Title: Chaucer and the fictions of gender 
Author: Hansen, Elaine Tuttle 1947-
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Literature | English Literature | Gender Studies | Medieval Studies
Publisher's Description: Hansen challenges both the long-standing myth of Chaucer as the tolerant, wise Father of English poetry and the recent arguments that Chaucer was a protofeminist, subversive of the misogyny of his day. Hansen argues that these mistaken interpretations inhibit readings of Chaucer that respond to feminist and other poststructuralist critiques of traditional literary scholarship.Hansen suggests that the woman's voice in Chaucer reflects an urgent problem of gender identity for two kinds of men, both feminized by fourteenth-century courtly conventions: those who love women, and those who traffic in stories about women. She maintains that Chaucer destabilizes the notion of fixed gender difference but then privileges masculine identity by reconstructing the feminine in orthodox ways. Hansen exhorts readers of Chaucer, and students of the history of gender, to approach Chaucer's fictions with a more sophisticated awareness of their complexity and timeliness.   [brief]
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Title: Chaucer's Dante: allegory and epic theater in The Canterbury tales 
Author: Neuse, Richard
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Literature | English Literature | European Literature | Medieval Studies
Publisher's Description: Richard Neuse here explores the relationship between two great medieval epics, Dante's Divine Comedy and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales . He argues that Dante's attraction for Chaucer lay not so much in the spiritual dimension of the Divine Comedy as in the human.Borrowing Bertolt Brecht's phrase "epic theater," Neuse underscores the interest of both poets in presenting, as on a stage, flesh and blood characters in which readers would recognize the authors as well as themselves. As spiritual autobiography, both poems challenge the traditional medieval mode of allegory, with its tendency to separate body and soul, matter and spirit. Thus Neuse demonstrates that Chaucer and Dante embody a humanism not generally attributed to the fourteenth century.   [brief]
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Title: Chaucerian play: comedy and control in the Canterbury tales 
Author: Kendrick, Laura
Published: University of California Press,  1988
Subjects: Literature | English Literature
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Title: The disenchanted self: representing the subject in the Canterbury tales 
Author: Leicester, H. Marshall (Henry Marshall) 1942-
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | Medieval Studies
Publisher's Description: The question of the "dramatic principle" in the Canterbury Tales , of whether and how the individual tales relate to the pilgrims who are supposed to tell them, has long been a central issue in the interpretation of Chaucer's work. Drawing on ideas from deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and social theory, Leicester proposes that Chaucer can lead us beyond the impasses of contemporary literary theory and suggests new approaches to questions of agency, representation, and the gendered imagination.Leicester reads the Canterbury Tales as radically voiced and redefines concepts like "self" and "character" in the light of current discussions of language and subjectivity. He argues for Chaucer's disenchanted practical understanding of the constructed character of the self, gender, and society, building his case through close readings of the Pardoner's, Wife of Bath's, and Knight's tales. His study is among the first major treatments of Chaucer's poetry utilizing the techniques of contemporary literary theory and provides new models for reading the poems while revising many older views of them and of Chaucer's relation to his age.   [brief]
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Title: Jews, medicine, and medieval society Joseph Shatzmiller
Author: Shatzmiller, Joseph
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Jewish Studies | Medieval History | European History | Medieval Studies | Medicine
Publisher's Description: Jews were excluded from most professions in medieval, predominantly Christian Europe. Bigotry was widespread, yet Jews were accepted as doctors and surgeons, administering not only to other Jews but to Christians as well. Why did medieval Christians suspend their fear and suspicion of the Jews, allowing them to inspect their bodies, and even, at times, to determine their survival? What was the nature of the doctor-patient relationship? Did the law protect Jewish doctors in disputes over care and treatment?Joseph Shatzmiller explores these and other intriguing questions in the first full social history of the medieval Jewish doctor. Based on extensive archival research in Provence, Spain, and Italy, and a deep reading of the widely scattered literature, Shatzmiller examines the social and economic forces that allowed Jewish medical professionals to survive and thrive in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Europe. His insights will prove fascinating to scholars and students of Judaica, medieval history, and the history of medicine.   [brief]
