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914 books match the query 'Medieval' and 244 start with t

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The Most Noble of People

Religious, Ethnic, and Gender Identity in Muslim Spain

Jessica A. Coope

University of Michigan Press, 2017

The Most Noble of People presents a nuanced look at questions of identity in Muslim Spain under the Umayyads, an Arab dynasty that ruled from 756 to 1031. With a social historical emphasis on relations among different religious and ethnic groups, and between men and women, Jessica A. Coope considers the ways in which personal and cultural identity in al-Andalus could be alternately fluid and contentious.

The opening chapters define Arab and Muslim identity as those categories were understood in Muslim Spain, highlighting the unique aspects of this society as well as its similarities with other parts of the medieval Islamic world. The book goes on to discuss what it meant to be a Jew or Christian in Spain under Islamic rule, and the degree to which non-Muslims were full participants in society. Following this is a consideration of gender identity as defined by Islamic law and by less normative sources like literature and mystical texts. It concludes by focusing on internal rebellions against the government of Muslim Spain, particularly the conflicts between Muslims who were ethnically Arab and those who were Berber or native Iberian, pointing to the limits of Muslim solidarity.

Drawn from an unusually broad array of sources—including legal texts, religious polemic, chronicles, mystical texts, prose literature, and poetry, in both Arabic and Latin—many of Coope’s illustrations of life in al-Andalus also reflect something of the larger medieval world. Further, some key questions about gender, ethnicity, and religious identity that concerned people in Muslim Spain—for example, women’s status under Islamic law, or what it means to be a Muslim in different contexts and societies around the world—remain relevant today.

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The Mystic Fable, Volume One

The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

Michel de Certeau

University of Chicago Press, 1992

The culmination of de Certeau's lifelong engagement with the human sciences, this volume is both an analysis of Christian mysticism during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and an application of this influential scholar's transdisciplinary historiography.

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The Myth of Pope Joan

Alain Boureau

University of Chicago Press, 2001

In the ninth century, a brilliant young woman named Joan disguised herself as a man so that she could follow her lover into the then-exclusively male world of scholarship. She proved so successful that she ascended the Catholic hierarchy in Rome and was eventually elected pope. Her pontificate lasted two years, until she became pregnant and died after giving birth during a public procession from the Vatican.

Or so the legend goes—a legend that was fabricated sometime in the thirteenth century, according to Alain Boureau, and which has persisted in one form or another down to the present day. In this fascinating saga of belief and rhetoric, politics and religion, Boureau investigates the historical and ecclesiastical circumstances under which the myth of Pope Joan was constructed and the different uses to which it was put over the centuries. He shows, for instance, how Catholic clerics justified the exclusion of women from the papacy and the priesthood by employing the myth in misogynist moral tales, only to find the popess they had created turned against them in anti-Catholic propaganda during the Reformation.

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The Nature of Natural Philosophy in the Late Middle Ages (Studies in Philosophy and the History of Philosophy, Volume 52)

Edward Grant

Catholic University of America Press, 2010

In this volume, distinguished scholar Edward Grant identifies the vital elements that contributed to the creation of a widespread interest in natural philosophy, which has been characterized as the "Great Mother of the Sciences."

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The Neapolitan Recipe Collection

Cuoco Napoletano

Terence Scully

University of Michigan Press, 2015

The fields of cookery and medieval food continue to draw the attention of those interested in a panoramic picture of aristocratic and bourgeois social life in the late Middle Ages. In the fifteenth century, wealthy courts in the Italian peninsula led all of Europe in gastronomical achievement. The professional cooks in the service of the Este, Medici, and Borgia families were the most advanced masters of their craft, and some of them bequeathed a record of their practice in manuscript collections of recipes.

Outstanding among these early cookbooks is the one written by an anonymous master cook in Naples toward the end of the century. In its 220 recipes, one can trace not only the Italian culinary practice of the day but also the very refined taste brought by the Catalan royal family when they ruled Naples. This edition—with Terence Scully’s introduction touching on the nature of cookery in the Neapolitano Collection, and English translation of and commentary on the recipes—will give the reader a glimpse into the rich fare available to occupants and guests of one of the greatest houses of late medieval Italy.

The Neapolitan Recipe Collection offers a particularly delicious slice of the primary documentation necessary for understanding the nature of medieval society and one of its most important aspects.

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The Normans in South Wales, 1070–1171

By Lynn H. Nelson

University of Texas Press, 1966

A frontier has been called "an area inviting entrance." For the Norman invaders of England the Welsh peninsula was such an area. Fertile forested lowlands invited agricultural occupation; a fierce but primitive and disunited native population was scarcely a formidable deterrent.

In The Normans in South Wales, Lynn H. Nelson provides a comprehensive history of the century during which the Normans accomplished this occupation. Skillfully he combines facts and statistics gleaned from a variety of original sources—The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the Domesday Book, Church records, charters of the kings and of the marcher lords, and more imaginative literary sources such as the chanson de geste and the frontier epic—to give a vivid picture of a century of strife. He describes the fluctuating conflict between Norman invaders in the lowlands and Welsh tribesmen in the highlands; the hard struggle of medieval frontiersmen to take from the new land a profit commensurate with their labors; the development of a Cambro-Norman society distinct and quite different from the Anglo-Norman culture which engendered it; and the attempt of the frontiersman to prevent the Anglo-Norman authorities from taking control of the lands he had won.

The turbulent Welsh tribes provided an ever present harassment along the frontier, and Nelson begins his presentation with an account of the failure of the Saxons to control them. He examines the methods adopted by William the Conqueror to cope with the problem—the creation of the great marcher lordships and the subsequent problems in controlling these lordships—and the weakness of some Anglo-Norman kings and the strength of others.

By 1171 the conquest of the Welsh frontier was complete; but as Nelson points out, this conquest was strangely limited. The frontier, which extended throughout the lowlands of Wales, stopped at the 600-foot contour line in the mountains. In his final chapter Nelson speculates upon the curious fact that large areas of seemingly inviting moorlands lying above this line remained closed to the Cambro-Norman, and his speculations lead him to some interesting inferences about the nature of the frontier's influence upon the civilization which moves in to occupy it.

