Drawing on the work of Holocaust writer Primo Levi and political philosopher Giorgio Agamben McClellan introduces a critical turn in our reading of Chaucer. He argues that the unprecedented event of t
This volume questions the extent to which Medieval studies has emphasized the period as one of change and development through reexamining aspects of the medieval world that remained static. The Mediev
What does it mean to "possess a voice" - or to be without one? That is the question that twelve scholars of philosophy, literature, history, art history, musicology, religion, law, a
Hybridity, Identity and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain examines an island made turbulent by conquest and civil war. Focusing upon history writing, ethnography, and saints' lives, this book details ho
Women, Power and Religious Patronage explores the actions of Jeanne and Marguerite, sisters and successive countesses of Flanders and Hainaut in the thirteenth century, on behalf of monastic communiti
This book considers howscientists, theologians, priests, and poets approached the relationship of thehuman body and ethics in the later Middle Ages. Is medicine merely a metaphorfor sin? Or can certai
By the later fourteenth century, Gnosticism and its influences seem to have dispersed almost completely, at least on the surface. Certainly the late-medieval church was vigorous in its efforts to teac
Key scholars in the field of lesbian and sexuality studies take part in an innovative conversation that offers a radical new methodology for writing lesbian history and geography, drawing new conclusi
The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were times of tumultuous change in medieval Europe; they witnessed the Black Death, the Great Papal Schism, heightened fears of the apocalypse, and the eliminati
This book presents a re-evaluation of The Castle of Perseverance, the longest and earliest complete morality play in English. It argues that vision - as a physical, moral, and cognitive process - is t
Medieval Welsh Pilgrimage, c.1100–1500 examines one of the most popular expressions of religious belief in medieval Europe—from the promotion of particular sites for political, religious, and financia
Did medieval women have the power to choose? This is a question at the heart of this book which explores three court cases from Yorkshire in the decades after the Black Death. Alice de Rouclif was a c
This book argues that Chaucer challenges his culture’s mounting obsession with vision through his varied constructions of masculinity. Because medieval theories of vision relied upon distinctions betw
This book addresses portrayals of children in a wide array of Chaucerian works. Situated within a larger discourse on childhood, Ages of Man theories, and debates about the status of the child in the
The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were times of tumultuous change in medieval Europe; they witnessed the Black Death, the Great Papal Schism, heightened fears of the apocalypse, and the eliminati
Medieval Spanish literature treating the 711 Islamic conquest of Spain is neither a literature of conquest nor reconquest, but one of both. This book explores understudied literary material on the con
This book is first in its field to analyze how disability and gender both thematically and formally operate within late medieval popular literature. Reading romance, conduct manuals, and spiritual aut
Medievalism, Multilingualism, and Chaucer examines multilingual identity in the writing of Gower, Langland, and Chaucer. Mary Catherine Davidson traces monolingual habits of inquiry to nineteenth-cen
Contrary to the monolithic impression left by postcolonial theories of Orientalism, the book makes the case that Orientals did not exist solely to be gazed at. Exploring a cross-section of 9th through
