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This study explores tropes concerned with the Middle Ages in Imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet Russia, seeking to explain why an often romanticized medieval past remains potent in Russian politics, society, and culture today.

Examines the nature and socialization of disabled performers in the medieval and early Tudor periods.

In a young American republic seeking to define itself in relation to European cultural and political models past and present, it was assumed that the history of Europe's peoples could be tracked across time over the longue durée. From this perspective, even the barbarous long-haired kings of the distant Merovingian era helped to define the political and cultural identity of a France--and, indeed, a Europe--whose actions Americans recognized as relevant to their own republic. Americans saw medieval parallels not only in the actions of successive French regimes, but in contemporary transatlantic issues of anxiety, including the adjudication of claims of political legitimacy and the debate over the perpetuation of racial slavery. That early American writers located their own meanings in the history of Merovingian Francia is indicative of a less linear, and more diverse and transnational, historiography than previously recognized.

This book explores the ways in which contemporary authors respond to and rework key aspects of Old Norse history and viking culture for young twenty-first-century audiences. Why are contemporary authors and audiences so manifestly attracted to the viking past? In what ways do writers respond to Norse sources? How do the narratives they tell reflect our beliefs about and desires for the past, our constructions of childhood and adolescence, our anxieties around gender, sexuality, and ethnicity? How do these texts engage with a future occluded by apocalyptic ecological threat? David Clark explores these questions through readings of a rich body of diverse material which retells, updates, and transforms Norse culture. The volume contextualizes Norse medievalism and explores how thematic foci on gender, sexuality, disability, and ethnicity relate to contemporary concerns around these topics, and the construction of childhood.

This book combines the history of charitable institutions with the study of power in urban and rural spaces from the late medieval to the early modern era. Focusing on the Ospedale di Santa Maria della Scala in Siena, the book goes beyond examining hospitals in an urban context to also consider the significant impact of charitable institutions in rural spaces. Case studies of Santa Maria della Scala's farms allow an investigation of the relationship between urban institutions and their rural properties, while looking at subject hospitals outside the Sienese state offers a glimpse into the competition for power with non-Sienese entities. As Siena's politics shifted in the sixteenth century, Santa Maria della Scala and its rural spaces became sites where power was negotiated. The book thus demonstrates how geographies of power affected the practice of charity for both urban hospitals and the rural communities they influenced.

This book examines feminist textual and cinematic engagements with the idea of the Middle Ages in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, arguing that the idea of the medieval past is central to the work of novelists and directors interested in embodiment and vulnerability. Careful and illuminating analysis of particular moments in fiction, film, and political discourse dismantles the false binary between popular and intellectual medievalisms, which rests on gendered understandings of genre and audience, while demonstrating that masculinist or patriarchal medievalisms have an equal but understudied counterpart. The book's first three chapters cover Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey and its afterlives, the final works of Virginia Woolf, and late twentieth-century film and music videos from the United States. The final chapter examines the treatment of women's bodies and vulnerability in both political theory and recent electoral politics, arguing that they share a common thread of misogyny rooted in the idea of the medieval past, and that one way to challenge that misogyny is by looking at complex feminist engagements with that same past, both real and imagined.

This book is a collection of essays offering a wide range of approaches to teaching with commonplace books. In the medieval period and beyond, commonplace books promoted a blend of excerpting, memorization, creative writing, and journaling, making them the analogue equivalent to modern-day digital journaling, bookmarking, and note-taking tools. Covering a variety of methods for introducing students to the medieval and Renaissance reading practice known as commonplacing, this volume provides instructors with concrete guidelines for using commonplace books as a teaching and learning tool. The enclosed essays provide a point of reference for best practices as well as concrete models for teaching and learning with commonplace books, helping instructors develop more student-centred, inclusive curricula.

This monograph examines how Korean women and men came to engage with Catholic missions during Europe's late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a profoundly volatile period in East Asian history during which political, cultural, and social disruption created opportunities for new interactions in the region. It analyzes the nature of that engagement, as women and men became both subjects for, and agents of, catechizing practices. As their evangelization, experience of faith, proselytizing, and suffering were recorded in mission archives, the monograph explores contact between Catholic Christianity and Korean women in particular. Broomhall demonstrates how gender ideologies shaped interactions between missionary men and Korean women, and how women's experiences would come to be narrated, circulated, and memorialized.

