Bestsellers and masterpieces: The changing medieval canon addresses the strange fact that, in both European and Middle Eastern medieval studies, those texts that we now study and teach as the most canonical representations of their era were in fact not popular or even widely read in their day. On the other hand, those texts that were popular, as evidenced by the extant manuscript record, are taught and studied with far less frequency. The book provides cross-cultural insight into both the literary tastes of the medieval period and the literary and political forces behind the creation of the 'modern canon' of medieval literature. -- .

Volume XXII/2 of History of Universities contains the customary mix of learned articles, book reviews, and bibliographical information, which makes this publication such an indispensable tool for the historian of higher education. Its contributions range widely geographically, chronologically, and in subject-matter. The volume is, as always, a lively combination of original research and invaluable reference material.

A comparative reading of the "literary" works of Thomas Walsingham, highlighting his reaction to contemporary historical events. The literary career of Thomas Walsingham, a significant figure in late fourteenth-century classicist letters in England and an overlooked contemporary of Chaucer, has been neglected - which this book remedies. Following the texts,rather than individuals or institutions, it demonstrates both authors' participation in a previously unrecognized discursive field that spans Latinate clerical prose and secular vernacular poetry, opening for reexamination the "idea" of public literature in the late Middle Ages and recalibrating the terms of the conversation about the advent of humanistic textual practice in England. Providing a connected and comparative reading of Walsingham's works, alongside those of Chaucer, and taking both historical and literary approaches, the book extends our understanding of Chaucer through the exploration of his relationship to the clerical constituencies of London, Oxford, and monasteries in the South-East, and inserts Walsingham into the modern study of the reception of the Latin classics among the vernacular authors of his period. Sylvia Federico is Professor of English and member of the Classical and Medieval Studies Program at Bates College.

In medieval England, a defendant who refused to plead to a criminal indictment was sentenced to pressing with weights as a coercive measure. Using peine forte et dure ('strong and hard punishment') as a lens through which to analyse the law and its relationship with Christianity, Butler asks: where do we draw the line between punishment and penance? And, how can pain function as a vehicle for redemption within the common law? Adopting a multidisciplinary approach, this book embraces both law and literature. When Christ is on trial before Herod, he refused to plead, his silence signalling denial of the court's authority. England's discontented subjects, from hungry peasant to even King Charles I himself, stood mute before the courts in protest. Bringing together penance, pain and protest, Butler breaks down the mythology surrounding peine forte et dure and examines how it functioned within the medieval criminal justice system.

""Medievalism and Orientalism" offers a glimpse into the history and role of the post-renaissance creation of the Middle Ages in the formulation of England's idea of itself. Ganim looks beyond academic medievalism into the fields of anthropology, popular culture, international expositions, gothic architecture, antiquarianism, gender studies, politics, religion, language, and race in this fascinating study of East-West relations that has never been more relevant or significant than at present."--R. Howard Bloch, Augustus R. Street Professor of French, Yale University"In an academic career that practically defines the word 'distinguished, ' John Ganim has repeatedly shown us new ways of approaching the Middle Ages and the 'medieval.' He continues this important work in his newest book, where he analyzes 'this hybrid identity, the twinned association of medievalism and Orientalism.' He invites and helps us to see how vexed, and vexatious, the categories of our 'historicisms' are as we try to identify the objects of our study, which change even as we ourselves change, not only over time but also through space, especially the unstable and ever troubled space 'between' East and West."--R. Allen Shoaf, Senior Editor, "Exemplaria""In these remarkable essays, John Ganim performs a virtuoso act of untangling the intricate web of cultural influences, anxieties, and agendas that have shaped the complex and mutually influential traditions of both medievalism and orientalism. In a radical yet subtle approach to cultural history, Ganim analyzes the afterlife of the Middle Ages through three distinctive and telling formations-as genre, as genealogy, and as display-showing exactly how, and why, the pastbecame 'another country' for European tradition. His range is extraordinarily wide, but every page is marked by insight and revelation, and an exactitude of criticism and analysis that is often breathtaking. This book shifts the discussion of medievalism onto another plane."-Stephanie Trigg, Associate Professor of English, University of Melbourne"John Ganim is one of the few scholars who see that orientalism is a tortuous form of self-recognition. His new book is timely and state-of-the-art: interdisciplinary, transhistorical, cross-cultural, engaging with literature, historiography, aesthetics, and architecture, with work in all periods between the medieval and now, and with much major scholarship in the various fields. It is also lucid, engaged, and intriguing--a book to be read for serious pleasure."--David A. Lawton, Professor and Chair of English and Professor of Religious Studies, Washington University

