Literary studies: ancient, classical and medieval Books

Margaret, saint and 11th-century Queen of the Scots, remains an often-cited yet little-understood historical figure. Her world was the product of perspectives and models from Nordic, Kievan, Hungarian, Anglo-Saxon, Norman, and Scottish traditions, with...

The Middle Ages depicted in Walt Disney movies have come, for many, to figure as the Middle Ages, forming the earliest visions of the medieval past for much of the contemporary western (and increasingly eastern) imaginary. The essayists of The Disney...

This book is the first comprehensive study of the reception of classical Greece among English aesthetic writers of the nineteenth century. By exploring this history of reception, the book aims to give readers a new and fuller understanding of literary...

The Invisible Satirist offers a fresh new reading of the Satires of Juvenal, rediscovering the poet as a smart and scathing commentator on the cultural and political world of second-century Rome. Breaking away from the focus in recent scholarship on...

The Structural Study of Medieval Narrative Introduction: Absent Narratives and the Textual Culture of the Late Middle Ages The Wanting Words of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Remembering Canacee: Chaucer, Incest, and the Structure of Narrative Chaucer's...

Lively and deeply productive discussions have focused on the topics of "magnificence" and "the sublime" in the art and literature of antiquity, the Renaissance, and the ages following. They have engaged major figures from Ernst Gombrich to Theodore...

When has using the term "lesbian" not been considered an anachronistic gesture? This question lies at the heart of this important new collection of essays. The Lesbian Premodern engages key scholars in lesbian studies and queer theory in an innovative...

Through interdisciplinary readings of medieval literature and devotional artifacts, this book shows how reliquaries shaped ideas about poetry and poetics in late-medieval England.

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. Yet, astonishingly, her...

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. Treating key medieval English texts and traditions, from romance and exemplum to...

Collectively undertaking the first sustained examination of Chaucer's representation of non-human creatures since Beryl Rowland's Blind Beasts in 1971, this book connects work in critical animal studies and close-readings of Chaucer's texts. Grouped under

This volume focuses on women's literary history in Britain between 700 and 1500. It brings to the fore a wide range of women's literary activity undertaken in Latin, Welsh and Anglo-Norman alongside that of the English vernacular, demanding a rethinking...

Studies in the Medieval Atlantic is an interdisciplinary collection of essays that answers the question: what did the Atlantic Ocean mean to medieval north Europeans? Contributors analyze the Atlantic Ocean of the seventh to sixteenth centuries through...

Old Norse texts offer many different ideas about what it is to be female, presenting women who occupy diverse social and economic positions or who have varying racial origins. Covering a much wider range of texts than have previous studies, this book...

Medieval drama based on the Bible commonly directs its audiences toward a Christian interpretation, but equally interesting, and less frequently investigated by scholars, are the plays' modes of resistance to Christian authority. Through a reading...

Medieval Irish texts reveal distinctive and unexpected constructions of gender. Constructing Gender in Medieval Ireland illuminates these ideas through its fresh and provocative re-readings of a wide range of texts, including saga, romance, legal texts,...

Marriage, Property, and Women's Narratives addresses Virginia Woolf's question, 'Why are women poor?' Drawing from three different time periods and three distinct legal models of female property ownership, this study investigates how women writers frame...

Medieval women's history is entering a new stage. In the last thirty years medievalists have recovered the sources about women, and have moved women to the foreground of narratives to view society from their vantage point. The historians in this...

Ecofeminist Subjectivities: Chaucer's Talking Birds analyzes the interaction between gender and species in Chaucer's poetry and interprets his adaptation of medieval genres through an ecofeminist lens. His self-conscious experimentation with talking...

No one working today in Middle English studies or in period-related film and/or documentary can proceed untouched by Terry Jones' thought-provoking views. Through films such as Monty Python and the Holy Grail, educational television series for BBC and...

Little attention has been focused on the representation of Muslims in medieval Germany. Proceeding from a grounded use of contemporary cultural theory and close textual analysis, this study analyzes the role of Muslims in several core texts representing...

The Anglo-Scottish border in the late medieval and early modern period was a highly contested region; both a militarized zone and a place of cultural contact and exchange. The contributors to this volume explore the role of this borderland in the...

This volume broadens the perspective of recent work on the discourse of the Muslim Other in medieval Christendom by investigating pertinent texts, art, and artifacts in Armenian, Old Irish and Breton, Old Norse, Serbo-Croatian, Middle English, Old...

For many medieval authors, sexuality was the ultimate expression of embodiment. Sexuality could be a medium for human communication with the divine, but it could also be a barrier when not conceptualized or practiced correctly. Broad in scope, this...

Ekphrasis, a genre of poetry describing a work of art, has traditionally existed on the ideological battleground between the verbal and visual arts. Medieval ekphrases, however, reveal ekphrasis as a process rather than a genre and show how it works with...

Contrary to the monolithic impression left by postcolonial theories of Orientalism, the book makes the case that Orientals did not exist solely to be gazed at. Exploring a cross-section of 9th through 12th centuries, non-religious Arabic prose and poetic...

Divine Ventriloquism in Medieval English Literature studies medieval attitudes towards the human mediation of God's and Christ's voices and thus attends to how medieval people resignified a pagan practice. As Mary Hayes demonstrates, the ventriloquized...

Medieval and Early Modern Film and Media contextualizes historical films in an innovative way--not only relating them to the history of cinema, but also to premodern and early modern media. This philological approach to the (pre)history of cinema engages...

Recent research suggests that emotions are largely constructed and performed and that narrative is one of the most important practices through which people become emotionally aware. Narrative literature thus offers a privileged means of exploring the...

This book serves as the first in its field to analyze how disability and gender both thematically and formally operate within late medieval popular literature. Reading romance, conduct manuals, and spiritual autobiography, the study proposes a "gendered...

This book makes the compelling argument that Chaucer, the Perle-poet, and The Cloud of Unknowing author exploited analogue and metaphor for marking out the pedagogical gap between science and the imagination. These writers take up an Aristotelian...

Medieval Studies and New Media presents all of the most memorable posts of the medievalist internet phenomenon "Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog," newly revised and updated, along with essays on the genesis of the blog itself, the role of internet blogs in me

Gender and Power in Medieval Exegesis analyzes the nexus of gender and power in biblical commentaries from the fifth to the fifteenth century, focusing on crucial moments in the development of exegesis. The argument pursues the literary trope of the...

From majestic 'Celtic' crosses to elaborate knotwork designs, visual symbols of Irish identity abound in contemporary culture. In jewelry, souvenirs, tattoos, and even graphic novels and massive public murals, Irishness is depicted in its most medieval...

In Performance, Cognitive Theory, and Devotional Culture, Jill Stevenson uses cognitive theory to explore the layperson's physical encounter with live religious performances, and to argue that laypeople's interactions with other devotional media-such as...

Witnesses to the disappearance of a text, palimpsest manuscripts bear the marks of their own genesis, with their original inscription rubbed out and written over on the same parchment. This collection explores analogies of erasure and rewriting observed...

The boundaries separating Literary Studies from other kinds of humanistic inquiry are more permeable now than at any moment since the Enlightenment, when disciplinary categories began to acquire their modern definition. The Forms of Renaissance Thought...

This study first examines the marginal repertoire in two well-known manuscripts, the Psalter of Guy de Dampierre and an Arthurian Romance, within their material and codicological contexts. This repertoire then provides a template for an extended study of...

J.R.R. Tolkien delved into the Middle Ages to create a critique of the modern world in his fantasy, yet did so in a form of modernist literature with postmodern implications and huge commercial success. These essays examine that paradox and its...