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The Odyssey of Ibn Battuta

Uncommon Tales of a Medieval Adventurer

David Waines

University of Chicago Press, 2010

Ibn Battuta was, without doubt, one of the world’s truly great travelers. Born in fourteenth-century Morocco, and a contemporary of Marco Polo, Ibn Battuta left an account in his own words of his remarkable journeys, punctuated by adventure and peril, throughout the Islamic world and beyond. Whether sojourning in Delhi and the Maldives, wandering through the mazy streets of Cairo and Damascus, or contesting with pirates and shipwreck, the indefatigable Ibn Battuta brought to vivid life a medieval world brimming with marvel and mystery. Carefully observing the great diversity of civilizations that he encountered, Ibn Battuta exhibited an omnivorous interest in such matters as food and drink; religious differences among Christians, Hindus, and Shia Muslims; and ideas about purity and impurity, disease, women, and sex.

David Waines offers here a graceful analysis of Ibn Battuta’s travelogue. This is a gripping treatment of the life and times of one of history’s most daring, and at the same time most human, adventurers.

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The Oedipus Casebook

Reading Sophocles' Oedipus the King

Mark R. Anspach

Michigan State University Press, 2019

Who killed Laius? Most readers assume Oedipus did. At the play’s end, he stands convicted of murdering his father, marrying his mother, and triggering a deadly plague. With selections from a stellar assortment of critics including Walter Burkert, Terry Eagleton, Michel Foucault, René Girard, and Jean-Pierre Vernant, this book reopens the Oedipus case and lets readers judge for themselves. The Greek word for tragedy means “goat song.” Is Oedipus the goat? Helene Peet Foley calls him “the kind of leader a democracy would both love and desire to ostracize.” The Oedipus Casebook readings weigh the evidence against Oedipus, place the play in the context of Greek scapegoat rites, and explore the origins of tragedy in the festival of Dionysus. This unique critical edition includes a new translation of the play by distinguished classics scholar Wm. Blake Tyrrell and the authoritative Greek text established by H. Lloyd-Jones and N. G. Wilson.

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The Old English Poem Seasons for Fasting

A Critical Edition

Mary P. Richards

West Virginia University Press, 2014

Seasons for Fasting, a late Old English poem probably composed in the early eleventh century, focuses on proper fasting observances in England. This poem, composed in eight-line stanzas, survives only in a sixteenth-century transcript made by the antiquary Laurence Nowell. With its topics, vocabulary, sources, and style derived from those of contemporary ecclesiastical prose, it belongs to a school of late tenth/early eleventh century poetry that only now is coming to be recognized and defined.

The Old English Poem Seasons for Fasting: A Critical Edition provides a new text and translation of the poem, accompanied by an extensive introduction, commentary, and glossary. The introduction includes analyses of the poem’s manuscript origins, sources, language, meter, style, and structure. The text is collated with all previous editions. The commentary elucidates points of grammar and style, and justifies all editorial decisions. The glossary covers every instance of each word in the poem.

Since its discovery among the papers of Laurence Nowell in 1934, the poem has had only four editions, two of the text with basic notes, and two in doctoral theses with more commentary and analysis. This new edition brings the latest resources on manuscript study, lexicon (through the Concordance and Dictionary of Old English A-G), poetics, and cultural milieu to bear on this fascinating poem. The apparatus, including the glossary, will allow fellow scholars to extend these findings through links to their own work.

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The Oldest Legend

Acts of the Canonization Process, and Miracles of Saint Margaret of Hungary

Bence Péterfi

Central European University Press, 2018

This bilingual volume (Latin text with English translation) is the second in the series presenting hagiographical narratives from medieval Central Europe. It contains the most important hagiographical corpus of medieval Hungarian history: that of Saint Margaret (1242–1270), daughter of King Béla IV, who lived her life as a Dominican nun. Margaret’s cult started immediately after her death and the demand to examine her sanctity was first formulated in 1272. The canonization process recommenced in 1276, followed by further initiatives across the centuries. Margaret was eventually canonized only in 1943. Besides the full Latin text and the English translation of her oldest legend, written between 1272 and 1275, this volume contains the acts of the 110 testimonies of the papal investigation concerning her sainthood, recorded between July and October 1276 and prepared from existing source editions. In addition, the editors include a series of recently discovered documents, including a petition by the bishop of Várad (Oradea) to promote the cause, and the notarial records of a set of miracles that occurred at Margaret's grave in the second half of the fifteenth century. The annotated bilingual text is complemented by a select bibliography on Saint Margaret and her hagiography.

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The Ordering of Time

From the Ancient Computus to the Modern Computer

Arno Borst

University of Chicago Press, 1993

This book is a concise history of the use and interpretation of time, written by one of the foremost medievalists in Europe today.

Arno Borst examines the various ways that time has been calculated by numbers and measured by instruments over several centuries, from the computus—an ancient method of determining times and dates—to the present-day computer. In a wide-ranging discussion, he analyzes the classical Greek concepts of divine, natural, and human time; the universal time of ancient Rome; the Easter cycle of the Middle Ages; the development of the mechanical clock in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; early modern chronology; and twentieth-century data processing.

Borst argues that although many centuries and countless different instruments—sundials, horologia, abaci, astrolabes, calendars, and calculating machines—separate the medieval computus from the modern computer, each generation has had to answer the same question: how can we make the best use of our available time to improve our lives? The computer, he suggests, is merely a new instrument employed for an ancient purpose.

Lively and accessible, The Ordering of Time will be welcomed by students and researchers in social and cultural history, the history of science and mathematics, as well as anyone interested in the history of time and numbers.

