Status and gender are two closely associated concepts within medieval society, which tended to view both notions as binary: elite or low status, married or single, holy or cursed, male or female, or as complementary and cohesive as multiple parts of a societal whole. With contributions on topics ranging from medieval leprosy to boyhood behaviors, this interdisciplinary collection highlights the various ways “status” can be interpreted relative to gender, and what these two interlocked concepts can reveal about the construction of gendered identities in the Middle Ages.

This collection of essays focuses attention on how medieval gender intersects with other categories of difference, particularly religion and ethnicity. It treats the period c.800-1500, with a particular focus on the era of the Gregorian reform movement, the First Crusade, and its linked attacks on Jews at home.

As distinct from the many recent collections and studies of medieval literature and culture that have focused on gender and sexuality as their major themes, this collection considers and serves to re-think and re-situate religion and sexuality together. Including 'traditional' works such as Chaucer and the Pearl-poet, as well as less well known and studied texts - such as alchemical texts and the Wohunge group - the contributors here focus on the meeting point of these two often-examined concepts. They seek an understanding of where sex and religion distinguish themselves from one another, and where they do not. This volume locates the Divine and the Erotic within the continuum of experience and devotion that characterize the paradox of the medieval world. Not merely original in their approaches, these authors seek a new vision of how these two inter-connected themes - sexuality and the Divine - meet, connect, distinguish themselves, and merge within medieval life, language, and literature.

The Middle Ages was an era of dynamic social transformation, and notions of disability in medieval culture reflected how norms and forms of embodiment interacted with gender, class, and race, among other dimensions of human difference. Ideas of disability in courtly romance, saints' lives, chronicles, sagas, secular lyrics, dramas, and pageants demonstrate the nuanced, and sometimes contradictory, relationship between cultural constructions of disability and the lived experience of impairment. An essential resource for researchers, scholars, and students of history, literature, visual art, cultural studies, and education, A Cultural History of Disability in the Middle Ages explores themes and topics such as atypical bodies; mobility impairment; chronic pain and illness; blindness; deafness; speech; learning difficulties; and mental health.

"This study brings together for the first time scholars of Christian, Islamic and Jewish art and music to reconstruct the complex intersection between art, architecture and sound in the medieval world. Case studies explore how ambient and programmatic sound, including chant and speech, and its opposite, silence, interacted with objects and the built environment to create the multisensory experiences that characterized medieval life. While sound is probably the most difficult component of the past to reconstruct, it was also the most pervasive, whether planned or unplanned, instrumental or vocal, occasional or ambient. Acoustics were central to the perception of performance; images in liturgical manuscripts were embedded in a context of song and ritual actions; and architecture provided both visual and spatial frameworks for music and sound. Resounding Images brings together specialists in the history of art, architecture, and music to explore the manifold roles of sound in the experience of medieval art. Moving beyond the field of musical iconography, the contributors reconsider the relationship between sound, space and image in the long Middle Ages."--

A unique, illustrated book that will change the way you see medieval history The Middle Ages: A Graphic History busts the myth of the 'Dark Ages', shedding light on the medieval period's present-day relevance in a unique illustrated style. This history takes us through the rise and fall of empires, papacies, caliphates and kingdoms; through the violence and death of the Crusades, Viking raids, the Hundred Years War and the Plague; to the curious practices of monks, martyrs and iconoclasts. We'll see how the foundations of the modern West were established, influencing our art, cultures, religious practices and ways of thinking. And we'll explore the lives of those seen as 'Other' - women, Jews, homosexuals, lepers, sex workers and heretics. Join historian Eleanor Janega and illustrator Neil Max Emmanuel on a romp across continents and kingdoms as we discover the Middle Ages to be a time of huge change, inquiry and development - not unlike our own.

This volume provides a comprehensive introduction to postcolonial medieval studies and examines the historical connections between postcolonial studies and medieval studies. Lisa Lampert-Weissig provides new readings of medieval texts including Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival, Mandeville's Travels and Guillaume de Palerne, a romance about werewolves set in Norman Sicily. In addition, she examines Walter Scott's Ivanhoe from the perspective of postcolonial medieval studies, as well contemporary novels by Salman Rushdie, Tariq Ali, Juan Goytisolo, and Amitav Ghosh.