Cornell University Press Medieval Studies Catalog 2018

EDIE

MEDIEVAL STUDIES

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

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2018

EUR ASIA

The Avars A Steppe Empire in Central Europe, 567–822 Walter Pohl tr ansl ated by William Sayers

The Avars arrived in Europe from the Central Asian steppes in the mid-sixth century CE and dominated much of Central and Eastern Europe for almost 250 years. Fierce warriors and canny power brokers, the Avars were more influential and durable than Attila’s Huns, yet have remained hidden in history. Walter Pohl’s epic narrative, translated into English for the first time, restores them to their rightful place in the story of early medieval Europe.

The Avars offers a comprehensive overview of their history, tracing the Avars from the construction of their steppe empire in the center of Europe; their wars and alliances with the Byzantines, Slavs, Lombards, and others; and their apex as the first so-called barbarian power to besiege Constantinople (in 626); to their fall under the Frankish armies of Charlemagne and subsequent disappearance as a distinct cultural group. Pohl uncovers the secrets of their society, synthesizing the rich archaeological record recovered from more than sixty thousand graves of the period, as well as accounts of the Avars by Byzantine and other chroniclers.

In recovering the story of the fascinating encounter between Eurasian nomads who established an empire in the heart of Europe and the post-Roman Christian cultures of Europe, this book provides a new perspective on the origins of medieval Europe itself.

Walter Pohl is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Vienna and Director of the Institute of Medieval Research at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. He is the editor of Visions of Community and Strategies of Identitifcation and author of numerous works in German.

From reviews of the German edition: “Contains a wealth of information and informed discussion; it will repay careful study by anyone involved in the late Roman and early medieval period, and will remain the standard guide into the foreseeable future.”

—English Historical Review “Walter Pohl has succeeded in stripping much of this veil of mystery from the Avars, a heterogeneous group from central Asia who dominated the Byzantine Danube frontier. In tracing the history of the Avars and the peoples they dominated or fought and traded with, this is an illuminating history of southeast Europe in the early Middle Ages.”

—Speculum “Future research on all questions concerning the Avars, henceforth cannot bypass this very important book.”

—Journal of Asian History

$69.95 hardcover 978-0-8014-4210-0 624 pages, 6 x 9, 4 maps U S E CO D E 0 9 M ED I E VA L TO S AV E 3 0 % O N YO U R O R D ER

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RELIGION

Burning Bodies Communities, Eschatology, and the Punishment of Heresy in the Middle Ages Michael D. Barbezat

Burning Bodies interrogates the ideas that the authors of historical and theological texts in the medieval West associated with the burning alive of Christian heretics. Michael Barbezat traces these instances from the eleventh century until the advent of the internal crusades of the thirteenth century, depicting the exclusionary fires of hell and judicial execution, the purifying fire of post-mortem purgation, and the unifying fire of God’s love that medieval authors used to describe processes of social inclusion and exclusion.

Burning Bodies analyses how the accounts of burning heretics alive referenced, affirmed, and elaborated upon wider discourses of community and eschatology. Descriptions of burning supposed heretics alive were profoundly related to ideas of a redemptive Christian community based upon a divine, unifying love, and medieval understandings of what these burnings could have meant to contemporaries cannot be fully appreciated outside of this discourse of communal love. For them, human communities were bodies on fire. Medieval theologians and academics often described the corporate identity of the Christian world as a body joined together by the love of God. This love was like a fire, melting individuals together into one whole. Those who did not spiritually burn with God’s love were destined to burn literally in the fires of Hell or Purgatory, and the fires of execution were often described as an earthly extension of these fires. Through this analysis, Barbezat demonstrates how presentations of heresy, and to some extent actual responses to perceived heretics, were shaped by long-standing images of biblical commentary and exegesis. He finds that this imagery is more than a literary curiosity; it is, in fact, a formative historical agent.

Michael David Barbezat is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia.

$55.00 hardcover 978-1-5017-1680-5 300 pages, 6 x 9, 6 b&w halftones 2

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B R I TA I N

Obscene Pedagogies Transgressive Talk and Sexual Education in Late Medieval Britain Carissa M. Harris

As anyone who has read Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales knows, Middle English literature is rife with sexually explicit language and situations. Less canonical works can be even more brazen in describing illicit acts of sexual activity and sexual violence. Such scenes and language were not, however, included exclusively for titillation. In Obscene Pedagogies, Carissa M. Harris argues instead for obscenity’s usefulness in sexual education. She investigates the relationship between obscenity, gender, and pedagogy in Middle English and Middle Scots literary texts from 1300 to 1580 to show how sexually explicit and defiantly vulgar speech taught readers and listeners about sexual behavior and consent.

Through innovative close readings of literary texts including erotic lyrics, single-woman’s songs, debate poems between men and women, Scottish insult poetry battles, and The Canterbury Tales, Harris demonstrates how through its transgressive charge and galvanizing shock value, obscenity taught audiences about gender, sex, pleasure, and power in ways both positive and harmful. She focuses in particular on understudied female-voiced lyrics and gendered debate poems, many of which have their origin in oral culture, and includes teaching-ready editions of fourteen largely unknown anonymous lyrics in women’s voices.

Harris’s own voice, proudly witty and sharply polemical, inspires the reader to address these medieval texts with an eye on contemporary issues of gender, violence, and misogyny.

“Obscene Pedagogies is an invigorating and dynamic study of how obscenity facilitates same-sex education in premodern English literatures. Harris intelligently details how these literatures are in dialogue with one another, attesting to a nuanced and complex conversation regarding sexual contact, erotic inter-subjectivity, and the limits of desire.”

—Holly Crocker, author of Chaucer’s Visions of Manhood

Carissa M. Harris is Assistant Professor of English at Temple University.

$42.95 hardcover 978-1-5017-3040-5 312 pages, 6 x 9 U S E CO D E 0 9 M ED I E VA L TO S AV E 3 0 % O N YO U R O R D ER

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GENDER STUDIES

Virgin Whore Emma Maggie Solberg

In Virgin Whore, Emma Maggie Solberg uncovers a surprisingly prevalent theme in late English medieval literature and culture: the celebration of the Virgin Mary’s sexuality. Although history is narrated as a progressive loss of innocence, the Madonna has grown purer with each passing century. Looking to a period before the idea of her purity and virginity had ossified, Solberg uncovers depictions and interpretations of Mary, discernible in jokes and insults, icons and rituals, prayers and revelations, allegories and typologies—and in late medieval vernacular biblical drama.

More unmistakable than any cultural artifact from late medieval England, these biblical plays do not exclusively interpret Mary and her virginity as fragile. In a collection of plays known as the N-Town manuscript, Mary is represented not only as virgin and mother but as virgin and promiscuous adulteress, dallying with the Trinity, the archangel Gabriel, and mortals in kaleidoscopic erotic combinations. Mary’s “virginity” signifies invulnerability rather than fragility, redemption rather than renunciation, and merciful license rather than ascetic discipline.

Taking the ancient slander that Mary conceived Jesus in sin as cause for joyful laughter, the N-Town plays make a virtue of those accusations: through bawdy yet divine comedy, she redeems and exalts the crime.

By revealing the presence of this promiscuous Virgin in early English drama and late medieval literature and culture—in dirty jokes told by Boccaccio and Chaucer, Malory’s Arthurian romances, and the double entendres of the allegorical Mystic Hunt of the Unicorn—Solberg provides a new understanding of Marian traditions.

Emma Maggie Solberg is Assistant Professor of Medieval Literature and Culture in the English department at Bowdoin College.

$39.95 hardcover 978-1-5017-3033-7 276 pages, 6 x 9 4

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“Scholarship digs deep or shifts sideways: the deep digger discovers what was hidden from view, while the sideways shifter exposes what was hidden in plain sight. In her feisty, provocative Virgin Whore, Maggie Solberg is a sideways-shifter. Her delightful, poker-faced prose realigns our sight to confront what was staring us in the face: a larger than life Virgin!”

—James Simpson, Harvard University “Virgin Whore shows that the Virgin beloved by medieval English Christians was not a demure, passive character, nor were her paradoxes limited to her roles of ‘mother of mercy’ and ‘queen of hell.’ Solberg’s investigation of Mary’s scandalous purity offers an exciting new paradigm for early drama scholarship and will make an impact on literary studies, history, theology, and art history.”

—Nicole R. Rice, author of Lay Piety and Religious Discipline in Middle English Literature

LITER ARY CRITICISM

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MEDITERR ANEAN

The City Lament Jerusalem across the Medieval Mediterranean Tamar M. Boyadjian

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 rithā’ al-mudun. The City Lament, Tamar M. Boyadjian traces the trajectory of this 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 focusing on the spiritual and strategic objective of those wars: Jerusalem. Through readings of city laments in English, French, Latin, Arabic, and Armenian literary traditions, this book 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 and sultanates 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 City Lament is an important and well-conceived study that will make a significant contribution to the field. Boyadjian widens our frame of reference by bringing in the enormously significant Kingdom of Armenia, enhancing our understanding of this crucial period of history.”

—Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Director of the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto

Tamar M. Boyadjian is Assistant Professor of Medieval Literature at Michigan State University.

$52.95 hardcover 978-1-5017-3053-5 210 pages, 6 x 9, 6 b&w halftones U S E CO D E 0 9 M ED I E VA L TO S AV E 3 0 % O N YO U R O R D ER

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RELIGION

Cluny and the Muslims of La Garde-Freinet Hagiography and the Problem of Islam in Medieval Europe Scot t G. Bruce

In the summer of 972 a group of Muslim brigands based in the south of France near La Garde-Freinet abducted the abbot of Cluny as he and his entourage crossed the Alps en route from Rome to Burgundy. Ultimately, the abbot was set free and returned home safely, but the audacity of this abduction outraged Christian leaders and galvanized the will of local lords. Shortly thereafter, Count William of Arles marshaled an army and succeeded in wiping out the Muslim stronghold. In Cluny and the Muslims of La Garde-Freinet, Scott G. Bruce uses this extraordinary incident, largely overlooked by contemporary scholars, to examine Christian perceptions of Islam in the Middle Ages.

The monks of Cluny kept the tale of their abbot’s abduction alive over the next century in hagiographical works and chronicles written to promote his sanctity. Bruce explores the telling and retelling of this story, focusing particularly on the representation of Islam in each account, and how that representation changed over time. The culminating figure in this study is Peter the Venerable, one of Europe’s leading intellectuals and abbot of Cluny from 1122 to 1156. Remembered today largely for his views of Islam, Peter commissioned Latin translations of Muslim historical and devotional texts including the Qur’an.

As Bruce shows, Peter’s thinking on Islam had its roots in the hagiographical tradition of the abduction at La Garde-Freinet. In fact, Peter drew from the stories as he crafted a “Muslim policy” relevant to the mid-twelfth century, a time of great anxiety about Islam in the aftermath of the failed Second Crusade. Compellingly written, Cluny and the Muslims of La Garde-Freinet provides us with an unparalleled opportunity to examine Christian perceptions of Islam in the Crusading era.

