The Canadian Society of Medievalists Member Publications

New Member Publication by Joanne Findon!

Donna Trembinski — Mon, 25 Nov 2024 20:18:10 GMT

See more about Dr. Findon's new book at the PIMS website, here.

Cate Gunn, Liz Herbert McAvoy and Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa, Women and Devotional Literature in the Middle Ages Giving Voice to Silence. Essays in Honour of Catherine Innes-Parker, D. S. Brewer, 2023

Thu, 11 May 2023 14:11:50 GMT

Silence was a much-lauded concept in the Middle Ages, particularly in the context of religious literature directed at women. Based on the Pauline prescription that women should neither preach nor teach, and should at all times keep speech to a minimum, the concept of silence lay at the forefront of many devotional texts, particularly those associated with various forms of women's religious enclosure. Following the example of the Virgin Mary, religious women were exhorted to speak seldom, and then only seriously and devoutly. However, as this volume shows, such gendered exhortations to silence were often more rhetorical than literal. The contributions range widely: they consider the English 'Wooing Group' texts and female-authored visionary writings from the Saxon nunnery of Helfta in the thirteenth century; works by Richard Rolle and the Dutch mystic Jan van Ruusbroec in the fourteenth century; Anglo-French treatises, and books housed in the library of the English noblewoman Cecily Neville in the fifteenth century; and the resonant poetics of women from non-Christian cultures. But all demonstrate the ways in which silence, rather than being a mere absence of speech, frequently comprised a form of gendered articulation and proto-feminist point of resistance. They thus provide an apt commemoration and celebration of the deeply innovative work of Catherine Innes-Parker (1956-2019), the respected feminist scholar and a pioneer of this important field of study.

-https://boydellandbrewer.com/9781843846628/women-and-devotional-literature-in-the-middle-ages/

Richard Firth Green and R.F. Yeager, “Of latine and of othire lare”: Essays in Honour of David R. Carlson, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies Press, 2022

Mon, 06 Feb 2023 13:27:27 GMT

"Unsurprisingly, in view of the remarkable diversity of David R. Carlson’s own scholarship, the eighteen essays gathered here in his honour represent a corresponding variety of subjects across a broad range of countries and periods, but all drawing inspiration from his deep learning.

Many are linked by their interest in Rome’s intellectual legacy to the Middle Ages, the way, for instance, medieval readers understood Ovid (Frank Coulson and David Gura), or the use to which vernacular writers like Chaucer and Gower might put both Ovid (Richard Firth Green) and Statius (James Simpson). Some illuminate various aspects of Anglo-Latin works by authors like Walter of Peterborough (Stephanie Batkie), John Gower (Bob Yeager and Matthew Irvin), and Thomas Gascoigne (Michael Van Dussen), while others investigate the Latin discourse of fifteenth-century London (Rita Copeland) and of the great abbeys of St Albans, Glastonbury, and Canterbury (Andrew Galloway and James Carley). Further, several authors reflect Carlson’s own interest in the social contexts of vernacular literary discourse, both English and French: Geoff Rector on Hue of Roteland, Andrew Taylor on Jean Froissart, Michael Bennett on John Gower, and John Scattergood on Charles d’Orléans. The collection concludes with two bibliographic studies (Julia Boffey on late fifteenth-century bills of fare and Ana Sáez-Hidalgo on Katherine of Aragon’s books), and with A.S.G. Edwards’ brief life of the American editor of John Lydgate, Henry Bergen, a scholar who may have shared Carlson’s left-leaning convictions but whose work was far less wide-ranging than his.

'This tribute volume for David Carlson fills an impressive role in celebrating his wide and varied interests. The contributors, all distinguished in their own fields, supplement his work with articles on subjects from Ovidian commentary to the management of feasts, from the improprieties of the Hereford market-place to the movements of manuscripts and books. There will be few medievalists who will not both enjoy it and learn from it.' — Helen Cooper, University of Cambridge"

-Pims.ca (https://pims.ca/publication/isbn-978-0-88844-835-4/)

Ann Marie Rasmussen, Medieval Badges: Their Wearers and Their Worlds, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021

Thu, 31 Mar 2022 17:18:02 GMT

Medieval badges are small, brooch-like objects featuring an image or symbol that was widely familiar in the High and late Middle Ages (ca. 1150-1500 C.E.). Largely mass-produced from tin-lead alloys, over 20,000 medieval badges have survived into our times. In this book, I consider all medieval badges, whether they originated in religious or secular contexts, and highlight the different ways badges could confer meaning and identity on their wearers. Interdisciplinary in approach, and sumptuously illustrated with more than 115 color and black-and-white images, Medieval Badges introduces badges in all their variety and uses.

"The book offers a thorough introduction to medieval badges that is both a solid work of scholarship and a joy to read."—Jennifer Lee, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis

“Ann Marie Rasmussen offers a new approach to her subject, combining archaeological and literary sources in a way that has not been done before. Her understanding of the nature of medieval badges is profound and well argued.”— Michael Andersen, National Museum of Denmark

Kathy Cawsey, Images of Language in Middle English Vernacular Writings, Boydell & Brewer, 2020

Mon, 04 Jan 2021 19:05:35 GMT

Publisher's Description:

In the Middle Ages, English did not have any explicit theory or philosophy of language: philosophers wrote in Latin. This book addresses the issue. By closely analysing the images and metaphors used to describe language in Middle English texts, it explores how English writers thought language works. These images are "reverse-engineered" in an attempt to deduce what underlying theory of language could have created that image. In this way, it is possible to go beyond the clerically-educated Latin thinkers of the medieval period and try to find out what people thought in English. Taking metaphors and images from the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer, Arthurian romances, bird debates, sermons, handbooks of exempla, and medieval dramas, the book provides new and sometimes surprising readings of such familiar texts as the House of Fame and the Morte Darthur.

