Ecstatic Transformation studies the manner in which medieval ways of knowing the Oriental 'other' were constructed around the idea of a utopic East as located in the legend and Letter of Prester John (c. 1160). The birth of utopic thinking, it argues, is tied to an understanding of alterity having as much to do with the ways the medieval West understood itself as the manner in which the foreign was mapped. Drawing upon the insights of cultural studies, film studies, and psychoanalysis, this book rethinks the contours of the known and the unknown in the medieval period. It demonstrates how the idea of otherness intersected in intricate ways with other categories of difference (spatial, gender, and religious). Scholars in the fields of history as well as literary and religious studies will be interested in the manner in which the book considers the formal dimensions of how histories of the Oriental 'other' were written and lived.

This timely volume examines the commitments of historicism in the wake of New Historicism. It contributes to the construction of a materialist historicism while, at the same time, proposing that discussions of work need not be limited to the clash between labor and capital. To this end, the essays offer more than a strictly historical view of the complex terms, social and literary, within which labor was treated in the medieval period. Several of the essays strive to reformulate the very critical language we use to think about the categories of labor and work through a continually doubled engagement with modern theories of labor and medieval theories and practices of labor.