Scot t G. Bruce is Associate Professor of History at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is the author of Silence and Sign Language in Medieval Monasticism: The Cluniac Tradition, c.

900–1200 and editor of Ecologies and Economies in Medieval and Early Modern Europe..

$39.95 hardcover 978-0-8014-5299-4 176 pages, 6 x 9, 1 map 6

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“Overall, this is an impressive book. It diligently unpacks the development of the hagiographical legend surrounding the kidnapping of Maiolus and assesses its impact upon later Cluniac authors—especially Peter the Venerable. It makes positive contributions to several major debates surrounding Peter and the broad character of the Cluniac engagement with non-Christians and places that discussion within a long-term context. Bruce expresses himself with some neat turns of phrase and the book as a whole is a very easy read.

It is much to be recommended!”—Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations “A particular strength of the book is Bruce’s understanding of how complex were medieval approaches to religion, polemic, and reason.”—Constance Brittain Bouchard, Distinguished Professor of History, The University of Akron, and author of “Every Valley Shall Be Exalted”: The Discourse of Opposites in Twelfth-Century Thought

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RELIGION

Dark Age Nunneries The Ambiguous Identity of Female Monasticism, 800–1050 Steven Vanderput ten

In Dark Age Nunneries, Steven Vanderputten dismantles the common view of women religious between 800 and 1050 as disempowered or even disinterested witnesses to their own lives.

It is based on a study of primary sources from forty female monastic communities in Lotharingia—a politically and culturally diverse region that boasted an extraordinarily high number of such institutions. Vanderputten highlights the attempts by women religious and their leaders, as well as the clerics and the laymen and -women sympathetic to their cause, to construct localized narratives of self, preserve or expand their agency as religious communities, and remain involved in shaping the attitudes and behaviors of the laity amid changing contexts and expectations on the part of the Church and secular authorities.

Rather than a “dark age” in which female monasticism withered under such factors as the assertion of male religious authority, the secularization of its institutions, and the precipitous decline of their intellectual and spiritual life, Vanderputten finds that the post-Carolingian period witnessed a remarkable adaptability among these women. Through texts, objects, archaeological remains, and iconography, Dark Age Nunneries offers scholars of religion, medieval history, and gender studies new ways to understand the experience of women of faith within the Church and across society during this era.

Steven Vanderput ten is Professor in the History of the Early and Central Middle Ages at Ghent University. He is the author of Monastic Reform as Process: Realities and Representations in Medieval Flanders, 900–1100 and Imagining Religious Leadership in the Middle Ages: Richard of Saint-Vanne and the Politics of Reform.

“Dark Age Nunneries is a thought-provoking and paradigm-changing book. By reimagining the very ‘ambiguity’ of female monastic communities as a strength, Steven Vanderputten’s book allows us to look at the scant sources for female monasticism in this period with new clarity and insight and, in doing so, changes the way that we think about religious practice in the central Middle Ages.”

—Scott G. Bruce, University of Colorado Boulder “Dark Age Nunneries is top-of-the-line work by one of the world’s greatest experts on medieval monasticism. I have no doubt that it will be received as fundamental in the field of women’s monasticism in the central Middle Ages and become the goto book on the subject for scholars of all linguistic or national backgrounds in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere.”

—Walter P. Simons, Dartmouth College

$32.95 paperback 978-1-5017-1595-2 320 pages, 6 x 9, 2 tables, 11 b&w halftones, 3 map U S E CO D E 0 9 M ED I E VA L TO S AV E 3 0 % O N YO U R O R D ER

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H I S TO R Y • G E N D E R S T U D I E S

Her Father’s Daughter Gender, Power, and Religion in the Early Spanish Kingdoms Lucy K. Pick

In Her Father’s Daughter, Lucy K. Pick considers a group of royal women in the early medieval kingdoms of the Asturias and of León-Castilla; their lives say a great deal about structures of power and the roles of gender and religion within the early Iberian kingdoms. Pick examines these women, all daughters of kings, as members of networks of power that work variously in parallel, in concert, and in resistance to some forms of male power, and contends that only by mapping these networks do we gain a full understanding of the nature of monarchical power.

Pick’s focus on the roles, possibilities, and limitations faced by these royal women forces us to reevaluate medieval gender norms and their relationship to power and to rethink the power structures of the era. Well illustrated with images of significant objects, Her Father’s Daughter is marked by Pick’s wide-ranging interdisciplinary approach, which encompasses liturgy, art, manuscripts, architecture, documentary texts, historical narratives, saints’ lives, theological treatises, and epigraphy.

Lucy K. Pick is Senior Lecturer in the History of Christianity at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Conflict and Coexistence and the novel Pilgrimage.

$65.00 hardcover 978-1-5017-1432-0 272 pages, 8 halftones, 2 maps, 6 charts, 6 x 9 8

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“In Her Father’s Daughter, Lucy K. Pick looks to a much-neglected aspect of the history of the Spanish kingdoms in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Her book is novel and original.”

—Teofilo Ruiz, author of A King Travels “Her Father’s Daughter will contribute to and enrich ongoing discussions regarding the role and evolution of the medieval monarchy.”

—Nuria Silleras-Fernandez, author of Chariots of Ladies

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RELIGION

Invisible Weapons Liturgy and the Making of Crusade Ideology M. Cecilia Gaposchkin

In 1098, three years into the First Crusade and after a brutal eight-month siege, the Franks captured the city of Antioch. Two days later, Muslim forces arrived with a relief army, and the victors became the besieged. Exhausted and ravaged by illness and hunger, the Franks were exhorted by their religious leaders to supplicate God, and for three days they performed a series of liturgical exercises, beseeching God through ritual prayer to forgive their sins and grant them victory. The following day, the Christian army, accompanied by bishops and priests reciting psalms and hymns, marched out of the city to face the Muslim forces and won a resounding and improbable victory.

From the very beginning and throughout the history of the Crusades, liturgical prayer, masses, and alms were all marshaled in the fight against the Muslim armies. During the Fifth Crusade, Pope Honorius III likened liturgy to “invisible weapons.”

This book is about those invisible weapons; about the prayers and liturgical rituals that were part of the battle for the faith.

M. Cecilia Gaposchkin tells the story of the greatest collective religious undertaking of the Middle Ages, putting front and center the ways in which Latin Christians communicated their ideas and aspirations for crusade to God through liturgy, how liturgy was deployed in crusading, and how liturgy absorbed ideals or priorities of crusading. By connecting medieval liturgical books with the larger narrative of crusading, Gaposchkin allows us to understand a crucial facet in the culture of holy war.

M. Cecilia Gaposchkin is Professor of History and Assistant Dean of Faculty for Pre-Major Advising at Dartmouth College.

She is the author of The Making of Saint Louis and coeditor of The Sanctity of Louis IX, both from Cornell, and the author of Blessed Louis, the Most Glorious of Kings.

“With alert, exact, meticulous scholarship on an impressively rich array of primary sources, M. Cecilia Gaposchkin reveals the precise liturgical frame behind the origins, shape, and development of crusade ideology across four centuries. This fresh, lucid, compelling, and accessible analysis of complex evidence provides a comprehensive study of how crusading was imagined within the context of wider Christian worship and religious culture. ” —Christopher Tyerman, University of Oxford, author of How to Plan a Crusade “M. Cecilia Gaposchkin’s new book represents the cutting edge of modern crusade studies. It establishes liturgy as a defining force of medieval crusading, its practice, and its ideology.”

—Christoph T. Maier, University of Zurich, author of Crusade Propaganda and Ideology “In this tremendously engaging and important book, M. Cecilia Gaposchkin deftly reveals the centrality of liturgical ideas and practices to the crusading movement.”

—Jonathan Phillips, University of London, author of Holy Warriors

$69.95 hardcover 978-1-5017-0515-1 376 pages, 6 x 9, 17 halftones, 2 maps, 1 table U S E CO D E 0 9 M ED I E VA L TO S AV E 3 0 % O N YO U R O R D ER

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Where Three Worlds Met Sicily in the Early Medieval Mediterranean Sarah Davis-Secord

Sicily is a lush and culturally rich island at the center of the Mediterranean Sea. Throughout its history, the island has been conquered and colonized by successive waves of peoples from across the Mediterranean region. In the early and central Middle Ages, the island was ruled and occupied in turn by Greek Christians, Muslims, and Latin Christians.

In Where Three Worlds Met, Sarah Davis-Secord investigates Sicily’s place within the religious, diplomatic, military, commercial, and intellectual networks of the Mediterranean. By looking at the island across this long expanse of time and during the periods of transition from one dominant culture to another, Davis-Secord uncovers the patterns that defined and redefined the broader Muslim-Christian encounter in the Middle Ages.

Complex combinations of political, cultural, and economic need transformed Sicily’s patterns of connection to other nearby regions—transformations that were representative of the fundamental shifts that took place in the larger Mediterranean system during the Middle Ages.

Sar ah Davis-Secord is Associate Professor of History at the University of New Mexico.

$65.00 hardcover 978-1-5017-0464-2 320 pages, 10 halftones, 4 maps, 6 x 9 10

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“Eschewing generalizations regarding medieval Sicily’s importance based on its geographical centrality in the Mediterranean, Davis-Secord presents a scholarly, nuanced view of the island during the period between the 6th and late 12th centuries.

She accomplishes this not through a standard narrative history, but by exploring— imaginatively and successfully—the travel and communication networks produced and experienced by its Byzantine, Muslim, and Norman conquerors.”—Choice “Where Three Worlds Met is an ambitious and intelligent portrait of Sicily’s place in Mediterranean life, a topic well worth undertaking.”

—Clifford R. Backman, author of The Decline and Fall of Medieval Sicily

RELIGION

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S PA I N

Defiant Priests Domestic Unions, Violence, and Clerical Masculinity in Fourteenth-Century Catalonia Michelle Armstrong-Partida BEST FIRST BOOK OF FEMINIST SCHOLARSHIP ON THE MIDDLE AGES, SOCIETY FOR MEDIEVAL FEMINIST SCHOLARSHIP

Two hundred years after canon law prohibited clerical marriage, parish priests in the late medieval period continued to form unions with women that were marriage all but in name. In Defiant Priests, Michelle Armstrong-Partida uses evidence from extraordinary archives in four Catalan dioceses to show that maintaining a family with a domestic partner was not only a custom entrenched in Catalan clerical culture but also an essential component of priestly masculine identity, one that extended to the carrying of weapons and use of violence to resolve disputes and seek revenge, to intimidate other men, and to maintain their status and authority in the community.

Armstrong-Partida reconstructs the personal lives and careers of Catalan parish priests to better understand the professional identity and masculinity of churchmen who made up the proletariat of the largest institution across Europe. Defiant Priests highlights a clerical culture that embraced violence and illuminates how the parish church could become a battleground in which rivalries among clerics took place and young clerics learned from senior clergymen to meld the lay masculine ideals that were a part of their everyday culture with the privilege and authority of their profession.

