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The eminent historian Patrick J. Geary has written a provocative book, based on lectures delivered at the Historical Society of Israel about the role of language and ideology in the study and history of the early Middle Ages. He includes a fascinating discussion of the rush by nationalist philologists to rediscover the medieval roots of their respective vernaculars, the rivalry between vernacular languages and Latin to act as transmitters of Christian sacred texts and administrative documents, and the rather sloppy and ad hoc emergence in different places of the vernacular as the local administrative idiom. This is a fascinating look at the weakness of language as a force for unity: ideology, church authority, and emerging secular power always trumped language.

Liturgical psalters are among the most important—and beautifully illustrated— of medieval Christian books. In their simplest form, psalters included 150 psalms, preceded by a calendar and followed by canticles, or biblical texts, meant to be sung at church services. Though this core content remained relatively unchanged throughout the Middle Ages and across countries, psalters show considerable variation in size, style of presentation, and choice of supplementary texts.

Latin Liturgical Psalters in the Bodleian Library describes more than one hundred psalters from Britain, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Italy, and Spain, ranging from the ninth to the sixteenth century and reflecting a wide range of requirements and interests. Each entry includes a description of the psalter’s contents, physical makeup, and provenance, alongside full-color images of pages, a bibliography, and tables to assist in the study of illumination and the liturgical use of psalms.

Bringing together important information on a stunning selection of little-known manuscripts held by the Bodleian Library, this volume will prove a valuable resource.

How do men imagine women? In the poetry of Petrarch and his English successors—Wyatt, Donne, and Marvell—the male poet persistently imagines pursuing a woman, Laura, whom he pursues even as she continues to deny his affections. Critics have long held that, in objectifying Laura, these male-authored texts deny the imaginative, intellectual, and physical life of the woman they idealize. In Laura, Barbara L. Estrin counters this traditional view by focusing not on the generative powers of the male poet, but on the subjectivity of the imagined woman and the imaginative space of the poems she occupies.
Through close readings of the Rime sparse and the works of Wyatt, Donne, and Marvell, Estrin uncovers three Lauras: Laura-Daphne, who denies sexuality; Laura-Eve, who returns the poet’s love; and Laura-Mercury, who reinvents her own life. Estrin claims that in these three guises Laura subverts both genre and gender, thereby introducing multiple desires into the many layers of the poems. Drawing upon genre and gender theories advanced by Jean-François Lyotard and Judith Butler to situate female desire in the poem’s framework, Estrin shows how genre and gender in the Petrarchan tradition work together to undermine the stability of these very concepts.
Estrin’s Laura constitutes a fundamental reconceptualization of the Petrarchan tradition and contributes greatly to the postmodern reassessment of the Renaissance period. In its descriptions of how early modern poets formulate questions about sexuality, society and poetry, Laura will appeal to scholars of the English and Italian Renaissance, of gender studies, and of literary criticism and theory generally.

This monumental study of medieval law and sexual conduct explores the origin and develpment of the Christian church's sex law and the systems of belief upon which that law rested. Focusing on the Church's own legal system of canon law, James A. Brundage offers a comprehensive history of legal doctrines–covering the millennium from A.D. 500 to 1500–concerning a wide variety of sexual behavior, including marital sex, adultery, homosexuality, concubinage, prostitution, masturbation, and incest. His survey makes strikingly clear how the system of sexual control in a world we have half-forgotten has shaped the world in which we live today. The regulation of marriage and divorce as we know it today, together with the outlawing of bigamy and polygamy and the imposition of criminal sanctions on such activities as sodomy, fellatio, cunnilingus, and bestiality, are all based in large measure upon ideas and beliefs about sexual morality that became law in Christian Europe in the Middle Ages.

"Brundage's book is consistently learned, enormously useful, and frequently entertaining. It is the best we have on the relationships between theological norms, legal principles, and sexual practice."—Peter Iver Kaufman, Church History

By the end of the fifteenth century, Cassandra Fedele (1465-1558), a learned middle-class woman of Venice, was arguably the most famous woman writer and scholar in Europe. A cultural icon in her own time, she regularly corresponded with the king of France, lords of Milan and Naples, the Borgia pope Alexander VI, and even maintained a ten-year epistolary exchange with Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain that resulted in an invitation for her to join their court. Fedele's letters reveal the central, mediating role she occupied in a community of scholars otherwise inaccessible to women. Her unique admittance into this community is also highlighted by her presence as the first independent woman writer in Italy to speak publicly and, more importantly, the first to address philosophical, political, and moral issues in her own voice. Her three public orations and almost all of her letters, translated into English, are presented here for the first time.

