Bøger i The New Middle Ages serien

Necessary Conjunctions is an original study of how regular medieval people created their public social identities. Employing a highly interdisciplinary methodology and an original theory makes it possible to see how personal agency and identity developed within the framework of later medieval power structures.

This study examines the monsters that haunt twelfth-century British texts, arguing that in these strange bodies are expressed fears and fantasies about community, identity and race during the period. Cohen finds the origins of these monsters in a contemporary obsession with blood, both the literal and metaphorical kind.

In what varieties of ways is late medieval literature inflected by spiritual insight and desires? What weaves of literary cloth especially suit religious insight? In this collection dedicated to Elizabeth D. Kirk, Emeritus Professor of English at Brown University, several renowned scholars assess those related issues in a range of Medieval texts.

This interdisciplinary study offers an interpretation of the major logical, philosophical/theological and poetic writings of Boethius, Abelard and Alan of Lille. The author examines their theories of language and the ways in which they explore how words illuminate things, how the mind comprehends God and how the individual reaches beatitude.

His book examines how Middle English writers including Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, and Malory treat unpredictable events such as sexual attraction, political disaster, social competition, traumatic accidents, and the textual condition itself - locating in fortune the very potentiality of ethical life.

In thirteen studies of representations of rape in Medieval and Early Modern literature by such authors as Chaucer, Shakespeare and Spenser, this volume argues that some form of sexual violence against women serves as a foundation of Western culture.

By examining a significant corpus of secular and monastic charters, this study provides a more complex understanding of the role of religious patronage in medieval society, specifically offering a glimpse of the experience of female rulers in a period when actions were often constrained and obscured by gender bias.

This study argues that late medieval English 'mystery plays' were about masculinity as much as Christian theology, modes of devotion, or civic self-consciousness. Performed repeatedly by generations of merchants and craftsmen, these Biblical plays produced fantasies and anxieties of middle class, urban masculinity, many of which are familiar today.

This book exposes the ways in which ostensibly normative sexualities depend upon queerness to shore up their claims of privilege. Through readings of such classic texts as The Canterbury Tales and Eger and Grime , Tison Pugh explains how sexual normativity can often be claimed only after queerness has been rejected.

Alice de Rouclif was a child heiress made to marry the illegitimate son of the local abbot and then abducted by her feudal superior. Alice Brathwell was a respectable widow who attracted the attentions of a supposedly aristocratic conman.

The chastity belt is one of those objects people have commonly identified with the 'dark' Middle Ages. This book analyzes the origin of this myth and demonstrates how a convenient misconception, or contorted imagination, of an allegedly historical practice has led to profoundly flawed interpretations of control mechanisms used by jealous husbands.

This book presents waste as an aesthetic category that introduces an arsy-versy world where detritus is precious. This aesthetic is applied in the second part to etymology, poking through the 'paternal dungheaps' of words, and tracing their origins not to Eden but to Babel, puns, and word play.

This collection examines the cultural and intellectual dimensions of war and its resolution between Han Chinese and the various ethnically dissimilar peoples surrounding them during the crucial 'middle period' of Chinese history.

This book reformulates the master narrative of erotic discourse in medieval literature. Individual chapters offer fresh readings of the nature and claims of erotic attachments in Abelard and Heloise, Marie de France, Jean de Meun, Dante, Boccaccio, and Chaucer - writers profoundly influenced by Augustine and Ovid.

This study charts relationships between moral claims and audience response in medieval exemplary works by such poets as Chaucer, Gower, Robert Henryson, and several anonymous scribes. In late medieval England, exemplary works make one of the strongest possible claims for the social value of poetic fiction.

This study of medieval women as postcolonial writers defines the literary strategies of subversion by which they authorized their alterity within the dominant tradition.

The articles in this volume, by scholars all pursuing careers in the United States, concern the theoretical approaches and methods of early medieval studies.

In Byzantium there were two overlapping systems of dress: a semiotic one whereby dress was a code for rank and wealth, and a fashion system where dress was based on the desire to look a certain way. This book explains secular dress from the eighth to the twelfth centuries through an examination of painted representations.

In new readings of medieval language attitudes and identities, this book concludes that multilingualism informed masculinist discourses, which were aligned against the vernacular sentiment traditionally attributed to Langland and Chaucer.

This text presents all of the most memorable posts of the medievalist internet phenomenon 'Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog', along with essays on the genesis of the blog itself, the role of blogs in medieval scholarship, and the unique pleasures of studying a time period full of plagues, schisms, and assizes.

The essays create an interdisciplinary conversation about the nature and function of sacred and devotional objects across the globe during the medieval and Early Modern period. Topics include the veneration of relics of the Buddha, the cult of the saints in medieval and early modern Ireland, medieval surveys of pagan and Christian Rome.

Drawing on new historical principles, this book examines literary and historical narratives, legal statutes and records, sermons, lyric poetry, and biblical exegesis circulating in medieval England in order to theorize the figure of the outlaw and uncover the legal, ethical, and social assumptions that underlie the practice of outlawry.

This is the first book to construct a theoretical framework that not only introduces a new way of reading romance writing at large, but more specifically that generates useful critical readings of the specific functions of fairies in individual romance texts.

Maintenance, Meed, and Marriage in Medieval English Literature deftly interrogates the relationship between lord and man in medieval England.

This collection of essays offers fresh analysis of topics in the exciting area of Atlantic World studies. Challenging standard assumptions, the essays advance the argument that the Atlantic Ocean was a region that encompassed ethnic and political boundaries, in which a sub-community shaped by culture and commerce arose.

Considering a wide array of sources, this book reveals the tenacity with which Alfonso II (1162-1196) and his son Peter II (1196-1213) of the Crown of Aragon forged a tighter Mediterranean regional network and augmented their regional success.

This book demonstrates how post-structuralist and psychoanalytic theory can serve to clarify structures of identity and economies of desire in medieval texts.

This collection of original essays repositions medieval literary studies after an era of historicism. By defining our post-historical moment in medieval English literary studies in terms of new possibilities, this collection will have broad appeal to those interested in the English Middle Ages, history, culture, and reading itself.

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.

Skin is a multifarious image in medieval culture: the material basis for forming a sense of self and relation to the world, as well as a powerful literary and visual image. This book explores the presence of skin in medieval literature and culture from a range of literary, religious, aesthetic, historical, medical, and theoretical perspectives.