Brandon Alakas, Richard Whitford's Dyuers Holy Instrucyons and Teachynges Very Necessary for the Helth of Mannes Soule (Liverpool UP, 2020)

Mon, 07 Dec 2020 16:56:20 GMT

Publisher's description:

Richard Whitford’s Dyuers Holy Instrucyons and Teachynges Very Necessary for the Helth of Mannes Soule is the last printed work written by a brother of the Brigittine community at Syon Abbey. A vocal opponent of Lutheran reforms and Henry VIII’s agenda to install himself as the head of the Church of England, Richard Whitford was also Syon’s most prolific author. His writing provides pastoral guidance on a range of issues as well as powerful articulations of the value of religious life during the turbulent years preceding the king’s break from the Catholic Church. Published in 1541, Dyuers Holy Instrucyons is also the only Syon text printed after the dissolution of the monasteries. This text thus offers a rare perspective on the concerns of those faithful to the old religion from a religious brother who actively participated in the abbey’s campaign against Lutheran reformers. As with his previous work, Whitford’s Dyuers Holy Instrucyons maintains an openly confrontational stance toward radical reformers while offering instruction to readers on issues that would certainly have been topical for faithful who lived after the 1534 Act of Supremacy—issues focussed on patience, avoiding vice, impediments to spiritual perfection, and detraction.

This edition makes this significant work available for the first time to modern readers with crucial discussions of the history and themes of the texts, including the indivisibility of politics and religion in the early years of the Reformation and the crucial role that Syon Abbey played in the textual representation of this period in English history.

Kathy Cawsey, Twentieth-Century Chaucer Criticism: Reading Audiences (Ashgate, 2011)

Sun, 08 Mar 2020 20:29:01 GMT

Publisher's description:

Shifting ideas about Geoffrey Chaucer's audience have produced radically different readings of Chaucer's work over the course of the past century. Kathy Cawsey, in her book on the changing relationship among Chaucer, critics, and theories of audience, draws on Michel Foucault's concept of the 'author-function' to propose the idea of an 'audience function' which shows the ways critics' concepts of audience affect and condition their criticism. Focusing on six trend-setting Chaucerian scholars, Cawsey identifies the assumptions about Chaucer's audience underpinning each critic's work, arguing these ideas best explain the diversity of interpretation in Chaucer criticism. Further, Cawsey suggests few studies of Chaucer's own understanding of audience have been done, in part because Chaucer criticism has been conditioned by scholars' latent suppositions about Chaucer's own audience. In making sense of the confusing and conflicting mass of modern Chaucer criticism, Cawsey also provides insights into the development of twentieth-century literary criticism and theory.

Fiona Somerset, editor with Nicholas Watson, Truth and Tales: Cultural Mobility and Medieval Media (Ohio State UP, 2015)

Sun, 08 Mar 2020 20:22:01 GMT

Publisher's description:

In the medieval period, as in the media culture of the present, learned and popular forms of talk were intermingled everywhere. They were also highly mobile, circulating in speech, writing, and symbol, as performances as well as in material objects. The communication through and between different media we all negotiate in daily life did not develop from a previous separation of orality and writing, but from a communications network not unlike our own, if slower, and similarly shaped by disparities of access. Truth and Tales: Cultural Mobility and Medieval Media, edited by Fiona Somerset and Nicholas Watson, develops a variety of approaches to the labor of imaginatively reconstructing this network from its extant artifacts.

Truth and Tales includes fourteen essays by medieval literary scholars and historians. Some essays focus on written artifacts that convey high or popular learning in unexpected ways. Others address a social problem of concern to all, demonstrating the genres and media through which it was negotiated. Still others are centered on one or more texts, detailing their investments in popular as well as learned knowledge, in performance as well as writing. This collective archaeology of medieval media provides fresh insight for medieval scholars and media theorists alike.

Adrienne Williams Boyarin, editor, Miracles of the Virgin in Middle English (Broadview, 2015)

Sun, 08 Mar 2020 20:20:40 GMT

Publisher's description:

During the Middle Ages, Mary was the most powerful of saints, and the combination of her humanity and her proximity to the divine captured the medieval imagination. Her importance is nowhere more clearly reflected than in the genre of “Miracles of the Virgin,” short narrative accounts of Mary’s miraculous intercessory powers. These stories tend to fit a basic narrative pattern in which Mary saves a devoted believer from spiritual or physical danger—but beneath this surface simplicity, the Miracles frequently evoke fine or revealing theological, social, and cultural distinctions. They are remarkably various in tone, ranging from the darkly serious to the comically scandalous, and many display anti-Semitism to a greater degree or with greater punch than do other medieval genres. Mary herself takes on a variety of characteristics, appearing as dominant and persuasive more often than she appears as gentle and maternal.

This volume offers a small but representative sampling of what survives of this literature in the English language. The Middle English has been helpfully glossed and annotated, and is lightly modernized for ease of reading; one particularly challenging story is translated in facing-page format. The “In Context” sections provide relevant biblical passages and medieval versions of the Christian prayers frequently evoked in the miracles; additional samples of Marian poetry and medieval illustrations of Marian miracles are also included.

Michael Van Dussen, editor with Michael Johnston, The Medieval Manuscript Book: Cultural Approaches (Cambridge UP, 2015)

Sun, 08 Mar 2020 20:18:45 GMT

Publisher's description:

Traditional scholarship on manuscripts has tended to focus on issues concerning their production and has shown comparatively little interest in the cultural contexts of the manuscript book. The Medieval Manuscript Book redresses this by focusing on aspects of the medieval book in its cultural situations. Written by experts in the study of the handmade book before print, this volume combines bibliographical expertise with broader insights into the theory and praxis of manuscript study in areas from bibliography to social context, linguistics to location, and archaeology to conservation. The focus of the contributions ranges widely, from authorship to miscellaneity, and from vernacularity to digital facsimiles of manuscripts. Taken as a whole, these essays make the case that to understand the manuscript book it must be analyzed in all its cultural complexity, from production to transmission to its continued adaptation.

Sara M. Butler, Forensic Medicine and Death Investigation in Medieval England (Routledge, 2015)

Sun, 08 Mar 2020 20:17:14 GMT

Publisher's description:

England has traditionally been understood as a latecomer to the use of forensic medicine in death investigation, lagging nearly two-hundred years behind other European authorities. Using the coroner's inquest as a lens, this book hopes to offer a fresh perspective on the process of death investigation in medieval England. The central premise of this book is that medical practitioners did participate in death investigation – although not in every inquest, or even most, and not necessarily in those investigations where we today would deem their advice most pertinent. The medieval relationship with death and disease, in particular, shaped coroners' and their jurors' understanding of the inquest's medical needs and led them to conclusions that can only be understood in context of the medieval world's holistic approach to health and medicine. Moreover, while the English resisted Southern Europe's penchant for autopsies, at times their findings reveal a solid understanding of internal medicine. By studying cause of death in the coroners' reports, this study sheds new light on subjects such as abortion by assault, bubonic plague, cruentation, epilepsy, insanity, senescence, and unnatural death.