Stained glass is arguably the most appealing of the achievements of the medieval craftsman, synthesizing monumental painting with the best of medieval architecture, but it is also the least-understood of the medieval arts. Drawing upon recent research in English medieval art-historical studies, "English Medieval Stained Glass" is a comprehensive survey of the art and business of producing stained glass windows, intended to both stimulate further research and to heighten awareness of the need to preserve this fragile art form. It considers stained glass in relation to architecture and other arts and, by examining contemporary documents, it throws valuable light on workshop organization, prices, patronage and iconography. Stained glass attracted outstanding craftsmen who were in the forefront of the main artistic innovations in English medieval art. Their significance is highlighted in this study which also makes use of the plentiful documentary material which throws light on workshop organization and practice, the role of patrons and the important contribution made by stained glass to our knowledge of medieval religions, beliefs and cults.

Essays offering new approaches to the changing forms of medieval religious masculinity. The complex relationship between masculinity and religion, as experienced in both the secular and ecclesiastical worlds, forms the focus for this volume, whose range encompasses the rabbis of the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmud,and moves via Carolingian and Norman France, Siena, Antioch, and high and late medieval England to the eve of the Reformation. Chapters investigate the creation and reconstitution of different expressions of masculine identity, from the clerical enthusiasts for marriage to the lay practitioners of chastity, from crusading bishops to holy kings. They also consider the extent to which lay and clerical understandings of masculinity existed in an unstable dialectical relationship, at times sharing similar features, at others pointedly different, co-opting and rejecting features of the other; the articles show this interplay to be more far more complicated than a simple linear narrative of either increasing divergence, or of clerical colonization of lay masculinity. They also challenge conventional historiographies of the adoption of clerical celibacy, of the decline of monasticism and the gendered nature of piety. Patricia Cullum is Head of History at the University of Huddersfield; Katherine J. Lewis is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Huddersfield. Contributors: James G. Clark, P.H. Cullum, Kirsten A. Fenton, Joanna Huntington, Katherine J. Lewis, Matthew Mesley, Catherine Sanok, Michael L. Satlow, Rachel Stone, Jennifer D. Thibodeaux, Marita von Weissenberg

This volume presents contributions to the conference Old English Runes Workshop, organised by the Eichstatt-Munchen Research Unit of the Academy project Runic Writing in the Germanic Languages (RuneS) and held at the Catholic University of Eichstatt-Ingolstadt in March 2012. The conference brought together experts working in an area broadly referred to as Runology. Scholars working with runic objects come from several different fields of specialisation, and the aim was to provide more mutual insight into the various methodologies and theoretical paradigms used in these different approaches to the study of runes or, in the present instance more specifically, runic inscriptions generally assigned to the English and/or the Frisian runic corpora. Success in that aim should automatically bring with it the reciprocal benefit of improving access to and understanding of the runic evidence, expanding and enhancing insights gained within such closely connected areas of study of the Early-Mediaeval past.

This is a collection of the selected papers of John La Patourel, considered by him to be the most representative of his body of work on the Norman and Plantaganet feudal empires. A striking feature of this anthology is the unity, modification and development of Professor Le Patourel's thought from his earliest to the latest essays included. Adopting a comparative framework and looking at topics such as the Channel Islands in the early middle ages, Normandy and England from 1066-1144, the Angevin Empire, the Hundred Years War and the Treaty of Bretigny, Professor La Patourel's work yields new insights and understandings in the history of 14th-century Europe.