“Michelle Armstrong-Partida’s splendid book is essential reading for anyone interested in clerical masculinity across medieval Europe. Defiant Priests is extremely well grounded in past and present.”

—Jacqueline Murray, editor of Marriage in Premodern Europe

Michelle Armstrong-Partida is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Texas at El Paso.

$69.95 hardcover 978-1-5017-0773-5 392 pages, 2 maps, 13 tables, 6 x 9 U S E CO D E 0 9 M ED I E VA L TO S AV E 3 0 % O N YO U R O R D ER

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LITER ARY CRITICISM

After Lavinia A Literary History of Premodern Marriage Diplomacy John Watkins

In medieval and early modern Europe, marriage treaties were a perennial feature of the diplomatic landscape. When one ruler decided to make peace with his enemy, the two parties often sealed their settlement with marriages between their respective families. In After Lavinia, John Watkins traces the history of the practice, focusing on the unusually close relationship between diplomacy and literary production in Western Europe from antiquity through the seventeenth century.

John Watkins is Distinguished McKnight University Professor of English at the University of Minnesota. He is coauthor of Shakespeare’s Foreign Worlds, also from Cornell, and author of Representing Elizabeth in Stuart England and The Specter of Dido.

“Watkins’s study of marriage diplomacy is a compelling work which proves an indispensable reference for readers of all creeds: from the literary analyst, to the specialist in diplomacy, gender studies or conflict studies, and to the lay reader trying to understand a volatile zeitgeist.

Watkins’s opus is not only a major and fresh contribution to the field, it is an enlightening commentary on contemporary politics and on the necessity of a literary view of history.”—Cahiers Élisabéthains “After Lavinia is an excellent book: extremely ambitious, successful, and important.

Its originality is one of its great strengths, along with its clarity and breadth. This book makes contributions to a whole raft of academic fields—comparative literature, diplomatic history, political history, cultural history, gender studies, medieval studies, English studies, French studies, Renaissance studies, even classics.”—Timothy Hampton, author of Fictions of Embassy

$59.95 hardcover 978-1-5017-0757-5 280 pages, 1 halftone, 6 x 9 12

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LITER ARY CRITICISM

Margery Kempe and the Lonely Reader Rebecca Krug

Since its rediscovery in 1934, the fifteenth-century Book of Margery Kempe has become a canonical text for students of medieval Christian mysticism and spirituality. Its author was a fifteenth-century English laywoman who, after the birth of her first child, experienced vivid religious visions and vowed to lead a deeply religious life while remaining part of the secular world.

In Margery Kempe and the Lonely Reader, Rebecca Krug shows how and why Kempe wrote her Book, arguing that in her engagement with written culture she discovered a desire to experience spiritual comfort and to interact with fellow believers who also sought to live lives of intense emotional engagement.

Krug offers a fresh analysis of the Book as a written work and draws attention to the importance of reading, revision, and collaboration for understanding both Kempe’s particular decision to write and the social conditions of late medieval women’s authorship.

Rebecca Krug is Associate Professor of English at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of Reading Families, also from Cornell.

$65.00 hardcover 978-1-5017-0533-5 256 pages, 6 x 9 U S E CO D E 0 9 M ED I E VA L TO S AV E 3 0 % O N YO U R O R D ER

“This learned and fascinating book presents Margery Kempe as one who reworks her life into writing as a way to respond to the books of consolation that were both deeply formative and deeply troubling to her. Rebecca Krug offers a particularly compelling account of collaboration, one that is intuitively persuasive but that also drives its point home with specific quotations from Kempe’s Book.”

—Claire M. Waters, author of Angels and Early Creatures “A deeply learned and humane book. For medievalists interested in the world of late medieval piety, Margery Kempe and the Lonely Reader is an important and compelling reinterpretation of a challenging and often puzzling text.”

—Katherine L. French, University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

“This balanced, and sympathetic account of the Book of Margery Kempe will be essential reading for anyone studying or teaching the work, the history of women’s writing, or the history of religious thought and feeling. This is a richly thought-provoking and original study of what remains an endlessly puzzling and fascinating work.”

—Nicholas Watson, Harvard University

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LITER ARY CRITICISM

Jacob’s Shipwreck Diaspora, Translation, and Jewish-Christian Relations in Medieval England Ruth Nisse

Jewish and Christian authors of the High Middle Ages not infrequently came into dialogue or conflict with each other over traditions drawn from ancient writings outside of the bible. Circulating in Hebrew and Latin translations, these included two independent versions of the Testament of Naphtali in which the patriarch has a vision of the Diaspora, a shipwreck that scatters the twelve tribes. For Ruth Nisse, this is an emblematic text that illuminates relationships between interpretation, translation, and survival. In her account, extrabiblical literature encompasses not only the historical works of Flavius Josephus but also some of the more ingenious Hebrew imaginative texts, Aesop’s fables and the Aeneid. While medieval England and Northern France were marked by persecutions of Jews in the wake of the Crusades and Christian polemics against Judaism, the period also saw a growing interest in language study and translation.

These noncanonical works and their afterlives provided Jews and Christians alike with resources of fiction that they used to reconsider boundaries of doctrine and interpretation.

Ruth Nisse is Associate Professor of English and Jewish Studies at Wesleyan University. She is the author of Defining Acts: Drama and the Politics of Interpretation in Late Medieval England.

$65.00 hardcover 978-1-5017-0307-2 248 pages, 6 x 9 14

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“Jacob’s Shipwreck contributes in very significant ways to scholarly work on Jewish-Christian relations. It will be required reading for anyone interested in the complex exchanges between medieval Christian and Jewish communities.”

—Steven Kruger, author of The Spectral Jew “Ruth Nisse’s brilliant analysis not only tells a new story about ChristianJewish interaction; it also makes a bold intervention in received notions of the literary. Anyone interested in rethinking the medieval literary canon—its languages, producers and influences—should read Jacob’s Shipwreck.”—Kathy Lavezzo, University of Iowa, author of The Accommodated Jew<

H I S TO RY

Viking Friendship The Social Bond in Iceland and Norway, c. 900–1300 Jón Viðar Sigurðsson

“To a faithful friend, straight are the roads and short.”

—Odin, from the Hávamál (c. 1000) Friendship was the most important social bond in Iceland and Norway during the Viking Age and the early Middle Ages. Far more significantly than kinship ties, it defined relations between chieftains, and between chieftains and householders. In Viking Friendship, Jón Viðar Sigurðsson explores the various ways in which friendship tied Icelandic and Norwegian societies together, its role in power struggles and ending conflicts, and how it shaped religious beliefs and practices both before and after the introduction of Christianity.

Drawing on a wide range of Icelandic sagas and other sources, Sigurðsson details how loyalties between friends were established and maintained. The key elements of Viking friendship, he shows, were protection and generosity, which was most often expressed through gift giving and feasting. In a society without institutions that could guarantee support and security, these were crucial means of structuring mutual assistance. As a political force, friendship was essential in the decentralized Free State period in Iceland’s history. In Norway, where authority was more centralized, kings attempted to use friendship to secure the loyalty of their subjects.

Sigurðsson concludes by tracing the decline of friendship as the fundamental social bond in Iceland as a consequence of Norwegian rule.

Jón Viðar Sigurðsson is a Professor in the Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History at the University of Oslo. He is the author and coeditor of numerous books, including Chieftains and Power in the Icelandic Commonwealth and Celtic-Norse Relationships in the Irish Sea in the Middle Ages 800–1200.

“Medieval friendship complicates our notions of horizontal versus vertical social relationships, of natural versus manufactured social ties, of intimate affect versus alliances of political convenience. Friendship in the Middle Ages often bore a much more utilitarian, political profile than it does in the modern imagination. Tensions such as these are the terrain that Jón Viðar Sigurðsson’s book provocatively navigates.

Viking Friendship offers a thorough, multifaceted survey of friendship in the Norse Middle Ages, making the rich Norse material accessible to scholars in other fields.”

—Oren Falk, Cornell University, author of The Bare-Sarked Warrior “Jón Viðar Sigurðsson is one of the foremost historians of the Middle Ages working in Scandinavia today. In Viking Friendship he demonstrates how the trope of friendship was developed within discourses of power relations and how chieftains, kings, and bishops were able to exploit friendship to extend their growing power.”

—Alex Woolf, University of St Andrews, author of From Pictland to Alba

$39.95 hardcover 978-1-5017-0577-9 200 pages, 2 tables, 6 x 9 U S E CO D E 0 9 M ED I E VA L TO S AV E 3 0 % O N YO U R O R D ER

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LITER ARY CRITICISM

The Transmission of “Beowulf” Language, Culture, and Scribal Behavior Leonard Neidorf

Beowulf, like The Iliad and The Odyssey, is a foundational work of Western literature that originated in mysterious circumstances.

In The Transmission of “Beowulf,” Leonard Neidorf adistinguishes linguistic and metrical regularities, which originate with the Beowulf poet, from patterns of textual corruption, which descend from copyists involved in the poem’s transmission. The Beowulf manuscript emerges from his study as an indispensible witness to processes of linguistic and cultural change that took place in England between the eighth and eleventh centuries. An appendix addresses J. R. R. Tolkien’s Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary, which was published in 2014. Neidorf assesses Tolkien’s general views on the transmission of Beowulf and evaluates his position on various textual issues.

Leonard Neidorf is Professor of English at Nanjing University and a former Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows.

He is the editor of The Dating of Beowulf and coeditor of Old English Philology.

MYTH AND POETICS II

$55.00 hardcover 978-1-5017-0511-3 232 pages, 6 x 9 16

C H A N G I N G T H E W O R L D O N E B O O K AT A T I M E

“A short review like this hardly does justice to the genius of this astonishing book.

The Transmission of Beowulf is a coup de théâtre, a scholarly manifesto of the utmost importance in its evidentiary rigor, theoretical utility, and vigorous prose. By any measure, it ranks as one of the most pivotal books ever written on Old English literature and will be recognized as a historic achievement.”—Anglia “For close engagement with the linguistic idiosyncrasies of Beowulf, one may turn to Leonard Neidorf’s recent study. Here formidable scholarship provides rich insights into the attitudes and methods of the scribes who made the only surviving copy of Beowulf. . . [t]he evidence that he puts forward in this book is both fascinating and highly persuasive, and the book is indispensable reading for anyone interested in the manuscript context of Beowulf, scribal culture in Anglo-Saxon England more generally, or the early history of the English language.”—Times Literary Supplement

H I S TO RY

Hell and Its Rivals Death and Retribution among Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the Early Middle Ages Alan E. Bernstein

The idea of punishment after death—whereby the souls of the wicked are consigned to Hell (Gehenna, Gehinnom, or Jahannam)—emerged out of beliefs found across the Mediterranean, from ancient Egypt to Zoroastrian Persia, and became fundamental to the Abrahamic religions. Once Hell achieved doctrinal expression in the New Testament, the Talmud, and the Qur’an, thinkers began to question Hell’s eternity, and to consider possible alternatives—hell’s rivals. Some imagined outright escape, others periodic but temporary relief within the torments. One option, including Purgatory and, in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, the Middle State, was to consider the punishments to be temporary and purifying. Despite these moral and theological hesitations, the idea of Hell has remained a historical and theological force until the present.

