People in the Middle Ages and the early modern age more often suffered from imprisonment and enslavement than we might have assumed. Incarceration and Slavery in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age approaches these topics from a wide variety of perspectives and demonstrates collectively the great relevance of the issues involved. Both incarceration and slavery were (and continue to be) most painful experiences, and no one was guaranteed exemption from it. High-ranking nobles and royalties were often the victims of imprisonment and, at times, had to wait many years until their ransom was paid. Similarly, slavery existed throughout Christian Europe and in the Arab world. However, while imprisonment occasionally proved to be the catalyst for major writings and creativity, slaves in the Ottoman empire and in Egypt succeeded in rising to the highest position in society (Janissaries, Mamluks, and others).

Annual volume of essays treating topics ranging from physical impairment to narrative afterlife and time. The fifteenth century defies consensus on fundamental issues; most scholars agree, however, that the period outgrew the Middle Ages, that it was a time of transition and a passage to modern times. Fifteenth-Century Studiestreats diverse aspects of the period, including liberal and fine arts, historiography, medicine, and religion. Volume 35 addresses topics including physical impairments as depicted in surgical handbooks printed in Germany and as reflected through eyeglasses for the blind (a therapy proposed by French vernacular poets); literary constructions of women in de Meun's Cite des Dames and in hagiographic legends of Spain; the evolution of the Order of theGarter as dramatized in Shakespeare; serious elements in French farces; the festival context of Villon's Pet-au-Deable; Boethius in the late Middle Ages; A Revelation of Purgatory and Chaucer's Prioress; Piers Plowman in one British Library manuscript; and narrative afterlife and time in Henryson's Testament of Cresseid. Book reviews conclude the volume. Contributors: Milagros Alameda-Irizarry, Chiara Benati, EdelgardE. DuBruck, Rosanne Gasse, Chelsea Honeyman, Noel Harold Kaylor Jr., James N. Ortego II, E. L. Risden, Julie Singer, Geri L. Smith, Martin W. Walsh. Matthew Z. Heintzelman is Curator of the Austria/Germany Study Center and Rare Book Cataloger at Hill Museum & Manuscript Library, Saint John's University, Minnesota; Barbara I. Gusick is Professor Emerita of English at Troy University Dothan; Martin W. Walsh is Head of the Drama Program at the University of Michigan's Residential College.

This book presents-through a series of nine high quality essays by international scholars-the beginnings of the lexicographic tradition and the appearance of the first mono- and multilingual dictionaries in various language areas across the world, paying particular attention to their dependence on glosses and glossaries.The contributions analyze, on the basis of significant case studies, how dictionaries first emerged in a wide spectrum of cultures, ranging from Greek Antiquity to 9th-century Japan, from Medieval Britain to 15th-century Poland. In this way, the book highlights both similarities and differences among these traditions, and allows a global and comparative approach to the history of lexicography in its earliest phases, a topic which, up until now, has usually been studied only within single languages and cultures.