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Title: The master and Minerva: disputing women in French medieval culture 
Author: Solterer, Helen
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Literature | European Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | Medieval Studies | Women's Studies | French Studies
Publisher's Description: Can words do damage? For medieval culture, the answer was unambiguously yes. And as Helen Solterer contends, in French medieval culture the representation of women exemplified the use of injurious language.Solterer investigates the debates over women between masters and their disciples. Across a broad range of Old French literature to the early modern Querelle des femmes , she shows how the figure of the female respondent became an instrument for disputing the dominant models of representing women. The female respondent exploited the criterion of injurious language that so preoccupied medieval masters, and she charged master poets ethically and legally with libel. Solterer's work thus illuminates an early, decisive chapter in the history of defamation.   [brief]
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Title: A medieval mirror, Speculum humanae salvationis, 1324-1500 
Author: Wilson, Adrian
Published: University of California Press,  1985
Subjects: Art | Architecture
Publisher's Description: The Speculum Humanae Salvationis or "Mirror of Human Salvation," is the only medieval work that exists in illuminated manuscripts, in blockbook editions of the mid-fifteenth century, and in sixteen later incunabula. The authors have provided lavishly illustrated accounts of the manuscripts and inclu . . . [more]
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Title: Living letters of the law: ideas of the Jew in medieval Christianity
Author: Cohen, Jeremy 1953-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Jewish Studies | Religion | Medieval History
Publisher's Description: In Living Letters of the Law , Jeremy Cohen investigates the images of Jews and Judaism in the works of medieval Christian theologians from Augustine to Thomas Aquinas. He reveals how - and why - medieval Christianity fashioned a Jew on the basis of its reading of the Bible, and how this hermeneutically crafted Jew assumed distinctive character and power in Christian thought and culture.Augustine's doctrine of Jewish witness, which constructed the Jews so as to mandate their survival in a properly ordered Christian world, is the starting point for this illuminating study. Cohen demonstrates how adaptations of this doctrine reflected change in the self-consciousness of early medieval civilization. After exploring the effect of twelfth-century Europe's encounter with Islam on the value of Augustine's Jewish witnesses, he concludes with a new assessment of the reception of Augustine's ideas among thirteenth-century popes and friars.Consistently linking the medieval idea of the Jew with broader issues of textual criticism, anthropology, and the philosophy of history, this book demonstrates the complex significance of Christianity's "hermeneutical Jew" not only in the history of antisemitism but also in the broad scope of Western intellectual history.   [brief]
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Title: The other economy: pastoral husbandry on a medieval estate 
Author: Biddick, Kathleen
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: History | European History | Medieval Studies
Publisher's Description: While the cereal agriculture of medieval Europe has been studied exhaustively, the pastoral resources and livestock husbandry of medieval estates have been seriously neglected. Kathleen Biddick's examination of one estate, Peterborough Abbey, during several decades before and after 1100 and the first decade after 1300, brings a new balance to the subject of the medieval economy. Her pioneering methodology and the conclusions she reaches will interest archaeologists and agricultural historians as well as anthropologists, economists, and historians of early European development.Drawing on the archival records of the abbey, an estate that straddled the "classic" open-field agriculture of the English Midlands and the more pastorally-oriented farming of the English peat fens, Biddick describes in great detail how these farmers managed their herds and consumed and marketed livestock products such as meat, wool, hides, milk, and cheese. Commitment to conserving consumption strategies did not mean that the Abbey resisted market involvement and technological innovation. Large numbers of work and cart horses indicate the estate's economic interest in speedy haulage. Cereal yields, where they are calculable, compare favorably to the high-yielding demesnes of parts of Norfolk, the most agriculturally advanced region of medieval England. By showing how the Abbey coordinated its resources to enhance diversity and flexibility, The Other Economy enlarges our understanding of agrarian lordship and political control over resources in the medieval economy.   [brief]
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Title: Nuns as artists: the visual culture of a medieval convent