This reference work examines the ways in which some medieval behaviours and identities were categorized as criminal or deviant. It also explores the implications of modern demonization of the Middle Ages. As well as discussing constructions of deviance, this book also explores the behaviours and identities which provoked these labels and processes. The model is one of reciprocity between behaviours and processes of demonisation and criminalisation. Each authoritative essay engages carefully with this approach, examining behaviours, the ways they were demonized, and the relationship between the two processes. The three parts of the volume are centred around forms of discursive and normative power--religious ideologies, political ideologies, and legalism. The authors also explore issues of political discourse, spiritual censure, justice and punishment, and the construction of taboos.

The authors comprehensively analyze all the available information regarding the ritual practices of Slavic pre-Christian religion that can be found in written medieval texts. After investigating every kind of reference to such practices, they offer a reconstruction of Slavic pre-Christian religion on the basis of these medieval testimonies. In doing so, they overcome the challenges presented by the fact that all of these sources are indirect, since the Slavs did not acquire literacy until they became Christians. Thus the writers of these texts mostly professed a monotheistic religion, being Christians and in some cases Muslims. The picture that they offer is biased and determined by their own faith. The present analysis innovatively combines testimonies from every Slavic area (Eastern, Western, and Southern), showing their mutual correspondences and emphasizing the relationship between the Slavic pre-Christian religion and its Indo-European roots.

This book explores shared religious practices among Jews, Christians, and Muslims, focusing primarily on the medieval Mediterranean. It examines the meanings members of each community ascribed to the presence of the religious other at "their" festivals or holy sites during pilgrimage. Communal boundaries were often redefined or dissolved during pilgrimage and religious festivals. Yet, paradoxically, shared practices served to enforce communal boundaries, since many of the religious elite devised polemical interpretations of these phenomena which highlighted the superiority of their own faith. Such interpretations became integral to each group's theological understanding of self and other to such a degree that in some regions, religious minorities were required to participate in the festivals of the ruling community. In all formulations, "otherness" remained an essential component of both polemic and prayer.

This historical anthology of Korean poetry, Ancient, Medieval, and Premodern Korean Songs and Poems highlights the evolution of poetic composition in the vernacular. The book is a manifesto of the uniquely Korean poetic tradition, which flourished quite separately along with the literary tradition retained by the men of letters devoted to the scholarship in classical Chinese. The beauty of the Korean language and the tradition of verse-making in it are sumptuously demonstrated by this book, which contains both the original texts in the unique Korean orthography of phonograms and the translator's English version that runs in parallel with the original poems.

From the fall of Islamic Isbīliya in 1248 to the conquest of the New World, Seville was a nexus of economic and religious power where interconfessional living among Christians, Jews, and Muslims was negotiated on public stages. From out of seemingly irreconcilable ideologies of faith, hybrid performance culture emerged in spectacles of miraculous transformation, disciplinary processionals, and representations of religious identity. Ritual, Spectacle, and Theatre in Late Medieval Seville reinvigorates the study of medieval Iberian theatre by revealing the ways in which public expressions of devotion, penance, and power fostered cultural reciprocity, rehearsed religious difference, and ultimately helped establish Seville as the imperial centre of Christian Spain.

This study features essays from leading scholars highlighting the important Jewish contributions to the popular medieval genre of romance. Writing against strict notions of genre boundaries and canonization, this volume provides a new understanding of medieval and early modern romance through a working definition consisting of variable elements, including language, literary devices, plot, and characters. The contributions in this volume establish that many texts written in the medieval and early modern Jewish communities across Europe and beyond can be classified as "romance." Each of the nine chapters as well as the afterword by Eli Yassif discusses romance as it relates to the medieval and early modern Jewish world, as well as the greater non-Jewish context. This volume places Jewish texts into the scholarly conversation as sources for forming a new understanding of the genre of romance across religious and cultural boundaries.

