The essays create an interdisciplinary conversation about the nature and function of sacred and devotional objects across the globe during the medieval and Early Modern period. Topics include the veneration of relics of the Buddha, the cult of the saints in medieval and early modern Ireland, medieval surveys of pagan and Christian Rome.

A range of approaches (literary, historical, art-historical, codicological) to this mysterious but hugely significant manuscript. Extravagantly heterogeneous in its contents, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 86 is an utterly singular production. On its last folio, the scribe signs off with a self-portrait - a cartoonishly-drawn male head wearing a close-fitted hood - and an inscription: "scripsi librum in anno et iii mensibus" (I wrote the book in a year and three months). His fifteen months' labour resulted in one of the most important miscellanies to survive from medieval England: a trilingual marvel of a compilation, with quirky combinations of content that range from religion, to science, to literature of a decidedly secular cast. It holds medical recipes, charms, prayers, prognostications, magic tricks, pious doctrine, a liturgical calendar, religious songs, lively debates, poetry on love and death, proverbs, fables, fabliaux, scurrilous games, and gender-based diatribes. That Digby is from the thirteenth century adds to its appeal, for English literary remnants from before 1300 are all too rare. Scholars on both sides of the vernacular divide, French and English, are deeply intrigued by it. Many of its texts are found nowhere else: for example, the French Arthurian Lay of the Horn, the English fabliau Dame Sirith and the beast fable Fox and Wolf, and the French Strife between Two Ladies (a candid debate on feminine politics). The interpretationsoffered in this volume of its contents, presentation, and ownership, show that there is much to discover in Digby's lively record of the social and spiritual pastimes of a book-owning gentry family. SUSANNA FEIN is Professor of English at Kent State University. CONTRIBUTORS: Maureen Boulton, Neil Cartlidge, Marilyn Corrie, Susanna Fein, Marjorie Harrington, John Hines, Jennifer Jahner, Melissa Julian-Jones, Jenni Nuttall, David Raybin, Delbert Russell, J.D. Sargan, Sheri Smith

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 medieval English writing along several axes: poetic, philosophical, material-textual, and historical. Gender, Poetry, and the Form of Thought in Later Medieval Literature focuses on the ways that the medieval body becomes a site of inquiry and agency, whether in the form of the idealized feminine body of secular and religious lyric, the sexually permissive and permeable body of fabliaux, or the intercessory body of religious devotional writing. This collection asks, how do imagined bodies frame literary explorations of philosophical categories such as nature, the will, and emotion? What can accounts of specific historical medieval women-as authors, patrons, interlocutors-tell us about such representations? In what ways do devotional practices and texts intersect with the representations of gender? The essays span a broad range of medieval literary works, from the lais of Marie de France to Pearl to Piers Plowman and the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer, and a broad range of methodological approaches, from philosophy to affect and manuscript studies.

Fruits of the most recent research into the "long" thirteenth century. The twin themes of authority and resistance are the focus of this volume, explored through topics such as landholding and secular politics, the church and religious orders and contemporary imagery and its reception. Together, thepapers combine to illustrate the variety of ways in which historians of the "long" thirteenth century are able to examine the practices and norms through which individuals and institutions sought to establish their authority, andthe ways in which these were open to challenge. JANET BURTON is Professor of Medieval History at University of Wales: Trinity Saint David; PHILLIPP SCHOFIELD is Professor of Medieval History at Aberystwyth University; BJORN WEILER is Professor of History at Aberystwyth University. Contributors: Helen Birkett, Richard Cassidy, Judith Collard, Peter Coss, Ian Forrest, Philippa Hoskin, Jennifer Jahner, Melissa Julian Jones, Fergus Oakes, John Sabapathy, Sita Steckel.

History writing in the Middle Ages did not belong to any particular genre, language or class of texts. Its remit was wide, embracing the events of antiquity; the deeds of saints, rulers and abbots; archival practices; and contemporary reportage. This volume addresses the challenges presented by medieval historiography by using the diverse methodologies of medieval studies: legal and literary history, art history, religious studies, codicology, the history of the emotions, gender studies and critical race theory. Spanning one thousand years of historiography in England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland, the essays map historical thinking across literary genres and expose the rich veins of national mythmaking tapped into by medieval writers. Additionally, they attend to the ways in which medieval histories crossed linguistic and geographical borders. Together, they trace multiple temporalities and productive anachronisms that fuelled some of the most innovative medieval writing.

The monograph series Oxford Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture showcases the plurilingual and multicultural quality of medieval literature and actively seeks to promote research that not only focuses on the array of subjects medievalists now pursue in literature, theology, and philosophy, in social, political, jurisprudential, and intellectual history, the history of art, and the history of science but also that combines these subjects productively. It offers innovative studies on topics that may include, but are not limited to, manuscript and book history; languages and literatures of the global Middle Ages; race and the post-colonial; the digital humanities, media and performance; music; medicine; the history of affect and the emotions; the literature and practices of devotion; the theory and history of gender and sexuality, ecocriticism and the environment; theories of aesthetics; medievalism. l Literature and Law in the Era of Magna Carta traces processes of literary training and experimentation across the early history of the English common law, from its beginnings in the reign of Henry II to its tumultuous consolidations under the reigns of John and Henry III. The period from the mid-twelfth through the thirteenth centuries witnessed an outpouring of innovative legal writing in England, from Magna Carta to the scores of statute books that preserved its provisions. An era of civil war and imperial fracture, it also proved a time of intensive self-definition, as communities both lay and ecclesiastic used law to articulate collective identities. Literature and Law in the Era of Magna Carta uncovers the role that grammatical and rhetorical training played in shaping these arguments for legal self-definition. Beginning with the life of Archbishop Thomas Becket, the book interweaves the histories of literary pedagogy and English law, showing how foundational lessons in poetics helped generate both a language and theory of corporate autonomy. In this book, Geoffrey of Vinsauf's phenomenally popular Latin compositional handbook, the Poetria nova, finds its place against the diplomatic backdrop of the English Interdict, while Robert Grosseteste's Anglo-French devotional poem, the Chateau d'Amour, is situated within the landscape of property law and Jewish-Christian interactions. Exploring a shared vocabulary across legal and grammatical fields, this book argues that poetic habits of thought proved central to constructing the narratives that medieval law tells about itself and that later scholars tell about the origins of English constitutionalism.