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The Origins of Mexican Catholicism

Nahua Rituals and Christian Sacraments in Sixteenth-Century Mexico

Osvaldo F. Pardo

University of Michigan Press, 2004

"Pardo's study provides a persuasive criticism of the widespread assumption that the process of Christianization in Mexico can be conceived as the imposition of a complete and fool-proof system that did not accept doubts or compromises. The Origins of Mexican Catholicism will become an invaluable tool for future researchers and enrich future debates on the subject."
---Fernando Cervantes, Bristol University, UK

"Pardo does an excellent job of balancing and contrasting sixteenth-century Catholic theology with Nahua thought and belief."
---John F. Schwaller, University of Minnesota

At first glance, religious conversion may appear to be only a one-way street. When studying sixteenth-century Mexico, one might assume that colonial coercion was the driving force behind the religious conversion of the native population. But The Origins of Mexican Catholicism shows how Spanish missionaries instead drew on existing native ceremonies in order to make Christianity more accessible to the Nahua population whom they were trying to convert.

Osvaldo F. Pardo explains that religious figures not only shaped native thought, but that indigenous rituals had an impact on the religion itself. This work illustrates the complex negotiations that took place in the process of making the Christian sacraments available to the native peoples, and at the same time, forced the missionaries to reexamine the meaning of their sacraments through the eyes of an alien culture.

For Spanish missionaries, ritual not only became a focus of evangelical concern but also opened a window to the social world of the Nahuas. Missionaries were able to delve into the Nahua's notions of self, emotions, and social and cosmic order. By better understanding the sociological aspects of Nahua culture, Christians learned ways to adequately convey their religion through mutual understanding instead of merely colonial oppression.

Given its interdisciplinary approach, this book will be of interest to specialists in Latin American intellectual and literary history, the history of religion, and anthropology, and to anyone interested in cross-cultural processes.

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The Orphans of Byzantium

Child Welfare in the Christian Empire

Timothy S. Miller

Catholic University of America Press, 2003

In The Orphans of Byzantium, Miller provides a perceptive and original study of the evolution of orphanages in the Byzantine Empire.

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The Philosophical Vision of John Duns Scotus

An Introduction

Mary Beth Ingham

Catholic University of America Press, 2004

In this much-anticipated work, distinguished authors Mary Beth Ingham and Mechthild Dreyer present an accessible introduction to the philosophy of the thirteenth century Franciscan John Duns Scotus

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The Pipes of Pan

Intertextuality and Literary Filiation in the Pastoral Tradition from Theocritus to Milton

Thomas K. Hubbard

University of Michigan Press, 1999

Departing from conventional views of the pastoral genre as an Arcadian escape from urban sophistication, The Pipes of Pan highlights its genesis in the allusive and polemical literary cultures of Alexandria and Rome. Both cities placed great emphasis upon learned invocation and reformulation of poetic models. The pastoral metaphor provided Theocritus and Vergil with tools for representing the contests and confrontations of poets and genres, the exchange of ideas among poets, and poets' reflections on the efficacy of their works.
Pastoral poetry highlights the didactic relationship of older and younger shepherds, whether as rivals or as patron and successor. As such it is an ideal form for young poets' self-representation vis-à-vis their elders, whose work they simultaneously appropriated and transformed, even as the elder poets were represented in the new texts. This influence is reenacted in every generation: Theocritus vs. his Alexandrian forebears, Vergil vs. Theocritus, Calpurnius vs. Vergil, Nemesianus vs. Vergil and Calpurnius, Petrarch vs. Vergil, Boccaccio vs. Petrarch, Spenser vs. Vergil, along with Chaucer and Milton vs. Spenser.
The Pipes of Pan combines multiple strands of contemporary intertextual theory with reception aesthetics and Harold Bloom's theory of intersubjective conflict between generations of poets. It also provides one of the first systematic studies of intertextual and intersubjective dynamics within a whole genre.
This work will be of interest to classicists, students of literary theory, comparative literature, medieval and Renaissance literature, Italian humanism, and English literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. All texts are translated.
Thomas Hubbard is Associate Professor of Classics, University of Texas at Austin.

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The Poems of Aimeric de Peguilhan

Aimeric de Peguilhan, edited and translated with introduction and commentary by William P. Shepard and Frank M. Chambers

Northwestern University Press, 1950

Poems of Aimeric de Peguilhan is the first critical, annotated translation in English of the collected work of poet Aimeric de Peguilhan. In it William P. Shepard and Frank M. Chambers provide translations and introductory material to the work of the medieval French troubadour.

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The Politics of Ecology

Land, Life, and Law in Medieval Britain

Edited by Randy P. Schiff and Joseph Taylor

The Ohio State University Press, 2016

If medieval literary studies is, like so many fields, currently conditioned by an ecological turn that dislodges the human from its central place in materialist analysis, then why now focus on the law? Is not the law the most human, if not indeed the human, institution? In proposing that all life in medieval Britain, whether animal or vegetable, was subject to the same legal machine that enabled claims on land, are we not ignoring the ecocritical demand that we counteract human exceptionalism and reframe the past with inhuman eyes?

This volume, edited by Randy P. Schiff and Joseph Taylor, presents a diverse and stimulating group of interconnected essays that respond to these questions by infusing biopolitical material and theory into ecocentric studies of medieval life. The Politics of Ecology: Land, Life, and Law in Medieval Britain pursues the political power of sovereign law as it disciplines and manages various forms of natural life, and discloses the literary biopolitics played out in texts that work out the fraught interactions of life and law, in all its forms. Contributors to this volume explore such issues as legal networks and death, Arthurian bare life, Chaucerian medical biopolitics, the biopolitics of fur, ecologies of sainthood, arboreal political theology, conservation and political ecology, and geographical melancholy.

Bringing together both established and rising critical voices, The Politics of Ecology creates a place for cutting-edge medievalist ecocriticism focused on the intersections of land, life, and law in medieval English, French, and Latin literature.

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The Pope's Body

Agostino Paravicini-Bagliani

University of Chicago Press, 2000

In contrast to the role traditionally fulfilled by secular rulers, the pope has been perceived as an individual person existing in a body subject to decay and death, yet at the same time a corporeal representation of Christ and the Church, eternity and salvation. Using an array of evidence from the eleventh through the fifteenth centuries, Agostino Paravicini- Bagliani addresses this paradox. He studies the rituals, metaphors, and images of the pope's body as they developed over time and shows how they resulted in the expectation that the pope's body be simultaneously physical and metaphorical. Also included is a particular emphasis on the thirteenth century when, during the pontificate of Boniface VIII (1294-1303), the papal court became the focus of medicine and the natural sciences as physicians devised ways to protect the pope's health and prolong his life.

