Bøker i The Middle Ages Series-serien

Drawn from two medieval collections of form letters for all manner of business and personal affairs, Lost Letters of Medieval Life depicts early thirteenth-century England through the everyday correspondence of people of all classes, from peasants and shopkeepers to bishops and earls.

Represents all the major areas of current work on the Romance of the Rose, both in America and in Europe.

This is the first English translation of a 13th-century work which set down the customary law of Clermont in the Beauvais region of France as it was practiced and understood. The work covers both procedural and substantive law, including the facts and decisions of nearly 100 cases.

Proffers diverse perspectives on the prehistory of government in Northern France, Spain, Germany, the Low Countries, and England. This book brings political, social, ecclesiastical, and cultural history to bear on topics such as aristocracies, women, rituals, commemoration, and manifestations of power through literary, legal, and scriptural means.

"The History of the Lombards constitutes one of the most important literary sources for the early history of Europe, and the vision and energy of its author make it ... the most complex of the histories of the Germanic peoples between the sixth and the ninth centuries."-from the Introduction

In Dark Speech, Robin Chapman Stacey explores the fascinating interaction between performance and law in Ireland between the seventh and ninth centuries.

Applies approaches to literacy, legal studies, memory, ritual, and the manorial economy to reexamine the transformation of medieval power. This book opens up perspectives on problems of power, in particular the idea and practice of accountability.

This first full-length treatment of the Barons' Crusade examines the call for holy war and its consequences in Hungary, France, England, Constantinople, and the Holy Land.

Explores the events in Byzantium and the Byzantine response to the actions of the Crusaders. This book includes a chapter on the sack of Constantinople and the election of its Latin emperor.

The scribes of early medieval England wrote out their vernacular poems using a format that looks primitive to our eyes because it lacks the familiar visual cues of verse lineation, marks of punctuation, and capital letters. The paradox is that scribes had those tools at their disposal, which they deployed in other kinds of writing, but when it came to their vernacular poems they turned to a sparser presentation. How could they afford to be so indifferent? The answer lies in the expertise that Anglo-Saxon readers brought to the task. From a lifelong immersion in a tradition of oral poetics they acquired a sophisticated yet intuitive understanding of verse conventions, such that when their eyes scanned the lines written out margin-to-margin, they could pinpoint with ease such features as alliteration, metrical units, and clause boundaries, because those features are interwoven in the poetic text itself. Such holistic reading practices find a surprising source of support in present-day eye-movement studies, which track the complex choreography between eye and brain and show, for example, how the minimal punctuation in manuscripts snaps into focus when viewed as part of a comprehensive system.How the Anglo-Saxons Read Their Poems uncovers a sophisticated collaboration between scribes and the earliest readers of poems like Beowulf, The Wanderer, and The Dream of the Rood. In addressing a basic question that no previous study has adequately answered, it pursues an ambitious synthesis of a number of fields usually kept separate: oral theory, paleography, syntax, and prosody. To these philological topics Daniel Donoghue adds insights from the growing field of cognitive psychology. According to Donoghue, the earliest readers of Old English poems deployed a unique set of skills that enabled them to navigate a daunting task with apparent ease. For them reading was both a matter of technical proficiency and a social practice.

Jean-Claude Schmitt examines a unique and controversial conversion narrative to explore its meaning within the society and culture of its period as well as what it has to tell us about the way historians think and write.

This groundbreaking work challenges the received history of William Langland's Piers Plowman. Through close textual analysis, Lawrence Warner brings about a fundamental shift in our understanding of the production and transmission of the poem's three versions, establishing an entirely new paradigm for the study of Middle English literature.

Late antique and early medieval hagiographic texts present holy women as simultaneously pious and corrupt, hideous and beautiful, exemplars of depravity and models of sanctity. In Sacred Fictions Lynda Coon unpacks these paradoxical representations to reveal the construction and circumscription of women''s roles in the early Christian centuries.Coon discerns three distinct paradigms for female sanctity in saints'' lives and patristic and monastic writings. Women are recurrently figured as repentant desert hermits, wealthy widows, or cloistered ascetic nuns, and biblical discourse informs the narrative content, rhetorical strategies, and symbolic meanings of these texts in complex and multivalent ways. If hagiographers made their women saints walk on water, resurrect the dead, or consecrate the Eucharist, they also curbed the power of women by teaching that the daughters of Eve must make their bodies impenetrable through militant chastity or spiritual exile and must eradicate self-indulgence through ascetic attire or philanthropy. The windows the sacred fiction of holy women open on the past are far from transparent; driven by both literary invention and moral imperative, the stories they tell helped shape Western gender constructs that have survived into modern times.