Author: Hamburger, Jeffrey F 1957-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Art | Religion | Gender Studies | Art History | Medieval History
Publisher's Description: Jeffrey F. Hamburger's groundbreaking study of the art of female monasticism explores the place of images and image-making in the spirituality of medieval nuns during the later Middle Ages. Working from a previously unknown group of late-fifteenth-century devotional drawings made by a Benedictine nun for her cloistered companions, Hamburger discusses the distinctive visual culture of female communities. The drawings discovered by Hamburger and the genre to which they belong have never been given serious consideration by art historians, yet they serve as icons of the nuns' religious vocation in all its complexity. Setting the drawings and related imagery - manuscript illumination, prints, textiles, and metalwork - within the context of religious life and reform in late medieval Germany, Hamburger reconstructs the artistic, literary, and institutional traditions that shaped the lives of cloistered women.Hamburger convincingly demonstrates the overwhelming importance of "seeing" in devotional practice, challenging traditional assumptions about the primacy of text over image in monastic piety. His presentation of the "visual culture of the convent" makes a fundamental contribution to the history of medieval art and, more generally, of late medieval monasticism and spirituality.   [brief]
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Title: Coronations: medieval and early modern monarchic ritual 
Author: Bak, János M
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: History | Medieval History
Publisher's Description: Fascination with royal pomp and circumstance is as old as kingship itself. The authors of Coronations examine royal ceremonies from the ninth to the sixteenth century, and find the very essence of the monarchical state in its public presentation of itself. This book is an enlightened response to the revived interest in political history, written from a perspective that cultural historians will also enjoy. The symbolic and ritual acts that served to represent and legitimate monarchical power in medieval and early modern Europe include not only royal and papal coronations but also festive entries, inaugural feasts, and rulers' funerals.Fifteen leading scholars from North America, Britain, France, Germany, Poland, and Denmark explore the forms and the underlying meanings of such events, as well as problems of relevant scholarship on these subjects. All the contributions demonstrate the importance of in-depth study of rulership for the understanding of premodern power structures. Emphasis is placed on interdisciplinary approaches, drawing on the findings of ethnography and anthropology, combined with rigorous critical evaluation of the written and iconic evidence. The editor's historiographical introduction surveys the past and present of this field of study and proposes some new lines of inquiry. "For 'reality' is not a one-dimensional matter: even if we can establish what actually transpired, we still need to ask how it was perceived by those present."   [brief]
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Title: The Gothic enterprise: a guide to understanding the Medieval cathedral
Author: Scott, Robert A 1935-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Medieval Studies | Architecture | European Studies | Christianity | European History | Architectural History | Sociology | Sociology
Publisher's Description: The great Gothic cathedrals of Europe are among the most astonishing achievements of Western culture. Evoking feelings of awe and humility, they make us want to understand what inspired the people who had the audacity to build them. This engrossing book surveys an era that has fired the historical imagination for centuries. In it Robert A. Scott explores why medieval people built Gothic cathedrals, how they built them, what conception of the divine lay behind their creation, and how religious and secular leaders used cathedrals for social and political purposes. As a traveler's companion or a rich source of knowledge for the armchair enthusiast, The Gothic Enterprise helps us understand how ordinary people managed such tremendous feats of physical and creative energy at a time when technology was rudimentary, famine and disease were rampant, the climate was often harsh, and communal life was unstable and incessantly violent. While most books about Gothic cathedrals focus on a particular building or on the cathedrals of a specific region, The Gothic Enterprise considers the idea of the cathedral as a humanly created space. Scott discusses why an impoverished people would commit so many social and personal resources to building something so physically stupendous and what this says about their ideas of the sacred, especially the vital role they ascribed to the divine as a protector against the dangers of everyday life. Scott's narrative offers a wealth of fascinating details concerning daily life during medieval times. The author describes the difficulties master-builders faced in scheduling construction that wouldn't be completed during their own lifetimes, how they managed without adequate numeric systems or paper on which to make detailed drawings, and how climate, natural disasters, wars, variations in the hours of daylight throughout the year, and the celebration of holy days affected the pace and timing of work. Scott also explains such things as the role of relics, the quarrying and transporting of stone, and the incessant conflict cathedral-building projects caused within their communities. Finally, by drawing comparisons between Gothic cathedrals and other monumental building projects, such as Stonehenge, Scott expands our understanding of the human impulses that shape our landscape.   [brief]
