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.

This book argues that autistic children can be successful in early learning environments when teachers and parents understand the basics of autism, and when they have the tools to help these children expand their social and emotional skills. For parents and teachers who may be unfamiliar with autism (especially in its milder, more elusive forms), Right from the Start is an indispensable resource explaining the best practices for teaching young children on the spectrum. The book offers practical strategies that any teacher can easily incorporate into her daily routine—strategies that enrich the learning environment for neurotypical children as well. Right from the Start is also a useful resource for parents who can practice many of the book’s techniques at home to reinforce the development of key skills. While many educational and therapeutic approaches to autism emphasize changing children's behavior and gaining their compliance, this book foregrounds the importance of self-regulation. This concept refers to a person’s ability to cope with emotional highs and lows, to control his or her reactions to events, and to feel “just right.” It is important that we help children learn to recognize, assess, and modulate their feelings because self-regulation is the foundation of all learning and social development. Children need to be able to self-regulate to get through the day and to function well in the long term. While all young children struggle with self-regulation, autistic children find it especially difficult to manage their strong feelings. As a result of their neurodifferences, these children experience high levels of anxiety, sensitivity to stimuli in the environment, and difficulty understanding the nuances of social interaction. These and other challenges compromise autistic children’s ability to self-regulate. In addition to discussing the importance of self-regulation, the book addresses the following key aspects of autism: social interaction, play skills, and sensory processing issues. After explaining why children experience challenges in these areas—and how such challenges impact self-regulation—the book offers techniques designed to help children improve their coping skills and overcome the various difficulties associated with autism. The chapters outline concrete strategies for helping children increase their social awareness, manage their sensory needs, engage with teachers and peers, and develop the language necessary for communicating emotions. With the tools in this book, parents, teachers, and administrators can help autistic children thrive from the first moment they ever set foot in a classroom.

In The Claims of Poverty, Kate Crassons explores a widespread ideological crisis concerning poverty that emerged in the aftermath of the plague in late medieval England. She identifies poverty as a central preoccupation in texts ranging from Piers Plowman and Wycliffite writings to The Book of Margery Kempe and the York cycle plays. Crassons shows that these and other works form a complex body of writing in which poets, dramatists, and preachers anxiously wrestled with the status of poverty as a force that is at once a sacred imitation of Christ and a social stigma; a voluntary form of life and an unwelcome hardship; an economic reality and a spiritual disposition. Crassons argues that literary texts significantly influenced the cultural conversation about poverty, deepening our understanding of its urgency as a social, economic, and religious issue. These texts not only record debates about the nature of poverty as a form of either vice or virtue, but explore epistemological and ethical aspects of the debates. When faced with a claim of poverty, people effectively become readers interpreting the signs of need in the body and speech of their fellow human beings. The literary and dramatic texts of late medieval England embodied the complexity of such interaction with particular acuteness, revealing the ethical stakes of interpretation as an act with direct material consequences. As The Claims of Poverty demonstrates, medieval literature shaped perceptions about who is defined as "poor," and in so doing it emerged as a powerful cultural force that promoted competing models of community, sanctity, and justice.