Kouky Fianu, Promettre, Confesser, S’obliger: Devant Pierre Christofle, Notaire Royale à Orléans (1437) (École Nationale des Chartes, 2016)

Sun, 08 Mar 2020 20:13:10 GMT

Publisher's description:

Pourquoi allait-on chez le notaire au Moyen Âge? La recherche sur le notariat médiéval n'a pas abordé de front cette question, pourtant essentielle à la compréhension d'une institution importante tant par la quantité de documents produits et conservés, que par sa place dans le discours des historiens et des juristes. Cette édition intégrale des notes prises en 1437 par Pierre Christofle, notaire royal d'Orléans, est précédée d'un essai interprétatif qui porte un regard original sur tous les contrats enregistrés par le notaire cette année-là. Le traitement exhaustif d’une année spécifique a permis d’émettre de nouvelles hypothèses sur la fonction de l’institution orléanaise qui, établie par le pouvoir royal, semble avoir porté et servi les prétentions des élites urbaines à assurer l’ordre social. Au-delà du rôle juridique qu’on lui attribue, l’écrit notarié attesterait alors une relation sociale exprimée par un tiers en position d’autorité: les rapports sociaux qu’il expose et les normes dont il joue en faisaient un puissant outil de légitimité, de hiérarchisation et de définition d’une communauté d’intérêts.

Siân Echard, Robert Rouse, et al., editors, The Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain (4 volumes) (Wiley-Blackwell, 2017)

Sun, 08 Mar 2020 20:11:11 GMT

Publisher's description:

Bringing together scholarship on multilingual and intercultural medieval Britain as never before, The Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain comprises over 600 authoritative entries spanning key figures, contexts, and influences in the literatures of Britain from the Saxon invasions of the fifth century to the transition from the Medieval to the Early Modern Period in the sixteenth. Unique in its approach, the Encyclopedia facilitates a fuller understanding of the complex literary landscape of the period by covering all the literatures of the Medieval British Isles and their direct influences, including Old and Middle English, Early Scots, Anglo-Norman, the Norse, Latin, and French of Britain, and the Celtic literature of Wales, Ireland, Scotland, and Cornwall. Covering all the important figures, texts, critical debates, methodologies, and cultural and historical contexts, the expertly written entries offer an authoritative yet accessible go-to resource for students and experienced scholars alike.

The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature is a comprehensive, scholarly, authoritative, and critical overview of literature and theory comprising individual titles covering key literary genres, periods, and sub-disciplines. Available both in print and online, this groundbreaking resource provides students, teachers, and researchers with cutting-edge scholarship in literature and literary studies.

James Grier, Ademarus Cabannensis Monachus et Musicus (Corpus Christianorum, Autographa Medii Aevi 7) (Brepols, 2018)

Sun, 08 Mar 2020 20:09:00 GMT

Publisher's description:

Adémar de Chabannes (989–1034), monk at the abbey of Saint Cybard in Angoulême, historian, homilist, polemicist and musician extraordinaire, left behind some 451 folios of music with notation written in his own hand. These documents constitute the earliest identifiable musical autographs by several centuries. They provide essential data for musical practices at Saint Martial, where Adémar contributed to their production, and for Adémar’s personal and professional involvement in those practices. They also attest the introduction to the scriptorium at Saint Martial by Adémar of accurately heighting the neumes (symbols of musical notation) above the text to which the melody is sung. Each pitch, therefore, receives a distinct position along the vertical axis of writing. This procedure shows the exact musical interval between notes, and expedites the reading and learning of the melodies. It remains today the standard convention for indicating pitch in modern Western notation.

The importance of this technique is impossible to overstate because Western music and its notation place higher importance on pitch than on many other elements, such as rhythm and timbre. Therefore heighting, the device by which notation precisely communicates pitch, holds a central place in the development of the musical language. In contrast, most of the notational dialects that appear in early music manuscripts from the medieval West use, to a greater or lesser degree, the vertical placement of signs to indicate melodic direction rather than pitch. After an overview of Adémar’s biography and musical activities, the study examines in detail the four surviving manuscripts in which Adémar inscribed musical notation, and then the notation itself. The study closes with a consideration of Adémar’s contributions to musical literacy through his introduction of accurate heighting.

Frank Klassen, Making Magic in Elizabethan England: Two Early Modern Vernacular Books of Magic (Penn State UP, 2019)

Sun, 08 Mar 2020 20:06:48 GMT

Publisher's description:

This volume presents editions of two fascinating anonymous and untitled manuscripts of magic produced in Elizabethan England: the Antiphoner Notebook and the Boxgrove Manual. Frank Klaassen uses these texts, which he argues are representative of the overwhelming majority of magical practitioners, to explain how magic changed during this period and why these developments were crucial to the formation of modern magic.

The Boxgrove Manual is a work of learned ritual magic that synthesizes material from Henry Cornelius Agrippa, the Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy, Heptameron, and various medieval conjuring works. The Antiphoner Notebook concerns the common magic of treasure hunting, healing, and protection, blending medieval conjuring and charm literature with materials drawn from Reginald Scot’s famous anti-magic work, Discoverie of Witchcraft. Klaassen painstakingly traces how the scribes who created these two manuscripts adapted and transformed their original sources. In so doing, he demonstrates the varied and subtle ways in which the Renaissance, the Reformation, new currents in science, the birth of printing, and vernacularization changed the practice of magic.

Illuminating the processes by which two sixteenth-century English scribes went about making a book of magic, this volume provides insight into the wider intellectual culture surrounding the practice of magic in the early modern period.