Masterfully translated from the Italian, this engaging history of the pope's body provides a new perspective for readers to understand the papacy, both historically and in our own time.

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The Postmodern Beowulf

A Critical Casebook

EILEEN A. JOY

West Virginia University Press, 2006

This work includes twenty-four essays including a preface, introduction, afterword, and sections containing seminal methodological pieces by such giants as Edward Said and Michel Foucault, as well as contemporary applications to Beowulf and other Old English and Germanic texts focusing on historicism, psychoanalysis, gender, textuality, and post-colonialism.

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The Power of Words

Anglo-Saxon Studies Presented to Donald G. Scragg on his Seventieth BirthdayANGLO-SAXON STUDIES PRESENTED TO DONALD G. SCRAGG ON HIS SEVENTIETH BIRTHDAY

Hugh Magennis

West Virginia University Press, 2006

The Power of Words: Anglo-Saxon Studies Presented to Donald G. Scragg on his Seventieth Birthday edited by Jonathan Wilcox and Hugh Magennis will find its place on the same shelf with these and other such valuable tomes in the discipline. This is a complex and carefully edited book, that showcases the work of some of Professor Scragg’s best students and most admiring professional friends. The contents range from several studies in homiletic literature, one of Professor Scragg’s own passions, to other of his pursuits, including editing theory and orthography. These are not, however, derivative essays that recommend a single adjustment in a reading or to a source study; instead, they are studies that do what Professor Scragg himself did: they observe clues to larger realities, and they point the way to a broader comprehension of our discipline and its several methodologies.

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The Power of Words

Studies on Charms and Charming in Europe

James Kapalo

Central European University Press, 2013

n medieval and early modern Europe, the use of charms was a living practice in all strata of society. The essays in this latest CEU Press publication explore the rich textual tradition of archives, monasteries, and literary sources. The author also discusses texts amassed in folklore archives and ones that are still accessible through field work in many rural areas of Europe.

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The Premodern Condition

Medievalism and the Making of Theory

Bruce Holsinger

University of Chicago Press, 2005

The Premodern Condition identifies and explains a surprising affinity for medievalism and medieval studies among the leading figures of critical theory. Drawing on a wide range of philosophical, literary-critical, and sociological works produced within the French nouvelle critique of the 1960s, Holsinger argues for reconceiving these discourses, in part, as a brilliant amalgamation of medievalisms.

Holsinger shows that the preoccupation with medieval cultures and practices among Bataille, Derrida, Lacan, Barthes, Bourdieu, and their cohorts was so wide ranging that it merits recognition as one of the most significant epiphenomena of postwar French thought. Not simply an object of nostalgic longing or an occasional source of literary exempla, the medieval epoch was continually mined by these thinkers for specific philosophical vocabularies, social formations, and systems of thought.

To supplement its master thesis, The Premodern Condition also contains original essays by Bataille and Bourdieu—translated here for the first time into English—that testify in various ways to the strange persistence of medievalisms in French postwar avant-garde writings. What results is an important and original work that will be a touchstone for specialists in medieval studies and critical theory alike.

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The Profession of Widowhood

Widows, Pastoral Care, and Medieval Models of Holiness

Katherine Clark Walter

Catholic University of America Press, 2018

The Profession of Widowhood explores how the idea of ‘true’ widowhood was central to pre-modern ideas concerning marriage and of female identity more generally. The medieval figure of the Christian vere vidua or “good” widow evolved from and reinforced ancient social and religious sensibilities of chastity, loyalty and grief as gendered ‘work.’ The ideal widow was a virtuous woman who mourned her dead husband in chastity, solitude, and most importantly, in perpetuity, marking her as “a widow indeed” (1 Tim 5:5). The widow who failed to display adequate grief fulfilled the stereotype of the ‘merry widow’ who forgot her departed spouse and abused her sexual and social freedom. Stereotypes of widows ‘good’ and ‘bad’ served highly-charged ideological functions in pre-modern culture, and have remained durable even in modern times, even as Western secular society now focuses more on a woman’s recovery from grief and possible re-coupling than the expectation that she remain forever widowed. The widow represented not only the powerful bond created by love and marriage, but also embodied the conventions of grief that ordered the response when those bonds were broken by premature death. This notion of the widow as both a passive memorial to her husband and as an active ‘rememberer’ was rooted in ancient traditions, and appropriated by early Christian and medieval authors who used “good” widowhood to describe the varieties of female celibacy and to define the social and gender order. A tradition of widowhood characterized by chastity, solitude, and permanent bereavement affirmed both the sexual mores and political agenda of the medieval Church. Medieval widows—both holy women recognized as saints and ‘ordinary women’ in medieval daily life—recognized this tradition of professed chastity in widowhood not only as a valuable strategy for avoiding remarriage and protecting their independence, but as a state with inherent dignity that afforded opportunities for spiritual development in this world and eternal merit in the next.

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The Rhetorics of Life-Writing in Early Modern Europe

Forms of Biography from Cassandra Fedele to Louis XIV

Thomas Mayer and D. R. Woolf, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 1995

Lives as lived and lives as written are never one and the same. To turn the first into the second one must introduce "fiction" into the "fact" of the actual existence; this is never more true than during the Renaissance, when multiformity was the rule. The Rhetorics of Life-Writing in Early Modern Europe explores the ways in which authors and their subjects constructed images for themselves, and some of the ways in which those images worked.
The volume is especially timely in light of the growing interest in "microhistory," and in the histories that are emerging from nonliterary documents. Chapters consider numerous genres, including hagiography, epistolary and verse biography, and less familiar forms such as parodic prosopography, life-writing in funeral sermons, and comic martyrology.
Contributors to the volume come from history, art history, and literature, and they include F.W. Conrad, Sheila ffolliott, Robert Kolb, James Mehl, Diana Robin, T.C. Price Zimmerman, and Elizabeth Goldsmith and Abby Zanger, among others.
Thomas F. Mayer is Associate Professor of History, Augustana College. D. R. Woolf is Professor of History, Dalhousie University.