In Hell and Its Rivals, Alan E. Bernstein examines an array of sources from within and beyond the three Abrahamic faiths— including theology, chronicles, legal charters, edifying tales, and narratives of near-death experiences—to analyze the origins and evolution of belief in Hell. Key social institutions, including slavery, capital punishment, and monarchy, also affected the afterlife beliefs of Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Reflection on hell encouraged a stigmatization of “the other” that in turn emphasized the differences between these religions. Yet, despite these rivalries, each community proclaimed eternal punishment and answered related challenges to it in similar terms. For all that divided them, they agreed on the need for—and fact of—Hell.

Al an E. Bernstein is Emeritus Professor of Medieval History at the University of Arizona. He is the author of The Formation of Hell: Death and Retribution in the Ancient and Early Christian Worlds.

“Erudite and readable, Hell and Its Rivals is the crucial resource for those interested in the formation of the doctrine of Hell over late antiquity and the early medieval period. Alan E. Bernstein has a remarkable knowledge of the relevant textual history of the period and of the details of the texts with which he deals.”

—Philip C. Almond, University of Queensland, author of Afterlife: A History of Life after Death “With The Formation of Hell, Alan E. Bernstein established his reputation as a sophisticated historian of Hell. He is an authority I regularly turn to for questions about Hell, its sources, and its implications for society, piety, and culture. The appearance of Hell and Its Rivals, extending the time frame into the early and high Middle Ages, and encompassing Patristic, Byzantine, Rabbinic, and Islamic sources, is a welcome event.”

—Carol Zaleski, Smith College, author of Otherworld Journeys: Accounts of NearDeath Experience in Medieval and Modern Times

$45.00 hardcover 978-1-5017-0780-3 432 pages, 1 halftone, 3 tables, 6 x 9 U S E CO D E 0 9 M ED I E VA L TO S AV E 3 0 % O N YO U R O R D ER

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GENDER STUDIES

From She-Wolf to Martyr The Reign and Disputed Reputation of Johanna I of Naples Elizabeth Casteen

In 1343 a seventeen-year-old girl named Johanna (1326–1382) ascended the Neapolitan throne, becoming the ruling monarch of one of medieval Europe’s most important polities. For nearly forty years, she held her throne and the avid attention of her contemporaries. Their varied responses to her reign created a reputation that made Johanna the most notorious woman in Europe during her lifetime. In From She-Wolf to Martyr, Elizabeth Casteen examines Johanna’s evolving, problematic reputation and uses it as a lens through which to analyze often-contradictory late-medieval conceptions of rulership, authority, and femininity.

When Johanna inherited the Neapolitan throne from her grandfather, many questioned both her right to and her suitability for her throne. After the murder of her first husband, Johanna quickly became infamous as a she-wolf—a violent, predatory, sexually licentious woman. Yet, she also eventually gained fame as a wise, pious, and able queen. Contemporaries—including Francesco Petrarch, Giovanni Boccaccio, Birgitta of Sweden, and Catherine of Siena—were fascinated by Johanna. Drawing on a wide range of textual and visual sources, Casteen reconstructs the fourteenth-century conversation about Johanna and tracks the role she played in her time’s cultural imaginary. She argues that despite Johanna’s modern reputation for indolence and incompetence, she crafted a new model of female sovereignty that many of her contemporaries accepted and even lauded.

Elizabeth Casteen is Assistant Professor of History at Binghamton University–The State University of New York.

$39.95 hardcover 978-0-8014-5386-1 312 pages, 7 halftones, 2 genealogies, 2 maps, 6 x 9 18

C H A N G I N G T H E W O R L D O N E B O O K AT A T I M E

“Perhaps the book’s most valuable contribution is in its sensitive handling of medieval preconceptions about femininity, Johanna’s opponents made abundant use of negative tropes about women—their irrationality, their lust, their physical and moral weakness—to discredit her claim to authority. But Casteen also explores how Johanna and her partisans manipulated more positive constructions of femininity— such as piety, humility, and obedience—as a means to promote her power while seeming, rhetorically, to limit it..”—The Catholic Historical Review “Through a careful analysis of extensive archival, manuscript, and secondary sources, Casteen makes an intriguing contribution to recent scholarly discussions of medieval queenship, the creation of reputations, ‘cultural imaginary,’and the reliability of narrative sources. The author traces Johanna I of Naples’s shifting public image throughout her reign as she was lambasted by her enemies, marginalized by one husband, criticized by female saints, and lauded by her allies, an image always cast in gendered terms.”—Choice<

H I S TO RY

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RELIGION

Chariots of Ladies Francesc Eiximenis and the Court Culture of Medieval and Early Modern Iberia Núria Silleras-Fernández WINNER OF LA CORÓNICA BOOK AWARD, MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION DIVISION ON MEDIEVAL HISPANIC LANGUAGES, LITERATURES, AND CULTURES WINNER OF PREMIO DEL REY, AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION

In Chariots of Ladies, Núria Silleras-Fernández traces the development of devotion and female piety among the Iberian aristocracy from the late Middle Ages into the Golden Age, and from Catalonia to the rest of Iberia and Europe via the rise of the Franciscan Observant movement. A program of piety and morality devised by Francesc Eiximenis, a Franciscan theologian, royal counselor, and writer in Catalonia in the 1390s, came to characterize the feminine ideal in the highest circles of the Iberian aristocracy in the era of the Empire. As Eiximenis’s work was adapted and translated into Castilian over the century and a half that followed, it became a model of devotion and conduct for queens and princesses, including Isabel the Catholic and her descendants, who ruled over Portugal and the Spanish Empire of the Hapsburgs.

Silleras-Fernández uses archival documentation, letters, manuscripts, incunabula, and a wide range of published material to clarify how Eiximenis’s ideas on gender and devotion were read by Countess Sanxa Ximenis d’Arenós and Queen Maria de Luna of Aragon and how they were then changed by his adaptors and translators in Castile for new readers (including Isabel the Catholic and Juana the Mad), and in sixteenth-century Portugal for new patronesses (Juana’s daughter, Catalina of Habsburg, and Catalina’s daughter, Maria Manuela, first wife of Philip II). Chariots of Ladies casts light on a neglected dimension of encounter and exchange in Iberia from the late fourteenth to the mid-sixteenth centuries.

“Chariots of Ladies is a terrific and thoughtful book! Francesc Eiximenis was an important figure, and his works are a lens through which to explore questions of political administrative practices, female spirituality, and religious concerns. It is about time that he is given his due as one of the most prolific and insightful writers of the fourteenth century. Núria Silleras-Fernández restores Eiximenis to his rightful and well-deserved place in the world of late medieval ideas in the Iberian peninsula and beyond. She adroitly reconstructs the world in which he wrote, his connections with the royal house of the Crown of Aragon, and, through the adoption of his works long after his death, his impact on female rulers in Iberia.”—Teofilo F. Ruiz, UCLA, and author of A King Travels: Festive Traditions in Late Medieval and Early Modern Spain

Núria Silleras-Fernández is Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of Colorado–Boulder. She is the author of Power, Piety, and Patronage in Late Medieval Queenship: Maria de Luna and coeditor of In and Of the Mediterranean: Medieval and Early Modern Iberian Studies.

$49.95 hardcover 978-0-8014-5383-0 328 pages, 6 x 9, 6 halftones, 1 genealogical tree, 1 map U S E CO D E 0 9 M ED I E VA L TO S AV E 3 0 % O N YO U R O R D ER

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A RCH A EO LOGY

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A RT H I S TO RY

Sicily Culture and Conquest Dirk Booms and Peter Higgs

The largest island in the Mediterranean, Sicily has been continuously inhabited for millennia. Its strategic position and fertile soil, enriched by the fires of Mount Etna, made it alluring to successive waves of settlers and conquerors. Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, and Normans vied to stake their claim on the island. Periods of decline, exploitation, and neglect alternated with those of enlightenment and prosperity, during which the arts flourished.

This book, accompanying a major 2016 exhibition at the British Museum, offers a broad survey of the island’s geography and its rich mythological and historical past, while focusing on Sicily’s two most artistically innovative periods. Greeks began settling on the island in the late eighth century BCE, encountering Phoenicians and other peoples. The artistic achievements of this Classical golden age include some of the most awe-inspiring temples seen anywhere in the Greek Mediterranean. A second extraordinary period of enlightenment took place under Norman rule in the twelfth century AD, when Sicily became a power broker in the Mediterranean world and one of the wealthiest and most culturally prosperous places in Europe.

Richly illustrated with full-color images of more than two hundred remarkable objects drawn from the collection in the British Museum and from museums across Sicily and around the world, this book highlights the skills of artists and artisans, architects and builders—and the vision of their patrons across the centuries—who together produced some of the most unique and significant works of art in the history of the Mediterranean.

COPUBLISHED WITH THE BRITISH MUSEUM PRESS

$35.00 paperback 978-1-5017-0529-8 288 pages, more than 250 color illustrations, 15 maps and line figures, 9.5 x 10.6 PUSAC 20

C H A N G I N G T H E W O R L D O N E B O O K AT A T I M E

Dir k Bo oms is curator of Roman Mediterranean archaeology at the British Museum, specializing in architecture, sculpture, and inscriptions, and Norman Sicily. He is the author of Latin Inscriptions and coauthor and cocurator of Roman Empire.

Peter Higgs is a curator of ancient Greek sculpture and architecture at the British Museum. He has contributed to numerous publications and journals and is the coeditor of Cleopatra of Egypt.

LITER ARY CRITICISM

The Accommodated Jew English Antisemitism from Bede to Milton K athy Lavezzo

England during the Middle Ages was at the forefront of European antisemitism. It was in medieval Norwich that the notorious “blood libel” was first introduced when a resident accused the city’s Jewish leaders of abducting and ritually murdering a local boy. England also enforced legislation demanding that Jews wear a badge of infamy, and in 1290, it became the first European nation to expel forcibly all of its Jewish residents. In The Accommodated Jew, Kathy Lavezzo rethinks the complex and contradictory relation between England’s rejection of “the Jew” and the centrality of Jews to classic English literature. Drawing on literary, historical, and cartographic texts, she charts an entangled Jewish imaginative presence in English culture.

K athy L avezzo is Associate Professor of English at the University of Iowa. She is the author of Angels on the Edge of the World, also from Cornell, and editor of Imagining a Medieval English Nation.