Shannon McSheffrey, Seeking Sanctuary: Crime, Mercy, and Politics in English Courts, 1400–1550 (Oxford UP, 2017)

Sun, 08 Mar 2020 19:51:20 GMT

Publisher's description:

Seeking Sanctuary explores a curious aspect of premodern English law: the right of felons to shelter in a church or ecclesiastical precinct, remaining safe from arrest and trial in the king's courts. This is the first volume in more than a century to examine sanctuary in England in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Looking anew at this subject challenges the prevailing assumptions in the scholarship that this 'medieval' practice had become outmoded and little-used by the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Although for decades after 1400 sanctuary-seeking was indeed fairly rare, the evidence in the legal records shows the numbers of felons seeing refuge in churches began to climb again in the late fifteenth century and reached its peak in the period between 1525 and 1535. Sanctuary was not so much a medieval practice accidentally surviving into the early modern era, as it was an organism that had continued to evolve and adapt to new environments and indeed flourished in its adapted state. Sanctuary suited the early Tudor regime: it intersected with rapidly developing ideas about jurisdiction and provided a means of mitigating the harsh capital penalties of the English law of felony that was useful not only to felons but also to the crown and the political elite. Sanctuary's resurgence after 1480 means we need to rethink how sanctuary worked, and to reconsider more broadly the intersections of culture, law, politics, and religion in the years between 1400 and 1550.

Michael Van Dussen, ed. with Pavel Soukup, A Companion to the Hussites (Brill’s Companions to the Christian Tradition 90) (Brill, 2020))

Tue, 25 Feb 2020 18:47:30 GMT

From the publisher:

The Hussites, as the Bohemian reformists have come to be called, became one of the most vocal and influential reform movements of the late Middle Ages, with significance for the reformations of the sixteenth century and later. They represented an interchange between “town and gown” that was largely unprecedented in medieval Europe. Scholarship on the Hussites has a long and distinguished tradition, and current studies must continually contend with a historiography that is implicated in the nationalism, confessionalism, and politics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This volume gives students and scholars a clear sense of the historiography and current trends in Hussite studies, as well as concise statements on major emphases in Hussite theology, ecclesiology, philosophy, and religious practice. Contributors are: Eliška Baťová, Pavlína Cermanová, Dušan Coufal, Phillip Haberkern, Ota Halama, David Holeton, Stephen Lahey, Jindřich Marek, Pavel Kolář, Olivier Marin, Petra Mutlová, Pavlína Rychterová, Pavel Soukup, Michael Van Dussen, and Blanka Zilynská.

Erik Kwakkel and Francis Newton, Medicine at Monte Cassino: Constantine the African and the Oldest Manuscript of his Pantegni (Brepols, 2019)

Tue, 25 Feb 2020 18:45:00 GMT

Publisher's description:

Medicine at Monte Cassino offers unprecedented insights into the revolutionary arrival of Arabic medicine to medieval Europe by exploring the oldest manuscript of Constantine the African’s Pantegni, which is identified here, for the first time, as a product of the skilled team of scribes and scholars working directly under the supervision of Constantine himself at the eleventh-century abbey of Monte Cassino.

Fleeing his North-African homeland for Italy, Constantine the African arrived in Salerno and then joined the abbey of Monte Cassino south of Rome in c. 1077. He dedicated his life to the translation of more than two dozen medical texts from Arabic into Latin. These great efforts produced the first substantial written body of medical theory and practice in medieval Europe. His most important contribution, an encyclopedia he called the Pantegni (The Complete Art), was translated and adapted from the Complete Book of the Medical Art by the Persian physician ‘Ali ibn al-‘Abbās al-Mağūsī (d. 982). This monograph focuses on the oldest manuscript of the Pantegni,Theorica, which represents a work-in-progress with numerous unusual features.

This study, for the first time, identifies Monte Cassino as the origin of this oldest Pantegni manuscript, and asserts that it was made during Constantine’s lifetime. It further demonstrates how a skilled team of scribes and scholars assisted the translator in the complex process of producing this Latin version of the Arabic text. Several members of this production team are identified, both in the Pantegni manuscript and in other copies of Cassinese manuscripts.

The book breaks new ground by identifying a range of manuscripts produced at Monte Cassino under Constantine’s direct supervision, as evidenced by their material features, script, and contents. In rare detail, this study explores some of the challenges met by ‘Team Constantine’ as they sought to reveal new knowledge to the West, which in turn revolutionized medical understanding throughout medieval Europe.

Nöelle Phillips, Craft Beer Culture and Modern Medievalism: Brewing Dissent (ARC Humanities Press, 2019)

Tue, 25 Feb 2020 18:41:45 GMT

Publisher's Description:

Since the 1970s, the craft brewing industry has grown in popularity. However, with the introduction of the Internet and the consequent globalization of cultures and economies, craft beer marketing has increasingly evoked the medieval past in order to appeal to our collective sense of a lost community, and even a lost purity. This book discusses the desire for the local, the non-corporate, and the pre-modern in the discourse of craft brewing, which has become a form of ideological resistance to corporate capitalism, forming a strong counter-cultural narrative. However, such discourses also reinforce colonial histories of purity and conquest while effacing indigenous voices, and there are troubling intersections between the desire for a medieval past and the desire to preserve the imaginary “whiteness” of that past. Such considerations are particularly relevant now, during a time in which white nationalist groups (many of which turn to a medieval past for inspiration) are increasing in influence and visibility. Moving from beer in the Middle Ages to beer in 2019, this book deploys analysis of literary and historical texts, advertisements, labels, and interviews with craft brewers and writers to argue that craft beer is much more than a delicious drink and a social connector; its marketing, its appeal, and its ubiquitous presence in middle class North America reveals a powerful cultural desire for the past in a world that privileges the present.

Ruth Wehlau, ed., Darkness, Depression, and Descent in Anglo-Saxon England (MIP, 2019)

Mon, 13 Jan 2020 19:56:00 GMT

Congrats to editor Ruth Wehlau and her contributors on the publication of Darkness, Depression, and Descent in Anglo-Saxon England, out now from Medieval Institute Publications! See the publisher's note below:

This collection of essays examines the motifs of darkness, depression, and descent in both literal and figurative manifestations within a variety of Anglo-Saxon texts, including the Old English Consolation of Philosophy, Beowulf, Guthlac, The Junius Manuscript, The Wonders of the East, and The Battle of Maldon. Essays deal with such topics as cosmic emptiness, descent into the grave, and recurrent grief. In their analyses, the essays reveal the breadth of this imagery in Anglo-Saxon literature as it is used to describe thought and emotion, as well as the limits to knowledge and perception. The volume investigates the intersection between the burgeoning interest in trauma studies and darkness and the representation of the mind or of emotional experience within Anglo-Saxon literature.