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The Romance of Tristan and Isolt

Norman B. Spector

Northwestern University Press, 1992

The Romance of Tristan and Isolt is the tragic tale of two star-crossed lovers set in Ireland.

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The Romance of the Middle Ages

Nicholas Perkins and Alison Wiggins

Bodleian Library Publishing, 2012

From chivalrous knights to damsels in distress, fire-breathing dragons, and high-walled towers, the characteristics and expectations we ascribe to stories of love and romance have their origins in some of the most beautiful and intriguing books of the Middle Ages. Encompassing Arthurian legends, Alexander the Great’s global conquests, sudden reversals of fortune, revenge, or enchantment, images and tales of medieval romance still resonate today. This beautifully illustrated history of romance legends explores the conjunctions of chivalric violence, love, sex, and piety that marked these striking and resonant stories.

Through a discussion of surviving manuscripts, printed books, and visual art, The Romance of the Middle Ages examines the development of romance as a literary genre, its place in medieval culture, and the scribes and readers who copied, owned, and commented on romance books—from magnificent illuminated manuscripts to personal notebooks. It describes the dangerous pull of desire in works by Dante, Chaucer, Malory, and many others, and traces the influence of these stories through their rewriting in Shakespeare, Spenser, Walter Scott, and Mark Twain, along with the medievalist visions of Morris, Rossetti, and Burne-Jones. The Romance of the Middle Ages then brings the story up to date by showing how later writers and artists have responded to medieval romance, including Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and J. K. Rowling, and the very different knightly casts of Monty Python and Star Wars.

The Romance of the Middle Ages is an engaging analysis of stories that still have the power to capture our imaginations long after ‘happily ever after’.

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The Ruins of Ani

A Journey to Armenia's Medieval Capital and its Legacy

Krikor Balakian

Rutgers University Press, 2019

Winner of the 2019 Dr. Sona Aronian Book Prize for Excellence in Armenian Studies (NAASR)

From the tenth to the thirteenth centuries, the city of Ani was the jewel of the Armenian kingdom, renowned far and wide for its magnificent buildings. Known as the city of 1001 churches, Ani was a center for artistic innovation, and its architecture is a potential missing link between Byzantine and Gothic styles. By the fifteenth century, Ani was virtually abandoned, its stunning buildings left to crumble. Yet its ruins have remained a symbol of cultural accomplishment that looms large in the Armenian imagination.

The Ruins of Ani is a unique combination of history, art criticism, and travel memoir that takes readers on a thousand-year journey in search of past splendors. Today, Ani is a popular tourist site in Turkey, but the city has been falsified in its presentation by the Turkish government in order to erase Armenian history in the wake of the Armenian Genocide. This timely publication also raises questions about the preservation of major historic monuments in the face of post atrocity campaigns of cultural erasure.

Originally written by young priest Krikor Balakian in 1910, just a few years before the Armenian genocide, this book offers a powerful and poignant counterpart to Balakian’s acclaimed genocide memoir Armenian Golgotha. This new translation by the author’s great-nephew, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Peter Balakian, eloquently renders the book’s vivid descriptions and lyrical prose into English. Including a new introduction that explores Ani’s continued relevance in the twenty-first century, The Ruins of Ani will give readers a new appreciation for this lost city’s status as a pinnacle of both Armenian civilization and human achievement.

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The Sacred Cosmos

Theological, Philosophical, and Scientific Conversations in the Twelfth Century School of Chartres

Peter Ellard

University of Scranton Press, 2007

The School of Chartres was a bold intellectual movement of the twelfth century that introduced the World Soul and the Chartrian cosmology to Christendom. In his controversial book, The Sacred Cosmos, theologian Peter Ellard analyzes the most radical aspects of Chartrian thought and traces their relation to classical and late-antique philosophers such as Boethius and Plato. In addition, Ellard investigates the Cathedral of Chartres as an important proof and example of Chartrian theology in this essential volume for anyone interested in the intersection of spirituality and philosophy.

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The Saga of St. Jón of Hólar

Translated by Margaret Cormack, With an Introduction byPeter Foote

Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2020

This volume contains a translation of the version of the Saga of St. Jón of Hólar that is probably closest to the first Latin vita. It is only the second saga of an Icelandic episcopal saint to appear in a modern translation in the present century. The volume consists of two parts, the first comprising a general introduction and a translation by Margaret Cormack. The second part provides a detailed scholarly analysis of the manuscripts, contents, style, and literary connections of the saga by the late Peter Foote, one of the foremost scholars of Old Norse and Icelandic literature.

The Jóns saga was written in the early thirteenth century, nearly a century after the death of its protagonist, the first bishop of the diocese of Hólar in Northern Iceland. The author of the saga combined Latin learning with native folklore to produce a readable narrative that is contemporary with the earliest family and contemporary sagas. This text provides valuable insight into the religious life of ordinary Icelanders in the thirteenth century, and the introduction corrects common misconceptions about ecclesiastical history and the cult of saints in Iceland. It will be of value to scholars of medieval Icelandic literature, hagiography, and history.

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The Saga of the Jomsvikings

Translated from the Old Icelandic by Lee M. Hollander

University of Texas Press, 1955

In A.D. 986, Earl Hákon, ruler of most of Norway, won a triumphant victory over an invading fleet of Danes in the great naval battle of Hjórunga Bay. Sailing under his banner were no fewer than five Icelandic skalds, the poet-historians of the Old Norse world. Two centuries later their accounts of the battle became the basis for one of the liveliest of the Icelandic sagas, with special emphasis on the doings of the Jómsvikings, the famed members of a warrior community that feared no one and dared all. In Lee M. Hollander's faithful translation, all of the unknown twelfth-century author's narrative genius and flair for dramatic situation and pungent characterization is preserved.

