The Hell of Holy War reads Jean de Joinville's famous account of King Louis IX and his Seventh Crusade as a powerful and unique representation of war, memory, and loss during the Middle Ages. In 1248, Joinville, a French nobleman, set out for the Holy Land, having taken the Cross and vowed to follow King Louis IX - Saint Louis (d. 1270) - across ......
Forms of Suffering demonstrates how Geoffrey Chaucer transformed pity into a central ethical and aesthetic concern in English literature by tracing his reformulations of trans-European pity discourses for an English audience. In these reformulations, Chaucer brought to the fore the modes and effects of pity's work in challenging, even overturning, ......
Forms of Suffering demonstrates how Geoffrey Chaucer transformed pity into a central ethical and aesthetic concern in English literature by tracing his reformulations of trans-European pity discourses for an English audience. In these reformulations, Chaucer brought to the fore the modes and effects of pity's work in challenging, even overturning, ......
How have we gained knowledge about women in the ancient Roman Republic? Roman historians were uniformly male, as were most historians of ancient Rome until quite recently. In the historiography handed down to us by Enlightenment-era scholars, women generally played marginal and often sexualized roles, relegated to the footnotes by historians who ......
In the second century CE, the multiethnic, multilingual, and religiously diverse Roman Empire grew to its greatest extent. To maintain order, Rome relied heavily on strict social hierarchies, established not only through legal frameworks like citizenship but also through cultural markers (such as clothing and language) and personal traits (such as ......
A critical edition of a never-before-published Italian text likely to be the original version of the influential masterpiece, The Meditations on the Life of Christ. The Meditations on the Life of Christ was the most popular and influential devotional work of the later Middle Ages. With its lively dialogue and narrative realism, its poignant and ......
Through close examination of ancient, medieval, and modern Lives of the saints, Ann W. Astell demonstrates how the historical transformation of hagiography as a genre correlates with similar changes in biblical studies. Christian hagiography flourished from the fourth to the fifteenth centuries, illuminating the gospel through the overlapping ......
An exploration of medieval philosopher and theologian Ramon Llull and his philosophical system through medieval and early modern book technology
The Art of Knowing Everything explores the legacy of medieval philosopher and theologian Ramon Llull, tracing the transformation of Llulls philosophical system, ......
Trees abound in Shakespeare's plays, and in Tree-Becoming Shannon Kelley explores how he uses his characters' identification with cypress, balsam, bay-laurel, myrrh, and pine trees as metaphors to express emotional distress. Opening new avenues for investigating knowledge of the plant world in early modern literature, Kelley traces the Ovidian ......