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        The Arts
        June 2021

        Medieval film

        by Anke Bernau, Bettina Bildhauer

        Medieval film explores theoretical questions about the ideological, artistic, emotional and financial investments inhering in cinematic renditions of the medieval period. What does it mean to create and watch a 'medieval film'? What is a medieval film and why are they successful? This is the first work that attempts to answer these questions, drawing, for instance, on film theory, postcolonial theory, cultural studies and the growing body of work on medievalism. Contributors investigate British, German, Italian, Australian, French, Swedish and American film, exploring topics such translation, temporality, film noir, framing and period film - and find the medieval lurking in inexpected corners. In addition it provides in-depth studies of individual films from different countries including The Birth of a Nation to Nosferatu, and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. Medieval Film will be of interest to medievalists working in disciplines including literature, history, to scholars working on film and in cultural studies. It will also be of interest to undergraduates, postgraduates and to an informed enthusiast in film or/and medieval culture.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        January 2019

        Medieval film

        by Anke Bernau, Bettina Bildhauer

        Medieval film explores theoretical questions about the ideological, artistic, emotional and financial investments inhering in cinematic renditions of the medieval period. What does it mean to create and watch a 'medieval film'? What is a medieval film and why are they successful? This is the first work that attempts to answer these questions, drawing, for instance, on film theory, postcolonial theory, cultural studies and the growing body of work on medievalism. Contributors investigate British, German, Italian, Australian, French, Swedish and American film, exploring topics such translation, temporality, film noir, framing and period film - and find the medieval lurking in unexpected corners. In addition it provides in-depth studies of individual films from different countries including The Birth of a Nation to Nosferatu, and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. Medieval film will be of interest to medievalists working in disciplines including literature, history, art history, to scholars working on film and in cultural studies. It will also be of interest to undergraduates, postgraduates and to an informed enthusiast in film or/and medieval culture.

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        Literature & Literary Studies
        May 2024

        Medieval afterlives

        Transforming traditions in Shakespeare and early English drama

        by Daisy Black, Katharine Goodland

        A collection of essays which show how early drama traditions were transformed, recycled, re-used and reformed across time to form new relationships with their audiences. Medieval afterlives brings new insight to the ways in which peoples in the sixteenth century understood, manipulated and responded to the history of their performance spaces, stage technologies, characterisation and popular dramatic tropes. In doing so, this volume advocates for a new understanding of sixteenth-seventeenth century theatre makers as highly aware of the medieval traditions that formed their performance practices, and audiences who recognised and appreciated the recycling of these practices between plays.

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        Humanities & Social Sciences
        May 2023

        Medieval women and urban justice

        Commerce, crime and community in England, 1300–1500

        by Teresa Phipps

        This book provides a detailed analysis of women's involvement in litigation and other legal actions within their local communities in late-medieval England. It draws upon the rich records of three English towns - Nottingham, Chester and Winchester - and their courts to bring to life the experiences of hundreds of women within the systems of local justice. Through comparison of the records of three towns, and of women's roles in different types of legal action, the book reveals the complex ways in which individual women's legal status could vary according to their marital status, different types of plea and the town that they lived in. At this lowest level of medieval law, women's status was malleable, making each woman's experience of justice unique.

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        Humanities & Social Sciences
        October 2023

        The illusion of the Burgundian state

        by Élodie Lecuppre-Desjardin, Christopher Fletcher

        On 25 January 1474, Charles the Bold, duke of Burgundy, appeared before his subjects in Dijon. Robed in silk, gold and precious jewels and wearing a headpiece that gave the illusion of a crown, he made a speech in which he cryptically expressed his desire to become a king. Three years later, Charles was killed at the battle of Nancy, an event that plunged the Great Principality of Burgundy into chaos. This book, innovative and essential, not only explores Burgundian history and historiography but offers a complete synthesis about the nature of politics in this region, considered both from the north and the south. Focusing on political ideologies, a number of important issues are raised relating to the medieval state, the signification of the nation under the 'Ancien Regime', the role of warfare in the creation of political power and the impact of political loyalties in the exercise of government. In doing so, the book challenges a number of existing ideas about the Burgundian state.

