Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Feminist Origins of the Arthurian Legend provides the first feminist analysis of both the Arthurian section of The History of the Kings of Britain and The Life of Merlin .

Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Translation of Female Kingship provides the first feminist analysis of the part of The History of the Kings of Britain that most readers overlook: the reigns before and after Arthur's.

Bringing the skills of a literary historian to the subject, Brian Moloney considers the genesis of Saint Francis of Assisi's Canticle of Brother Sun to show how it works as a carefully composed work of art. The study examines the saint's life and times, the structure of the poem, the features of its style, and the range of its possible meanings.

This book explores the tangled relationship between literary production and epistemological foundation as exemplified in one of the masterpieces of Italian literature. Filippo Andrei argues that Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron has a significant though concealed engagement with philosophy, and that the philosophical implications of its narratives can be understood through an epistemological approach to the text. He analyzes the influence of Dante, Petrarch, Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle...

Written by Europe’s first professional woman writer, The Treasure of the City of Ladies offers advice and guidance to women of all ages and from all levels of medieval society, from royal courtiers to prostitutes. It paints an intricate picture of daily life in the courts and streets of fifteenth-century France and gives a fascinating glimpse into the practical considerations of running a household, dressing appropriately and maintaining a reputation in all circumstances. Christin...

The Malleus Maleficarum, first published in 1486–7, is the standard medieval text on witchcraft and it remained in print throughout the early modern period. Its descriptions of the evil acts of witches and the ways to exterminate them continue to contribute to our knowledge of early modern law, religion and society. Mackay's highly acclaimed translation, based on his extensive research and detailed analysis of the Latin text, is the only complete English version available, and the most rel...

Published just after the Second World War, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages is a sweeping exploration of the remarkable continuity of European literature across time and place, from the classical era up to the early nineteenth century, and from the Italian peninsula to the British Isles. In what T. S. Eliot called a "magnificent" book, Ernst Robert Curtius establishes medieval Latin literature as the vital transition between the literature of antiquity and the vernacu...

This bookexamines the sustained interest in legends of the pagan and peripheral North, tracing and analyzing the use of an ‘out-of-Scandinavia’ legend (Scandinavia as an ancestral homeland) in a wide range of medieval texts from all over Europe, with a focus on the Anglo-Saxon tradition. The pagan North was an imaginative region, which attracted a number of conflicting interpretations. To Christian Europe, the pagan North was an abject Other, but it also symbolized a place from which ances...

Medieval French literature encompasses 450 years of literary output in Old and Middle French, mostly produced in Northern France and England. These texts, including courtly lyrics, prose and verse romances, dits amoureux and plays, proved hugely influential for other European literary traditions in the medieval period and beyond. This Companion offers a wide-ranging and stimulating guide to literature composed in medieval French from its beginnings in the ninth century until the Renaissanc...

This study shows how contemporary theory can serve to clarify structures of identity and economies of desire in medieval texts. Bringing the resources of psychoanalytic and poststructuralist theory to bear on Chaucer's tales about women, this book addresses those registers of the Canterbury project that remain major concerns for recent feminist theory: the specificity of feminine desire, the cultural articulation of gender, the logic of sacrifice as a cultural ideal, the structure of misog...

This book examines William Langland’s late medieval poem, The Vision of Piers Plowman, in light of contemporary intellectual thought. David Strong argues that where the philosophers John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham revolutionize the view of human potential through their theories of epistemology, ethics, and freedom of the will, Langland vivifies these ideas by contextualizing them in an individual’s search for truth and love. Specifically, the text ponders the intersection between re...

This book analyzes the interaction between gender and species in Chaucer's poetry and strives to understand his adaptation of medieval discourse through an ecofeminist lens. Works that either speak of animals, or those with animals speaking, give new insights into the medieval textual handling of the 'others' of society.