Essays using feminist approaches to offer fresh insights into aspects of the texts and the material culture of the middle ages. Feminist discourses have called into question axiomatic world views and shown how gender and sexuality inevitably shape our perceptions, both historically and in the present moment. Founding Feminisms in Medieval Studies advances that critical endeavour with new questions and insights relating to gender and queer studies, sexualities, the subaltern, margins, and blurred boundaries. The volume's contributions, from French literary studies as well as German, English, history and art history, evince a variety of modes of feminist analysis, primarily in medieval studies but with extensions into early modernism. Several interrogate the ethics of feminist hermeneutics, the function of women characters in various literary genres, and so-called "natural" binaries - sex/gender, male/female, East/West, etc. - that undergird our vision of the world. Others investigate learned women and notions of female readership, authorship, and patronage in the production and reception of texts and manuscripts. Still others look at bodies - male male, female, neither, and both - and how clothes cover and socially encode them. Founding Feminisms in Medieval Studies is a tribute to E. Jane Burns, whose important work has proven foundational to late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Old French feminist studies. Through her scholarship, teaching, and leadership in co-founding the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship, Burns has inspired a new generation of feminist scholars. Laine E. Doggett is Associate Professor of French at St. Mary's College of Maryland, St. Mary's City; Daniel E. O'Sullivan is Professor of French at the University of Mississippi. Contributors: Cynthia J. Brown, Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, Kristin L. Burr, Madeline H. Caviness, Laine E. Doggett, Sarah-Grace Heller,Ruth Mazo Karras, Roberta L. Krueger, Sharon Kinoshita, Tom Linkinen, Daniel E. O'Sullivan, Lisa Perfetti, Ann Marie Rasmussen, Nancy Freeman Regalado, Elizabeth Robertson, Helen Solterer

New essays by outstanding European and American medievalists on major aspects of the most enduring medieval epic. The legend of Tristan and Isolde -- the archetypal narrative about the turbulent effects of all-consuming, passionate love -- achieved its most complete and profound rendering in the German poet Gottfried von Strassburg's verse romance Tristan (ca. 1200-1210). Along with his great literary rival Wolfram von Eschenbach and his versatile predecessor Hartmann von Aue, Gottfried is considered one of three greatest poets produced by medieval Germany, andover the centuries his Tristan has lost none of its ability to attract with the beauty of its poetry and to challenge -- if not provoke -- with its sympathetic depiction of adulterous love. The essays, written by a dozen leading Gottfried specialists in Europe and North America, provide definitive treatments of significant aspects of this most important and challenging high medieval version of the Tristan legend. They examine aspects of Gottfried'sunparalleled narrative artistry; the important connections between Gottfried's Tristan and the socio-cultural situation in which it was composed; and the reception of Gottfried's challenging romance both by later poets inthe Middle Ages and by nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors, composers, and artists -- particularly Richard Wagner. The volume also contains new interpretations of significant figures, episodes, and elements (Riwalin and Blanscheflur, Isolde of the White Hands, the Love Potion, the performance of love, the female figures) in Gottfried's revolutionary romance, which provocatively elevates a sexual, human love to a summum bonum. Will Hasty is Professor of German at the University of Florida. He is the editor of Companion to Wolfram's "Parzival," (Camden House, 1999). Click here to view the introduction (PDF file 83KB)

Mass-produced of tin-lead alloys and cheap to make and purchase, medieval badges were brooch-like objects displaying familiar images. Circulating widely throughout Europe in the High and late Middle Ages, badges were usually small, around four-by-four centimeters, though examples as tiny as two centimeters and a few as large as ten centimeters have been found. About 75 percent of surviving badges are closely associated with specific charismatic or holy sites, and when sewn or pinned onto clothing or a hat, they would have marked their wearers as having successfully completed a pilgrimage. Many others, however, were artifacts of secular life; some were political devices-a swan, a stag, a rose-that would have denoted membership in a civic organization or an elite family, and others-a garland, a pair of clasped hands, a crowned heart-that would have been tokens of love or friendship. A good number are enigmatic and even obscene. The popularity of badges seems to have grown steadily from the last decades of the twelfth century before waning at the very end of the fifteenth century. Some 20,000 badges survive today, though historians estimate that as many as two million were produced in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries alone. Archaeologists and hobbyists alike continue to make new finds, often along muddy riverbanks in northern Europe. Interdisciplinary in approach, and sumptuously illustrated with more than 115 color and black-and-white images, Medieval Badges introduces badges in all their variety and uses. Ann Marie Rasmussen considers all medieval badges, whether they originated in religious or secular contexts, and highlights the different ways badges could confer meaning and identity on their wearers. Drawing on evidence from England, France, the Low Countries, Germany, and Scandinavia, this book provides information about the manufacture, preservation, and scholarly study of these artifacts. From chapters exploring badges and pilgrimage, to the complexities of the political use of badges, to the ways the visual meaning-making strategies of badges were especially well-suited to the unique features of medieval cities, this book offers an expansive introduction of these medieval objects for a wide readership.