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        Humanities & Social Sciences
        November 2025

        Serfdom in medieval England

        Theory and practice 1200 to 1500

        by Mark Bailey

        Serfdom was a coercive relationship between a landowner and peasant, which was widespread across medieval and early modern Europe. Itfeatures prominently in major historical debates, such as the origins of capitalism and the divergent pathways of western and eastern Europe to modernity. Scholars have paid particular attention to English serfdom, which is usually portrayed as highly oppressive and a major cause of the Peasants' Revolt in 1381. This comprehensive survey draws on a vast scholarship and new research to show how, in reality, English serfdom was weak, casting new light on the nature of its society and economy when the Black Death struck in 1348-9. The pandemicnow assumesa central role in the rapid decline of serfdom, as illustrated in a case study of the estate of one of England's harshest landowners, St Albans abbey.

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        Literature & Literary Studies
        January 2023

        The gift of narrative in medieval England

        by Nicholas Perkins

        This invigorating study places medieval romance narrative in dialogue with theories and practices of gift and exchange, opening new approaches to questions of storytelling, agency, gender and materiality in some of the most engaging literature from the Middle Ages. It argues that the dynamics of the gift are powerfully at work in romances: through exchanges of objects and people; repeated patterns of love, loyalty and revenge; promises made or broken; and the complex effects that time works on such objects, exchanges and promises. Ranging from the twelfth century to the fifteenth, and including close discussions of poetry by Chaucer, the Gawain-Poet and romances in the Auchinleck Manuscript, this book will prompt new ideas and debate amongst students and scholars of medieval literature, as well as anyone curious about the pleasures that romance narratives bring.

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        Humanities & Social Sciences
        March 2020

        Medieval women and urban justice

        by Teresa Phipps, Cordelia Beattie

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        Literature & Literary Studies
        January 2013

        Popular protest in late-medieval Europe

        Italy, France and Flanders

        by Samuel Kline Cohn

        The documents in this stimulating volume span from 1245 to 1424 but focus on the 'contagion of rebellion' from 1355 to 1382 that followed in the wake of the plague. They comprise a diversity of sources and cover a variety of forms of popular protest in different social, political and economic settings. Their authors range across a wide political and intellectual horizon and include revolutionaries, the artistocracy, merchants and representatives from the church. They tell gripping and often gruesome stories of personal and collective violence, anguish, anger, terror, bravery, and foolishness. Of over 200 documents presented here, most have been translated into English for the first time, providing students and scholars with a new opportunity to compare social movements across Europe over two centuries, allowing a re-evaluation of pre-industrial revolts, the Black Death and its consequences for political culture and action. This book will be essential reading for those seeking to better understand popular attitudes and protest in medieval Europe.

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        The Arts
        June 2017

        Gothic television

        by Helen Wheatley

        Gothic television is the first full length study of the Gothic released on British and US television. An historical account, the book combines detailed archival research with analyses of key programmes, from Mystery and Imagination and Dark Shadows, to The Woman in White and Twin Peaks, and uncovers an aspect of television drama history which has, until now, remained critically unexplored. While some have seen television as too literal or homely a medium to successfully present Gothic fictions, Gothic television argues that the genre, in its many guises, is, and has always been, well-suited to television as a domestic medium, given the genre's obsessions with haunted houses and troubled families. This book will be of interest to lecturers and students across a number of disciplines including television studies, Gothic studies, and adaptation studies, as well as to the general reader with an interest in the Gothic, and in the history of television drama.