Erik Kwakkel, Books Before Print (ARC Humanities Press, 2018)

Tue, 02 Jul 2019 16:01:23 GMT

Congrats to Erik Kwakkel on the publication of Books Before Print, out now from ARC Humanities Press.

From the publisher:
This beautifully illustrated book provides an accessible introduction to the medieval manuscript and what it can tell us about the world in which it was made and used. Captured in the materiality of manuscripts are the data enabling us to make sense of the preferences and habits of the individuals who made up medieval society. With short chapters grouped under thematic headings, Books Before Print shows how we may tap into the evidence and explores how manuscripts can act as a vibrant and versatile tool to understand the deep historical roots of human interaction with written information. It highlights extraordinary continuities between medieval book culture and modern-world communication, as witnessed in medieval pop-up books, posters, speech bubbles, book advertisements, and even sticky notes.

https://arc-humanities.org/products/b-66111-110116-18-6912-2/

N. M. Van Deusen, The Saga of the Sister Saints: The Legend of Martha and Mary Magdalen in Old Norse-Icelandic Translation (Brepols, 2019)

Fri, 26 Apr 2019 13:55:17 GMT

Congrats to Natalie M. Van Deusen on the publication of The Saga of the Sister Saints: The Legend of Martha and Mary Magdalen in Old Norse-Icelandic Translation, out now from Brepols.

From the publisher:

This book examines the cults and legends of Martha and Mary Magdalen in medieval Scandinavia, especially Iceland. While a number of parallels may be drawn between Iceland and mainland Scandinavia in terms of liturgical and artistic representations of Martha and Mary Magdalen, the Old Norse-Icelandic literary tradition stands apart from its Scandinavian counterparts in the cultural significance and relevance it gives to each of the "sister saints" in medieval Iceland, where the composite Mǫrtu saga ok Maríu Magðalenu was compiled in the mid-fourteenth century.

The historical study that opens the volume treats the manuscripts and Latin sources of the saga, lending insight into authorship and provenance; it also details representations of Martha and Mary Magdalen in liturgical materials, art, and literature from medieval Scandinavia, before turning to the saints’ cults and legends in medieval Iceland.

All the available evidence for the "sister saints" in Iceland from its Christianization in 1000 until around the time of the Reformation in 1550 is analyzed in detail, especially evidence from church inventories (máldagar) but also from literary works in prose and verse, as well as from charters and letters. Special attention is given to issues of style and content in the saga and, in particular, to views on women preachers in medieval Iceland.

The book concludes with a normalized edition of the only complete redaction of Mǫrtu saga ok Maríu Magðalenu, followed by its first English translation.

Alison More, Fictive Orders and Feminine Religious Identities, 1200-1600 (Oxford UP, 2018)

Fri, 01 Jun 2018 10:46:36 GMT

Alison More, Fictive Orders and Feminine Religious Identities, 1200-1600 (Oxford UP, 2018)

From the publisher:

Any visitor to Belgium or the Netherlands is immediately struck by the number of convents and beguinages (begijnhoven) in both major cities and small towns. Their number and location in urban centres suggests that the women who inhabited them once held a prominent role. Despite leaving a visible mark on cities in Europe, much of the story of these women - known variously as beguines, tertiaries, klopjes, recluses, and anchoresses--remains to be told. Instead of aspiring to live as traditional religious, they transcended normative assumptions about religion and gender and had a very real impact on their religious and secular worlds. The sources for their tale are often fragmentary and difficult to interpret. However, careful scrutiny allows their voices to be heard.

Jennifer Garrison, Challenging Communion: The Eucharist and Middle English Literature (Ohio State UP, 2017)

Thu, 16 Nov 2017 22:04:08 GMT

Jennifer Garrison, Challenging Communion: The Eucharist and Middle English Literature (Ohio State UP, 2017)

From the publisher:

“An important book on a subject many medievalists think we already understand but do not.” —Rebecca Krug, University of Minnesota

In this book, Jennifer Garrison examines literary representations of the central symbol of later medieval religious culture: the Eucharist. In contrast to scholarship that depicts mainstream believers as enthusiastically and simplistically embracing the Eucharist, Challenging Communion: The Eucharist and Middle English Literature identifies a pervasive Middle English literary tradition that rejects simplistic notions of eucharistic promise.

Through new readings of texts such as Piers Plowman, A Revelation of Love, The Book of Margery Kempe, and John Lydgate’s religious poetry, Garrison shows how writers of Middle English often take advantage of the ways in which eucharistic theology itself contests the boundaries between the material and the spiritual, and how these writers challenge the eucharistic ideal of union between Christ and the community of believers. By troubling the definitions of literal and figurative, Middle English writers respond to and reformulate eucharistic theology in politically challenging and poetically complex ways. Garrison argues that Middle English texts often reject simple eucharistic promises in order to offer what they regard as a better version of the Eucharist, one that is intellectually and spiritually demanding and that invites readers to transform themselves and their communities.

Jennifer Garrison is Associate Professor at St. Mary’s University in Calgary, Canada.

Sheryl McDonald Werronen, Popular Romance in Iceland The Women, Worldviews, and Manuscript Witnesses of Nítíða saga (Amsterdam UP, 2016)

Wed, 01 Nov 2017 23:47:07 GMT

Sheryl McDonald Werronen, Popular Romance in Iceland: The Women, Worldviews, and Manuscript Witnesses of Nítíða saga (Amsterdam UP, 2016)

From the publisher:

A late medieval Icelandic romance about the maiden-king of France, the Nítíða saga was well received in its day and grew in popularity throughout post-Reformation Iceland. It has not, however, received the comprehensive scholarly analysis it deserves, or that other Icelandic sagas have received. Sheryl McDonald Werronen corrects that here, offering a detailed study of the saga and its presentation of women and the Icelandic worldview, including questions of identity, gender, female solidarity, and the romance genre itself.

