Queer Love in the Middle Ages points out queer themes in the works of the French canon, including "Perceval," "Romance of the Rose, " and "Roman d'Eneas." It brings out less known works that prominently feature same-sex themes: Yde and Olive, a romance with a cross-dressed heroine who marries a princess; and many others. The book combines an interest in contemporary French theory (Kristeva, Barthes, psychoanalysis) with a close reading of medieval texts. It discusses important recent publications in pre-modern queer studies in the US. It is the first major contribution to queer studies in medieval French literature.

Trans Historical explores the plurality of gender experiences that flourished before the modern era, from Late Antiquity to the eighteenth century, across a broad geographic range, from Spain to Poland and Byzantium to Boston. Refuting arguments that transgender people, experiences, and identities were non-existent or even impossible prior to the twentieth century, this volume focuses on archives—literary texts, trial transcripts, documents, and artifacts—that denaturalize gender as a category. The volume historicizes the many different social lives of sexual differentiation, exploring what gender might have been before modern medicine, the anatomical sciences, and the sedimentation of gender difference into its putatively binary form. The volume's multidisciplinary group of contributors consider how individuals, communities, and states understood and enacted gender as a social experience distinct from the assignment of sex at birth. Alongside historical questions about the meaning of sexual differentiation, Trans Historical also offers a series of diverse meditations on how scholars of the medieval and early modern periods might approach gender nonconformity before the nineteenth-century emergence of the norm and the normal. Contributors: Abdulhamit Arvas, University of Pennsylvania; Roland Betancourt, University of California, Irvine; M. W. Bychowski, Case Western Reserve University; Emma Campbell, Warwick University; Igor H. de Souza, Yale University; Leah DeVun, Rutgers University; Micah James Goodrich, University of Connecticut; Alexa Alice Joubin, George Washington University; Anna Kłosowska; Greta LaFleur; Scott Larson, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Kathleen Perry Long, Cornell University; Robert Mills, University College London; Masha Raskolnikov; Zrinka Stahuljak, UCLA.

Trans Historical explores the plurality of gender experiences that flourished before the modern era, from Late Antiquity to the eighteenth century, across a broad geographic range, from Spain to Poland and Byzantium to Boston. Refuting arguments that transgender people, experiences, and identities were non-existent or even impossible prior to the twentieth century, this volume focuses on archives-literary texts, trial transcripts, documents, and artifacts-that denaturalize gender as a category. The volume historicizes the many different social lives of sexual differentiation, exploring what gender might have been before modern medicine, the anatomical sciences, and the sedimentation of gender difference into its putatively binary form. The volume's multidisciplinary group of contributors consider how individuals, communities, and states understood and enacted gender as a social experience distinct from the assignment of sex at birth. Alongside historical questions about the meaning of sexual differentiation, Trans Historical also offers a series of diverse meditations on how scholars of the medieval and early modern periods might approach gender nonconformity before the nineteenth-century emergence of the norm and the normal. Contributors: Abdulhamit Arvas, University of Pennsylvania; Roland Betancourt, University of California, Irvine; M. W. Bychowski, Case Western Reserve University; Emma Campbell, Warwick University; Igor H. de Souza, Yale University; Leah DeVun, Rutgers University; Micah James Goodrich, University of Connecticut; Alexa Alice Joubin, George Washington University; Anna Klosowska; Greta LaFleur; Scott Larson, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Kathleen Perry Long, Cornell University; Robert Mills, University College London; Masha Raskolnikov; Zrinka Stahuljak, UCLA.

Proceedings from two Speculative Medievalisms symposia, held at King's College London (Jan. 2011) and The Graduate Center, City University of New York (Sep. 2011), and organized by The Petropunk Collective (Eileen Joy, Anna Klosowska, Nicola Masciandaro, and Michael O'Rourke). These interdisciplinary events were dedicated to dialogue and cross-contamination between traditional concepts of speculatio, present-minded premodern studies, and contemporary speculative realist and object-oriented philosophies. In its medieval formulation, speculatio signifies the essentially reflective and imaginative operations of the intellect. Here the world, books, and mind itself are all conceived as specula (mirrors) through which the hermeneutic gaze can gain access to what lies beyond it. "To know is to bend over a mirror where the world is reflected, to descry images reflected from sphere to sphere: the medieval man was always before a mirror, both when he looked around himself and when he surrendered to his own imagination" (Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas). Correlatively, speculative realism, as the term suggests, is characterized by the self-contradictory intensity of a desire for thought that can think beyond itself - a desire that proceeds, like all philosophy, in a twisted and productive relation to the phantasm of the word. Aiming to rise above and tunnel below the thought-being or self-world correlation, speculative realism "depart s] from the text-centered hermeneutic models of the past and engage s] in daring speculations about the nature of reality itself" (The Speculative Turn). Speculative Medievalisms, like some weird friar-alchemist in an inexistent romance, plays the erotic go-between for these text-centered and text-eccentric intellectual domains by trying to transmute the space between past and present modes of speculation from shared blindness to love at first sight. Possibly succeeding, the volume brings together the work of a motley crew of philosophers and premodernists into prismatic relation. Contents: Kathleen Biddick, "Toy Stories: Vita Nuda Then and Now?" - Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, "Sublunary" - Graham Harman, "Aristotle With a Twist" - Anna Klosowska, "Transmission by Sponge: Aristotle's Poetics" - J. Allan Mitchell, "Cosmic Eggs, or Events Before Everything" - Kellie Robertson, "Abusing Aristotle" - Anthony Paul Smith, "The Speculative Angel" - Nick Srnicek, "Abstraction and Value: The Medieval Origins of Financial Quantification" - Eugene Thacker, "Divine Darkness" - Scott Wilson, "Neroplatonism" - Julian Yates, "Shakespeare's Kitchen Archives." With response and post-script essays by: Liza Blake, Patricia Clough, Drew Daniel, Eileen A. Joy and Anna Klosowska, Nicola Masciandaro, Michael O'Rourke, and Ben Woodard.

Volume 5 of the journal Glossator. Contents: What Separates the Birth of Twins - Jordan Kirk Prosopopeia to Prosopagnosia: Dante on Facebook - Scott Wilson When You Call My Name - Karmen MacKendrick All That Remains Unnoticed I Adore: Spencer Reece's Addresses - Eileen A. Joy Plato's Symposium and Commentary for Love - David Hancock Dreaming Death: the Onanistic and Self-Annihilative Principles of Love in Fernando Pessoa's Book of Disquiet - Gary J. Shipley On Not Loving Everyone: Comments on Jean-Luc Nancy's "L'amour en eclats Shattered Love]" - Mathew Abbott The Grace of Hermeneutics - Michael Edward Moore Tearsong: Valentine Visconti's Inverted Stoicism - Anna K osowska