This is a collection of essays on the subject of lament in the medieval period, with a particular emphasis on parental grief. The analysis of texts about pain and grief is an increasingly important area in medieval studies, offering as it does a mean of exploring the ways in which cultural meanings arise from loss and processes of mourning. Scholars from Canada, the USA, New Zealand, the UK, and elsewhere, have come together to produce a volume with a coherent thematic focus and a primary investment in Northern European medieval texts.

Poetic elegies for lost or fallen cities are seemingly as old as cities themselves. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, this genre finds its purest expression in the book of Lamentations, which mourns the destruction of Jerusalem; in Arabic, this genre is known as the ritha al-mudun. In The City Lament, Tamar M. Boyadjian traces the trajectory of the genre across the Mediterranean world during the period commonly referred to as the early Crusades (1095–1191), focusing on elegies and other expressions of loss that address the spiritual and strategic objective of those wars: Jerusalem. Through readings of city laments in English, French, Latin, Arabic, and Armenian literary traditions, Boyadjian challenges hegemonic and entrenched approaches to the study of medieval literature and the Crusades. The City Lament exposes significant literary intersections between Latin Christendom, the Islamic caliphates of the Middle East, and the Armenian kingdom of Cilicia, arguing for shared poetic and rhetorical modes. Reframing our understanding of literary sources produced across the medieval Mediterranean from an antagonistic, orientalist model to an analogous one, Boyadjian demonstrates how lamentations about the loss of Jerusalem, whether to Muslim or Christian forces, reveal fascinating parallels and rich, cross-cultural exchanges.

The 'long' fourteenth century perhaps can be seen as Thessalonica's heyday. Alongside its growing commercial prowess, the city was developing into an important centre of government, where members of the Byzantine imperial family of the Palaiologoi ruled independently under full imperial titles, striking coinage and following an increasingly autonomous external policy. It was also developing into a formidable centre for letters, education, and artistic expression, due in part to Palaiologan patronage. This volume sets out the political and commercial landscape of Thessalonica between 1303 and 1430, when the city fell to the Ottoman Turks, before focusing on the literary and hymnographical aspects of the city's cultural history and its legacy. The cosmopolitan nature of urban life in Thessalonica, the polyphony of opinions it experienced and expressed, its multiple links with centres such as Constantinople, Adrianople, Athos, Lemnos and Lesvos, and the diversity and strength of its authorial voices make the study of the city's cultural life a vital part of our understanding of the Byzantine Eastern Mediterranean.

Medical Texts and Cultures of Northern Europe is a series which opens up a dedicated forum for comparative work on northern European medieval literature, history, and society and their significance in the modern world. It promotes dialogue between anglophone and continental medievalists and addresses the need for transcultural perspectives on Europe's medical origins in a way that is distinctive both in scope and in academic orientation. The focus is on the medical texts and cultures of the British Isles, northern and central mainland Europe, and Scandinavia. The chronological range of the series is from c. 800 AD to c. 1600 Each volume makes available to an international readership excellent new work, offering ways of readings texts, cultures, and institutions that speak to the contemporary world.

Draws on Old Norse literary heritage to explore questions of emotion as both a literary motif and as a social phenomenon.

Over the last twenty-five years, the ‘history of emotion’ field has become one of the most dynamic and productive areas for humanities research. This designation, and the marked leadership of historians in the field, has had the unlooked-for consequence of sidelining literature — in particular secular literature — as evidence-source and object of emotion study. Secular literature, whether fable, novel, fantasy or romance, has been understood as prone to exaggeration, hyperbole, and thus as an unreliable indicator of the emotions of the past. The aim of this book is to decentre history of emotion research and asks new questions, ones that can be answered by literary scholars, using literary texts as sources: how do literary texts understand and depict emotion and, crucially, how do they generate emotion in their audiences — those who read them or hear them read or performed?

Research into the emotions is beginning to gain momentum in Anglo-Saxon studies. In order to integrate early medieval Britain into the wider scholarly research into the history of emotions (a major theme in other fields and a key field in interdisciplinary studies), this volume brings together established scholars, who have already made significant contributions to the study of Anglo-Saxon mental and emotional life, with younger scholars. The volume presents a tight focus - on emotion (rather than psychological life more generally), on Anglo-Saxon England and on language and literature - with contrasting approaches that will open up debate. The volume considers a range of methodologies and theoretical perspectives, examines the interplay of emotion and textuality, explores how emotion is conveyed through gesture, interrogates emotions in religious devotional literature, and considers the place of emotion in heroic culture. Each chapter asks questions about what is culturally distinctive about emotion in Anglo-Saxon England and what interpretative moves have to be made to read emotion in Old English texts, as well as considering how ideas about and representations of emotion might relate to lived experience. Taken together the essays in this collection indicate the current state of the field and preview important work to come. By exploring methodologies and materials for the study of Anglo-Saxon emotions, particularly focusing on Old English language and literature, it will both stimulate further study within the discipline and make a distinctive contribution to the wider interdisciplinary conversation about emotions.