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Examining English, Latin, French, and German texts, The Knight, the Cross, and the Song traces the role of secular chivalric literature in shaping Crusade propaganda across three centuries.

Can the Letters of Two Lovers be the previously lost love letters of Abelard and Heloise? Making Love in the Twelfth Century presents a new literary translation of the collection, along with a full commentary and two extended essays that parse its literary and intellectual contexts and chart the course of the doomed affair.

In Translating "Clergie," Claire M. Waters explores medieval texts in French verse and prose from England and the Continent that perform and represent the process of teaching as a shared lay and clerical endeavor.

The life of an aristocratic Carolingian man involved an array of behaviors and duties associated with his gender and rank: an education in arms and letters; training in horsemanship, soldiery, and hunting; betrothal, marriage, and the virile production of heirs; and the masterful command of a prominent household. In Be a Perfect Man, Andrew J. Romig argues that Carolingian masculinity was constituted just as centrally by the performance of caritas, defined by the early medieval scholar Alcuin of York as a complete and all-inclusive love for God and for fellow human beings, flowing from the whole heart, mind, and soul. The authority of the Carolingian man depended not only on his skills in warfare and landholding but also on his performances of empathy, devotion, and asceticism.Romig maps caritas as a concept rooted in a vast body of inherited Judeo-Christian and pagan philosophies, shifting in meaning and association from the patristic era to the central Middle Ages. Carolingian discussions and representations of caritas served as a discourse of power, a means by which early medieval writers made claims, both explicit and implicit, about the hierarchies of power that they believed ought to exist within their world. During the late eighth, ninth, and early tenth centuries, they creatively invoked caritas to link aristocratic men with divine authority. Romig gathers conduct handbooks, theological tracts, poetry, classical philosophy, church legislation, and exegetical texts to outline an associative process of gender ideology in the Carolingian Middle Ages, one that framed masculinity, asceticism, and authority as intimately interdependent. The association of power and empathy remains with us to this day, Romig argues, as a justification for existing hierarchies of authority, privilege, and prestige.

Conduct Becoming examines a new genre of late medieval writing that focuses on a wife''s virtuous conduct and ability of such conduct to alter marital and social relations in the world. Considering a range of texts written for women—the journées chrétiennes or daily guides for Christian living, secular counsel from husbands and fathers such as Le Livre du Chevalier de La Tour Landry and Le Menagier de Paris, and literary narratives such as the Griselda story—Glenn D. Burger argues that, over the course of the long fourteenth century, the "invention" of the good wife in discourses of sacramental marriage, private devotion, and personal conduct reconfigured how female embodiment was understood.While the period inherits a strongly antifeminist tradition that views the female body as naturally wayward and sensual, late medieval conduct texts for women outline models of feminine virtue that show the good wife as an identity with positive influence in the world. Because these manuals imagine how to be a good wife as necessarily entangled with how to be a good husband, they also move their readers to consider such gendered and sexed identities in relational terms and to embrace a model of self-restraint significantly different from that of clerical celibacy. Conduct literature addressed to the good wife thus reshapes how late medieval audiences thought about the process of becoming a good person more generally. Burger contends that these texts develop and promulgate a view of sex and gender radically different from previous clerical or aristocratic models—one capable of providing the foundations for the modern forms of heterosexuality that begin to emerge more clearly in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

In the late 1320s, Martha de Cabanis was widowed with three young sons, eleven, eight, and four years of age. Her challenges would be many: to raise and train her children to carry on their father''s business; to preserve that business until they were ready to take over; and to look after her own financial well-being. Examining the visible trail Martha left in Montpellier''s notarial registers and other records, Kathryn L. Reyerson reveals a wealth of information about her activities, particularly in the area of business, commerce, and real estate. From these formal, contractual documents, Reyerson gleans something of Martha''s personality and reconstructs what she may have done, and a good deal of what she actually did, in her various roles of daughter, wife, mother, and widow.Mother and Sons, Inc. demonstrates that while women were hardly equal to men in the fourteenth century, under the right conditions afforded by wealth and the status of widowhood, they could do and did more than many have thought. Within the space of twenty years, Martha developed a complex real estate fortune, enlarged a cloth manufacturing business and trading venture, and provided for the support and education of her sons. Just how the widow Martha maneuvered within the legal constraints of her social, economic, and personal status forms the heart of the book''s investigation. Situating Martha''s story within the context of Montpellier and medieval Europe more broadly, Reyerson''s microhistorical approach illuminates the opportunities and the limits of what was possible for elite mercantile women in the urban setting in which Martha lived.

