Less than a hundred years after Thomas Becket’s martyrdom at the hands of four of Henry II’s knights, his Anglo-Norman mother was transformed into a pagan princess who abandoned faith and kin for Becket’s father and Christianity. Pagès uses this wholly fictional legend about the saint to examine the place and function of conversion and mission in The Man of Law’s Tale, juxtaposing the tale with the legend about Becket’s mother to assess the power (or lack thereof) of baptism in late medieval English works. This new comparative study thus provides productive insights into the complexity of the emergence of the concept of race in medieval English culture and literature.

Saints were powerful role models in the early Middle Ages, capable of defining communities. But what roles did saintly biographies play in shaping the medieval West? Can we understand society and its many post-Roman transformations through them? This short book takes readers from the creation of medieval hagiography, through the ways in which it circulated, to a wide-ranging assessment of different modern methodologies used to interrogate hagiographies, from early twentieth-century source criticism, to the insights gained from gender studies, postmodernism and digital humanities.

This book is a collection of essays offering a wide range of approaches to teaching with commonplace books. In the medieval period and beyond, commonplace books promoted a blend of excerpting, memorization, creative writing, and journaling, making them the analogue equivalent to modern-day digital journaling, bookmarking, and note-taking tools. Covering a variety of methods for introducing students to the medieval and Renaissance reading practice known as commonplacing, this volume provides instructors with concrete guidelines for using commonplace books as a teaching and learning tool. The enclosed essays provide a point of reference for best practices as well as concrete models for teaching and learning with commonplace books, helping instructors develop more student-centred, inclusive curricula.

Byzantine art is normally explained as devotional, historical, highly intellectualized, but this book argues for an experiential necessity for a fuller, deeper, more ethical approach to this art. Written in response to an exhibition the author curated at The Menil Collection in 2013, this monograph challenges us to search for novel ways to explore and interrogate the art of this distant culture. They marshal diverse disciplines—modern art, environmental theory, anthropology—to argue that Byzantine culture formed a special kind of Christian animism. While completely foreign to our world, that animism still holds important lessons for approaches to our own relations to the world. Mutual probings of subject and art, of past and present, arise in these essays—some new and some previously published—and new explanations therefore open up that will interest historians of art, museum professionals, and anyone interested in how art makes and remakes the world.

The study of medieval and early modern geographic space, literary cartography, and spatial thinking at a time of rapid digitization in the Humanities offers new ways to investigate spatial knowledge and world perceptions in pre-modern societies. Digitization of cultural heritage collections, open source databases, and interactive resources utilizing a rich variety of source materials—place names, early modern cadastral maps, medieval literature and art, Viking Age and medieval runic inscriptions—provides opportunities to re-think traditional lines of research on spatiality and worldviews, encourage innovation in methodology, and engage critically with digital outcomes. In this book, Nordic scholars of philology, onomastics, history, geography, literary studies, and digital humanities examine multiple aspects of ten large- and small-scale digital spatial infrastructures from the early stages of development to the practical applications of digital tools for studying spatial thinking and knowledge in pre-modern sources and societies.

<div>In recent years craft beer marketing has increasingly evoked the medieval past in orderto appeal to our collective sense of a lost community. This book discusses thedesire for the local, the non-corporate, and the pre-modern in the discourse ofcraft brewing, forming a strong counter-cultural narrative. However, suchdiscourses also reinforce colonial histories of purity and conquest whileeffacing indigenous voices. This book reveals that craft beer is therefore muchmore than a delicious adult beverage; its marketing reveals a cultural desirefor a past that has disappeared in a world that privileges the present.</div>

The problem of fraternal relations in the early Middle Ages has not been hitherto studied in detail, especially in comparison with the multitude of studies dealing with the models of marriage, gender-based social roles, or the relations between generations. Historians have been often prone to assume that relations between siblings in European culture were naturally constant, based on loyalty, solidarity, and readiness to act in the common interest, stemming from blood ties. However, this conviction equates the category of brotherhood/fraternitas used by medieval authors with concepts associated with sources from later periods. This study does not concern narrowly defined family history, but is an attempt to examine fraternal relations in the early Middle Ages as a multidimensional cultural phenomenon. As the author seeks to demonstrate, it is difficult to speak of kinship in the ninth century and later without being aware of the religious and ideological implications of the transformations taking place at the time, even if direct traces of the impact of moralizing and theological teachings on the conduct of individuals are hard to capture in the sources.

With a specific focus on travel narratives, this collection looks at how various Islamic and eastern cultural threads weaved themselves, through travel and trading networks, into Western European/Christian visual culture and discourse and, ultimately, into the artistic explosion which has been labeled the "Renaissance."  Scholars from across humanities disciplines examine Islamic, Jewish, Spanish, Italian, and English works from a truly comparative and non-parochial perspective, to explore the transfer through travel of cultural and religious values and artistic and scientific practices, from the eleventh to the seventeenth centuries.

Laments of the Virgin Mary represent a devotional genre that offered its clerical and lay audiences of the High and Late Middle Ages a deeply inspiring, yet at the same time ambiguous, religious experience. Through the deeply emotional and markedly animated representation of the Passion, seen as if through the eyes of the mother of God, audiences and performers were not only reminded of the redemptive power of the Cross, but encouraged to experience Christ’s sacrifice in a more personal and intimate manner. In the pious practice of imitatio Mariae, believers mirrored the sorrow of the mother through their own bodies in order to develop a kind of visceral empathy towards, and hence a deeper understanding of, the divine.

The twelfth century witnessed the birth of modern Western European literary tradition: major narrative works appeared in both French and in German, founding a literary culture independent of the Latin tradition of the Church and Roman Antiquity. But what gave rise to the sudden interest in and legitimization of literature in these “vulgar tongues"? Until now, the answer has centred on the somewhat nebulous role of new female vernacular readers. Powell argues that a different appraisal of the same evidence offers a window onto something more momentous: not “women readers” but instead a reading act conceived of as female lies behind the polysemic identification of women as the audience of new media in the twelfth century. This woman is at the centre of a re-conception of Christian knowing, a veritable revolution in the mediation of knowledge and truth. By following this figure through detailed readings of key early works, Powell unveils a surprise, a new poetics of the body meant to embrace the capacities of new audiences and viewers of medieval literature and visual art.

A Handbook of Animals in Old English Texts is the definitive handbook for students, scholars, and observers of the non-human in early medieval England. In this interdisciplinary compendium to the animal inhabitants of medieval Britain, Preston documents each creature mentioned in the Old English literary textual canon and correlates its standard literary interpretation with relevant historical, archaeological, and ecological studies. Beyond its usefulness as a reference work, Preston’s text challenges the reader to move beyond a literary analysis of the figural beast to one that leaves space for the actual animal.

This book presents a comparative approach to the role of women in religious and monastic life in Europe and the Americas during the medieval and early modern periods. The contributors inquire into differences and similarities, continuities and discontinuities of women’s agency inside and outside the convent. The volume challenges traditional chronological and regional limitations such as those between the Middle Ages and the Modern era and stresses the transatlantic exchange of models between Europe and the Americas.