Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture

The Carolingian Sacramentaries of Saint-Amand: Art, Script, and Liturgical Creativity in an Early Medieval Monastery

By Arthur Westwell

The series of beautiful sacramentaries made at Saint-Amand in the later ninth century offer us unique insight into an early medieval scriptorium at work. These manuscripts contain principally the prayer texts for the celebration of the Mass, a ceremony which stood at the centre of monastic life in this period. They display how this largely neglected genre discloses creativity and initiative on the part of the monks of Saint-Amand, who re-organised and re-composed this especially versatile literature. They made their books uniquely comprehensive and full of insight into how the mass liturgy was re-made at a critical period in its development. This innovative study makes these sources accessible for the first time. In-depth study of script, decoration, and content enables a new appreciation of the context in which the deluxe Saint-Amand manuscripts were produced. It foregrounds ecclesiastical patronage, the political and intellectual dynamics at the waning of Carolingian power, and the intensive collaboration of scribes, artists, and liturgical composers, as well as the unique ways liturgical manuscripts can inform our understanding of medieval life and thought.

Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture XXXIX, ISBN 978-1-50152-120-1 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-50151-756-3 (PDF), ISBN 978-1-50151-758-7 (EPUB) © 2024

English Birth Girdles: Devotions for Women in "Travell of Childe"

By Mary Morse

In medieval England, women in labor wrapped birth girdles around their abdomens to protect themselves and their unborn children. These parchment or paper rolls replicated the “girdle relics” of the Virgin Mary and other saints loaned to queens and noblewomen, extending childbirth protection to women of all classes. This book examines the texts and images of nine English birth girdles produced between the reigns of Richard II and Henry VIII. Cultural artifacts of lay devotion within the birthing chamber, the birth girdles offered the solace and promise of faith to the parturient woman and her attendants amid religious dissent, political upheaval, recurring epidemics, and the onset of print.

Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture XXXVIII, ISBN 978-1-50151-814-0 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-50151-390-9 (PDF), ISBN 978-1-50151-400-5 (EPUB) © 2024

Spiritual and Material Boundaries in Old French Verse: Contemplating the Walls of the Earthly Paradise

By Jacob Abell

The Earthly Paradise was a vibrant symbol at the heart of medieval Christian geographies of the cosmos. As humanity’s primal home now lost through the sins of Adam of Eve, the Earthly Paradise figured prominently in Old French tales of lands beyond the mundane world. This study proposes a fresh look at the complex roles played by the Earthly Paradise in three medieval French poems: Marie de France’s The Purgatory of St. Patrick, Benedeit’s Voyage of Saint Brendan the Abbot, and Guillaume de Lorris’s The Romance of the Rose. By examining the literary, cultural, and artistic components that informed each poem, this book advances the thesis that the exterior walls of the Earthly Paradise served evolving purposes as contemplative objects that implicitly engaged complex notions of economic solidarity and idealized community. These visions of the Earthly Paradise stand to provide a striking contribution to a historically informed response to the contemporary legacies of colonialism and the international refugee crisis.

Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture XXXVII, ISBN 978-1-50152-057-0 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-50151-425-8 (PDF), ISBN 978-1-50151-427-2 (EPUB) © 2023

Canon Fanfiction: Reading, Writing, and Teaching with Adaptations of Premodern and Early Modern Literature

By Christine Schott

Several scholarly fields investigate the reuse of source texts, most relevantly adaptation studies and fanfiction studies. The limitation of these two fields is that adaptation studies focuses narrowly on retelling, usually in the form of film adaptations, but is not as well equipped to treat other uses of source material like prequels, sequels and spinoffs. On the other hand, fanfiction studies has the broad reach adaptation studies lacks but is generally interested in "underground" production rather than material that goes through the official publication process and thus enters the literary canon. This book sits in the gap between these fields, discussing published novels and their contribution to the scholarly engagement with their pre- and early modern source material as well as applying that creative framework to the teaching of literature in the college classroom.

Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture XXXVI, ISBN 978-1-50152-337-3 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-50151-597-2 (PDF), ISBN 978-1-50151-598-9 (EPUB) © 2022

The Bond of Empathy in Medieval and Early Modern Literature

By David Strong

This study examines the various means of becoming empathetic and using this knowledge to explain the epistemic import of the characters’ interaction in the works written by Chaucer, Shakespeare and their contemporaries. By attuning oneself to another’s expressive phenomena, the empathizer acquires an inter- and intrapersonal knowledge that exposes the limitations of hyperbole, custom, or unbridled passion to explain the profundity of their bond. Understanding the substantive meaning of the characters’ discourse and narrative context discloses their motivations and how they view themselves. Strong explores the place of empathy in select late medieval and early modern portrayals of the body and mind and explicates the role they play in forging an intimate rapport.

Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture XXXV, ISBN 978-1-50152-252-9 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-50151-546-0 (PDF), ISBN  978-1-50151-547-7 (EPUB) © 2022

Mapping Narrations, Narrating Maps: Concepts of the World in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period

By Ingrid Baumgärtner and edited by Daniel Gneckow, Anna Hollenbach and Phillip Landgrebe

This volume offers Ingrid Baumgärtner's central articles on the medieval and early modern history of cartography for the first time in English translation. A first group of essays gives an overview of medieval cartography and illustrates the methods of cartographers. Another analyzes world maps and travel accounts in relation to mapped spaces. A third examines land surveying, cartographical practices of exploration and the production of Portolan atlases.

This volume is Open Access. 

Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture XXXIV, ISBN 978-1-50152-381-6 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-50151-601-6 (PDF), ISBN 978-1-50151-604-7 (EPUB) © 2022

Humanism, Capitalism, and Rhetoric in Early Modern England: The Separation of the Citizen from the Self

By Lynette Hunter

This book offers an interdisciplinary approach to concepts of the self associated with the development of humanism in England, and to strategies for both inclusion and exclusion in structuring the early modern nation state. It addresses writings about rhetoric and behavior from 1495-1660, beginning with Erasmus’ work on sermon or the conversational rhetoric between friends, and following the transference of this stance to a politics whose broadening democratic constituency needed a legitimate structure for governance-at-a-distance.

Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture XXXIII, ISBN 978-1-50151-857-7 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-50151-424-1 (PDF), ISBN 978-1-50151-407-4 (EPUB) © 2022

The Eleventh and Twelfth Books of Giovanni Villani's New Chronicle

Translated from the Italian by Rala I. Diakité and Matthew T. Sneider

Giovanni Villani’s New Chronicle traces the history of Europe, Italy, and Florence over a vast sweep of time – from the Tower of Babel to the great earthquake of 1348. In the eleventh and twelfth books, Villani depicts a particularly eventful period in the history of Florence, whose grandeur is illustrated in several famous chapters describing the city’s income, expenses, and magnificence. The dramatic account follows Florence’s internal affairs as well as its conflicts with powerful lords like Castruccio Castracani and Mastino della Scala. The chronicler’s perspective, however, ranges beyond his city, as he documents such events as the imperial coronation of Louis of Bavaria, the penitential pilgrimage of Venturino da Bergamo, and the first campaigns of the Hundred Year’s War.

Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture XXXI, ISBN 978-1-50151-842-3 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-50151-426-5 (PDF) © 2022

Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Readings of the Medieval Orient: Other Encounters

By Liliana Sikorska

Travel narratives and historical works shaped the perception of Muslims and the East in the Victorian and post-Victorian periods. The book discusses that troubled legacy drawing on the discourses on Muslims originating in the European Middle Ages, and locates the nineteenth-century texts concerning the Saracens and their lands in the liminal space between history and travel accounts.

Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture XXXII, ISBN 978-1-50151-791-4 (hardback), ISBN  978-1-50151-336-7 (PDF) © 2021

Dante's Dream: A Jungian Psychoanalytical Approach

By Gwenyth E. Hood

An artist or mystic can refresh and revive a culture’s imagination by exploring his personal dream-images and connecting them to the past.  Dante Alighieri presents his Divine Comedy as a dream-vision, investing considerable energy in establishing and alluding to its dates (starting Good Friday, 1300). Modern readers will therefore welcome a Jungian psychoanalytical approach, which can trace both instinctual and spiritual impulses in the human psyche.

Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture XXX, ISBN 978-1-50151-822-5 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-50151-372-5 (PDF), ISBN 978-1-50151-356-5 (EPUB), © 2021

Chaucer's Polyphony: The Modern in Medieval Poetry

By Jonathan Fruoco

Geoffrey Chaucer has long been considered by the critics as the father of English poetry. However, this notion not only tends to forget a huge part of the history of early medieval English literature but also to ignore the specificities of Chaucer’s style — if Chaucer cannot be thought of as the father of English poetry, he is, however, the father of English prose and one of the main artisans of what Mikhail Bakhtin called the polyphonic novel.

Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture XXIX, ISBN 978-1-50151-849-2 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-50151-436-4 (PDF), ISBN 978-1-50151-404-3 (EPUB), © 2020

The World Chronicle of Guillaume de Nangis: A Manuscript's Journey from Saint-Denis to St. Pancras

By Daniel Williman and Karen Corsano

The core of this book is the life story of a manuscript codex, British Library Royal MS 13 E.iv: the Latin Chronicle (from the Creation to 1300) of Guillaume de Nangis, copied in a Paris atelier from the original in the abbey of St-Denis-en-France. The authors show how it traveled from one capital to the other, narrating the entire life and interesting times of this codex.

Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture XXVIII, ISBN 978-1-50151-871-3 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-50151-001-4 (PDF), ISBN 978-1-50151-005-2 (EPUB), © 2020

Sacred Journeys in the Counter-Reformation: Long Distance Pilgrimage in North-Western Europe

By Elizabeth Caroline Tingle

Sacred Journeys in the Counter-Reformation examines long-distance pilgrimages to ancient, international shrines in northwestern Europe in the two centuries after Luther. In this region in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, saints' cults and pilgrimage were frequently contested, more so than in the Mediterranean world. The central focus is that of agency in religious change: what drove spiritual reform and what were its consequences for the 'ordinary' Catholic? This is explored through concepts of the religious self, holy materiality, and sacred space.

Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture XXVII, ISBN 978-1-50151-815-5 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-50151-438-8 (PDF), ISBN 978-1-50151-413-5 (EPUB), © 2020

Hysteria, Perversion, and Paranoia in the Canterbury Tales: "Wild" Analysis and the Symptomatic Storyteller

By Becky Renee McLaughlin

Beginning with the spectacle of hysteria, moving through the perversions of fetishism, masochism, and sadism, and ending with paranoia and psychosis, this book explores the ways that conflicts with the Oedipal law erupt on the body and in language in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture XXV, ISBN 978-1-50151-841-6 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-50151-410-4 (PDF), ISBN 978-1-50151-406-7 (EPUB), © 2020

Architectural Rhetoric in Shakespeare and Spenser

Jennifer Vaught

This book illustrates how architectural rhetoric in Shakespeare and Spenser provides a bridge between the human body and mind and the nonhuman world of stone and timber.

Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture XXIV, ISBN 978-1-50151-793-8 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-5015-1315-2 (PDF), ISBN 978-1-5015-1309-1 (EPUB) © 2019

Early Modern Britain's Relationship to Its Past: The Historiographical Fortunes of the Legends of Brute, Albina, and Scota

Philip Mark Robinson-Self

This volume considers the reception in the early modern period of four popular medieval myths of nationhood—the legends of Brutus, Albina, and Scota—tracing their intertwined literary and historiographical afterlives.

Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture XXIII, ISBN 978-1-58044-351-7 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-58044-352-4 (PDF), ISBN 978-3-11-062668-1 (EPUB) © 2018

The Valiant Welshman, the Scottish James, and the Formation of Great Britain

By Megan S. Lloyd

This book explores how R.A.'s play "The Valiant Welshman" reflected contemporary hopes and fears about the potential unification of England and Scotland during the reign of James VI of Scotland and I of England.

Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture XXII, ISBN 978-1-58044-353-1 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-58044-354-8 (PDF), ISBN 978-3-11-062540-0 (EPUB) © 2018

The Gawain-Poet and the Fourteenth-Century English Anticlerical Tradition

Ethan Campbell

A fresh contextual reading of the four Middle English "Gawain" poems that situates them within the rich tradition of fourteenth-century English anticlericalism.

Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture XXI, ISBN 978-1-58044-307-4 (hardback) © 2018

Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, and the Nature of Fame

Robert A. Logan

A characterological study of the standards of measure and the nature of fame of the renowned figures in "Antony and Cleopatra," juxtaposed to the origins and nature of Shakespeare's fame.

Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture XX, ISBN 978-158044-319-7 (hardback) © 2018

Spenser's Narrative Figuration of Women in "The Faerie Queene"

Judith H. Anderson

This study interrogates the figuration of women within the narrative of Spenser's culturally encyclopedic romance-epic, "The Faerie Queene."

Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture XIX, ISBN 978-158044-317-3 (hardback) © 2018

Medieval London: Collected Papers of Caroline M. Barron

Martha Carlin and Joel Rosenthal

Caroline Barron is the world's leading authority on the history of medieval London and she has made her impact through a series of major articles revised and updated here.

Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture XVIII, ISBN 978-158044-256-5 (hardback) © 2017

The Disperata, from Medieval Italy to Renaissance France

Gabriella Scarlatta

This study explores how Italian and French poets adopted the "disperata" genre to establish a tradition that both merges with and subverts Petrarchism.

Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture XVII, ISBN 978-158044-256-5 (hardback) © 2017

Art in Spain and Portugal from the Romans to the Early Middle Ages: Routes and Myths

Rose Walker

A reconsideration of Spanish and Portuguese art and architecture from the time of the Romans to the turn of the eleventh century. Challenging earlier overviews, Walker highlights the artistic unities shared by Christians and Muslims that culminated in the later tenth century and went on to inform aspects of Romanesque art.

Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture XVI, ISBN 978-1-58044-264-0 (hardback) © 2017

Vernacular Traditions of Boethius’s “De consolatione philosophiae”

Edited by Noel Harold Kaylor Jr. And Philip Edward Phillips

This collection critically examines translations of Boethius's “Consolatio” not only into English and German but also into Dutch, Italian, Polish, Hebrew, Greek and Korean.

Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture XV, ISBN 978-1-58044-216-9 (hardback) © 2016

The Final Book of Giovanni Villani’s New Chronicle

Translated from the Italian by Rala Diakite and Matthew Sneider

The first full translation of the final book of Giovanni Villani's important “Cronica Fiorentina” - includes introduction, annotations and index.

Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture XIV, ISBN 978-1-58044-217-6 (hardback) © 2016

A Bibliographical Guide to the Study of the Troubadours and Old Occitan Literature

Robert A. Taylor

Taylor provides a definitive survey of the field of Occitan literary studies and treats over two thousand recent books and articles with full annotations. Taylor's painstaking attention to detail and broad knowledge of the field ensure that this guide will become the essential resource for Occitan literary studies worldwide.

Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture XIII, ISBN 978-1-58044-215-2 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-58044-207-7 (paperback) © 2015

Demon Possession in Anglo-Saxon England

Peter Dendle

Early medieval England was a society governed by the competing discourses of illness, spirituality, power, and community. The concepts of demon possession and exorcism, introduced by Christian missionaries, provided a potential outlet for expressing the psychological, biological, and sociopolitical dysfunctions of a society that was at the center of multiple conflicting cultural dimensions. This book is a reexamination of the available sources describing the possessed and a study of the currently recognized medical and psychiatric conditions that may be relevant to and resemble medieval possession.

Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture XII, ISBN 978-1-58044-169-8 (hardback) © 2014

Saints at Play: The Performance Features of French Hagiographic Mystery Plays

Vicki L. Hamblin

In the introduction to her study of twenty-eight French non-biblical hagiographic mystery plays from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Hamblin notes that "this approach is intended to strengthen a comparative analysis of relatively similar texts created within a particular cultural setting."

Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture XI, ISBN 978-1-58044-167-4 (hardback) © 2012

William Langland, Piers Plowman: A Parallel-Text Edition of the A, B, C and Z Versions

Edited by A.V.C. Schmidt

This work—a parallel-text edition that contains all four versions of Piers Plowman—constitutes a major enterprise of textual scholarship and will provide for students of Langland a modern equivalent to Skeat's standard edition of 1886. This revised and corrected three-volume set is specifically designed to facilitate study of the parallel text (Volume 1) alongside both the textual notes (Volume 2, Part 1) and the commentary/glossary (Volume 2, Part 2), and is intended to make the entire edition available to as many students of Langland as possible.