Sheryl McDonald Werronen is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellow at the Arnamagnæan Institute in Copenhagen, where she is carrying out research on seventeeth-century Icelandic manuscripts, scribes, and patronage.

For more information, visit: http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/P/bo25087000.html

James Bugslag and Ariane Isler-de Jongh, The Stained Glass of the Hosmer Collection (McGill-Queen's UP 2014)

Mon, 23 Oct 2017 18:39:29 GMT

James Bugslag and Ariane Isler-de Jongh, The Stained Glass of the Hosmer Collection, McGill University, Corpus Vitrearum Canada, Volume 1 (McGill-Queen's UP, 2014).

From the publisher:

A detailed look at one of the most impressive collections of pre-modern stained glass roundels in North America.

The Hosmer Collection is one of the most significant collections of secular pre-modern stained glass in North America and the largest in Canada. In contrast to the better-known stained glass works made for churches, these exquisite sixteenth- and seventeenth-century small panels were intended to grace the windows of private residences and other non-religious spaces.

The first book-length treatment of pre-modern stained glass in Canada, this volume provides new information on the diverse subject matter (ranging from allegories to heraldic displays), provenance (the Low Countries and Switzerland), style, and dating. Each work receives a detailed treatment according to the criteria of the Corpus Vitrearum, the international organization which set the scrupulous standards for modern stained glass research, and is accompanied by photographs. The volume's introduction situates the collection both within the history of the medium and within the context of the architectural history and artistic environment of Montreal.

Also structured as an on-site guide to the collection, The Stained Glass of the Hosmer Collection, McGill University breaks new ground on collecting practices, architectural design, and the installation of pre-modern stained glass in new buildings.

Roisin Cossar, Clerical Households in Late Medieval Italy (Harvard UP, 2017)

Mon, 23 Oct 2017 18:35:41 GMT

Roisin Cossar, Clerical Households in Late Medieval Italy (Harvard UP, 2017)

From the publisher:

Roisin Cossar brings a new perspective to the history of the Christian church in fourteenth century Italy by examining how clerics managed efforts to reform their domestic lives in the decades after the arrival of the Black Death.

Priests at the end of the Middle Ages resembled their lay contemporaries as they entered into domestic relationships with women, fathered children, and took responsibility for managing households, or familiae. Cossar limns a complex portrait of daily life in the medieval clerical familia that traces the phases of its development. Many priests began their vocation as apprentices in the households of older clerics. In middle age, priests fully embraced the traditional role of paterfamilias—patriarchs with authority over their households, including servants and, especially in Venice, slaves. As fathers they endeavored to establish their illegitimate sons in a clerical family trade. They also used their legal knowledge to protect their female companions and children against a church that frowned on such domestic arrangements and actively sought to stamp them out.

Clerical Households in Late Medieval Italy refutes the longstanding charge that the late medieval clergy were corrupt, living licentious lives that failed to uphold priestly obligations. In fashioning a domestic culture that responded flexibly to their own needs, priests tempered the often unrealistic expectations of their superiors. Their response to the rigid demands of church reform allowed the church to maintain itself during a period of crisis and transition in European history.

Levi Roach, Æthelred the Unready (Yale UP, 2016)

Wed, 16 Aug 2017 16:09:35 GMT

**2017 - Levi Roach, Æthelred the Unready. Yale UP, 2016.**

From the publisher:

An imaginative reassessment of Æthelred "the Unready," one of medieval England’s most maligned kings and a major Anglo-Saxon figure

The Anglo-Saxon king Æthelred "the Unready" (978–1016) has long been considered to be inscrutable, irrational, and poorly advised. Infamous for his domestic and international failures, Æthelred was unable to fend off successive Viking raids, leading to the notorious St. Brice’s Day Massacre in 1002, during which Danes in England were slaughtered on his orders. Though Æthelred’s posthumous standing is dominated by his unsuccessful military leadership, his seemingly blind trust in disloyal associates, and his harsh treatment of political opponents, Roach suggests that Æthelred has been wrongly maligned. Drawing on extensive research, Roach argues that Æthelred was driven by pious concerns about sin, society, and the anticipated apocalypse. His strategies, in this light, were to honor God and find redemption. Chronologically charting Æthelred’s life, Roach presents a more accessible character than previously available, illuminating his place in England and Europe at the turn of the first millennium.

Levi Roach is lecturer at the University of Exeter, and formerly a junior research fellow at St John’s College, Cambridge. He lives in Exeter, UK.

Seeking Our Eden: The Dreams and Migrations of Sarah Jameson Craig

Fri, 11 Aug 2017 19:42:35 GMT

From the publisher:

Although few nineteenth-century rural Canadian women could read and write well, Sarah Jameson Craig (1840-1919) was not only literate but eloquent. Unlike many women writers of her time, Craig lived at the bottom of the economic ladder. Nevertheless, she dared to dream the utopian dreams more commonly associated with educated women from the middle and upper classes. Craig vividly documented her attempt to run away at age fifteen, her plans to found a utopian colony based on alternative medicine and women’s dress reform, and her lifelong crusade for women's equality.

Quoting liberally from Sarah Craig's unpublished diaries and memoir, Seeking Our Eden sets Craig's life writing within the context of her early days in New Brunswick, her later migrations to New Jersey and then westward to Saskatchewan and British Columbia, and the American-based reform and utopian movements that stirred her imagination. Convinced that the tight corsets and long skirts demanded by conventional fashion undermined the fight for women's equality, Craig wore the "reform dress" - a short dress over trousers - despite society's disapproval, and rejected opiate- and alcohol-based medicines in favour of the water cure.

Even today, when the way women dress remains an issue, and skepticism about conventional medicine still fuels alternative health movements, Sarah Craig's early feminist voice from the margins of Canada continues to be relevant and compelling.

Byzantine Art and Diplomacy in an Age of Decline

Fri, 11 Aug 2017 19:42:08 GMT

From the publisher:

The Late Byzantine period (1261–1453) is marked by a paradoxical discrepancy between economic weakness and cultural strength. The apparent enigma can be resolved by recognizing that later Byzantine diplomatic strategies, despite or because of diminishing political advantage, relied on an increasingly desirable cultural and artistic heritage. This book reassesses the role of the visual arts in this era by examining the imperial image and the gift as reconceived in the final two centuries of the Byzantine Empire. In particular it traces a series of luxury objects created specifically for diplomatic exchange with such courts as Genoa, Paris and Moscow alongside key examples of imperial imagery and ritual. By questioning how political decline refigured the visual culture of empire, Dr Hilsdale offers a more nuanced and dynamic account of medieval cultural exchange that considers the temporal dimensions of power and the changing fates of empires.

