Thomas Hahn’s work laid the foundations for medieval romance studies to embrace the study of alterity and hybridity within Middle English literature. His contributions to scholarship brought Robin Hood studies into the critical mainstream, normalized the study of historically marginalized literature and peoples, and encouraged scholars to view medieval readers as actively encountering others and exploring themselves. This volume employs his methodologies – careful attention to texts and their contexts, cross-cultural readings, and theoretically-informed analysis – to highlight the literary culture of late medieval England afresh. Addressing long-established canonical works such as Chaucer, Christine de Pizan, and Malory alongside understudied traditions and manuscripts, this book will be of interest to literary scholars of the later Middle Ages who, like Hahn, work across boundaries of genre, tradition, and chronology.

Throughout his distinguished career at Vanderbilt and Yale, Paul H. Freedman has established a reputation for pushing against and crossing perceived boundaries within history and within the historical discipline. His numerous works have consistently ventured into uncharted waters: from studies uncovering the hidden workings of papal bureaucracy and elite understandings of subaltern peasants, to changing perceptions of exotic products and the world beyond Europe, to the role modern American restaurants have played in taking cuisine in exciting new directions. The fifteen essays collected in this volume have been written by Paul Freedman's former students and closest colleagues to both honour his extraordinary achievements and to explore some of their implications for medieval and post-medieval European society and historical study. Together, these studies assess and explore a range of different boundaries, both tangible and theoretical: boundaries relating to law, religion, peasants, historiography, and food, medicine, and the exotic. While drawing important conclusions about their subjects, the collected essays identify historical quandaries and possibilities to guide future research and study.

In Medieval Boundaries, Sharon Kinoshita examines the role of cross-cultural contact in twelfth- and early thirteenth-century French literature. Starting from the observation that many of the earliest and best-known works of the French literary tradition are set on or beyond the borders of the French-speaking world, she reads the Chanson de Roland, the lais of Marie de France, and a variety of other texts in an expanded geographical frame that includes the Iberian peninsula, the Welsh marches, and the eastern Mediterranean. In Kinoshita's reconceptualization of the geographical and cultural boundaries of the medieval West, such places become significant not only as sites of conflict but also as spaces of intense political, economic, and cultural negotiation. An important contribution to the emerging field of medieval postcolonialism, Kinoshita's work explores the limitations of reading the literature of the French Middle Ages as an inevitable link in the historical construction of modern discourses of Orientalism, colonialism, race, and Christian-Muslim conflict. Rather, drawing on recent historical and art historical scholarship, Kinoshita uncovers a vernacular culture at odds with official discourses of crusade and conquest. Situating each work in its specific context, she brings to light the lived experiences of the knights and nobles for whom this literature was first composed and—in a series of close readings informed by postcolonial and feminist theory—demonstrates that literary representations of cultural encounters often provided the pretext for questioning the most basic categories of medieval identity. Awarded honorable mention for the 2007 Modern Language Association Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Studies

This study explores how the history of medieval Europe is written, as well as what national discourses shape the editing of medieval texts and their interpretation in historiography. The essays show medieval historians at work, questioning and reflecting on their practice.

The twelve essays in Crossing Borders: Boundaries and Margins in Medieval and Early Modern Britain examine marches and margins as jurisdictional, legal, and social expressions of power, building upon the scholarship of Professor Cynthia J. Neville.

A wide-ranging collection on one of the most interesting features of medieval romance.

This collaborative volume explores how the creation and the crossing of faculty, disciplinary and social boundaries contributed to the development of the medieval European university.