"A remarkable analysis of an important medieval text... This work will surely initiate new studies of the precolonial frame of mind and the role of distinct versions of medieval manuscripts in the shaping of medieval understanding."-Sixteenth Century Journal

Kreutz writes the first modern study in English of the land, political structures, and cultures of southern Italy in the two centuries before the Norman conquest.

The Hystoria Constantinopolitana relates the adventures of Martin of Pairis, an abbot of the Cistercian Order who participated in the plunder of the city, as recorded by his monk Gunther. Alfred Andrea has captured the full flavor of the original with its alternating sections of prose and poetry.

"A gifted poet has given us an astute, adroit, vigorous, inviting, eminently readable translation... The challenging gamut of Langland's language ... has here been rendered with blessed energy and precision. Economou has indeed Done-Best."-Allen Mandelbaum

Theodore Evergates has assembled, translated, and annotated some two hundred documents from the country of Champagne into a sourcebook that focuses on the political, economic, and legal workings of a feudal society, uncovering the details of private life and social history that are embedded in the official records.

Explored in this book are women''s contributions to letter writing in western Europe from the sixth to the sixteenth centuries. The essays represent the first attempt to chart medieval women''s achievements in epistolarity, and the contributions to this volume situate the women writers in a historical context and employ a variety of feminist approaches.

"This elegantly written volume turns upside down prejudices and idees recues concerning society, family, and women in the Middle Ages."-The Medieval Review

Describing in detail weaponry and armor, daily life on the march or in camp, clothing, food, medical care, military law, and titles of the Byzantine army of the seventh century, this text offers insights into the Byzantine military ethos. It also provides data for the historian, and even for the ethnologist.

Rewriting Saints and Ancestors examines the ways medieval French writers re-remembered and rewrote the lives of saints and dynastic ancestors, reconceptualizing the past in order to make sense of the present.

Composed at the height of the Hundred Years War by Geoffroi de Charny, one of the most respected knights of his age, A Knight's Own Book of Chivalry is an invaluable guide to fourteenth-century knighthood.

The Trotula was the most influential compendium on women's medicine in medieval Europe. Green here presents the first modern English translation of the so-called standardized Trotula ensemble, a composite form of the texts that was produced in the mid-thirteenth century and circulated widely in learned circles.

In The Kingdom of Sicily, 1100-1250, Karla Mallette writes the first literary history of the Kingdom of Sicily in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The study contains an extensive selection of poems and documents translated from the Arabic, Latin, Old French, and Italian.

Includes the first readable English translation of the Laws of Edward the Confessor and a much-needed critical edition of its Latin text.

Using sermons, exorcisms, letters, biographies of the saints, inscriptions, autobiographical and legal documents—some of which are translated nowhere else—J. N. Hillgarth shows how the Christian church went about the formidable task of converting western Europe. The book covers such topics as the relationship between the Church and the Roman state, Christian attitudes toward the barbarians, and the missions to northern Europe. It documents as well the cult of relics in popular Christianity and the emergence of consciously Christian monarchies.

"Gives the reader a portrayal of the social institutions of a Germanic people far richer and more exhaustive than any other available source."—from the Foreword, by Edward PetersFrom the bloody clashes of the third and fourth centuries there emerged a society that was neither Roman nor Burgundian, but a compound of both. The Burgundian Code offers historians and anthropologists alike illuminating insights into a crucial period of contact between a developed and a tribal society.

Contains essays about a segment of the past that runs roughly from the end of antiquity to the thirteenth century. This volume includes essays about the past that is written about and the writing that brings it to life.

Thomas DuBois unravels for the first time the history of the Nordic religions in the Viking Age. "A seminal study of Nordic religions that future scholars will not be able to avoid."-Church History