Recent years have seen a welcome growth of interest in the history of early Rome. Libri Annales Pontificum Maximorum: the Origins of the Annalistic Tradition contributes important information on this period by focusing on the earliest stages of Roman historical writing. The book is once again available, with a new Introduction by the author that brings the work up to date and helps place it in its current context. This book remains the starting point for study of the pre-annalistic tradition of Roman history.
When first published, the volume sparked a lively debate among classicists and historians of the ancient world. Previous scholarship had often assigned the pontifical chronicle a central role not only in preserving the history of the early Republic, but also in shaping the form of the annalistic tradition. But the author showed that these assumptions rested on insecure foundations; to a large extent, they misrepresented the historiographic development of the annalistic tradition as we know it from, above all, Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus.
Perhaps the book's most controversial contention was that the final eighty-book edition of the chronicle, which previous scholars had dated to the later second century BCE, is more probably a massive reworking of materials in the Augustan period. This finding will likely require a considerable revision in our understanding of the development of the annalistic tradition. In the course of making these innovative arguments, the author offers extensive information about the origins of the annalistic tradition and about the early history and historiography of Rome.
Bruce W. Frier is Professor of Classics and Roman Law, and Henry King Ransom Professor of Law, University of Michigan. He has published numerous books and articles on classical and legal topics, and has won the Charles J. Goodwin Award of Merit from the American Philological Association.

Before the Renaissance and Reformation, holy images were treated not as "art" but as objects of veneration which possessed the tangible presence of the Holy. In this magisterial book, Hans Belting traces the long history of the sacral image and its changing role in European culture.
Likeness and Presence looks at the beliefs, superstitions, hopes, and fears that come into play as people handle and respond to sacred
images, and presents a compelling interpretation of the place of the image in Western history.

"A rarity within its genre—an art-historical analysis of iconography which is itself iconoclastic. . . . One of the most intellectually exciting and historically grounded interpretations of Christian iconography." —Graham Howes, Times Literary Supplement

"Likeness and Presence offers the best source to survey the facts of what European Christians put in their churches. . . . An impressively detailed contextual analysis of medieval objects." —Robin Cormack, New York Times Book Review

"I cannot begin to describe the richness or the imaginative grandeur of Hans Belting's book. . . . It is a work that anyone interested in art, or in the history of thought about art, should regard as urgent reading. It is a tremendous achievement."—Arthur C. Danto, New Republic

Nationalism, like medieval romance literature, recasts history as a mythologized and seamless image of reality. Living in the Future analyzes how the anachronistic nationalist fantasies in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales create a false sense of England’s historical continuity that in turn legitimized contemporary political ambitions. This book spells out the legacy of the Tales that still resonates throughout English literature, exploring the idea of England in the medieval literary imagination as well as critiquing more recent centuries’ conceptions of Chaucer’s nationalism.     
       
Chaucer uses two extant national ideals, sovereignty and domesticity, to introduce the concept of an English nation into the contemporary popular imagination and reinvent an idealized England as a hallowed homeland. For nationalist thinkers, sovereignty governs communities with linguistic, historical, cultural, and religious affinities. Chaucerian sovereignty appears primarily in romantic and household contexts that function as microcosms of the nation, reflecting a pseudo-familial love between sovereign and subjects and relying on a sense of shared ownership and judgment. This notion also has deep affinities with popular and political theories flourishing throughout Europe. Chaucer’s internationalism, matched with his artistic use of the vernacular and skillful distortions of both time and space, frames a discrete sovereign English nation within its diverse interconnected world.

As it opens up significant new points of resonance between postcolonial theories and medieval ideas of nationhood, Living in the Future marks an important contribution to medieval literary studies. It will be essential for scholars of Middle English literature, literary history, literary political and postcolonial theory, and literary transnationalism.
 

"Fichtenau delivers a fascinating view of tenth-century Europe on the eve of the second millenium. He writes this hoping we, on the eve of the third millennium, will take time also to look at who we are and at our world. . . . This engaging book lucidly carries the reader through an amazing amount of material. Medieval scholars will find it resourceful and challenging; the nonscholar will find it fascinating and enlightening."—A. L. Kolp, Choice

"Living in the Tenth Century resembles an anthropological field study more than a conventional historical monograph, and represents a far more ambitious attempt to see behind the surface of avowals and events than others have seriously attempted even for much more voluminously documented periods. . . . It is remarkably rich and readable."—R.I. Moore, Times Higher Education Supplement

"Fichtenau offers a magnificent survey of all the main spheres of life: the social order, the rural economy, schooling and religious belief and practice in both the secular and monastic church. His command, especially of the narrative sources, their fine nuances of attitude emotion and underlying norms, is masterly and he employs them here with all the sensitiveness and feel for the subject that have always been the hallmarks of his work."—Karl Leyser, Francia

If one had looked for a potential global city in Europe in the 1540s, the most likely candidate would have been Antwerp, which had emerged as the center of the German and Spanish silver exchange as well as the Portuguese spice and Spanish sugar trades. It almost certainly would not have been London, an unassuming hub of the wool and cloth trade with a population of around 75,000, still trying to recover from the onslaught of the Black Plague. But by 1700 London’s population had reached a staggering 575,000—and it had developed its first global corporations, as well as relationships with non-European societies outside the Mediterranean. What happened in the span of a century and half? And how exactly did London transform itself into a global city?