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The Saint and the Atheist

Thomas Aquinas and Jean-Paul Sartre

Joseph S. Catalano

University of Chicago Press, 2021

It is hard to think of two philosophers less alike than St. Thomas Aquinas and Jean-Paul Sartre. Aquinas, a thirteenth-century Dominican friar, and Sartre, a twentieth-century philosopher and atheist, are separated by both time and religious beliefs. Yet, for philosopher Joseph S. Catalano, the two are worth bringing together for their shared concern with a fundamental issue: the uniqueness of each individual person and how this uniqueness relates to our mutual dependence on each other. When viewed in the context of one another, Sartre broadens and deepens Aquinas’s outlook, updating it for our present planetary and social needs. Both thinkers, as Catalano shows, bring us closer to the reality that surrounds us, and both are centrally concerned with the place of the human within a temporal realm and what stance we should take on our own freedom to act and live within that realm. Catalano shows how freedom, for Sartre, is embodied, and that this freedom further illuminates Aquinas’s notion of consciousness.

Compact and open to readers of varying backgrounds, this book represents Catalano’s efforts to bring a lifetime of work on Sartre into an accessible consideration of philosophical questions by placing him in conversation with Aquinas, and it serves as a primer on key ideas of both philosophers. By bringing together these two figures, Catalano offers a fruitful space for thinking through some of the central questions about faith, conscience, freedom, and the meaning of life.

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The Sanctity of the Leaders

Holy Kings, Princes, Bishops and Abbots from Central Europe (11th to 13th Centuries)

Gábor Klaniczay

Central European University Press, 2023

The latest title in the Central European Medieval Texts series contains the lives of saints who were canonized in the eleventh through thirteenth centuries in the newly Christianized countries of Central and Eastern Europe (Bohemia, Poland, Hungary, and Dalmatia). A rejoinder to the earlier volume in the series, the Saints of the Christianization Age of Central Europe (CEMT, Vol. 6), containing hermits, missionaries, and martyrs, this second volume of hagiography is dominated by political or ecclesiastical leaders who became saintly patrons of their region and were highly venerated throughout the Middle Ages.

The legends in the volume present the two Hungarian holy kings Stephen and Ladislas, the holy duke Emeric, the Czech holy abbot Prokop of Sázava, three bishops, the Venetian-Hungarian Gellért of Csanád, the Polish Stanislas of Cracow (both martyrs), and the Dalmatian holy bishop Saint John of Trogir. Each “vita” is published in Latin original with an English translation and with prefaces discussing the textual tradition.

Saints’ lives have been recognized as an invaluable source of information on social and economic history, the history of mentalities and everyday life, cultural history, and, above all, as a special genre with crucial importance and prevalence in medieval literature.

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The Sasanian Empire at War

Persia, Rome, and the Rise of Islam, 224–651

Michael J. Decker

Westholme Publishing, 2025

A comprehensive military history of one of the most important empires of Late Antiquity

The Sasanian Empire at War: Persia, Rome, and the Rise of Islam, 224–651 is the first comprehensive study in English examining war and society in one of the most important empires in world history: the Persian Empire of 224-651 AD, ruled by the Sasanian clan. At its height the Sasanians governed lands from the Indus River in the east to Egypt and the Mediterranean in the west. Adversaries of Rome, they also faced grave challenges from nomadic powers from Central Asia, notably the Huns and Turks. The Sasanians were able to maintain their empire for hundreds of years through nearly constant warfare, but when their expansion was checked in the north by the Byzantines at Constantinople in 626, and with the Muslim invasions to their south and west beginning in the 630s, the empire could no longer be sustained, and it finally collapsed.

In this book, Michael J. Decker examines Sasanian warfare, including military capabilities, major confrontations, organization and weapons of the Persian army. In addition to providing a comprehensive overview of the conflicts that marked this vital period in the history of Eurasia, The Sasanian Empire at War challenges long cherished notions of the inferiority of Sasanian military capabilities and renders a new image of a sophisticated, confident culture astride the heart of Eurasia at the end of the ancient world and birth of the Silk Road. Persian arms were among the many features of their culture that drew widespread admiration and was one of the keys to the survival of Iranian culture beyond the Arab Conquest and into the present day.

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The Saxon War

Bruno of Merseburg

Catholic University of America Press, 2022

Bruno, a cleric who served the archbishop of Magdeburg and subsequently the bishop of Merseburg during the course of the 1060s to the 1080s, composed one of the most important historical works treating the tumultuous period in the history of the German kingdom in the second half of the eleventh century. Bruno’s main focus in his Saxon War is the civil wars that engulfed the German kingdom from the mid 1060s through the end of the 1080s. However, as a historian of contemporary affairs, Bruno also offers crucial insights regarding the so-called Investiture Controversy, which Bruno treats largely as a political conflict between a tyrannical German ruler and the Saxons with some papal intervention, social conflict within the German kingdom, as well as the development of economic and military institutions. Unlike his contemporary Lampert of Hersfeld, Bruno was closely connected to the foremost leaders of the Saxon resistance against King Henry IV, and provides unique insights regarding their plans, hopes, and fears. Bruno also provides nearly two dozen full-text copies of letters that were sent by the main participants in the intra-German conflict as well as ten letters from Pope Gregory VII, four of which do not appear in any other source including the papal register. An additional important feature of Bruno’s history is that he treats military matters in an extraordinarily detailed manner, and is the most important narrative source for understanding the conduct of war during the second half of the eleventh century. Bruno’s detailed treatment of military matters is based upon his very extensive contacts with leading military figures, as well as his own personal observations regarding the numerous battles that punctuated the struggle between the Saxons and their erstwhile ruler. In sum, Bruno offers both unique perspectives and unique information about a crucial period in both German and European history, which make this text valuable not only for scholars, but also for a broader audience interested in the political, religious, and particularly military history of the eleventh century. This will be the first English translation of this work.

