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Despite the intensive research of the past quarter century, there still is no single book that examines all major aspects of the medieval scientific enterprise in depth. This illustrated volume is meant to fill that gap. In it sixteen leading scholars address themselves to topics central to their research, providing as full an account of medieval science as current knowledge permits. Although the book is definitive, it is also introductory, for the authors have directed their chapters to a beginning audience of diverse readers, including undergraduates, scholars specializing in other fields, and the interested lay reader.

The book is not encylopedic, for it does not attempt to provide all relevant factual data; rather, it attempts to interpret major developments in each of the disciplines that made up the medieval scientific world. Data are not absent, but their function is to support and illustrate generalizations about the changing shape of medieval science. The editor, David C. Lindberg, has written a Preface in which he discusses the growth of scholarship in this field in the twentieth century.

During the Middle Ages in Europe, some sexual and gendered behaviors were labeled “sodomitical” or evoked the use of ambiguous phrases such as the “unmentionable vice” or the “sin against nature.” How, though, did these categories enter the field of vision? How do you know a sodomite when you see one?
           
In Seeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages, Robert Mills explores the relationship between sodomy and motifs of vision and visibility in medieval culture, on the one hand, and those categories we today call gender and sexuality, on the other. Challenging the view that ideas about sexual and gender dissidence were too confused to congeal into a coherent form in the Middle Ages, Mills demonstrates that sodomy had a rich, multimedia presence in the period—and that a flexible approach to questions of terminology sheds new light on the many forms this presence took. Among the topics that Mills covers are depictions of the practices of sodomites in illuminated Bibles; motifs of gender transformation and sex change as envisioned by medieval artists and commentators on Ovid; sexual relations in religious houses and other enclosed spaces; and the applicability of modern categories such as “transgender,” “butch” and “femme,” or “sexual orientation” to medieval culture.
           
Taking in a multitude of images, texts, and methodologies, this book will be of interest to all scholars, regardless of discipline, who engage with gender and sexuality in their work.

Joseph Westlund brings recent developments in psychoanalytic thought to his elegant and sensitive readings of Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, All's Well That Ends Well, and Measure for Measure. Westlund departs from the usual preoccupation in psychoanalytic criticism with conflict and guilt to rely instead on Melanie Klein's theory of reparation, which emphasizes the impulse in life to resolve and transcend conflict. Through interpretations that are new and convincing, Westlund views the interactions of characters in the six comedies as attempts to work through anger and guilt to effect reparations for themselves and for us.

Focusing on medieval women with a wide range of occupations and life-styles, the interdisciplinary essays in this collection examine women's activities within the patriarchal structures of the time. Individual essays explore women's challenges to a sexual ideology that confined them strictly to the roles of wives, mothers, and servants. Also included are sections on women and work, cultural production and literacy, and religious life.

These essays provide a greater understanding of the ways in which gender has played a part in determining relations of power in Western cultures. This volume makes a vital contribution to the current scholarship about women in the Middle Ages.