European history: medieval period, middle ages Books

Studies of women and writing frequently take historical woman authors as their starting point. Poet Heroines in Medieval French Narrative proposes a different approach, looking instead at the numerous fictional female characters of 13th-15th century...

Providing new and challenging ways of understanding the medieval in the modern and vice versa, The Medieval Motion Picture: The Politics of Adaptation highlights how medieval aesthetic experience breathes life into contemporary cinema. Engaging with the...

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...

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...

Women and Economic Activities in Late Medieval Ghent argues that women managed their own wealth to a far greater extent than previously recognized. Women bought, sold, sued, lent money, and contracted debts with little legal or financial oversight of...

Queenship and Voice in Medieval Northern Europe offers a unique perspective on aspects of female rulership in the Scandinavian Middle Ages. Working with historical as well as literary evidence from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, this book shows...

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...

The urgent debate about torture in public discourse of the twenty-first century thrusts pain into the foreground while research in neuroscience is transforming our understanding of this fundamental human experience. In late-medieval France, a country...

A neglected aspect of Byzantium, physical beauty appears as a quality with an unmistakable dark side, relating ambiguously to notions of power, goodness, evil, masculinity, effeminacy, life and death. Examined as an attribute of the human and, in...

Successful management of radical innovation is a key to growth. Managing radical innovation involves decisions for risky projects and unknown markets with a high growth potential. This research work identifies nearly 40 best practice cases illustrating...

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...

This broad-reaching collection of essays constitutes a thorough introduction to the fields and methodologies concerned with studies of textiles and dress of the Middle Ages. New themes and critical viewpoints from many disciplines are brought to bear on...