Cecily J. Hilsdale, McGill University, Montréal

Cecily J. Hilsdale is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. Her research concerns cultural exchange in the medieval Mediterranean, in particular the circulation of Byzantine luxury objects as diplomatic gifts as well as the related dissemination of eastern styles, techniques, and iconographies and ideologies of imperium.

An Environmental History of Medieval Europe

Fri, 11 Aug 2017 19:41:34 GMT

From the publisher:

How did medieval Europeans use and change their environments, think about the natural world, and try to handle the natural forces affecting their lives? This groundbreaking environmental history examines medieval relationships with the natural world from the perspective of social ecology, viewing human society as a hybrid of the cultural and the natural. Richard Hoffmann's interdisciplinary approach sheds important light on such central topics in medieval history as the decline of Rome, religious doctrine, urbanization and technology, as well as key environmental themes, among them energy use, sustainability, disease and climate change. Revealing the role of natural forces in events previously seen as purely human, the book explores issues including the treatment of animals, the 'tragedy of the commons', agricultural clearances and agrarian economies. By introducing medieval history in the context of social ecology, it brings the natural world into historiography as an agent and object of history itself.

Richard Hoffmann, York University, Toronto
Richard Hoffmann is Professor Emeritus and Senior Scholar at the Department of History, York University, Canada. As a pioneer in the environmental history of pre-industrial Europe, he is widely known for his contributions to medieval studies, environmental studies and historic fisheries.

Religious Women in Early Carolingian Francia: A Study of Manuscript Transmission and Monastic Culture by Felice Lifshitz

Fri, 11 Aug 2017 19:40:40 GMT

From the publisher:

Religious Women in Early Carolingian Francia, a groundbreaking study of the intellectual and monastic culture of the Main Valley during the eighth century, looks closely at a group of manuscripts associated with some of the best-known personalities of the European Middle Ages, including Boniface of Mainz and his “beloved,”abbess Leoba of Tauberbischofsheim. This is the first study of these “Anglo-Saxon missionaries to Germany” to delve into the details of their lives by studying the manuscripts that were produced in their scriptoria and used in their communities. The author explores how one group of religious women helped to shape the culture of medieval Europe through the texts they wrote and copied, as well as through their editorial interventions.

Using compelling manuscript evidence, she argues that the content of the women’s books was overwhelmingly gender-egalitarian and frequently feminist (i.e., resistant to patriarchal ideas). This intriguing book provides unprecedented glimpses into the “feminist consciousness” of the women’s and mixed-sex communities that flourished in the early Middle Ages.

Felice Lifshitz

Felice Lifshitz is Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and of Religious Studies at the University of Alberta.

From Lawmen to Plowmen: Anglo-Saxon Legal Tradition and the School of Langland by Stephen Yeager

Fri, 11 Aug 2017 19:37:46 GMT

The reappearance of alliterative verse in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries remains one of the most puzzling issues in the literary history of medieval England. In From Lawmen to Plowmen, Stephen M. Yeager offers a fresh, insightful explanation for the alliterative structure of William Langland’s Piers Plowman and the flourishing of alliterative verse satires in late medieval England by observing the similarities between these satires and the legal-homiletical literature of the Anglo-Saxon era.

Unlike Old English alliterative poetry, Anglo-Saxon legal texts and documents continued to be studied long after the Norman Conquest. By comparing Anglo-Saxon charters, sermons, and law codes with Langland’s Piers Plowman and similar poems, Yeager demonstrates that this legal and homiletical literature had an influential afterlife in the fourteenth-century poetry of William Langland and his imitators. His conclusions establish a new genealogy for medieval England’s vernacular literary tradition and offer a new way of approaching one of Middle English’s literary classics.

Stephen M. Yeager is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Concordia University.

Robert Desjardins, Andrew Gow, and François Pageau, eds. The Arras Witch Treatises (Penn State UP, 2016)

Thu, 11 Aug 2016 19:43:55 GMT

Robert Desjardins, Andrew Gow and François Pageau, eds., The Arras Witch Treatises (Penn State UP, 2016).

Dear Colleagues:

On behalf of my colleagues Andrew Gow and François Pageau, I'm pleased to announce the publication of our new book, The Arras Witch Treatises. It presents accessible (and fully annotated) translations of two fifteenth-century texts that offer important insights into the evolution of witch-hunting ideology in late medieval and early modern Europe.

Based on our recent contacts, we thought that you might be interested in knowing about the text, and in sharing the news with colleagues at your institution. A more detailed summary from the publisher is presented below, and a summary sheet is attached to this note. Please don't hesitate to contact us if you have additional questions about the volume.

From the publisher:

This is the first complete and accessible English translation of two major source texts—Tinctor’s Invectivesand the anonymous Recollectio—that arose from the notorious Arras witch hunts and trials in the mid-fifteenth century in France. These writings, by the “Anonymous of Arras” (believed to be the trial judge Jacques du Bois) and the intellectual Johannes Tinctor, offer valuable eyewitness perspectives on one of the very first mass trials and persecutions of alleged witches in European history. More importantly, they provide a window onto the early development of witchcraft theory and demonology in western Europe during the late medieval period—an entire generation before the infamous Witches’ Hammer appeared.

Perfect for the classroom, The Arras Witch Treatises includes a reader-friendly introduction situating the treatises and trials in their historical and intellectual contexts. Scholars, students, and others interested in the occult will find these translations invaluable.

You can find The Arras Witch Treatises on the Penn State University Press web site at this URL: http://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-07128-2.html

Be sure to ask for it at your local library and bookstore!

-- Robert Desjardins

Sébastien Rossignol, Aux origines de l’identité urbaine en Europe centrale et nordique (Brepols, 2013)

Mon, 02 Sep 2013 18:49:02 GMT

Sébastien Rossignol, Aux origines de l’identité urbaine en Europe centrale et nordique: Traditions culturelles, formes d’habitat et différenciation sociale (VIIIe – XIIe siècles) (Brepols, 2013).