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Title: Medieval stereotypes and modern antisemitism
Author: Chazan, Robert
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Medieval Studies | Jewish Studies | Medieval History | European History | European Studies
Publisher's Description: The twelfth century in Europe, hailed by historians as a time of intellectual and spiritual vitality, had a dark side. As Robert Chazan points out, the marginalization of minorities emerged during the "twelfth-century renaissance" as part of a growing pattern of persecution, and among those stigmatized the Jews figured prominently.The migration of Jews to northern Europe in the late tenth century led to the development of a new set of Jewish communities. This northern Jewry prospered, only to decline sharply two centuries later. Chazan locates the cause of the decline primarily in the creation of new, negative images of Jews. He shows how these damaging twelfth-century stereotypes developed and goes on to chart the powerful, lasting role of the new anti-Jewish imagery in the historical development of antisemitism.This coupling of the twelfth century's notable intellectual bequests to the growth of Western civilization with its legacy of virulent anti-Jewish motifs offers an important new key to understanding modern antisemitism.   [brief]
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Title: The honeysuckle and the hazel tree: medieval stories of men and women 
Author: Terry, Patricia Ann 1929-
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Literature | Literature in Translation | European Literature | Poetry | Literary Theory and Criticism | French Studies | Medieval Studies | Gender Studies
Publisher's Description: Known for her fine translations of octosyllabic narrative verse, Patricia Terry presents translations of four major practitioners of this dominant literary form of twelfth- and thirteenth-century France. Her introduction discusses the varying views of women and love in the texts and their place in the courtly tradition.From Chrétien de Troyes Terry includes an early work, Philomena , here translated into verse for the first time. The other great writer of this period was Marie de France, the first woman in the European narrative tradition. Lanval is newly translated for this edition, which also features four of Marie's other poems. The collection further includes The Reflection by Jean Renart, known for his realistic settings; and the anonymous Chatelaine of Vergi , a fatalistic and perhaps more modern depiction of love.   [brief]
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Title: The Arnolfini betrothal: medieval marriage and the enigma of Van Eyck's double portrait 
Author: Hall, Edwin 1928-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Art | Art History | Art Criticism | Medieval History
Publisher's Description: Commonly known as the "Arnolfini Wedding" or "Giovanni Arnolfini and His Bride," Jan van Eyck's double portrait, painted in 1434, is probably the most widely recognized panel painting of the fifteenth century. One of the great masterpieces of early Flemish art, this enigmatic picture has also aroused intense speculation as to its precise meaning. Edwin Hall's accessible study - firmly grounded in Roman and canon law, theology, literature, and the social history of the period - offers a compelling new interpretation of this wonderful painting.Instead of depicting the sacrament of marriage, Hall argues, the painting commemorates the alliance between two wealthy and important Italian mercantile families, a ceremonious betrothal that reflects the social conventions of the time. Hall not only unlocks the mystery that has surrounded this work of art, he also makes a unique contribution to the fascinating history of betrothal and marriage custom, ritual, and ceremony, tracing their evolution from the late Roman Empire through the fifteenth century and providing persuasive visual evidence for their development. His illuminating view of Van Eyck's quintessential work is a striking example of how art continues to endure and engage us over the centuries.   [brief]
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Title: Jews in the notarial culture: Latinate wills in Mediterranean Spain, 1250-1350 
Author: Burns, Robert Ignatius
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Medieval Studies | Judaism | Jewish Studies | European History | Law | Medieval History