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The Scandal of the Fabliaux

R. Howard Bloch

University of Chicago Press, 1986

R. Howard Bloch argues that medieval French comic tales are shocking not so much for their dirty words, scatology, and celebration of the body in all its concavities and protrusions, but moreso for their insistent exposure of the scandal of their own production. Looking first at fabliaux about poets, Bloch demonstrates that the medieval comic poet was highly conscious of the inadequacy of language and pushed this perception to its logical, scandalous limit. The comic function of the fabliaux was intentionally disruptive: anticlerical, antifeminist, and antiestablishment, these tales were part of a sophisticated culture's critical perspective on itself.

By showing how the medieval poet's obsession with the outrageous, the low, and the lewd was intimately bound to poetry, Bloch forces a revision of traditional approaches to Old French literature. His final chapter, on castration anxiety, fetishism, and the comic, links the fabliaux with the development of modern notions of the self and makes a case for the medieval roots of our own sense of humor.

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The Scarith of Scornello

A Tale of Renaissance Forgery

Ingrid D. Rowland

University of Chicago Press, 2004

A precocious teenager, bored with life at his family's Tuscan villa Scornello, Curzio Inghirami staged perhaps the most outlandish prank of the seventeenth century. Born in the age of Galileo to an illustrious family with ties to the Medici, and thus an educated and privileged young man, Curzio concocted a wild scheme that would in the end catch the attention of the Vatican and scandalize all of Rome.

As recounted here with relish by Ingrid D. Rowland, Curzio preyed on the Italian fixation with ancestry to forge an array of ancient Latin and Etruscan documents. For authenticity's sake, he stashed the counterfeit treasure in scarith (capsules made of hair and mud) near Scornello. To the seventeenth-century Tuscans who were so eager to establish proof of their heritage and history, the scarith symbolized a link to the prestigious culture of their past. But because none of these proud Italians could actually read the ancient Etruscan language, they couldn't know for certain that the documents were frauds. The Scarith of Scornello traces the career of this young scam artist whose "discoveries" reached the Vatican shortly after Galileo was condemned by the Inquisition, inspiring participants on both sides of the affair to clash again—this time over Etruscan history.

An expert on the Italian Renaissance and one of only a few people in the world to work with the Etruscan language, Rowland writes a tale so enchanting it seems it could only be fiction. In her investigation of this seventeenth-century caper, Rowland will captivate readers with her sense of humor and obvious delight in Curzio's far-reaching prank. And even long after the inauthenticity of Curzio's creation had been established, this practical joke endured: the scarith were stolen in the 1980s by a thief who mistook them for the real thing.

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The Scope of History

Studies in the Historiography of Alfonso el Sabio

Charles F. Fraker

University of Michigan Press, 1996

The Scope of History brings together a selection of classic and new articles in the field of Spanish and specifically Castilian history, focusing on the historiography of Alfonso X, King of Castile. The volume shows how the Alfonsine histories became well-fashioned and independent works of literature, having begun as simple compilations of preexisting texts. The author seeks to point out that the editors of the Alfonsine histories amplify and alter their sources, rejoin them with artistic skill, and generally arrange the elements into an ordered system. In so doing, Fraker explains, the final text speaks uniquely, giving voice to themes alien to the original texts. Fraker also aims to illustrate the scope of the editorial labor which set Alfonso's General Estoria and his Estoria de España apart from their contemporary histories.
In his introduction the author addresses the place of Alfonso's work in its own time, giving the reader a notion of what other works in the genre were like and how they differ. The connecting thread running through these chapters is a continuing focus on the art of the compiler. Medieval historical compilations are by definition scissors-and-paste jobs, stringing older texts together to tell new, different stories. But the Alfonsine editors bend the rules: in the short run they make their work yield the themes they think important, and in the long run they build a literary monument of impressive architecture.
Charles F. Fraker is Professor Emeritus in Romance Languages, University of Michigan.

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The Search for Medieval Music in Africa and Germany, 1891-1961

Scholars, Singers, Missionaries

Anna Maria Busse Berger

University of Chicago Press, 2020

This innovative book reassesses the history of musicology, unearthing the field’s twentieth-century German and global roots. In the process, Anna Maria Busse Berger exposes previously unseen historical relationships such as those between the modern rediscovery of medieval music, the rise of communal singing, and the ways in which African music intersected with missionary work in the German colonial period. Ultimately, Busse Berger offers a monumental new account of the early twentieth-century music culture in Germany and East Africa.

The book unfolds in three parts. Busse Berger starts with the origins of comparative musicology circa 1900, when early proponents used ideas from comparative linguistics to test whether parallels could be drawn between nonwestern and medieval European music. She then turns to youth movements of the era—the Wandervogel, Jugendmusikbewegung, and Singbewegung—whose focus on joint music making influenced many musicologists. Finally, she considers case studies of Protestant and Catholic mission societies in what is now Tanzania, where missionaries—many of them musicologists and former youth-group members—extended the discipline via ethnographic research and a focus on local music and communities. In highlighting these long-overlooked transnational connections and the role of global music in early musicology, Busse Berger shapes a fresh conception of music scholarship during a pivotal part of the twentieth century.

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The Secret of Secrets

The Scholarly Career of a Pseudo-Aristotelian Text in the Latin Middle Ages

Steven J. Williams

University of Michigan Press, 2003

The Secret of Secrets. The title alone promises the revelation of the most treasured arcana and piques our interest. Add the names of Aristotle and Alexander the Great, and our curiosity is securely engaged. Readers reacted similarly during the Latin Middle Ages. The work alleges to be an extended letter of advice sent by Aristotle to his former pupil Alexander the Great while the latter was on a campaign in Persia. It stood at the top of the "best-seller" list for hundreds of years and was read by two different audiences: scholars and laypersons. Steven J. Williams focuses his study on its reception by European scholars, starting with its translation into Latin during the High Middle Ages and carrying the story through to the time when scholarly attention waned around 1550.

An important medieval text that also provides a window onto medieval intellectual life, Secret of Secrets played a modest though significant role in medieval scholarly life: "significant" in that it was used in a variety of scholarly contexts, had some part to play in the scholarly controversies of the day, and was so often read that an impressive number of manuscripts are still extant today; "modest" in that it was cited much less frequently than the major works of its day.

