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Early French Cookery introduces the general features of the food prepared for wealthy French households at the end of the Middle Ages. The volume presents over 100 recipes, drawn from actual medieval manuscripts, together with preparation instructions. The authors help place these enticing recipes in context through a short survey of medieval dining behavior, and they give practical menu suggestions for preparing simple meals or banquets that incorporate these delightfully tasty dishes.
Chapters include an overview of early French culinary traditions, foodstuffs that were used, and methods of preparation. Early French Cookery also discusses the equipment of the kitchens and dining rooms that were used, and characterizes those who prepared the food and those who consumed it.
The recipes are set out in a modern format, with quantities given in both metric and standard U.S. measurements. Recipes are grouped by category: appetizers, vegetables, fish dishes, desserts, and so forth.
Early French Cookery concludes with a fascinating look at a day in the life of a contemporary master chef at a duke's court. We watch Master Chiquart organize the purchase, storage, preparation, and serving of the food consumed by a duke and his dozens of family members, courtiers, staff and servants--and all done without benefit of grocery stores, refrigeration, labor-saving electric appliances, or running water.
Early French Cookery will be of interest to a wide variety of people, from those who like to hold unusual parties to those who are interested in the economics of the middle ages.
D. Eleanor Scully is an occasional lecturer at the Stratford Chef School and advisor to Wilfrid Laurier University on Medieval and Renaissance cooking and customs. Terence Scully is Professor of French Language and Literature, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario.

Weaving early accounts of witchcraft—trial records, ecclesiastical tracts, folklore, and popular iconography—into new and startling patterns, Carlo Ginzburg presents in Ecstasies compelling evidence of a hidden shamanistic culture that flourished across Europe and in England for thousands of years.

Emblem books—books containing pictorial representations whose symbolic meaning is expressed in words—were produced in great quantities and in numerous languages during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Because literary critics and art historians increasingly recognize the importance of the emblem in Renaissance and Baroque studies, this book answers the need for a bibliography listing the locations of all known emblem books in Spanish, as well as those translated into Spanish, written by Spaniards in other languages, and polyglot editions that contain a Spanish text.
Covered in this bibliography are all emblem books published from the beginning to the end of the Spanish Golden Age, as well as a wide range of secondary sources on relevant subjects, among them mythography, paradoxography, numismatics, fetes, funerals, proverbs, apothegms, antiquarianism, collecting, and pertinent studies in art history and architecture. Providing call numbers for library locations, information on facsimile reprints, and microform editions, the work is extensively indexed—by date and place of publication, by printers and booksellers, by authors and artists, and by dedicatees, as well as by subject.

A potent mixt of salvation and adventure, the Crusades were one of the most prominent features of medieval Europe, reflecting and directing religious and secular movements in Western society for half a millennium. Christopher Tyerman offers the first book-length study of the role of England in the Crusades. Focusing on the courtroom and council chamber rather than the battlefield, he demonstrates the impact of the Crusades on the political and economic functions of English society.

Drawing on a wide range of archival, chronicle, and literary evidence, Tyerman brings to life the royal personalities, foreign policy, political intrigue, taxation and fundraising, and the crusading ethos that gripped England for hundreds of years.

"An ambitious task to undertake. . . . Tyerman has done the job not only thoroughly but brilliantly. . . . A highly impressive study, deserving rich praise and wide readership."—Norman Housley, Times Literary Supplement

"Christopher Tyerman has written a wonderful book. . . . [He] manages to confront thorny issues in scholarship and to contribute new perspectives on them."—William Chester Jordan, American Historical Review

"Tyerman provides valuable insights into preaching, recruitment, and the funding and organisation of crusading expeditions. . . . Fascinating new perspectives on English history."—Edward Powell, Sunday Times

"Impressive. . . . Tyerman's research has yielded valuable evidence, and his admirably lucid argument sheds new light on a complex and bloody period in English history."—Virginia Quarterly Review

ISAS Dublin 2013. England, Ireland and the Insular World: Textual and Material Connections in the Early Middle Ages is a collection of twelve essays related to the theme of the 2013 conference of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists, ‘Insular Cultures’. Contributors cover a broad range of topics, from early medieval agriculture in Ireland and England, to sculpture, manuscript illumination and script, homilies, hagiography, aristocratic gift-giving, relics, calendars, Beowulf, and Anglo-Saxon perceptions of the Celtic peoples, considering connections, parallels and differences between Anglo-Saxon England and its insular neighbors. The volume will be of interest to all those working on Early Medieval history, literature, archaeology, liturgy, art, and manuscripts.

