Medieval

Strange Beauty provides a new perspective on early Celtic stories of the Otherworld and their relevance to today's ecological concerns, arguing for a contemporary re-reading of the Otherworld trope in relation to physical experience.About the...

A captivating study of translation, adaptation, and intellectual cross-pollination that situates the Castilian Hermes in the center of medieval Mediterranean cultural exchange Hermes Trismegistus, a Hellenistic conflation of the Greek Hermes (god of...

In Boccaccio Defends Literature, Brenda Deen Schildgen contends that Giovanni Boccaccio's significant contribution to literary history remains underappreciated. The book asserts that Boccaccio refuted the detractors that condemned poetry as immoral,...

The twelfth and early thirteenth centuries saw some of the most important changes to marriage laws in European history, the foremost being the decision of the Catholic Church to recognize consent as an overriding requirement for marriage. Though this...

Vernacular Aesthetics in the Later Middle Ages explores the formal composition, public performance, and popular reception of vernacular poetry, music, and prose within late medieval French and English cultures. This collection of essays considers the...

Broadens the perspective of recent work on the discourse of the Muslim Other in medieval Christendom by investigating pertinent texts, art, and artefacts, situating these local discourses of the Muslim Other in the larger cultural context of...

Vernacular Aesthetics in the Later Middle Ages explores the formal composition, public performance, and popular reception of vernacular poetry, music, and prose within late medieval French and English cultures. This collection of essays considers the...

Building on recent critical work, this volume offers a comprehensive consideration of the nature and forms of medieval and early modern childhoods, viewed through literary cultures. Its five groups of thematic essays range across a spectrum of...

A meditative reflection on what medieval disaster writing can teach us about how to respond to the climate emergency. When a series of ecological disasters swept medieval England, writers turned to religious storytelling for precedents. Their...

The second volume of Old Norse Folklore explores medieval and early modern Nordic magic and witchcraft, covering syncretism, continuity, survival, and the reconstruction of pagan beliefs and cultic practices in this last area of western Europe to be...

A unique study of the only physical manuscript containing Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as both a material and literary object. In this book, Arthur Bahr takes a fresh look at the four poems and twelve illustrations of the so-called...

Late-medieval European vernacular literature defined itself as the redeployment of classical and post-classical antecedents in new cultural coordinates. Many authors of narrative and poetic fiction between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries resisted...

Libanius of Antioch (AD 314-93), teacher, rhetorician and eloquent exponent of Greek paideia, was one of the most prolific letter writers of late antiquity with more than 1500 surviving letters from an even greater total. This volume contains the...

The second volume of Old Norse Folklore explores medieval and early modern Nordic magic and witchcraft, covering syncretism, continuity, survival, and the reconstruction of pagan beliefs and cultic practices in this last area of western Europe to be...

The first English translation of Petrarch's Psalms and Prayers provides an intimate look at the personal devotions of the "Father of Humanism." Throughout Petrarch's work, there is an undercurrent of tension between the secular and the sacred. In this...

Experiencing the Afterlife provides the first sustained analysis of popular, vernacular depictions of the afterlife written in Italy before the Divine Comedy by authors such as Uguccione da Lodi, Giacomino da Verona, and Bonvesin da la Riva. Manuele...

Over the course of her career, Elizabeth Robertson has pursued innovative scholarship that investigates the overlapping domains of medieval philosophy, literature, and gender studies. This collection of essays dedicated to her work examines gender in...

Criticism of the Court and the Evil King in the Middle Ages: Literary-Historical Analyses, identifies and discusses the discourse focused on the criticism of the court, specifically of the king, across medieval Europe. Tracing its development from the...

The thirteenth-century poet Gonzalo de Berceo is the first named author of Old Spanish letters and the most prolific contributor to the emergence of the body of learned vernacular verse known as the mester de clerecia. In the Doorway of All Worlds...

The Making of Felony Procedure in Middle English Literature explores the literary inheritance of criminal procedure in thirteenth to fifteenth century English law, focusing on felony, the gravest common law offense. Most scholarship in medieval law and...