The comparative or connected study of localized intellectual traditions poses special challenges to the global turn in medieval studies. How can we enable conversations across language groups and intricate cultural formations, as well as disciplines? Practices of commentary offer a compelling opportunity: their visual layouts reveal assumptions about the relative status of text and gloss, while interpretive interlinear or marginal prompts capture the dynamic relationships among generations of teachers, students, and readers. The material traces of manuscript usage--from hastily scrawled marginal notes to vivid rubrication--illuminate the shared didactic and communicative practices developed within scholarly communities. By bringing together researchers working on specific cultures and discourses across Eurasia, this volume moves toward a global account of premodern commentary traditions.

The problem of fraternal relations in the early Middle Ages has not been hitherto studied in detail, especially in comparison with the multitude of studies dealing with the models of marriage, gender-based social roles, or the relations between generations. Historians have been often prone to assume that relations between siblings in European culture were naturally constant, based on loyalty, solidarity, and readiness to act in the common interest, stemming from blood ties. However, this conviction equates the category of brotherhood/fraternitas used by medieval authors with concepts associated with sources from later periods. This study does not concern narrowly defined family history, but is an attempt to examine fraternal relations in the early Middle Ages as a multidimensional cultural phenomenon. As the author seeks to demonstrate, it is difficult to speak of kinship in the ninth century and later without being aware of the religious and ideological implications of the transformations taking place at the time, even if direct traces of the impact of moralizing and theological teachings on the conduct of individuals are hard to capture in the sources.

It is well known that in several of her works, Christine de Pizan actively sought to valorize and empower women; she notably made the case for women's education, argued for the protection of widows, and famously attacked the misogyny of the all-pervasive Roman de la Rose. Whilst numerous examinations have shown that Christine sought to empower women through her texts, this book demonstrates that the visual programmes of her works offer further evidence of Christine's championing women in their role as educators and activists, whilst challenging some assumptions made about gender in Christine's works. It also examines the conduits and structures by which power is conferred upon women within them. When read together, the text and image across Christine's oeuvre reveal a consistent picture: one in which women educate and empower one another.

This book uses sociological perspectives to bring together work on war and identity in the Middle Ages relating to a range of peoples and geographical settings from Europe, the eastern Mediterranean, the Middle East, and Asia. Focusing on the interrelation between ideological practices and group formation, it examines the role of warfare in the emergence and decline of particular social structures, and changing patterns of collective identification. It contributes to the debate on the longue durée development of the phenomena of ethnicity and nationhood by drawing attention to the impact of war on the evolution of various types of polity and visions of community in the Middle Ages. Its use of non-European as well as European exemplars provides a wealth of fruitful comparative material, shedding new light on the relationship between medieval warfare and high-level identities.

The first extended study of supernatural discourse in Old English poetry, Supernatural Speakers in Old English Verse fills a conspicuous gap in the scholarship of early medieval literature. Drawing insights from various disciplines, including critical discourse analysis, social psychology, and oral poetry studies, Supernatural Speakers demonstrates how and why three poets--the poets of Genesis A, Christ C, and Guthlac A--marshalled their distinction as experts of the Old English poetic medium to perform the power of supernatural speech by means of masterful poetics. By offering new analytical paths through these early medieval poems, Supernatural Speakers elucidates the importance of poetics as a critical window on the social and religious functions of verbal art in early medieval England.

Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, historia septentrional (1617) is Miguel de Cervantes's last major work. Virtually ignored for the past four hundred years and overshadowed by the acclaim accorded Don Quixote, it is due a revival. As indicated by this new English title, The Perils of Persiles and Sigismunda, a Northern Saga, this challenging saga-like fiction follows an attractive young prince and princess who undertake a perilous pilgrimage by sea and on land from their North Atlantic islands to Rome. This new translation by William Thomas Little takes full account of recent scholars' ground-breaking research and their new readings. It also includes a selected bibliography, a contextualizing introduction, and footnotes on the text that clarify for contemporary readers cultural issues that were readily known to seventeenth-century readers in Spain, France, Italy, Portugal, and England.

