy, as well as enabling the reader to reassess the understanding and expectations of science and narrative within medieval English poetry.

Elionor of Sicily, 1325¿1375: A Mediterranean Queen¿s Life of Family, Administration, Diplomacy, and War follows Elionor of Sicily, the third wife of the important Aragonese king, Pere III. Despite the limited amount of personal information about Elionor, the large number of Sicilian, Catalan, and Aragonese chronicles as well as the massive amount of notarial evidence drawn from eastern Spanish archives has allowed Donald Kagay to trace Elionor¿s extremely active life roles as a wife and mother, a queen, a frustrated sovereign, a successful administrator, a supporter of royal war, a diplomat, a feudal lord, a fervent backer of several religious orders, and an energetic builder of royal sites. Drawing from the correspondence between the queen and her husband, official papers and communiques, and a vast array of notarial documents, the book casts light on the many phases of the queen¿s life.

This collection of essays explores the literary legacy of medieval England by examining the writers, editors and exemplars of medieval English texts.

The book shows how the Franciscans in Jerusalem in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries wrote works which standardized the cultural memory of the Holy Land. This book shows how the Franciscans developed a representation of the Holy Land by elaborating on its history and describing its religious groups and the geography of the region.

Reading Illegitimacy in Early Iberian Literature presents illegitimacy as a fluid, creative, and negotiable concept in early literature which challenges society's definition of what is acceptable.

Medieval Considerations of Incest, Marriage, and Penance focuses on the incest motif as used in numerous medieval narratives.

This collection of essays explores the literary legacy of medieval England by examining the writers, editors and exemplars of medieval English texts.

Elionor of Sicily, 1325¿1375: A Mediterranean Queen¿s Life of Family, Administration, Diplomacy, and War follows Elionor of Sicily, the third wife of the important Aragonese king, Pere III. Despite the limited amount of personal information about Elionor, the large number of Sicilian, Catalan, and Aragonese chronicles as well as the massive amount of notarial evidence drawn from eastern Spanish archives has allowed Donald Kagay to trace Elionor¿s extremely active life roles as a wife and mother, a queen, a frustrated sovereign, a successful administrator, a supporter of royal war, a diplomat, a feudal lord, a fervent backer of several religious orders, and an energetic builder of royal sites. Drawing from the correspondence between the queen and her husband, official papers and communiques, and a vast array of notarial documents, the book casts light on the many phases of the queen¿s life.

Negotiating the Art of Fatherhood in Late Medieval and Early Modern Italy examines contested notions of fatherhood in written and visual texts during the development of the mercantile economy in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy.

This book offers analyses of texts from medieval France influenced by Ovid's myth of Narcissus including the Lay of Narcissus, Alain de Lille's Plaint of Nature, Rene d'Anjou's Love-Smitten Heart, Chretien de Troyes's Story of the Grail and Guillaume de Machaut's Fountain of Love.

The Gender of Money in Middle English Literature: Value and Economy in Late Medieval England explores the vital and under-examined role that gender plays in the conceptualization of money and value in a period that precedes and shapes what we now recognize as the discipline of political economy.

Analyzing Medieval and Early Modern art and literature replete with images of non-normative bodies, these essays consider the pernicious history of defining people with distinctly non-normative bodies or non-normative cognition as monsters.

This concise and unique volume explores the vital relationship between testimony, memory, and the community in medieval society.

This book examines the power held by the French medieval queens during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and their larger roles within the kingdom at a time when women were excluded from succession to the throne.

This book illuminates the connections and interaction among women and between women and men during the medieval period. Agnes was a real estate mogul and a patron of philanthropic institutions that permitted lower strata women to survive and thrive in a mature urban economy of the period before 1350.

Early Christians sought miracles from Michael the Archangel and this enigmatic ecumenical figure was the subject of hagiography, liturgical texts, and relics across Western Europe. Entering contemporary debates about angelology, this fascinating study explores the formation and diffusion of the cult of Saint Michael from c. 300-c.800.

Retracing the contours of a bitter controversy over the meaning of sacred architecture that flared up among some of the leading lights of the Carolingian renaissance, Collins explores how ninth-century authors articulated the relationship of form to function and ideal to reality in the ecclesiastical architecture of the Carolingian empire.

This book examines evolution of medieval patience literature from a focus on male and female sufferers to a focus on female suffers in particular. Using feminist revisions of genre-theory, Waugh analyses the concept of counterfeit consciousness in the works of Margery Kempe and Chaucer among others.

Market Power explores society and economy in medieval Iberia, examining the intersection of regional commercial interests, lordship, and royal authority as part of the evolution of a small village into a rural market town.

In setting English figurations of Wales against the contrasted representations of the Welsh language tradition, this volume seeks to reverse this neglect, insisting on the crucial importance of the English experience in Wales for any understanding of the literary cultures of medieval England and medieval Britain.