Cette publication étudie les conceptions d’un habitat à caractère urbain dans les territoires de l’Europe centrale et nordique situés à l’extérieur des anciennes provinces romaines avant la période de transformations sociales et démographiques du Moyen Âge central.

Y a-t-il eu un habitat à caractère urbain dans les territoires de l’Europe centrale et nordique situés à l’extérieur des anciennes provinces romaines avant la période de transformations sociales et démographiques du Moyen Âge central? Bien que cette question ait préoccupé de nombreuses générations de chercheurs, les réponses proposées sont restées ambiguës. Cette étude reprend le dossier en abordant le problème du point de vue des auteurs médiévaux: avait-on, lors des siècles précédant les transformations accompagnant la fondation de villes nouvelles aux XII^e et XIII^e siècles, une conception d’un habitat urbain? Avait-on conscience d’une particularité, d’une qualité, d’une identité urbaine? Les recherches archéologiques des dernières décennies invitent à une reconsidération de l’habitat et du mode de vie des populations du haut Moyen Âge. Seule, cependant, une approche interdisciplinaire permet d’illustrer pourquoi le processus d’urbanisation, en tant que phénomène culturel, était le résultat d’interactions constantes entre traditions culturelles, formes d’habitat et différenciation sociale. More...

Steven Bednarski, A Poisoned Past: The Life and Times of Margarida de Portu, A Fourteenth-Century Accused Poisoner (U of Toronto P, 2013)

Sun, 11 Aug 2013 19:43:18 GMT

Steven Bednarski, A Poisoned Past: The Life and Times of Margarida de Portu, A Fourteenth-Century Accused Poisoner (U of Toronto P, 2013).

From the publisher:

This is the story of Margarida de Portu, a fourteenth-century French medieval woman accused of poisoning her husband to death. As Bednarski points out, the story is important not so much for what it tells us about Margarida but for how it illuminates a past world. Through the depositions and accusations made in court, the reader learns much about medieval women, female agency, kin networks, solidarity, sex, sickness, medicine, and law.

Unlike most histories, this book does not remove the author from the analysis. Rather, it lays bare the working methods of the historian. Throughout his tale, Bednarski skillfully weaves a second narrative about how historians "do" history, highlighting the rewards and pitfalls of working with primary sources.

The book opens with a chapter on microhistory as a genre and explains its strengths, weaknesses, and inherent risks. Next is a narrative of Margarida's criminal trial, followed by chapters on the civil suits and appeal and Margarida's eventual fate. The book features a rough copy of a court notary, a notorial act, and a sample of a criminal inquest record in the original Latin. A timeline of Margarida's life, list of characters, and two family trees provide useful information on key people in the story. A map of late medieval Manosque is also provided. More...

Cynthia J. Neville and Grant G. Simpson, eds., The Acts of Alexander III King of Scots 1249 -1286 : Regesta Regum Scottorum Vol 4 Part 1 (Edinburgh UP, 2012)

Sun, 02 Sep 2012 19:14:22 GMT

Cynthia J. Neville and Grant G. Simpson, eds., The Acts of Alexander III King of Scots 1249 -1286: Regesta Regum Scottorum, vol 4, part 1 (Edinburgh UP, 2012)

This volume contains the full texts of 175 acts issued under the seal of King Alexander III, together with notes on a further 155 'lost acts' that survive only in notices. These acts, many of which have never been published before, have been collected from a variety of archives in Scotland, England, Belgium and France. The Introduction examines the administrative contexts of the later thirteenth century in which the royal chancery drafted and authenticated charters, brieves and other written instruments, and the varied sources from which the collection is compiled. The texts include full Latin transcriptions and detailed English-language summaries of the contents of each act, together with a series of notes and comments on context and significance. By drawing together both original archive sources and widely scattered published sources, the volume offers a unique opportunity to understand how Scottish government and administration operated in the key period before the reign of Robert Bruce. The Regesta Regum Scottorum series has already made available in print a definitive edition of the written acts of several of the medieval kings of Scotland. It remains the standard reference for Scottish, British and European scholars interested in the history of royal chanceries, the evolution of medieval royal government and the growth of literate modes of expression in the Middle Ages. More...

Jacqueline Murray, ed., Marriage in Premodern Europe: Italy and Beyond (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, Victoria University in the University of Toronto, 2012)

Sun, 02 Sep 2012 19:05:41 GMT

Jacqueline Murray, ed., Marriage in Premodern Europe: Italy and Beyond (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, Victoria University in the University of Toronto, 2012).

The articles in this volume provide an overview of the issues and complexities that informed marriage in the premodern West. They provide a series of interdisciplinary and multicultural analyses of an institution that was fundamental across societies and cultures, but manifested in diverse practices and beliefs. Focusing, in particular, on the Italian peninsula, the articles move outward to include the distant worlds of England and Scotland. Studies of endogamy and exogamy reveal how complex marriage strategies functioned, often in contrast to their intended goals. The articles move from the highest reaches of society, royalty and papacy, to burghers and town dwellers. The richness of sources for the premodern world is explored including legal records, letters, paintings, and literature. Together the articles provide a window onto marriage as a social institution and as a lived experience, at once profoundly other yet curiously familiar.

Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Maidie Hilmo, and Linda Olson, Opening Up Middle English Manuscripts (Cornell UP, 2012)

Sun, 02 Sep 2012 18:57:52 GMT

Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Maidie Hilmo, and Linda Olson, Opening Up Middle English Manuscripts: Literary and Visual Approaches (Cornell UP, 2012).

This deeply informed and lavishly illustrated book is a comprehensive introduction to the modern study of Middle English manuscripts. It is intended for students and scholars who are familiar with some of the major Middle English literary works, such as The Canterbury Tales, Gawain and the Green Knight, Piers Plowman, and the romances, mystical works or cycle plays, but who may not know much about the surviving manuscripts. The book approaches these texts in a way that takes into account the whole manuscript or codex—its textual and visual contents, physical state, readership, and cultural history. Opening Up Middle English Manuscripts also explores the function of illustrations in fashioning audience response to particular authors and their texts over the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. More...