In this volume, we approach the phenomenon of slavery and other types of strong asymmetrical dependencies from two methodologically and theoretically distinct perspectives: semantics and lexical fields. Detailed analyses of key terms that are associated with the conceptualization of strong asymmetrical dependencies promise to provide new insights into the self-concept and knowledge of pre-modern societies. The majority of these key terms have not been studied from a semantic or terminological perspective so far. Our understanding of lexical fields is based on an onomasiological approach - which linguistic items are used to refer to a concept? Which words are used to express a concept? This means that the concept is a semantic unit which is not directly accessible but may be manifested in different ways on the linguistic level. We are interested in single concepts such as 'wisdom' or 'fear', but also in more complex semantic units like 'strong asymmetrical dependencies'. In our volume, we bring together and compare case studies from very different social orders and normative perspectives. Our examples range from Ancient China and Egypt over Greek and Maya societies to Early Modern Russia, the Ottoman Empire and Islamic and Roman law.

This is the first scholarly study of the political role of the Order of the Garter during the late middle ages. It evaluates the relationship between the practical objectives served by the institution and its status as a chivalric elite. Focusing on the years between the Garter's inception in 1348 and the deposition of Henry VI in 1461, the study considers the Order's conception, companionship and collective activities, and places them against the political backdrop of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Hugh Collins highlights the potential of the fraternity as an instrument of political patronage, and attributes its success in this area to the important balance achieved in the Garter's constitution and fellowship between pragmatic considerations and knightly ideas. His examination of the interdependence of these two facets thus reveals the extent to which political society in the late middle ages founded its ambitions and aspirations on the cult of chivalry.

The Routledge History of Medieval Magic brings together the work of scholars from across Europe and North America to provide extensive insights into recent developments in the study of medieval magic between c.1100 and c.1500. This book covers a wide range of topics, including the magical texts which circulated in medieval Europe, the attitudes of intellectuals and churchmen to magic, the ways in which magic intersected with other aspects of medieval culture, and the early witch trials of the fifteenth century. In doing so, it offers the reader a detailed look at the impact that magic had within medieval society, such as its relationship to gender roles, natural philosophy, and courtly culture. This is furthered by the book's interdisciplinary approach, containing chapters dedicated to archaeology, literature, music, and visual culture, as well as texts and manuscripts. The Routledge History of Medieval Magic also outlines how research on this subject could develop in the future, highlighting under-explored subjects, unpublished sources, and new approaches to the topic. It is the ideal book for both established scholars and students of medieval magic.

Jacobean Public Theatre recovers for the modern reader the acting, production and performance values of the public theatre of Jacobean London. It relates this drama to the popular culutre of the day and concludes with a close study of four important plays, including King Lear, which emerge in an unexpected light as the products of popular tradition.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203169166

Voice is a fleeting physical phenomenon that leaves behind traces of its existence. Medieval literary voices offers a wide-reaching approach to the concept of literary voices, both the vanished authorial ones and the implicit textual ones. Its impressive lineup deepens our understanding of how literary voices evoke the elusive voices lurking beyond the text, capturing the absent authorial voice, the traces of scribal voices and the soundscape of the uttered text. It explores multiple dimensions of medieval voice and vocalisations, and the interactions between literary voices and their authorial, scribal and socio-political settings. It contends that through the theorizing of literary voices we can begin to understand the ways in which medieval voices mediate or proclaim an embodied selfhood or material presence, how they dictate or contest moral conventions, and how they create and sustain narrative soundscapes. -- .

This study comprises a descriptive analysis of the entire range of Anglo-Saxon grave goods and an exploration of their causes and meanings from the 7th and 8th centuries, a time when kingdoms went through far-reaching changes in their ideologies, trade relationships and social structures. The first half of the book consists of discussion of identification of the data, the grave-goods types, the cultural affliations of grave-goods and interpretation of the data. The second half consists of a gazetteer of conversion-period Anglo-Saxon burial sites, numerous maps and pages of figures illustrating the artefacts. Geake concludes that the grave-goods from this period expressed a pan-English neo-classical' identity, an Anglo-Saxon imperial ideology, drawing heavily on Roman prototypes and that this identity was promoted by the church and the state to legitimise the power of their hierarchies.