Paul Alvarus wrote the Indiculus luminosus in 854 in response to the executions of a number of Córdoban Christians, beginning with the monk Isaac in 851, who had denounced Muhammad in public. The first half of the treatise offers an extended apologia in...

This volume provides the first English (or indeed any modern) translation of two early ninth-century hagiographical texts that deal with the Virgin Mary and the apostle Andrew. Both texts are attributed to a Constantinopolitan monk and priest called...

The Boke of Gostely Grace is the anonymous Middle English version of the Liber specialis gratiae by the German visionary Mechthild of Hackeborn (1241–1298). The original Liber, compiled at the convent of Helfta in Saxony, presents Mechthild’s visions as...

Zoroastrianism was the religion of the ancient Persian kings and following the Arab conquest, it remained the religion of a significant portion of the population in Iran and parts of Central Asia. This book investigates the most important polemical...

Athanasius of Alexandria (bishop 328-373) is one of the great personalities of late-antique Christianity, and he is well-known to theologians and historians alike as a champion of orthodoxy against the 'Arian' heresy and a proponent of the ascetic life...

The book is about the genealogy of the ancient Greek gods and the legend of Troy. William Caxton, for almost thirty years, led his life as a merchant, a diplomat and a cosmopolitan in Bruges, at that time the most prosperous international center of...

The period from the Mamluk reconquest of Acre (1291) to the Ottoman siege of Constantinople (1453) witnessed the production of a substantial corpus of Middle English crusade romances. Marcel Elias places these romances in dialogue with multifarious...

The Findern Manuscript (Cambridge University Library, Ff.1.6): A New Edition of the Unique Poems is the first critical edition of the thirty-four unique and unattributed Middle English poems contained in Cambridge, University Library MS Ff.1.6. This...

Detachment is widely recognized as one of the key concerns of Eckhart in his anthropology. This monograph of the editor of the series introduces this concept from Eckhart's teaching on divine essence, the principle and the transcendentals, to then...

Fantastic Histories explores the political and cultural contexts of the entry of fairies to the historical record in twelfth century England, and the subsequent uses of fairy narratives in both insular and continental history and romance. It traces the...

Combining an accessible approach with innovative scholarship, An Introduction to the Sagas of Icelanders provides up-to-date perspectives on a unique medieval literary genre that has fascinated the English-speaking world for more than two centuries. Carl...

The Middle English poem Pearl is an elegy on the death of a child, written to provide consolation for the loss of a loved one through instruction in Christian theology. The mourning father's faith in God has been shaken by his daughter's death. Having...

This book is the first systematic study in decades of Malory's development of his characters in the Morte Darthur. Focusing on sixteen key figures in the most important medieval English treatment of the Arthurian saga, it examines Malory's thematic...

This book is the first systematic study in decades of Malory's development of his characters in the Morte Darthur. Focusing on sixteen key figures in the most important medieval English treatment of the Arthurian saga, it examines Malory's thematic...

Calling into question the common assumption that the Middle Ages produced no secondary epics, Ann W. Astell here revises a key chapter in literary history. She examines the connections between the Book of Job and Boethius' s Consolation of...

Lucinda Cole's Imperfect Creatures offers the first full-length study of the shifting, unstable, but foundational status of "vermin" as creatures and category in the early modern literary, scientific, and political imagination. In the space between...

Short works known for their humor and ribaldry, the fabliaux were comic or satirical tales told by wandering minstrels in medieval France. Although the fabliaux are widely acknowledged as inspiring Giovanni Boccaccio's masterpiece, the Decameron, this...

Only a few decades ago, American folklore research focused primarily on narrative folklore with obvious literary connections, such as the ballad and the folktale. In the past twenty years, however, folklore studies have veered sharply away from...

Why did medieval dramatists weave so many scenes of torture into their plays? Exploring the cultural connections among rhetoric, law, drama, literary creation, and violence, Jody Enders addresses an issue that has long troubled students of the Middle...

This is a new edition of Friedman's classic examination of the myth of Orpheus in the late antique and medieval periods. Friedman discusses Christian, Jewish and romantic secular `portraits' of Orpheus, and considers artistic, literary and philosophical...