Stanbury explores the lost traffic in images in late medieval England and its impact on contemporary authors and artists.

Enemies in the Plaza examines medieval personalities, cities, and pageants at the border of Castile and Grenada, illuminating how public spectacle reflected and altered attitudes towards Jews, Muslims, and converts. Although it once helped to dissipate anxieties, pageantry ultimately contributed to the rejection of religious minorities.

Dark Age Bodies reconstructs the gender ideology of monastic masculinity through an investigation of early medieval readings of the body and its parts. It brings together scholarship in architectural history and cultural anthropology to frame an important reconsideration of Carolingian culture.

This book argues that between 1200 and 1400 Ifrīqiya was not an economic or political region. It shows how Emirism, a political ideology that emerged at the end of the fourteenth century, led both medieval sources and modern historians to imagine Ifrīqiya as a region.

Lords' Rights and Peasant Stories suggests rethinking master narratives about transitions from oral to literate societies, examining how village laws (Weistumer) were written down.

Poetics of the Incarnation examines fourteenth-century writers whose poetry and narrative explore the intellectual implications of the hypostatic union. The Incarnation inspired a working-through of the philosophical and theological implications of language while Middle English was emerging as a legitimate medium for theological expression.

Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia provides a sweeping survey of the many forms of bound labor in Iberia from ancient times to the decline of slavery in the eighteenth century.

In Old Age in Late Medieval England, Joel T. Rosenthal explores the life spans, sustained activities, behaviors, and mentalites of the individuals who approached and who passed the biblically stipulated span of three score and ten in late medieval England. Drawing on a wide variety of documentary and court records (which were, however, more likely to specify with precision an individual's age on reaching majority or inheriting property than on the occasion of his or her death) as well as literary and didactic texts, he examines "old age" as a social construct and web of behavioral patterns woven around a biological phenomenon.Focusing on "lived experience" in late medieval England, Rosenthal uses demographic and quantitative records, family histories, and biographical information to demonstrate that many people lived into their sixth, seventh, and occasionally eighth decades. Those who survived might well live to know their grandchildren. This view of a society composed of the aged as well as of the young and the middle aged is reinforced by an examination of peers, bishops, and members of parliament and urban office holders, for whom demographic and career-length information exists. Many individuals had active careers until near the end of their lives; the aged were neither rarities nor outcasts within their world. Late medieval society recognized the concept of retirement, of old age pensions, and of the welcome release from duty for those who had served over the decades.

Studying the medieval tradition of quoting verbatim from troubadour songs, Sarah Kay explores works produced along the arc of the northern Mediterranean in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, illuminating how this tradition influenced medieval literary history and the development of European subjectivity.

In medieval Europe, where theologians saw sin, some natural philosophers saw a phenomenon in need of explanation. They believed some men were born with homosexual inclinations and others acquired them as habits based on early pleasurable experiences.

The Making and Unmaking of a Saint traces the rise and fall of devotion to Gerald of Aurillac through a millennium, from his death in the tenth century to the attempt to reinvigorate his cult in the nineteenth century.

The Last Crusade in the West traces Castilian efforts to conquer Granada from the middle of the fourteenth century until the end of the fifteenth. Although the Castilian kings neglected the reconquest for many years, Fernando and Isabel achieved the capitulation of Granada in 1492.

The Queen's Dumbshows explores the importance of John Lydgate's mummings and entertainments for literary and theatrical history, rethinking what constitutes "drama" in late medieval England and what role it played in public life.

Adam Usk, a fifteenth-century professor, royal advisor, schismatic, and spy, wrote a peculiar book in a reticent, nervous prose better suited to keeping secrets than setting them in writing. Steven Justice sets out to find what Usk wanted to hide and comes to surprising conclusions about the foundations of literary and historical study.

The Secret Faith of Maestre Honoratus explores late medieval Iberian Jewish culture through the figure of Profayt Duran, a rationalist Jewish scholar who was compelled during the riots of 1391 to become a Christian in name, and whose broad-ranging philosophical and scientific education was mustered in defense of his religious convictions.