“The Accommodated Jew is at its most brilliant in its careful juxtaposition of urban histories and cartographic evidence with literary texts, situating the place of ‘the Jew’ within both local and global topographies. This book is sure to be widely read by students, scholars, and general audiences for a long time to come.”

—Suzanne Conklin Akbari, University of Toronto, author of author of Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and the Orient “Filled with surprising historical revelations, fascinating accounts of geography and architecture, and insightful readings of a broad range of literary texts, The Accommodated Jew marks a crucial contribution to the ongoing puzzle of Jews in English literary history.”

—Jeffrey Shoulson, Doris and Simon Konover Chair of Judaic Studies, University of Connecticut

$65.00 hardcover 978-1-5017-0315-7 360 pages, 17 halftones, 7 maps, 6 x 9 U S E CO D E 0 9 M ED I E VA L TO S AV E 3 0 % O N YO U R O R D ER

“The Accommodated Jew will shift the way we consider the figure of the Jew in English literature. I find Kathy Lavezzo’s readings brilliant.”

—Lisa Lampert-Weissig, author of Gender and Jewish Difference from Paul to Shakespeare

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LITER ARY CRITICISM

Staging Harmony Music and Religious Change in Late Medieval and Early Modern English Drama K atherine Steele Brokaw

DAVID BEVINGTON AWARD FOR BEST NEW BOOK IN EARLY DRAMA STUDIES, MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE DRAMA SOCIETY

In Staging Harmony, Katherine Steele Brokaw reveals how the relationship between drama, music, and religious change across England’s long sixteenth century moved religious discourse to more moderate positions. It did so by reproducing the complex personal attachments, nostalgic overtones, and bodily effects that allow performed music to evoke the feeling, if not always the reality, of social harmony. By bringing medieval and early Tudor drama into conversation with Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, Brokaw uncovers connections and continuities across diverse dramatic forms and demonstrates the staying power of musical performance traditions. In analyzing musical practices and discourses, theological debates, devotional practices, and early staging conditions, Brokaw offers new readings of well-known plays (Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Shakespeare’s The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale) as well as Tudor dramas by playwrights including John Bale, Nicholas Udall, and William Wager.

K atherine Steele Brok aw is Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Merced.

$65.00 hardcover 978-1-5017-0314-0 296 pages, 6 x 9 22

C H A N G I N G T H E W O R L D O N E B O O K AT A T I M E

“Staging Harmony is a marvelously rich and suggestive work that brings a fresh perspective to the complex interactions of music, religion, and drama across the Reformation divide. There is much here to excite literary scholars, historians, musicologists, and anybody with an interest in theater. An outstanding achievement.”

—Christopher Marsh, author of Music and Society in Early Modern England “Staging Harmony is an important contribution to the field of sound studies and will interest readers from a range of fields, including drama criticism, performance studies, music history, and religious studies.”

—Gina Bloom, University of California, Davis “Katherine Steele Brokaw’s significant new book enlarges and enriches the burgeoning field of Tudor drama studies.

Especially attractive is Brokaw’s sense that, for all the ways that musical developments in drama influence and are influenced by divisions and disruptions in religious and popular culture, they serve a deeper interest that deserves increased critical attention, the staging of the possibility of social harmony.”

—Kent Cartwright, University of Maryland

RELIGION

PH ILI P C . ALMOND

Philip C. Almond is Emeritus Professor Philip of C. Religion Almond is Emeritus Professor of Religion in the University of Queensland. His previous booksof Queensland. His previous books in the University include The Witches of Warboys: An Extraordinary of of Warboys: An Extraordinary Story of include TheStory Witches Sorcery, Sadism and Satanic Possession (2008), FirstSatanic Possession (2008), England’s First Sorcery,England’s Sadism and Demonologist: Reginald Scot and ‘The Discoverie of Witchcraft’ Demonologist: Reginald Scot and ‘The Discoverie of Witchcraft’ (2011, paperback 2014), The Lancashire Witches: A Chronicle (2011, paperback 2014), The Lancashire Witches: A Chronicle of Sorcery and Death on Pendle Hill (2012), and The Devil: on A Pendle Hill (2012), and The Devil: of Sorcery and Death A Almond’s cultural history ‘Philip of the afterlifecultural is a fascinating andafterlife is a fascinating – and ‘Philip Almond’s history of– the New Biography (2014), all publishedNew

by I.B.Tauris.

Biography (2014), all published by I.B.Tauris. frequently disturbing – journey through the Western imagination: its

A History of Life after Death Philip C. Almond

frequently disturbing – journey through the Western imagination: its dreams, desires, fears and hopes.

Erudite, lucid,fears ranging the while from lucid, ranging the while from dreams, desires, and hopes.

Erudite, Plato to Madam Blavatsky andPlato fromtoDante’s Inferno, Madamportrayals Blavatskyofand from Dante’s portrayals of Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise to HalPurgatory Lindsey’sand apocalyptic the book Paradise scenarios, to Hal Lindsey’s apocalyptic scenarios, the book draws us into an exhilarating draws currentusofinto eschatologies and final things an exhilarating current of eschatologies and final things that challenge any secular ideology because of abiding relevance. that challenge anytheir secular ideology because of their abiding relevance.

Staring at death and finitude, Staring humankind aspires and tries to picture aspires to and tries to picture at death andtofinitude, humankind post-mortem conditions: a perennial occupation that cannot be erased. post-mortem conditions: a perennial occupation that cannot be erased.

It is who we are. In his engaging us a roadmap It isbook who Almond we are. Inoffers his engaging book Almond offers us a roadmap to self-understanding.’ to self-understanding.’

P H I L I P CP. HAILLM N .DA L M O N To I PO C D die, to sleep: perchanceT PH ILI P C . ALMOND

Afterlife

–GRAHAM WARD, Regius Professor of–GRAHAM Divinity, University Oxford WARD, of Regius Professor of Divinity, University of Oxford

‘Hilloresto des eatem. Nemposs equuntibus verorep erorepe ‘Hilloresto desapero eatem.et,Nemposs equuntibus apero et, verorep erorepe reperrum as et et utem alitae nobit volum num dolum reperrum as et et fugiatquiae et utem alitae nobit volum et fugiatquiae num dolum quates ad mos ea nam imagnisquates modicaborum tiaeprem ad mos earem namdolupta imagnis modicaborum rem dolupta tiaeprem accuptiatiae volectas doluptataaccuptiatiae ducium quevolectas inctur sed quae porem doluptata ducium que inctur sed quae porem aliquam ulparite cus quis et parchitas placicus volor laut.’non placi volor as endunt laut.’ aliquam non ulparite quisasetendunt parchitas –L.U. CIFER, Professor of Religion and Philosophy, Purgatory University –L.U. CIFER, Professor of Religion and Philosophy, Purgatory University

www.ibtauris.com

A H I S T O RY O F L I F E A F T E R D E AT H

www.ibtauris.com

A H I S T O RY O F L I F E A F T E R D E AT H

The end of life has never meant the extinction of hope. People have always yearned for, and often been terrified by, continuance beyond the horizon of mortality. Over many centuries various imaginative and sometimes macabre ideas have been devised to explain what happens to human beings after death. As Philip C. Almond reveals in his new history of the hereafter, whichever image or metaphor has been employed by visionaries, writers, philosophers, or theologians, it has tended to oscillate between two contrary poles: the resurrection of the body and the immortality of the soul. This pendulum movement of ideas and language reflects the contending influence of the Hebrew Bible and of ancient Greek thought and the encounters, skirmishes, and compromises between them.

Exploring this polarity, and boldly ranging across time and space, Almond takes his readers on a remarkable journey to worlds of both torment and delight. Including medieval fears for the fate of those consumed by cannibals, early modern ideas about the Last Day, and modern scientific explorations of the domains of the dead, this first full treatment of the afterlife in Western thought evokes many rich imaginings of Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, and Limbo.

$29.95 hardcover 978-1-5017-0489-5 288 pages, 40 halftones, 5.5 x 8.5 PUSAC U S E CO D E 0 9 M ED I E VA L TO S AV E 3 0 % O N YO U R O R D ER

The end of life has never meant the Th hope. People perpetually have yearn ho been terrified by, continuance beyon be mortality. Over many centuries a mo clu imaginative and sometime macabre im devised to explain what happens to de after death. But as Philip Almondaft r and zesty history of the hereafter,anw metaphor has been employed by visi me philosophers or theologians, it haspht between two contrary poles: the resu be body and the immortality of the so bo movement of ideas and language refl mo influence of the Hebrew Bible andino thought – and the often tense encou th and compromises between them. an

Exploring this polarity, and boldly Ex and space, the author takes his read an journey to worlds of both tormentjou a travels to the banks of the Styx, whe tra grizzled boatman ferries a departin gr river only if a gold obol is first place riv on the tongue of its corpse. He tran on legendary Isles of the Blessed, walks leg ground of the Elysian Fields and plu gr depths of Tartarus, primordial dun de The pitiable souls of the damnedTh ar soot-filled caverns of Lucifer evensoa to Paradise. Including medieval fear to those consumed by cannibals, early th about the Last Day and modern scie ab of the domains of the dead, this firs of of the afterlife in Western thought of imaginings of Heaven, Hell, Purgat im

A H I S T O AR YH IOSFT O L IRFYE O F L I F E A F T E R DAEFATTEHR D E A T H

Cover image: Detail from The Garden of Earthly Delights.

Cover image: Detail from The Garden of Earthly Delights.

Hieronymus Bosch Hieronymus Bosch

Philip C. Almond is Emeritus Professor of Religion at the University of Queensland. He is the author of many books, including The Devil, also from Cornell, The Lancashire Witches, and England’s First Demonologist.

for in that sleep of deathfo may come? m

“As is true of all his previous books, Philip C. Almond’s Afterlife is thoughtful, perceptive, inquiring, accurate, wide-ranging, clear, and engagingly written.”

—Jeffrey Burton Russell, author of A History of Heaven “Philip C. Almond’s new book is a welcome and readable reminder that belief in life after death is not one simple set of convictions but a range of hopes and conceptions, including both the sophisticated and the simple, engaging in diverse ways with diverse models of what human life essentially is.”

—Rowan Williams, Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, and former Archbishop of Canterbury “In Afterlife, Philip C. Almond takes the reader on a remarkable journey. As we progress through the centuries, wrestling with the conceptual problems of postmortem life—will our bodies as well as our souls enjoy paradise? what exactly is the soul? and what is the relation between time and eternity?—we marvel at the tenacity that has compelled human beings in all cultures to insist on this seemingly impossible idea.”

—Karen Armstrong, author of The Case for God

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H I S TO RY

Language of Power Feasting and Gift-Giving in Medieval Iceland and Its Sagas Viðar Pálsson

In Language of Power, Viðar Pálsson addresses pre-modern European power relationships that provide the context for narratives of feasts and exchanges of gifts so conspicuous in the Icelandic sagas. Viðar’s point of departure considers “comparative perspectives on rituals, the sociology of power, and pre-state political cultures in Europe,” focusing on medieval Europe and its political and cultural heritage from classical antiquity, before proceeding to a similar contemplation of sagas of kings of Norway and sagas of the Icelandic commonwealth. In writing for scholars of Icelandic sagas and for scholars of medieval European cultures of power, Viðar analyzes in depth the demonstrative character of friendship in this pre-modern world as it derives from classical manifestations of amicitia.