Vitality and change marked twelfth- and thirteenth-century medieval Mediterranean society. Many sought to capitalize upon resurgences in economic success, political intrigue, and social cohesion. Alfonso II (1162-1196) and his son Peter II (1196-1213) of the Crown of Aragon worked diligently to augment their regional success. Yet the sources relating the internal workings of these developments are, by themselves, insufficient for appreciating the scope and potential of these opportunities. Considering a wide array of sources reveals the tenacity with which Alfonso II and Peter II forged a tighter Mediterranean regional network ready to respond to urgent needs and enduring concerns.

Winner of ASOR's 2022 G. Ernest Wright Award for the most substantial volume dealing with archaeological material, excavation reports and material culture from the ancient Near East and Eastern Mediterranean. This is a complete history of Antioch, one of the most significant major cities of the eastern Mediterranean and a crossroads for the Silk Road, from its foundation by the Seleucids, through Roman rule, the rise of Christianity, Islamic and Byzantine conquests, to the Crusades and beyond. Antioch has typically been treated as a city whose classical glory faded permanently amid a series of natural disasters and foreign invasions in the sixth and seventh centuries CE. Such studies have obstructed the view of Antioch's fascinating urban transformations from classical to medieval to modern city and the processes behind these transformations. Through its comprehensive blend of textual sources and new archaeological data reanalyzed from Princeton's 1930s excavations and recent discoveries, this book offers unprecedented insights into the complete history of Antioch, recreating the lives of the people who lived in it and focusing on the factors that affected them during the evolution of its remarkable cityscape. While Antioch's built environment is central, the book also utilizes landscape archaeological work to consider the city in relation to its hinterland, and numismatic evidence to explore its economics. The outmoded portrait of Antioch as a sadly perished classical city par excellence gives way to one in which it shines as brightly in its medieval Islamic, Byzantine, and Crusader incarnations. Antioch: A History offers a new portal to researching this long-lasting city and is also suitable for a wide variety of teaching needs, both undergraduate and graduate, in the fields of classics, history, urban studies, archaeology, Silk Road studies, and Near Eastern/Middle Eastern studies. Just as importantly, its clarity makes it attractive for, and accessible to, a general readership outside the framework of formal instruction.

In Melusine's Footprint: Tracing the Legacy of a Medieval Myth, editors Misty Urban, Deva Kemmis, and Melissa Ridley Elmes offer an invigorating international and interdisciplinary examination of the legendary fairy Melusine. Along with fresh insights into the popular French and German traditions, these essays investigate Melusine's English, Dutch, Spanish, and Chinese counterparts and explore her roots in philosophy, folklore, and classical myth. Combining approaches from art history, history, alchemy, literature, cultural studies, and medievalism, applying rigorous critical lenses ranging from feminism and comparative literature to film and monster theory, this volume brings Melusine scholarship into the twenty-first century with twenty lively and evocative essays that reassess this powerful figure's multiple meanings and illuminate her dynamic resonances across cultures and time. Contributors are Anna Casas Aguilar, Jennifer Alberghini, Frederika Bain, Anna-Lisa Baumeister, Albrecht Classen, Chera A. Cole, Tania M. Colwell, Zoe Enstone, Stacey L. Hahn, Deva F. Kemmis, Ana Pairet, Pit Peporte, Simone Pfleger, Caroline Prud'Homme, Melissa Ridley Elmes, Renata Schellenberg, Misty Urban, Angela Jane Weisl, Lydia Zeldenrust, and Zifeng Zhao.

This comparative study explores three key cultural and political spheres - the Latin west, Byzantium and the Islamic world from Central Asia to the Atlantic - roughly from the emergence of Islam to the fall of Constantinople. These spheres drew on a shared pool of late antique Mediterranean culture, philosophy and science, and they had monotheism and historical antecedents in common. Yet where exactly political and spiritual power lay, and how it was exercised, differed. This book focuses on power dynamics and resource-allocation among ruling elites; the legitimisation of power and property with the aid of religion; and on rulers' interactions with local elites and societies. Offering the reader route-maps towards navigating each sphere and grasping the fundamentals of its political culture, this set of parallel studies offers a timely and much needed framework for comparing the societies surrounding the medieval Mediterranean.