In New Legends of England, Catherine Sanok examines a significant, albeit previously unrecognized, phenomenon of fifteenth-century literary culture in England: the sudden fascination with the Lives of British, Anglo-Saxon, and other native saints. Embodying a variety of literary forms—from elevated Latinate verse, to popular traditions such as the carol, to translations of earlier verse legends into the medium of prose—the Middle English Lives of England''s saints are rarely discussed in relation to one another or seen as constituting a distinct literary genre. However, Sanok argues, these legends, when grouped together were an important narrative forum for exploring overlapping forms of secular and religious community at local, national, and supranational scales: the monastery, the city, and local cults; the nation and the realm; European Christendom and, at the end of the fifteenth century, a world that was suddenly expanding across the Atlantic.Reading texts such as the South English Legendary, The Life of St. Etheldrede, the Golden Legend, and poems about Saints Wenefrid and Ursula, Sanok focuses especially on the significance of their varied and often experimental forms. She shows how Middle English Lives of native saints revealed, through their literary forms, modes of affinity and difference that, in turn, reflected a diversity in the extent and structure of medieval communities. Taking up key questions about jurisdiction, temporality, and embodiment, New Legends of England presents some of the ways in which the Lives of England''s saints theorized community and explored its constitutive paradox: the irresolvable tension between singular and collective forms of identity.

Modern studies of the religious reform movement of the central Middle Ages have often relied on contemporary accounts penned by Cistercian monks, who routinely exaggerated the importance of their own institutions while paying scant attention to the remarkable expansion of abbeys of Cistercian women. Yet by the end of the thirteenth century, Constance Hoffman Berman contends, there were more houses of Cistercian nuns across Europe than of monks. In The White Nuns, she charts the stages in the nuns'' gradual acceptance by the abbots of the Cistercian Order''s General Chapter and describes the expansion of the nuns'' communities and their adaptation to a variety of economic circumstances in France and throughout Europe. While some sought contemplative lives of prayer, the ambition of many of these religious women was to serve the poor, the sick, and the elderly.Focusing in particular on Cistercian nuns'' abbeys founded between 1190 and 1250 in the northern French archdiocese of Sens, Berman reveals the frequency with which communities of Cistercian nuns were founded by rich and powerful women, including Queen Blanche of Castile, heiresses Countess Matilda of Courtenay and Countess Isabelle of Chartres, and esteemed ladies such as Agnes of Cressonessart. She shows how these founders and early patrons assisted early abbesses, nuns, and lay sisters by using written documents to secure rights and create endowments, and it is on the records of their considerable economic achievements that she centers her analysis.The White Nuns considers Cistercian women and the women who were their patrons in a clear-eyed reading of narrative texts in their contexts. It challenges conventional scholarship that accepts the words of medieval monastic writers as literal truth, as if they were written without rhetorical skill, bias, or self-interest. In its identification of long-accepted misogynies, its search for their origins, and its struggle to reject such misreadings, The White Nuns provides a robust model for historians writing against received traditions.

Nuns' Priests Tales explores the spiritual ideas that motivated priestly service to nuns across Europe and throughout the medieval period, revealing the central role that women played in male spiritual life, and thus moving beyond the reductionist assumption that celibacy defined male spirituality in the age of reform.

Covering decades that included the last major crusades, the birth of the Inquisition, and the unexpected invasion of the Mongols, The Two Powers shows how Popes Gregory and Innocent's battles with Emperor Frederick shaped the political circumstances of the thirteenth-century papacy and its role in the public life of medieval Christendom.

In his final book, the distinguished historian John Baldwin argues that the aristocrats who inhabited the region of Paris over the turn of the twelfth century were important not only because they contributed to Philip Augustus's increase of royal power but also for their own establishment as an elite and powerful social class.

In Pure Filth, Noah D. Guynn argues that the superficial crudeness and predictability of late medieval French farce conceal finely drawn, and sometimes quite radical, perspectives on ethics, politics, and religion.

In Dead Voice, Jesus R. Velasco explores how the thirteenth-century law code known as Siete Partidas introduced canon and ecclesiastical law in the vernacular for explicitly secular purposes and embraced intellectual disciplines and fictional techniques that normally lie outside legal science.

Inspired by one fascinating and unusual historical case, Conversion, Circumcision, and Ritual Murder in Medieval Europe explores the ways religious conversion fueled Jewish-Christian tensions. In the process, it elucidates how the interplay of fact and fantasy shaped Christian views of Jews as agents of Christian apostasy to Judaism.

Drawing on the perspectives of modern and medieval narratology, medieval multilingualism, and cultural memory, History and the Written Word argues that members of an administrative elite demonstrated their mastery of the rules of literate political behavior by producing and consuming history-writing and its documents.