Viðar Pálsson (b. 1978), Assistant Professor of History at the University of Iceland, earned his PhD in 2010 from the University of California, Berkeley.

ISLANDICA

$65.00 hardcover 978-0-9359-9521-3 274 pages, 6 x 9 24

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LITER ARY CRITICISM

The Sagas of Norwegian Kings (1130–1265) An Introduction Theodore M. Andersson

In The Sagas of Norwegian Kings (1130–1265), Theodore M. Andersson offers an orientation to the category of Icelandic sagas known as “kings’ sagas,” a genre of Old Norse-Icelandic prose literature less known than the somewhat later sagas of early Icelanders and their extended families. The kings’-saga genre culminated in three compendia that appeared prior to 1250: the manuscripts Morkinskinna and Fagrskinna and the compilation of sagas known as Heimskringla. These remarkable sagas are among the most readable of European chronicles. Theodore M. Andersson’s book examines not only the evolution of the genre and its associated critical literature but also the genre’s points of interaction with Icelandic family sagas.

Theodore M. Andersson is Professor of Germanic Studies Emeritus at Indiana University. He is the author of several books, including The Sagas of Norwegian Kings (1130–1265), The Partisan Muse in the Early Icelandic Sagas (1200–1250), Early Epic Scenery: Homer, Virgil, and the Medieval Legacy and The Legend of Brynhild; translator of The Saga of Olaf Tryggvason; and cotranslator, with Kari Ellen Gade, of “Morkinskinna”: The Earliest Icelandic Chronicle of the Norwegian Kings (1030–1157), all from Cornell.

CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY | ISLANDICA

$65.00 hardcover 978-0-935995-20-6 214 pages, 6 x 9, 3 Illustrations, 3 maps U S E CO D E 0 9 M ED I E VA L TO S AV E 3 0 % O N YO U R O R D ER

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H I S TO RY

New Norse Studies Essays on the Literature and Culture of Medieval Scandinavia Edited by Jeffrey Turco

New Norse Studies, edited by Jeffrey Turco, gathers twelve original essays engaging aspects of Old Norse–Icelandic literature that continue to kindle the scholarly imagination in the twenty-first century. The assembled authors examine the arrière-scène of saga literature; the nexus of skaldic poetry and saga narrative; medieval and post-medieval gender roles; and other manifestations of language, time, and place as preserved in Old Norse–Icelandic texts. This volume will be welcomed not only by the specialist and by scholars in adjacent fields but also by avid general readers, drawn in ever-increasing numbers to the Icelandic sagas and their world.

Jeffrey Turco is Assistant Professor of German, Comparative Literature, Medieval & Renaissance Studies, and Religious Studies at Purdue University.

Contributors: Paul Acker, Saint Louis University; Guðrún Nordal, University of Iceland; Sarah Harlan-Haughey, Cornell University; Joseph Harris, Harvard University; Richard Harris, University of Saskatchewan; Thomas D. Hill, Cornell University; Shaun Hughes, Purdue University; Andy Orchard, University of Toronto; Russell Poole, University of Western Ontario; Torfi Tulinius, University of Iceland; Jeffrey Turco; Purdue University; Kirsten Wolf, University of Wisconsin–Madison

CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY | ISLANDICA

$29.95 paperback 978-0-935995-23-7 440 pages, 6 x 9 26

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H I S TO RY

The Talents of Jacopo da Varagine A Genoese Mind in Medieval Europe Steven A. Epstein

Jacopo da Varagine (c. 1228–1298) is remembered today primarily for his immensely popular work The Golden Legend, a massive collection of stories about the saints. Compiled over the years 1260–67, The Golden Legend quickly eclipsed earlier collections of saints’ lives. One indication of its popularity is the fact that so many manuscript copies of the work have survived—more than one thousand according to some estimates. Despite the enduring influence of The Golden Legend, Jacopo remains an elusive figure because he left behind so little information about himself. In The Talents of Jacopo da Varagine, Steven A. Epstein sets out to remedy this situation through a careful study of all Jacopo’s works, including many hundreds of sermons and his innovative chronicle of Genoese history.

In Epstein’s sure hands, Jacopo emerges as one of the most active and talented minds of his day. Indeed, Epstein argues that one needs to read all of Jacopo’s books, in a Genoese context, in order to understand the original scope of his thinking, which greatly influenced the ways generations of people across Europe experienced their Christianity. The rich sources for Jacopo’s sermons, saints’ lives, and history illuminate the traditions that inspired him and shaped his imaginative and artistic powers.

Jacopo was also one of the inventors of social history, and his writings reveal complex and new perspectives on family life as well as the histories of gay people, slaves, Jews, and the medieval economy. Filled with impressive insights into the intellectual life of the thirteenth century, The Talents of Jacopo da Varagine will be of interest to a wide range of medieval scholars and students of religious history, church history, and hagiography as well as intellectual history and Italian history.

Steven A. Epstein is Ahmanson-Murphy Distinguished Professor of Medieval History at the University of Kansas. He is the author of several books, including The Medieval Discovery of Nature and Speaking of Slavery.

$59.95 hardcover 978-1-5017-0050-7 312 pages, 6 x 9 U S E CO D E 0 9 M ED I E VA L TO S AV E 3 0 % O N YO U R O R D ER

“The Talents of Jacopo da Varagine offers a new way of looking at a particularly important medieval writer and, therefore, a new way of understanding his works.

Steven A. Epstein illuminates Jacopo’s contexts, such as Genoa at its height and the Dominican order as it had become established by the later thirteenth century.

This book will deepen scholarly use of Jacopo’s writings; there are no comparable books that consider Jacopo in his integrity as an author in this way.”

—Samantha Kahn Herrick, author of Imagining the Sacred Past: Hagiography and Power in Early Normandy “This is a work of outstanding scholarship.

It will constitute a significant contribution to our scholarship on Jacopo. One of the major strengths is its close readings of primary sources. I finished this book deeply impressed by the range of Jacopo’s contributions in a wide variety of genres. That an archbishop of a major port city was able to administer his archdiocese and complete so much brilliant work is remarkable. This book is distinguished by its interdisciplinarity, which should help it appeal to a wide variety of historians and scholars.”

—George Dameron, author of Florence and Its Church in the Age of Dante

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ENGL AND

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RELIGION

The Secret Within Hermits, Recluses, and Spiritual Outsiders in Medieval England Wolfgang Riehle tr ansl ated by Charit y Scot t-Stokes

Spiritual seekers throughout history have sought illumination through solitary contemplation. In the Christian tradition, medieval England stands out for its remarkable array of hermits, recluses, and spiritual outsiders—from Cuthbert, Godric of Fichale, and Christina of Markyate to Richard Rolle, Julian of Norwich, and Margery Kempe. In The Secret Within, Wolfgang Riehle offers the first comprehensive history of English medieval mysticism in decades—one that will appeal to anyone fascinated by mysticism as a phenomenon of religious life.

In considering the origins and evolution of the English mystical tradition, Riehle begins in the twelfth century with the revival of eremitical mysticism and the early growth of the Cistercian Order in the British Isles. He then focuses in depth on the great mystics of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—Richard Rolle (the first great English mystic), the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, Walter Hilton, Margery Kempe, and Julian of Norwich.

Riehle carefully grounds his narrative in the broader spiritual landscape of the Middle Ages, pointing out both prior influences dating back to Late Antiquity and corresponding developments in mysticism and theology on the Continent. He discusses the problem of possible differences between male and female spirituality and the movement of popularizing mysticism in the late Middle Ages. Filled with fresh insights, The Secret Within will be welcomed especially by teachers and students of medieval literature as well as by those engaged in historical, theological, philosophical, cultural, even anthropological and comparative studies of mysticism.

Wolfgang Riehle is Professor Emeritus of English at the Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz and a Corresponding Member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. He is the author of many books, including The Middle English Mystics and Shakespeare, Plautus, and the Humanist Tradition.

$29.95 paperback 978-1-5017-2516-6 448 pages, 6 x 9, 16 b&w halftones 28

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“The Secret Within furthers our understanding of English medieval mysticism with an unusual brand of intellectual honesty: that of the scholar who reads widely and deeply into medieval devotional texts and does not allow himself to be influenced by contemporary theorizations of the religious experience, gender and the medieval circulation of ideas. Riehle’s pays justice to the wealth of meanings in individual authors while tracing patterns of change and continuitiy in English music literature.”

—Comitatus “This book is the fruit of decades of immersion inthe corpus of mystical and affective writing based on the experience of solitude. As a result, . . . his detailed, subtle and dense readings serve to remind us how rich these texts are and how fully they repay constant study.”

—Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies

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EUROPE

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S L AV E R Y

Speaking of Slavery Color, Ethnicity, and Human Bondage in Italy Steven A. Epstein

In this highly original work, Steven A. Epstein shows that the ways Italians employ words and think about race and labor are profoundly affected by the language used in medieval Italy to sustain a system of slavery. The author's findings about the surprising persistence of the "language of slavery" demonstrate the difficulty of escaping the legacy of a shameful past.

For Epstein, language is crucial to understanding slavery, for it preserves the hidden conditions of that institution. He begins his book by discussing the words used to conduct and describe slavery in Italy, from pertinent definitions given in early dictionaries, to the naming of slaves by their masters, to the ways in which bondage has been depicted by Italian writers from Dante to Primo Levi and Antonio Gramsci. Epstein then probes Italian legal history, tracing the evolution of contracts for buying, selling, renting, and freeing people. Next, he considers the behaviors of slaves and slave owners as a means of exploring how concepts of liberty and morality changed over time. He concludes by analyzing the language of the market, where medieval Italians used words to fix the prices of people they bought and sold.

Steven A. Epstein is Professor of History at the University of Colorado. He is the coeditor of Portraits of Medieval and Renaissance Living and author of Wills and Wealth in Medieval Genoa, Wage Labor and Guilds in Medieval Europe, and Genoa and the Genoese, 958-1528.

“This monograph presents a case for a historical memory of slavery that colors modern discourse in Italy and carries important implications for perceptions of race and ethnicity.”

—Journal of Interdisciplinary History “Speaking of Slavery argues that Italian words specifically, and Italy’s spoken culture generally, supported the owning and exploiting of humans, thus mainstreaming ideas about cultural superiority and inferiority that are still evident in Italian nomenclature today. . . . Epstein’s study is successful on two fronts. First, he successfully challenges the alienation of discussions of New World slavery to the American context; moreover, he demonstrates that the attitudes of explorers like Christopher Columbus cannot be separated from preexisting slave traditions and language traditions.”