           

London’s success, Robert K. Batchelor argues, lies not just with the well-documented rise of Atlantic settlements, markets, and economies. Using his discovery of a network of Chinese merchant shipping routes on John Selden’s map of China as his jumping-off point, Batchelor reveals how London also flourished because of its many encounters, engagements, and exchanges with East Asian trading cities. Translation plays a key role in Batchelor’s study—translation not just of books, manuscripts, and maps, but also of meaning and knowledge across cultures—and Batchelor demonstrates how translation helped London understand and adapt to global economic conditions. Looking outward at London’s global negotiations, Batchelor traces the development of its knowledge networks back to a number of foreign sources and credits particular interactions with England’s eventual political and economic autonomy from church and King. 

           

London offers a much-needed non-Eurocentric history of London, first by bringing to light and then by synthesizing the many external factors and pieces of evidence that contributed to its rise as a global city. It will appeal to students and scholars interested in the cultural politics of translation, the relationship between merchants and sovereigns, and the cultural and historical geography of Britain and Asia.

In Love and Ethics, Peter Nicholson offers a comprehensive and accessible reading of Gower's Confessio, as well as a guide to the issues that it poses, linking all of the diverse elements of Gower's complex poem into a single broad view of its purpose and structure. Beginning with an investigation of the literary antecedents of the poem, the author then distinguishes the Confessio from its predecessors in order to discover what is most unique about it. In viewing the Confessio both as a poem and as a work of moral instruction, Love and Ethics illustrates the work's concern with the laws that govern human love, and its understanding of the elusiveness of moral certainty in a fallen world.

Intended for both specialists and non-specialists, Love and Ethics addresses many of the specific concerns of current Gower criticism, provides complete translations of all foreign quotation, and guides the novice reader through Gower's Middle English.

Preeminent medieval scholar Georges Duby argues that the structure of sexual relationships took its cue from the family and from feudalism—both bastions of masculinity—as he reveals the role of women, what they represented, and what they were in the Middle Ages.

Beautifully written in Duby's characteristically nuanced and powerful style, this collection is an ideal entree into Duby's thinking about marriage and the diversities of love, spousal decorum, family structure, and their cultural context in bodily and spiritual values. Love and Marriage in the Middle Ages will be of great interest to students in social and cultural history, medieval and early modern history, and women's studies, as well as those interested in the nature of social life in the Middle Ages.

Georges Duby (1919-1996) was a member of the Académie française and for many years held the distinguished chair in medieval history at the Collège de France. His books include The Three Orders; The Age of Cathedrals; The Knight, the Lady, and the Priest; Love and Marriage in the Middle Ages; and History Continues, all published by the University of Chicago Press.

The works of the second-century Greek satirist Lucian enjoyed a tremendous vogue in the early Renaissance. His Greek prose furnished one of the first texts in the Florentine classroom around 1400, and it aroused as much interest as Plato. At first praised as an eloquent rhetorician, Lucian was soon appreciated for his irreverent wit, which inspired new satirical and paradoxical currents in Renaissance literature.
Until now, no study has attempted to connect the Latin translators and imitators of Lucian with his wider European influence. In Lucian and the Latins, David Marsh describes how Renaissance authors rediscovered the comic writings of Lucian. He traces how Lucianic themes and structures made an essential contribution to European literature beginning with a survey of Latin translations and imitations, which gave new direction to European letters in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Lucianic dialogues of the dead and dialogues of the gods were immensely popular, despite the religious backlash of the sixteenth century. The paradoxical encomium, represented by Lucian's "The Fly" and "The Parasite," inspired so-called serious humanists like Leonardo Bruni and Guarino of Verona. Lucian's "True Story" initiated the genre of the fantastic journey, which enjoyed considerable popularity during the Renaissance age of discovery. Humanist descendants of this work include Thomas More's Utopia and much of Rabelais' Pantagruel.
Lucian and the Latins will attract readers interested in a wide variety of subjects: the classical tradition, the early Italian Renaissance, the origins of modern European literature, and the uses of humor and satire as instruments of cultural critique.
David Marsh is Professor of Italian, Rutgers University.