During the Middle Ages, the head of St John the Baptist was widely venerated. According to the biblical text, John was beheaded at the order of Herod's stepdaughter, who is traditionally given the name Salome. His head was later found in Jerusalem. Legends concerning the discovery of this relic form the basis of an iconographic type in which the head of St John the Baptist is represented as an "object." The phenomenon of the Johannesschussel is the subject of this essay. Little is known about how exactly these objects functioned. How are we to understand this fascination with horror, death and decapitation? What phantasms does the artifact channel? The present study offers the unique key to the Johannesschussel as artifact, phenomenon, phantasm and medium.

This title offers a complete account of the rulers and politics of the Plantagenet reign. The story of the Plantagenet dynasty is the story of one of the pivotal ages in English history. Attitudes and outlooks were formed with regard to a vast array of profoundly important issues. Such fundamental issues as the relationship between church and state, the nature of government/governance, the interaction of social and economic classes, and ultimately the idea of what it means to be English were all shaped to a great degree by the events of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

An examination of the fabrics, garments and cloth of the Iberian Middle Ages, bringing out in particular the international context. The Medieval Iberian Peninsula, encompassing various territories which make up present-day Spain and Portugal, was an ethnic and religious melting pot, comprising Christian, Jewish and Muslim communities, each contributing to a vibrant textile economy. They were also defined and distinguished by the material culture of clothing and dress, partly dictated by religious and cultural tradition, partly imposed by rulers anxious to avoid cross-ethnic relationships considered undesirable. Nevertheless, textiles, especially magnificent Islamic silks, crossed these barriers. The essays in this volume offer the first full analysis of Iberian textiles from the period, drawing on both material remains and historical documents, supported by evidence from contemporary artwork. Chapters cover surviving textiles, many of them magnificent silks; textile industries and trade; court dress and its use as a language of power and patronage; the vast market in utilitarian textiles for lower-status clothing and furnishings; and Muslim and Jewish dress. It also considers Arabic and Jewish texts as sources of information on textiles and the Arabic garment-names which crossed into Spanish. Particular emphasis is given to the the different ethnicities of Iberia and their influences on the use and trade of garments (both precious and common-place) and textiles.

Drawing on sources from archaeology and written texts, the author brings out the full significance of trees in both pagan and Christian Anglo-Saxon religion. Trees were of fundamental importance in Anglo-Saxon material culture - but they were also a powerful presence in Anglo-Saxon religion before and after the introduction of Christianity. This book shows that they remained prominentin early English Christianity, and indeed that they may have played a crucial role in mediating the transition between ancient beliefs and the new faith. It argues that certain characteristics of sacred trees in England can be determined from insular contexts alone, independent of comparative evidence from culturally related peoples. This nevertheless suggests the existence of traditions comparable to those found in Scandinavia and Germany. Tree symbolismhelped early English Christians to understand how the beliefs of their ancestors about trees, posts, and pillars paralleled the appearance of similar objects in the Old Testament. In this way, the religious symbols of their forebears were aligned with precursors to the cross in Scripture. Literary evidence from England and Scandinavia similarly indicates a shared tradition of associations between the bodies of humans, trees, and other plant-life. Though potentially ancient, these ideas flourished amongst the abundance of vegetative symbolism found in the Christian tradition. Michael Bintley is Senior Lecturer in Medieval Literature at Canterbury Christ Church University.

Alongside annals, chronicles were the main genre of historical writing in the Middle Ages. Their significance as sources for the study of medieval history and culture is today widely recognised not only by historians, but also by students of medieval literature and linguistics and by art historians. The series The Medieval Chronicle aims to provide a representative survey of the on-going research in the field of chronicle studies, illustrated by examples from specific chronicles from a wide variety of countries, periods and cultural backgrounds.