Publisher's Description: In the rapidly transforming world of thirteenth-century Mediterranean Spain, the all-purpose scribe and contract lawyer known as the notary became a familiar figure. Most legal transactions of the Roman Law Renaissance were framed in this functionary's notoriously hasty shorthand. Notarial archives, then, offer a remarkable window on the daily life of this pluri-ethnic society. Robert I. Burns brings together the testimony of a multitude of documents, and transcribes in full nearly fifty will-related charters prepared by notaries, to give a never-before-seen view of Jewish society in that place and time.Wills can display the religious conscience, ethical institutions, social mobility, and property dynamics of whole groups or regions. Even a single testament allows a glimpse into the testator's family and into the life and times of the living person. Burns devotes special attention to women in wills and to women's wills, extracting rich information on medieval women and gender relationships.While learning much about the role of kings and courts and the dynamics of Christian-Jewish relations, the reader also gains rare insights into a unique Jewish community.   [brief]
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Title: Form and good in Plato's Eleatic dialogues: the Parmenides, Theaetetus, Sophist, and Statesman 
Author: Dorter, Kenneth 1940-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Classics | Philosophy | Classical Literature and Language
Publisher's Description: In this innovative analysis, Plato's four eleatic dialogues are treated as a continuous argument. In Kenneth Dorter's view, Plato reconsiders the theory of forms propounded in his earlier dialogues and through an examination of the theory's limitations reaffirms and proves it essential. Contradicted are both those philosophers who argue that Plato espoused his theory of forms uncritically and those who argue that Plato in some sense rejected the theory and moved toward the categorical analysis developed byAristotle. Dorter's reexamination of Plato's insights implies an important new direction for modern philosophical inquiry.   [brief]
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Title: Writing and rebellion: England in 1381
Author: Justice, Steven 1957-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | Medieval Studies | Medieval History | European History
Publisher's Description: In this compelling account of the "peasants' revolt" of 1381, in which rebels burned hundreds of official archives and attacked other symbols of authority, Steven Justice demonstrates that the rebellion was not an uncontrolled, inarticulate explosion of peasant resentment but an informed and tactical claim to literacy and rule.Focusing on six brief, enigmatic texts written by the rebels themselves, Justice places the English peasantry within a public discourse from which historians, both medieval and modern, have thus far excluded them. He recreates the imaginative world of medieval villagers - how they worked and governed themselves, how they used official communications in unofficial ways, and how they produced a disciplined insurgent ideology.   [brief]
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Title: A new world in a small place: church and religion in the Diocese of Rieti, 1188-1378 
Author: Brentano, Robert 1926-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: History | Religion | Christianity | European History | Medieval History | Medieval Studies
Publisher's Description: Distinguished historian Robert Brentano provides an entirely new perspective on the character of the church, religion, and society in the medieval Italian diocese of Rieti from 1188 to 1378. Combing through a cache of previously ignored documents stored in a tower of the cathedral, he uses wills, li . . . [more]
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Title: Knights at court: courtliness, chivalry, & courtesy from Ottonian Germany to the Italian Renaissance 
Author: Scaglione, Aldo D
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Literature | European Literature | Medieval Studies | Renaissance Literature
Publisher's Description: Knights at Court is a grand tour and survey of manners, manhood, and court life in the Middle Ages, like no other in print. Composed on an epic canvas, this authoritative work traces the development of court culture and its various manifestations from the latter years of the Holy Roman Empire (ca. A.D. 1000) to the Italian Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.Leading medievalist and Renaissance scholar Aldo Scaglione offers a sweeping sociological view of three geographic areas that reveals a surprising continuity of courtly forms and motifs: German romances; the lyrical and narrative literature of northern and southern France; Italy's chivalric poetry. Scaglione discusses a broad number of texts, from early Norman and Flemish baronial chronicles to the romances of Chrétien de Troyes, the troubadours and Minnesingers. He delves into the Niebelungenlied, Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and an array of treatises on conduct down to Castiglione and his successors.All these works and Scaglione's superior scholarship attest to the enduring power over minds and hearts of a mentality that issued from a small minority of people - the courtiers and knights - in central positions of leadership and power. Knights at Court is for all scholars and students interested in "the civilizing process."   [brief]
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