This book explores the dimensions of medieval monastic meditation, prayer, and contemplation in the heyday of Benedictine and Cistercian spiritual writing, the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Mancia aims to answer the following questions: What did extra-liturgical prayer and meditation look like for medieval monks and nuns in western medieval Europe? When, where, and how was it practised? Was there a set way to engage with monastic meditation, or were there a variety of medieval monastic meditative experiences in the eleventh and twelfth centuries? What did monks and nuns perceive as the limitations of monastic prayer and meditation, and how did they understand their own imperfections and failures to perform "perfect" devotion? What extra-textual tools--art, manuscripts, diagrams, spaces--did monks and nuns rely upon to stimulate their practices of meditation? What does monastic meditation reveal about the emotional lives of Benedictine and Cistercian monks and nuns in the high Middle Ages? And, finally, what does the monastic struggle to pursue a prayerful Christian life have to teach the secular world of the twenty-first century?

This collection explores playful ways of fostering creative engagements with the medieval and early modern past and its own literary and artistic products, especially among those new to their study. As scholars and teachers of early English, the contributors cover literary and cultural material from a range of genres within the Old English, Middle English, Tudor, and Stuart periods and collectively delve into a shared interest in facilitating what we might loosely define as "newcomer" or "non-specialist" encounters with the past: initial, exploratory contact in which prior knowledge cannot be assumed, whether involving creative professionals, experts from other disciplines, undergraduate and school students, or members of the public. Considering artworks and installation, theatre and performance and curation practices, case studies offer practice-based examples of learning and engagement which proceed primarily through creative and playful approaches. The case studies are arranged into two broad groups: those which work through performance and theatrical play of various kinds, and those which work through playful practices of production and making. All share a perspective of irreverence, of vivid immersion, and of the possibilities of conjuring with the past.

Museums have long been viewed as exclusive, excluding, and as antiseptic to intimacy. In the past few decades, however, humanized experiences--cultivated by curators, educators, artists, activists, and marketers alike--have emerged as the reason for being for these cornerstones of community. Such experiences are often possible only in museum settings, where cultural exploration, probing conversation, and safe risk-taking can occur in spaces now becoming sacred through inclusiveness. This book brings together an interdisciplinary collection of essays examining the kinds of human experiences and interactions that have converted the once-sterile museum into a space of enlivenment and enrichment, as well as physical and emotional well-being. The essays focus for the first time on the uniquely human and humanizing experiences to be found in the collections, programs, exhibitions, and spaces of today's museums.

This book is a new cultural and intellectual history of the natural world in the early medieval Latin West. It examines the complex relationships between language, texts, and the physical world they describe, focusing on the manuscripts of the Physiologus--the foundation of the medieval bestiary. The Physiologus helped to shape the post-Roman worldview about the role and place of human beings in Creation. This process drew on classical ideas, but in its emphasis on allegory, etymology, and a plurality of readings, it was original and distinctive. This study demonstrates precisely how the early medieval re-contextualization of existing knowledge, together with a substantial amount of new writing, set the course of ideas about faith and nature for centuries to come. In doing so, it establishes the importance of multi-text miscellanies for early medieval written culture.

Describes the Almoravid transformation of western North Africa through trans-Saharan and trans-Mediterranean commerce, urbanization, and the epic encounter with the Christian, Muslim, and Jewish cultures of Iberia.

The concept of the Rus' Land became and remained an historical myth of modern Russian nationalism as the equivalent of "Russia." This book looks at the history of the use of the concept of the Rus' Land from the tenth to the seventeenth century.

These teaching and reference materials paint a vivid picture of the kinds of French that medieval English learners might desire to wield and of the high levels of fluency they could achieve.

"Europe" has become a modern political concept, but it has a long and varied history. This volume analyzes medieval ideas of Europe and their representations by modern historians.

Using histories, letters, and material culture from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, this book explores how violence was understood and justified during the time of the crusades.

This book examines imaging techniques for digitizing illuminated manuscripts, demonstrating the range of technologies necessary to show the materiality of medieval culture.