Bestiaries. Lapidaries. Lunaries. Inventories and household vocabularies. Lists are everywhere in medieval and early modern texts––evidence of the need to manage and order knowledge and experience. Yet until now, listing as a formal practice has received scant scholarly attention. In Enlistment, foremost medievalists and early modernists from both the Anglo-American and German traditions investigate the humble list as a platform for better understanding how and why lists captivated period audiences. From epic catalogues of trees in Geoffrey Chaucer and Edmund Spenser to genealogies and the names of the divine, the lists in question come from a variety of periods, languages, and genres. Throughout, contributors demonstrate how lists have the curious capacity to challenge our categories of thinking and ordering of the world. The lists we encounter in medieval and early modern literature can thus be seen as seismographs of cultural knowledge and also as testing grounds for defining the ineffable, or unfathomable, or that which would be dangerous if otherwise expressed.

Contributors: Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Ingo Berensmeyer, Eva von Contzen, Alex Davis, Andrew James Johnston, Wolfram R. Keller, Alexis Kellner Becker, Kathryn Mogk Wagner, Martha Rust, James Simpson

Lucrezia Marinella (1571–1653) is, by all accounts, a phenomenon in early modernity: a woman who wrote and published in many genres, whose fame shone brightly within and outside her native Venice, and whose voice is simultaneously original and reflective of her time and culture. In Enrico; or, Byzantium Conquered, one of the most ambitious and rewarding of her numerous narrative works, Marinella demonstrates her skill as an epic poet.
 

Now available for the first time in English translation, Enrico retells the story of the conquest of Byzantium in the Fourth Crusade (1202–04). Marinella intersperses historical events in her account of the invasion with numerous invented episodes, drawing on the rich imaginative legacy of the chivalric romance. Fast-moving, colorful, and narrated with the zest that characterizes Marinella’s other works, this poem is a great example of a woman engaging critically with a quintessentially masculine form and subject matter, writing in a genre in which the work of women poets was typically shunned.

In this study of the manner in which medieval nuns lived, Penelope Johnson challenges facile stereotypes of nuns living passively under monastic rule, finding instead that collectively they were empowered by their communal privileges and status to think and act without many of the subordinate attitudes of secular women. In the words of one abbess comparing nuns with monks, they were "different as to their sex but equal in their monastic profession."

Johnson researched more than two dozen nunneries in northern France from the eleventh century through the thirteenth century, balancing a qualitative reading of medieval monastic documents with a quantitative analysis of a lengthy thirteenth-century visitation record which allows an important comparison of nuns and monks. A fascinating look at the world of medieval spirituality, this work enriches our understanding of women's role in premodern Europe and in church history.

Eschatological Subjects: Divine and Literary Judgment in Fourteenth-Century French Poetry takes an innovative approach to medieval eschatology by examining how poets cast themselves in the scene of judgment as defendants summoned to answer to the Almighty for the sins of their writing. Since medieval Europeans lived in perpetual anxiety of divine judgment, constantly surrounded by reminders in art and literature, author J. M. Moreau shows that this is a natural extension of medieval life.
 
But Eschatological Subjects goes even further to demonstrate the largely unrecognized duality of this judge figure: not just God, the judge is also the imperious and imperfect human reader. The simultaneous divine and human judgments in (and of) French poetry reveal much about the ethical stakes of writing vernacular poetry in the later Middle Ages and, most importantly, about the relationships between authors and audiences.
 
Focusing on Guillaume de Deguileville, Guillaume de Machaut, and Jean Froissart (each of whom composed scenes in which they appear on trial before God), Moreau contributes important new insights on the complex “trial process” of later medieval literature, in which poetic authority and fame depended on the poet’s ability to defend himself before a fearful court of reader opinion.
 

 

Europe's Inner Demons is a fascinating history of the irrational need to imagine witches and an investigation of how those fantasies made the persecutions of the middle ages possible. In addition, Norman Cohn's discovery that some influential sources on European witch trials were forgeries has revolutionized the field of witchcraft, making this one of the most essential books ever written on the subject.

The origins of the Ottomans, whose enterprise ruled much of the Near East for more than half a millennium, have long tantalized and eluded scholars, many of whom have thrown up their hands in exasperation. While the later fourteenth- and fifteenth-century history of the Ottomans has become better known, the earlier years have proved an alluring and recalcitrant puzzle. A reconsideration of the sources and a canvass of new ones has long been overdue. Rudi Paul Lindner’s Explorations in Ottoman Prehistory is the first book in over sixty years to reassess the overture to Ottoman history.

In addition to conducting a critical examination of the Ottoman chronicles and the Byzantine annals, Lindner develops hitherto unutilized geographic data and previously unknown numismatic evidence and also draws on travelers’ descriptions of the Anatolian landscape in an earlier epoch. By investigating who the Ottomans were, where they came from, and where they settled and why, as well as what sort of relationships they had with their neighbors in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, Lindner makes an engaging and lucid contribution to an otherwise very small store of knowledge of Ottoman history in the early stages of the empire.

Rudi Paul Lindner is Professor of History at the University of Michigan and author of Nomads and Ottomans in Medieval Anatolia,part of Indiana University’s Uralic and Altaic Series.