The number of surviving medieval secular poems attributed to named female authors is small, some of the best known being those of the trobairitz the female troubadours of southern France. However, there is a large body of poetry that constructs a particular textual femininity through the use of the female voice. Some of these poems are by men and a few by women (including the trobairitz); many are anonymous, and often the gender of the poet is unresolvable. A "woman's song" in this sense can be defined as a female-voice poem on the subject of love, typically characterized by simple language, sexual candor, and apparent artlessness.
The chapters in "Medieval Woman's Song" bring together scholars in a range of disciplines to examine how both men and women contributed to this art form. Without eschewing consideration of authorship, the collection deliberately overturns the long-standing scholarly practice of treating as separate and distinct entities female-voice lyrics composed by men and those composed by women. What is at stake here is less the voice of women themselves than its cultural and generic construction.

More than any other secular story of the Middle Ages, the tale of Tristan and Isolde fascinated its audience. Adaptations in poetry, prose, and drama were widespread in western European vernacular languages. Visual portrayals of the story appear not only in manuscripts and printed books but in individual pictures and pictorial narratives, and on an amazing array of objects including stained glass, wall paintings, tiles, tapestries, ivory boxes, combs, mirrors, shoes, and misericords. The pan-European and cross-media nature of the surviving medieval evidence is not adequately reflected in current Tristan scholarship, which largely follows disciplinary and linguistic lines. The contributors to Visuality and Materiality in the Story of Tristan and Isolde seek to address this problem by opening a cross-disciplinary dialogue and by proposing a new set of intellectual coordinates-the concepts of materiality and visuality-without losing sight of the historical specificity or the aesthetic character of individual works of art and literature. Their theoretical paradigm allows them to survey the richness of the surviving evidence from a variety of disciplinary approaches, while offering new perspectives on the nature of representation in medieval culture. Enriched by numerous illustrations, this volume is an important examination of the story of Tristan and Isolde in the European context of its visual and textual transmission.

This volume contains papers by Germanists, historians, and art historians from Germany, Austria, the United States and Canada on visual and conceptual aspects of early modern city culture ranging from representations of the city to urban spatial and social practices. The essays focus on some of the culturally most vibrant cities in early modern Europe, with special emphasis on German-speaking countries: Nuremberg, Cologne, Vienna, Ghent, Munich, Amsterdam, Florence, and Rome. The topics include the dissemination and control of city images, carnivalizing performances of social/religious dissent, narrative constraints in fifteenth-century urban historiography, Christian humanism and the controversy over Jewish books, the Carthusian influence on the spiritual topography of a city, the humanist agenda in imperial entries, the evolution of three-dimensional city models, transposing Renaissance Italian song models into a transalpine city context, and the emergence of the city views known as vedute.

Bringing together the work of both leading and emerging scholars in the field of medieval gender studies, the essays in Rivalrous Masculinities advance our understanding of medieval masculinity as a pluralized category and as an intersectional category of gender. The essays in this volume are distinguished by a conceptual focus that goes beyo nd heteronormativity and by their attention to constructions of medieval masculinity in the context of femininity, class, religion, and place. Some widen the field of medieval gender studies inquiry to include explorations of medieval friendship as a framework or culture of arousal and deep emotionality that produced multiple, complex ways of living intensely with respect to gender and sexuality, without reducing all forms of intimacy to implicit sexuality. Some examine intersections of identity, explicating change and difference in conventional modes of gender with regards to regional culture, religion, race, or class. In order to ground this intersectional and interdisciplinary approach with the appropriate disciplinary expertise, the essays in this volume represent a broad cross-section of disciplines: art history, religious studies, history, and French, Italian, German, Yiddish, Middle English, and Old English literature. Together, they open up new intellectual vistas for future research in the field of medieval gender studies. Contributors include: Ann Marie Rasmussen, Clare A. Lees, Gillian R. Overing, J. Christian Straubhaar-Jones, Astrid Lembke, Darrin Cox, F. Regina Psaki, Corinne Wieben, Ruth Mazo Karras, Diane Wolfthal, Karma Lochrie, and Andreas Krass.

More than any other secular story of the Middle Ages, the tale of Tristan and Isolde fascinated its audience. Adaptations in poetry, prose, and drama were widespread in western European vernacular languages. Visual portrayals of the story appear not only in manuscripts and printed books but in individual pictures and pictorial narratives, and on an amazing array of objects including stained glass, wall paintings, tiles, tapestries, ivory boxes, combs, mirrors, shoes, and misericords.The pan-European and cross-media nature of the surviving medieval evidence is not adequately reflected in current Tristan scholarship, which largely follows disciplinary and linguistic lines. The contributors to "Visuality and Materiality in the Story of Tristan and Isolde" seek to address this problem by opening a cross-disciplinary dialogue and by proposing a new set of intellectual coordinates--the concepts of materiality and visuality--without losing sight of the historical specificity or the aesthetic character of individual works of art and literature. Their theoretical paradigm allows them to survey the richness of the surviving evidence from a variety of disciplinary approaches, while offering new perspectives on the nature of representation in medieval culture. Enriched by numerous illustrations, this volume is an important examination of the story of Tristan and Isolde in the European context of its visual and textual transmission. "Comprehensive and cutting edge, "Visuality and Materiality in the Story of Tristan and Isolde "defines the moment in the history of Tristan scholarship. The essays, gathered from both sides of the Atlantic, enrich and expand the key concepts of materiality and visuality to account for the proliferation of the Tristan story in an astonishing range of media. The collection gives scholars in several disciplines the tools to explore the productive connections between the verbal and the visual in medieval culture." --Sarah Westphal-Wihl, Washington University in St. Louis