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        Literature & Literary Studies
        July 2022

        Nordic Gothic

        by Maria Holmgren Troy, Johan Hõglund, Yvonne Leffler, Sofia Wijkmark

        Nordic Gothic traces Gothic fiction in the Nordic region from its beginnings in the nineteenth century, with a main focus on the development of Gothic from the 1990s onwards in literature, film, TV and new media. The volume gives an overview of Nordic Gothic fiction in relation to transnational developments and provides a number of case studies and in-depth analyses of individual narratives. It creates an understanding of this under-researched cultural phenomenon by showing how the narratives make visible cultural anxieties haunting the Nordic countries, their welfare systems, identities and ideologies. Nordic Gothic examines how figures from Nordic folklore function as metaphorical expressions of Gothic themes and Nordic settings are explored from perspectives such as ecocriticism and postcolonialism. The book will be of interest to researchers and post- and- undergraduate students in various fields within the Humanities.

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        Literature & Literary Studies
        December 2025

        The Gothic in times of crisis

        by John Whatley

        The Gothic in times of crisis reflects contemporary society, showing how the Gothic modes continually resets its own forms to encompass each new reality, each new apocalypse, each new plague or crisis. This collection expands oncurrent scholarship to show how the Gothic challenges our understanding of both older and recent crises and, in turn, disturbs all genre complacencies to expose and confront the problems and contradictions in what our world has been, has become, or is in danger of becoming. This collection explores Gothic's current relevance to the contestations of ideas and the underlying and visible conflicts it dramatizes across a wide range of media. In various ways, it reveals what happens to Gothic modes now they confront the increasingly Gothic realities of our times, sometimesby recalling earlier crises and ideological contestations leading up to them.

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        Humanities & Social Sciences
        March 2025

        Emotional contagion

        The Aristotelian compassio in medieval medicine and philosophy

        by Béatrice Delaurenti, Graham Robert Edwards

        Yawning makes one yawn, crying makes one cry. In the same way, a shiver, appetite, sexual desire and confidence are transmitted from one person to another. These examples capture the contagion-like dimension of emotion, spreading rapidly among people with tangible behavioural manifestations. Emotional contagion still challenges scientific explanation, and philosophical, scientific and anthropological topics converge around this issue. In Medieval Latin, there is a specific name for this contagion: compassio ('compassion'). Etymologically, 'compassion' means the co-experience of a 'passion', involving an involuntary reaction of the soul or the body imitating the reactions of others. The book investigates how these topics were treated in medieval learned texts, and illuminates the twofold enigma, that of the trajectory of the term compassio, and that of explaining the phenomenon it denoted.

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        Literature & Literary Studies
        May 2026

        Women’s Agency and the Gothic in Spain and the Americas

        by Megan DeVirgilis, Sandra García Gutiérrez

        This volume has emerged to fulfill two main purposes: Primarily, to constitute the first collaborative work that traces the relationship between the Gothic and Women in Spain and the Americas, but also, to surpass the term 'Female Gothic,' coined by Ellen Moers, by transferring the focus towards women and their agency as writers, readers and characters. This volume functions as a manifesto per se to open new avenues into understanding how women have interacted with the Gothic between the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries in Spain and the Americas. The question, we determine, is not simply about identity, but rather about agency. We define women's agency as the total capacity of characters, authors and readers to act freely within a social framework in relation to gothic texts. In our exploration of authorship, we reject the claim that the Gothic is a simplistic literary genre, instead sustaining that the plasticity of the Gothic has enabled it to survive for centuries; by shifting from a genre to a mode, it has surpassed literary forms and invaded all kinds of media: from film to music and merchandise such as clothing and pop culture collectables, fostering an authentic goth fandom.

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        Literature & Literary Studies
        September 2025

        Ghosts and the Gothic

        by Ruth Heholt, Joanne Ella Parsons

        Ghosts have long been connected with the Gothic, but until now there has not been a book dedicated to the subject. This collection examines ghostly presences (and absences) in both classic and lesser-known Gothic texts from the beginning of the genre to the present in a global context. Arguing that the undead, in the form of ghosts, are intrinsic to the Gothic mode, essays in the collection question the place of manifested spirits. The Gothic has always been 'political', and essays in this collection examine some of the most relevant issues facing us today: from the destruction of the natural environment, to questions of 'freedom', to gender politics.

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