—Sixteenth Century Journal

CONJUNCTIONS OF RELIGION AND POWER IN THE MEDIEVAL PAST

$25.00 paperback 978-1-5017-2512-8 240 pages, 6 x 9, 1 color plate U S E CO D E 0 9 M ED I E VA L TO S AV E 3 0 % O N YO U R O R D ER

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RELIGION

Before the Gregorian Reform The Latin Church at the Turn of the First Millennium John Howe

WINNER, HELEN AND HOWARD R. MARRARO PRIZE, AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION

Historians typically single out the hundred-year period from about 1050 to 1150 as the pivotal moment in the history of the Latin Church, when the Gregorian Reform movement established the ecclesiastical structure that would ensure Rome’s dominance throughout the Middle Ages and beyond. In Before the Gregorian Reform John Howe challenges this familiar narrative by examining earlier, “pre-Gregorian” reform efforts within the Church. He finds that they were more extensive and widespread than previously thought and that they actually established a foundation for the subsequent Gregorian Reform movement.

The low point in the history of Christendom came in the late ninth and early tenth centuries—a period when much of Europe was overwhelmed by barbarian raids and widespread civil disorder, which left the Church in a state of disarray. As Howe shows, however, the destruction gave rise to creativity. Aristocrats and churchmen rebuilt churches and constructed new ones, competing against each other so that church building, like castle building, acquired its own momentum. Patrons strove to improve ecclesiastical furnishings, liturgy, and spirituality. Schools were constructed to staff the new churches. The result was that by the mid-eleventh century a wealthy, unified, better-organized, better-educated, more spiritually sensitive Latin Church was assuming a leading place in the broader Christian world.

Before the Gregorian Reform challenges us to rethink the history of the Church and its place in the broader narrative of European history. Compellingly written and generously illustrated, it is a book for all medievalists as well as general readers interested in the Middle Ages and Church history.

John Howe is Professor of History at Texas Tech University.

He is the author of Church Reform and Social Change in Eleventh-Century Central Italy: Dominic of Sora and His Patrons and coeditor of Inventing Medieval Landscapes: Senses of Place in Western Europe.

$29.95 paperback 978-1-5017-3268-3 368 pages, 6 x 9, 44 halftones, 1 table, 2 maps 30

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“A comprehensive and accessible survey of two hundred years of church history....

A richly textured and arresting image of a world rooted in its Carolingian past yet foundational to the expansionist and ecumenical church of the later Middle Ages....

Indispensible to any medieval history syllabus.”

—H-Soz-Kult “Before the Gregorian Reform is wide-ranging, thoughtful, and thought-provoking, written in a clear and indeed engaging way: I have found this book very stimulating, and have learned a great deal.”

—G. A. Loud, author of The Latin Church in Norman Italy “In this deeply learned and handsomely illuminated book, John Howe boldly reinserts the role played by church reform into the story of the formation of Europe during the fraught centuries around the millennium. Before the Gregorian Reform is a mature work of scholarship written by a leading scholar of church history at the top of his craft.”

—Hans J. Hummer, author of Politics and Power in Early Medieval Europe

H I S TO RY • EU R O P E

Fearful Spirits, Reasoned Follies The Boundaries of Superstition in Late Medieval Europe Michael D. Bailey

In Fearful Spirits, Reasoned Follies, Michael D. Bailey explores the thorny concept of superstition as it was understood and debated in the Middle Ages. By revealing the extent to which premodern thinkers took up old questions about the operation of natural properties and forces using the vocabulary of science in addition to belief, Bailey exposes the powerful but in many ways false dichotomy between the “superstitious” Middle Ages and “rational” European modernity.

Michael D. Bailey is Professor of History at Iowa State University. He is the author of Battling Demons, Historical Dictionary of Witchcraft, and Magic and Superstition in Europe.

“Fearful Spirits, Reasoned Follies is a groundbreaking work, suitable for graduate seminars and advanced undergraduate courses on premodern magic and witchcraft. It exemplifies why Bailey is one of the best scholars writing about the Middle Ages today.”

—Catholic Historical Review “Bailey clearly explains the importance of superstition among the elite and in common practice during the late Middle Ages and explains how authorities sought to create a coherent theory of superstition to better control society. Highly recommended.”

—Choice

$29.95 paperback 978-1-5017-1473-3 312 pages, 2 tables, 6.125 x 9.25 U S E CO D E 0 9 M ED I E VA L TO S AV E 3 0 % O N YO U R O R D ER

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H I S TO R Y • R E L I G I O N

Monastic Reform as Process Realities and Representations in Medieval Flanders, 900–1100 Steven Vanderput ten

In Monastic Reform as Process, Steven Vanderputten puts the history of monastic reform to the test by examining the evidence from seven monasteries in Flanders, one of the wealthiest principalities of northwestern Europe, between 900 and 1100.

Monastic Reform as Process is essential reading for scholars and their students working on the history of monasteries as well as the phenomenon of reform throughout history.

Steven Vanderput ten is Professor of Medieval History at Ghent University. He is the editor of Imagining Religious Leadership in the Middle Ages, also from Cornell, and Understanding Monastic Practices of Oral Communication and coeditor of Ecclesia in medio nationis.

“This book will be invaluable for anyone working on the period and for historians of the twelfth century who want to avoid being blinded by the flashpoints described in reforming narratives.”

—Speculum “This is an important book. I hope Vanderputten’s study finds readership not only among those interested in Flanders or monasticism in the central Middle Ages or even ecclesiastical reform more generally.

For this is a book about how institutions change, the opportunities available to those who want to change them, and the limits they face in the attempt. It is history as process.”

—The Medieval Review

$24.95 paperback 978-1- 20175017-1065-0 264 pages, 9 halftones, 2 maps, 1 table, 6.125 x 9.25 32

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H I S TO RY • R EL I G I O N

Afterlives The Return of the Dead in the Middle Ages Nancy Mandeville Caciola

Simultaneously real and unreal, the dead are people, yet they are not. In Afterlives, Nancy Mandeville Caciola explores the extraordinary phenomenon of the living’s relationship with the dead in Europe during the five hundred years after the year 1000.

Caciola considers both Christian and pagan beliefs, showing how certain traditions survived and evolved over time, and how attitudes both diverged and overlapped through different contexts and social strata.

Nancy Mandeville Caciol a is Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego. She is the author of Discerning Spirits, also from Cornell.

“Afterlives is an enlivening read for anyone tickled by ghost stories or the recurrent need to represent the social unconscious; its occasional repetitions notwithstanding, it delivers on the author’s promise to “chart . . . a history of the unknown: of pure, unslaked curiosity,” a quest as true of its illumination of medieval afterlives as it is of resourcing the medieval period itself.”— MAKE Literary Magazine “Afterlives is a very large and ambitious work, based on a remarkable range of sources, and it grips the reader. It is multifaceted, fun, and nuanced at the same time. I couldn’t put it down.”

—Chris Wickham, author of The Inheritance of Rome “The dead walk again in this important scholarly study of medieval attitudes toward reanimation and life after death.

Nancy Mandeville Caciola reveals that early Westerners shared our modern fascination with the afterlife. Afterlives is a greatly original and thorough book.”

—Mitch Horowitz, author of Occult America

$24.95 paperback 978-1-5017-1069-8 384 pages, 23 halftones, 6.125 x 9.25 U S E CO D E 0 9 M ED I E VA L TO S AV E 3 0 % O N YO U R O R D ER

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To Follow in Their Footsteps The Crusades and Family Memory in the High Middle Ages Nicholas L. Paul

COWINNER, JOHN NICHOLAS BROWN PRIZE, MEDIEVAL ACADEMY OF AMERICA In To Follow in Their Footsteps, Nicholas Paul shows how traditions of crusading were established and reinforced in the collective memories of noble families throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Filled with unique insights and careful analysis, To Follow in Their Footsteps reveals the lasting impact of the crusades, beyond the expeditions themselves, on the formation of dynastic identity and the culture of the medieval European nobility.

Nicholas L . Paul is Associate Professor of History at Fordham University. He is coeditor of Remembering the Crusades.

“To Follow in Their Footsteps is a stimulating contribution to each of the two subjects it covers. Its publication should mark a new phase in critical discussion about how the crusades were interpreted in the middle ages.”—The English Historical Review< “[Paul] weaves a history of the texts produced about crusader families into an analytic framework that draws on the insights of anthropology, literary theory, and sociology. To Follow in Their Footstep marks a critical moment in the creation of a new cultural history of crusading.”—Speculum “A prominent example from Medieval Europe of how past generations were invoked to mold the actions of their successors is supplied by the crusades. As Nicholas L. Paul puts it in this lively new account, ‘crusading was always a family matter.’ And by family he means the dead as well as the quick. Paul provides a splendidly informative, illuminating, and often entertaining description and analysis of what, how, and where ancestral voices could have been heard by putative crusaders in the twelfth century.”—Times Literary Supplement

$29.95 paperback 978-1-5017-1064-3 368 pages, 5 halftones, 3 maps, 1 table, 6.125 x 9.25 34

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H I S TO RY • L AW

The Criminalization of Abortion in the West Its Origins in Medieval Law Wolfgang P. Müller

Anyone who wants to understand how abortion has been treated historically in the western legal tradition must first come to terms with two quite different but interrelated historical trajectories. On one hand, there is the ancient Judeo-Christian condemnation of prenatal homicide as a wrong warranting retribution; on the other, there is the juristic definition of “crime” in the modern sense of the word, which distinguished the term sharply from “sin” and “tort” and was tied to the rise of Western jurisprudence. To find the act of abortion first identified as a crime in the West, one has to go back to the twelfth century, to the schools of ecclesiastical and Roman law in medieval Europe.

In this book, Wolfgang P. Müller tells the story of how abortion came to be criminalized in the West. As he shows, criminalization as a distinct phenomenon and abortion as a self-standing criminal category developed in tandem with each other, first being formulated coherently in the twelfth century at schools of law and theology in Bologna and Paris. Over the ensuing centuries, medieval prosecutors struggled to widen the range of criminal cases involving women accused of ending their unwanted pregnancies. In the process, punishment for abortion went from the realm of carefully crafted rhetoric by ecclesiastical authorities to eventual implementation in practice by clerical and lay judges across Latin Christendom. Informed by legal history, moral theology, literature, and the history of medicine, The Criminalization of Abortion in the West is written with the concerns of modern readers in mind, thus bridging the gap that might otherwise divide modern and medieval sensibilities.

Wolfgang P. Müller is Professor of History at Fordham University. He is the author of Huguccio: The Life, Works, and Thought of a Twelfth-Century Jurist and coeditor of Medieval Church Law and the Origins of the Western Legal Tradition.

“This is an important book, which will interest historians across the sub-disciplinary spectrum and not only late medievalists.

It provides a stimulating account of the theoretical and practical development of medieval criminal justice and will become a sine qua non in the history of abortion.”