Volume 1 revises the first edition published by Longman in 1995. The two-part Volume 2 contains in a full and clearly presented form all the material essential for advanced study of a great medieval poem that continues to attract wide and intense interest.

Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture X, 3-volume set, ISBN 978-1-58044-161-2 (paperback set) © 2011

• 2nd edition of Volume 1: Text (pp. xviii + 764), ISBN 978-1-58044-158-2 (paperback) © 2011
• Revised edition of Volume 2, Part 1: Introduction and Textual Notes (pp. xiv + 472), ISBN 978-1-58044-159-9 (paperback) © 2011
• Revised edition of Volume 2, Part 2: Commentary, Bibliography and Indexical Glossary (pp. viii + 476), ISBN 978-1-58044-160-5 (paperback) © 2011
• Earlier edition of Volume 2, Parts 1 and 2 (pp. xiv + 950), ISBN 978-1-58044-141-4 (paperback–out of print) © 2008

My Wyl and My Wrytyng: Essays on John the Blind Audelay

Edited by Susanna Fein

The essays examine Audelay's biography, his self-representation as the maker of his book, and the specific parts of that book, from the poems and colophons found in "The Counsel of Conscience" to the salutations and carols that follow in the manuscript, concluding with a defense of Audelay's authorship of "Three Dead Kings" and Fein's own study of the multiple endings of the Audelay Manuscript. The scholarly work gathered in this collection allows John the Blind Audelay to take his rightful place among his peers in early fifteenth-century English literature.

Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture IX, ISBN 978-1-58044-135-3 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-58044-136-0 (paperback) © 2009

Inventing Latin Heretics: Byzantines and the Filioque in the Ninth Century

Tia M. Kolbaba

Focusing on the ninth-century beginnings of Byzantine writings against the Latin addition of the Filioque to the creed, this book illuminates several aspects of Byzantine thought—their self-definition, their theology, their uniquely constituted state—based both on what they had to say for themselves and on modern approaches to the study of group identity, religious conflict, and sociology of knowledge. The book introduces the concept of heresiology in general, defining terms, summarizing a vast body of secondary scholarship, and bringing the history of Byzantine antiheretical texts down to the ninth century.

Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture VII, ISBN 978-1-58044-133-9 (hardback) © 2009

Late Medieval England (1377–1485): A Bibliography of Historical Scholarship, 1990–1999

Joel T. Rosenthal

The volume represents the second part of Rosenthal's cataloging of historical scholarship on Ricardian, Lancastrian and Yorkist England, covering categories from political and legal history to social and intellectual history and the arts. As Rosenthal notes in the introduction, its size (1,888 entries for the decade) "hardly gives much support to those who warn us of the imminent demise of the more traditional lines of historical endeavor and inquiry."

Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture VI, ISBN 1-58044-075-4 (hardback) © 2003

Late Medieval England (1377–1485): A Bibliography of Historical Scholarship, 1975–1989

Joel T. Rosenthal

This volume is the first part of Rosenthal’s cataloging of historical scholarship on Ricardian, Lancastrian and Yorkist England, and covers categories from political and legal history to social and intellectual history and the arts. This volume is a must for any scholar of the period.

Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture VI, ISBN 1-879288-16-8 (hardback) © 1994

Magister Paulus Niavis: Epistole breues, Epistole mediocres, Epistole longiores

Edited by Rand H. Johnson

During the last two decades of the fifteenth century Paulus Niavis wrote Latin dialogues and letters in the desire to equip students with a sufficient and elegant means of expressing themselves on many aspects of their experiences at the university. For the modern reader the letters witness life and thought at a critical stage of early modern German history.

Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture IV, ISBN 1-879288-51-6 (hardback) © 1995

Early Prose in France: Contexts of Bilingualism and Authority

Jeanette M.A. Beer

This study of some of the earliest examples of French prose is designed to show that prose as a genre did not suddenly appear in the thirteenth century as a result of "diversification" but "had been, for many centuries before the thirteenth, the medium of the clercs." It had been

 honed by constant use to all manner of functions whether legal, diplomatic, epistolary or edificatory.

Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture II, ISBN 1-879288-12-5 (hardback) © 1992