Steven J. Williams is Associate Professor in the Department of History, New Mexico Highlands University.

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The Secrets We Keep

Hidden Histories of the Byzantine Empire

Roland Betancourt

J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2024

An intriguing look at secrecy during the Byzantine Empire and the role of the art historian in seeking truth.

Secrecy has played a role throughout human history and continues to capture the popular imagination. Some of the most seductive aspects of the Byzantine Empire—such as the relics of the imperial palace and the military uses of Greek fire—have been shrouded in mystery for centuries. This book provides a brief history of secrecy in Byzantium and examines the role of the art historian in uncovering the truth, demonstrating how visual evidence can not only reveal new findings but also purposely conceal answers.

Art historians face many challenges in their search for hidden knowledge, including accessing accounts preserved in fragmentary glimpses and reconciling how practices of speculation and reconstruction result in different, and sometimes contradictory, understandings. With pressing urgency, this book asks scholars to consider their role in articulating the stories of marginalized people, particularly for queer and trans history.

At the core of these investigations is the quest to discover how clandestine knowledge was transmitted and how relationships were strengthened by collective secret keeping, as well as how concealment is used as a strategy for exercising power. With insights into the religious, imperial, military, and cultural uses of secrecy, this book offers an intriguing look at the ways secrecy manifested itself during the Byzantine Empire and the implications it has for the issues we face today.

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The Shock of Medievalism

Kathleen Biddick

Duke University Press, 1998

In The Shock of Medievalism Kathleen Biddick explores the nineteenth-century foundations of medieval studies as an academic discipline as well as certain unexamined contemporary consequences of these origins. By pairing debates over current academic trends and issues with innovative readings of medieval texts, Biddick exposes the presuppositions of the field of medieval studies and significantly shifts the objects of its historical inquiry.
Biddick describes how the discipline of medieval studies was defined by a process of isolation and exclusion—a process that not only ignored significant political and cultural issues of the nineteenth century but also removed the period from the forces of history itself. Wanting to separate themselves from popular studies of medieval culture, and valuing their own studies as scientific, nineteenth-century academics created an exclusive discipline whose structure is consistently practiced today, despite the denials of most contemporary medieval scholars. Biddick supports her argument by discussing the unavowed melancholy that medieval Christians felt for Jews and by revealing the unintentional irony of nineteenth-century medievalists’ fabrication of sentimental objects of longing (such as the “gothic peasant”). The subsequent historical distortions of this century-old sentimentality, the relevance of worker dislocation during the industrial revolution, and other topics lead to a conclusion in which Biddick considers the impact of an array of factors on current medieval studies.
Simultaneously displacing disciplinary stereotypes and altering an angle of historical inquiry, The Shock of Medievalism challenges accepted thinking even as it produces a new direction for medieval studies. This book will provoke scholars in this field and appeal to readers who are interested in how historicizing processes can affect the development of academic disciplines.

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The Social Politics of Medieval Diplomacy

Anglo-German Relations (1066-1307)

Joseph P. Huffman

University of Michigan Press, 2000

Late nineteenth- and twentieth-century political and intellectual boundaries have heavily influenced our views of medieval Germany. Historians have looked back to the Middle Ages for the origins of modern European political crises. They concluded that while England and France built nation-states during the medieval era, Germany--lacking a unified nation-state--remained uniquely backward and undeveloped.

Employing a comparative social history, Huffman reassesses traditional national historiographies of medieval diplomacy and political life. Germany is integrated into Anglo-French notions of western Europe and shown to be both an integral player in western European political history as well as a political community that was as fully developed as those of medieval England or France.

The Social Politics of Medieval Diplomacy offers a study of the social dynamics of relations between political communities. In particular, the Anglo-French political communities do not appear as state and constitution builders, while the German political community is not as a state and constitution destroyer. The book concludes by encouraging medievalists to integrate the German kingdom into their intellectual constructs of medieval Europe.

This book is an essential history of medieval Germany. It bridges the gaps between Anglo-French and German scholarship and political and social history. Joseph Huffman makes available German-language scholarship. Both English and German history is integrated in an accessible and interesting way. The historiographical implications of this study will be far-reaching.

Joseph P. Huffman is Associate Professor of History and Political Science, Messiah College.

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The Story of Wamba

Julian of Toledo's Historia Wambae regis

Joaquín Martínez Julian of Toledo

Catholic University of America Press, 2005

The Story of Wamba offers the first complete English translation of Julian's work. The text is fully annotated and preceded by a thorough introduction to its historical and literary backgrounds.

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The Stranger in Medieval Society

Frank. R. P. Akehurst and Stephanie Cain Van D’Elden, Editors

University of Minnesota Press, 1998

The Stranger in Medieval Society was first published in 1998. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

The Stranger in Medieval Society examines the presence of outsiders in medieval Europe. Whether welcome or unwelcome, voluntary or involuntary, strangers appear in every society; they leave their own communities, venture into new environments, confront differences, and often spark changes. The first collection in medieval studies to concentrate on the notion of the stranger, these essays show how outsiders influenced the culture of Europe in the Middle Ages.

Among the topics explored are Edward III and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as historical and literary instances of chivalric skill and courage; political conflict in the late French epic Renaut de Montauban; and a group of people who were doubly strangers-some thirty thousand Jews, who after being expelled from France in 1306 returned under an experimental agreement a few years later.

Contributors: William Calin, U of Florida; Susan Crane, Rutgers; Maria Dobozy, U of Utah; Edward R. Haymes, Cleveland State U; William Chester Jordan, Princeton U; Derek Pearsall, Harvard U; William D. Phillips Jr., U of Minnesota; Kathryn L. Reyerson, U of Minnesota; and Janet L. Solberg, Kalamazoo College.

F. R. P. Akehurst is professor of French in the Department of French and Italian at the University of Minnesota. Stephanie Cain Van D'Elden is director of graduate studies for the program in Germanic philology at the University of Minnesota.

This is volume 12 in the Medieval Cultures Series

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