—The Mediaeval Journal “The Criminalization of Abortion in the West should be regarded as essential reading for those studying the interface between law and medicine in medieval Europe, to legal historians and social historians.”

—Social History of Medicine “The Criminalization of Abortion in the West is the definitive book on the subject of the history of the criminalization of abortion in the Western world and also a brilliant account of the history of the invention of criminalization itself—that is, early criminal law—in the Western legal tradition.”

—Edward Peters, author of Inquisition

$24.95 paperback 978-1-5017-1365-1 280 pages, 6.1 x 9.3 U S E CO D E 0 9 M ED I E VA L TO S AV E 3 0 % O N YO U R O R D ER

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IDOLS IN THE EAST European Representations of Islam and the Orient, 1100–1450 Suzanne Conklin Akbari $28.95 paperback

“EVERY VALLEY SHALL BE EXALTED” The Discourse of Opposites in Twelfth-Century Thought Constance Brittain Bouchard $24.95 paperback

THE DEVIL A New Biography Philip C. Almond $29.95 hardcover

SWORD, MITER, AND CLOISTER Nobility and the Church in Burgundy, 980–1198 Constance Brittain Bouchard $39.95 paperback

KNOWING POETRY Verse in Medieval France from the “Rose” to the “Rhétoriqueurs” Adrian Armstrong & Sarah Kay $55.00 hardcover EATING BEAUTY The Eucharist and the Spiritual Arts of the Middle Ages Ann W. Astell $29.95 paperback

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THE PARTISAN MUSE IN THE EARLY ICELANDIC SAGAS (1200–1250) Theodore M.Andersson $65.00 hardcover DISCERNING SPIRITS Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages Nancy Mandeville Caciola $24.95 paperback | Conjunctions of Religion and Power in the Medieval Past

The Sanctity of Louis IX early lives of saint louis by geoffrey of beaulieu and william of chartres

m Translated by Larry F. Field

Edited and Introduced by M. Cecilia Gaposchkin and Sean L. Field

THE GOOD WIFE’S GUIDE

Le Ménagier de Paris A Medieval

Household Book Translated by Gina L. Greco & Christine M. Rose

THE TEMPLARS, THE WITCH, AND THE WILD IRISH Vengeance and Heresy in Medieval Ireland Maeve Brigid Callan $29.95 paperback

WOMEN AND ARISTOCRATIC CULTURE IN THE CAROLINGIAN WORLD Valerie L. Garver $29.95 paperback

THE SERF, THE KNIGHT, AND THE HISTORIAN Dominique Barthélemy Translated by Graham Robert Edwards $33.95 paperback

THE GOOD WIFE’S GUIDE (LE MÉNAGIER DE PARIS) A Medieval Household Book Edited and translated by Gina L. Greco, Christine M. Rose $24.95 paperback

INTRODUCTION TO MANUSCRIPT STUDIES Raymond Clemens & Timothy Graham $39.95 paperback

SACRED FOLLY A New History of the Feast of Fools Max Harris $29.95 paperback

THE SANCTITY OF LOUIS IX Early Lives of Saint Louis by Geoffrey of Beaulieu and William of Chartres Translated by Larry F. Field Edited by M. Cecilia Gaposchkin & Sean L. Field $18.95 paperback

WINNER, OTTO GRÜNDLER BOOK PRIZE, MEDIEVAL INSTITUTE; DAVID BEVINGTON AWARD, MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE DRAMA SOCIETY

THE DIVORCE OF LOTHAR II Christian Marriage and Political Power in the Carolingian World Karl Heidecker Translated by Tanis M. Guest $54.95 hardcover | Conjunctions of Religion and Power in the Medieval Past

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OPENING UP MIDDLE ENGLISH MANUSCRIPTS Literary and Visual Approaches Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Maidie Hilmo & Linda Olson $45.00 paperback

CREATING CISTERCIAN NUNS The Women’s Religious Movement and Its Reform in Thirteenth-Century Champagne Anne E. Lester $29.95 paperback

2013 CHOICE MAGAZINE “OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC TITLE”

WINNER, 2012 BEST FIRST BOOK OF FEMINIST SCHOLARSHIP ON THE MIDDLE AGES, SOCIETY FOR MEDIEVAL FEMINIST SCHOLARSHIP

MERLIN Knowledge and Power through the Ages Stephen Knight $21.00 paperback 2010 CHOICE MAGAZINE “OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC TITLE”

EMPEROR OF THE WORLD Charlemagne and the Construction of Imperial Authority, 800–1229 Anne A. Latowsky $49.95 hardcover WINNER, BEST FIRST BOOK AWARD, SOUTHEASTERN MEDIEVAL ASSOCIATION

THE POWERS OF PROPHECY The Cedar of Lebanon Vision from the Mongol Onslaught to the Dawn of the Enlightenment Robert E. Lerner $29.95 paperback

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OUT OF LOVE FOR MY KIN Aristocratic Family Life in the Lands of the Loire, 1000–1200 Amy Livingstone $27.95 paperback PRINCELY BROTHERS AND SISTERS The Sibling Bond in German Politics, 1100– 1250 Jonathan R. Lyon $66.95 hardcover CO-WINNER, JOHN NICHOLAS BROWN PRIZE, MEDIEVAL ACADEMY OF AMERICA

FRIENDSHIP AND COMMUNITY The Monastic Experience, 350–1250 Brian Patrick McGuire $37.95 paperback

THE SLEEP OF BEHEMOTH Disputing Peace and Violence in Medieval Europe, 1000–1200 Jehangir Yezdi Malegam $57.95 hardcover CLOTHING THE CLERGY Virtue and Power in Medieval Europe, c.

800–1200 Maureen C. Miller $39.95 paperback WINNER, JOHN GILMARY SHEA PRIZE, AMERICAN CATHOLIC HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION; WINNER, OTTO GRÜNDLER BOOK PRIZE, MEDIEVAL INSTITUTE AT WESTERN MICHIGAN UNIVERSITY

WALKING CORPSES Leprosy in Byzantium and the Medieval West Timothy S. Miller & John W. Nesbitt $35.00 hardcover HEROIC SAGAS AND BALLADS Stephen A. Mitchell $24.95 paperback | Myth and Poetics

Children’s Poetry from the Middle Ages Nicholas Orme $17.95 paperback CERTAIN SAINTHOOD Canonization and the Origins of Papal Infallibility in the Medieval Church Donald S. Prudlo $49.95 hardcover THE CARE OF THE DEAD IN LATE ANTIQUITY Éric Rebillard Translated by Elizabeth Trapnell Rawlings & Jeanine Routier-pucci $24.95 paperback | Cornell Studies in Classical Philology 2010 CHOICE MAGAZINE “OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC TITLE”

CHRISTIANS AND THEIR MANY IDENTITIES IN LATE ANTIQUITY, NORTH AFRICA, 200-450 CE Éric Rebillard $22.95 paperback

FLEAS, FLIES, AND FRIARS

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HOLY MATTER Changing Perceptions of the Material World in Late Medieval Christianity Sara Ritchey $55.00 hardcover EMOTIONAL COMMUNITIES IN THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES Barbara H. Rosenwein $23.95 paperback HERESY AND THE POLITICS OF COMMUNITY The Jews of the Fatimid Caliphate Marina Rustow $45.00 paperback| Conjunctions of Religion and Power in the Medieval Past WINNER, SALO W. BARON PRIZE, AMERICAN ACADEMY FOR JEWISH RESEARCH; WINNER, JORDAN SCHNITZER BOOK AWARD, ASSOCIATION FOR JEWISH STUDIES

A KINGDOM OF STARGAZERS Astrology and Authority in the Late Medieval Crown of Aragon Michael A. Ryan $27.95 paperback

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DEFINING BOUNDARIES IN AL-ANDALUS Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Islamic Iberia Janina M. Safran $27.95 paperback WINNER, PREMIO DEL REY, AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION

SHAKESPEARE’S MEDIEVAL CRAFT Remnants of the Mysteries on the London Stage Kurt A. Schreyer $49.95 hardcover THE POOR AND THE PERFECT The Rise of Learning in the Franciscan Order, 1209–1310 Neslihan Senocak $59.95 hardcover THE ENIGMA OF EGILL The Saga, the Viking Poet, and Snorri Sturluson Torfi H. Tulinius Translated by Victoria Cribb $65.00 hardcover

THE SAINT AND THE CHOPPED-UP BABY The Cult of Vincent Ferrer in Medieval and Early Modern Europe Laura Ackerman Smoller $45.00 hardcover WINNER, LA CORÓNICA BOOK AWARD, MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION

FEELING LIKE SAINTS Lollard Writings after Wyclif Fiona Somerset $65.00 hardcover WINNER, MARGARET WADE LABARGE PRIZE, CANADIAN SOCIETY OF MEDIEVALISTS

STAG OF LOVE The Chase in Medieval Literature Marcelle Thiébaux $27.95 paperback FRANCIS OF ASSISI A New Biography Augustine Thompson, O.P. $29.95 hardcover

FRANCIS OF ASSISI The Life Augustine Thompson, O.P. $14.95 paperback IMAGINING RELIGIOUS LEADERSHIP IN THE MIDDLE AGES Richard of Saint-Vanne and the Politics of Reform Steven Vanderputten $49.95 hardcover ANGLO-SAXON ART Leslie Webster $29.95 paperback NAM VIKINGS Life and Legend Edited by Gareth Williams, Peter Pentz & Matthias Wemhoff Foreword by Queen Margrethe of Denmark $35.00 paperback

WINNER, ENNIO FLAIANO PRIZE IN ITALIAN STUDIES, DIRECTORS OF ITALIAN CULTURAL INSTITUTES; HONORABLE MENTION, PROSE AWARD, BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY, ASSOCIATION OF AMERICAN PUBLISHERS

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CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

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MANUSCRIPT SUBMISSONS

MAHINDER KINGRA, Editor-in-chief, msk55@cornell.edu Medieval Studies, Literary Studies, Classics, Film & Media Studies BETHANY WASIK, Assistant editor, bw446@cornell.edu Archaeology

EXAM COPY REQUESTS

Instructors are encouraged to request copies of Cornell University Press titles for possible course use.

If you would like free digital access to any of the books featured in this catalog please contact Carmen Torrado Gonzalez at cat223@cornell.edu To obtain a print examination copy, send your request to Cornell University Press, c/o Longleaf Services Inc., 116 South Boundary St., Chapel Hill, NC 27514-3808 or email customerservice@longleafservices.org. Include: • Name, address, phone number, and email address • Course for which the book is being considered • Whether the course is undergraduate or graduate level • Projected enrollment • Semester the course will be taught • Indicate if text will be recommended or required Paperbacks are available for a $7.50 shipping and handling fee per book (limit 3 titles per request). Please enclose a check or money order with your request. If faxing your request, please include credit card information (account name and number, expiration date, and billing address if different from shipping address). Requests received without payment will not be processed.