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      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        January 2013

        Women of the English Nobility and Gentry, 1066-1500

        by Jennifer Ward

        While there is increasing interest in the lives of medieval women, the documentary evidence for their activities remains little known. This book provides a collection of sources for an important and influential group of women in medieval England, and examines changes in their role and activities between 1066 and 1500. For most noble and gentry-women, early marriage led to responsibilities for family and household, and, in the absence of their husbands, for the family estates and retainers. Widowhood enabled them to take control of their affairs and to play an independent part in the local community and sometimes further afield. Although many women's lives followed a conventional pattern, great variety existed within family relationships, and individuality can also be seen in religious practices and patronage. Piety could take a number of different forms, whether a woman became a nun, a vowess or a noted philanthropist and benefactor to religious institutions. This volume provides a broad-ranging and accessible coverage of the role of noble women in medieval society. It highlights the significant role played by these women within their families, households, estates and communities.

      • Trusted Partner
        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.

      • Trusted Partner
        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.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        July 1997

        Picturing women in late medieval and renaissance art

        by Christa Grossinger

        This extensively illustrated book discusses the representation of women in the art of the late Middle Ages in Northern Europe. Drawing on a wide range of different media, but making particular use of the rich plethora of woodcuts, the author charts how the images of women changed during the period and proposes two basic categories - the Virgin and Eve, good and evil. Within these, however, we discover attitudes to sinful, foolish, married and unmarried women and the style and use of these images exposes the full extent of the misogyny entrenched in medieval society. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Medieval history
        March 2003

        Medieval maidens

        Young women and gender in England, 1270–1540

        by Kim M. Phillips

        The first study on medieval women to treat young women or 'maidens' separately and at length. The book makes a contribution to gender studies through its study of medieval girls' acquisition of appropriate roles and identities, and their own attitudes towards these roles. Examines the experiences and voices of young womanhood. Provides insights into ideals of feminine gender roles and identities at different social levels.

      • Trusted Partner
        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.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        April 2024

        Women in exile in early modern Europe and the Americas

        by Linda Levy Peck, Adrianna E. Bakos

        Exile, its pain and possibility, is the starting point of this book. Women's experience of exile was often different from that of men, yet it has not received the important attention it deserves. Women in exile in early modern Europe and the Americas addresses that lacuna through a wide-ranging geographical, chronological, social and cultural approach. Whether powerful, well-to-do or impoverished, exiled by force or choice, every woman faced the question of how to reconstruct her life in a new place. These essays focus on women's agency despite the pressures created by political, economic and social dislocation. Collectively, they demonstrate how these women from different countries, continents and status groups not only survived but also in many cases thrived. This analysis of early modern women's experiences not only provides a new vantage point from which to enrich the study of exile but also contributes important new scholarship to the history of women.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        June 2021

        Emotional monasticism

        Affective piety in the eleventh-century monastery of John of Fécamp

        by Lauren Mancia

        Medievalists have long taught that highly emotional Christian devotion, often called 'affective piety', appeared in Europe after the twelfth century and was primarily practiced by communities of mendicants, lay people and women. Emotional monasticism challenges this view. The first study of affective piety in an eleventh-century monastic context, it traces the early history of affective devotion through the life and works of the earliest known writer of emotional prayers, John of Fécamp, abbot of the Norman monastery of Fécamp from 1028-78. Exposing the early medieval monastic roots of later medieval affective piety, the book casts a new light on the devotional life of monks in Europe before the twelfth century and redefines how medievalists should teach the history of Christianity.

      • Trusted Partner
        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.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        November 2021

        Practising shame

        Female honour in later medieval England

        by Mary C. Flannery, Anke Bernau, David Matthews

        Practicing shame investigates how the literature of medieval England encouraged women to safeguard their honour by cultivating hypervigilance against the possibility of sexual shame. A combination of inward reflection and outward comportment, this practice of 'shamefastness' was believed to reinforce women's chastity of mind and body, and to communicate that chastity to others by means of conventional gestures. The book uncovers the paradoxes and complications that emerged from these emotional practices, as well as the ways in which they were satirised and reappropriated by male authors. Working at the intersection of literary studies, gender studies and the history of emotions, it transforms our understanding of the ethical construction of femininity in the past and provides a new framework for thinking about honourable womanhood now and in the years to come.

      • Trusted Partner
        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.

      • Trusted Partner
        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.

      • Trusted Partner
        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.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        April 2024

        Graveyard Gothic

        by Eric Parisot, David McAllister, Xavier Aldana Reyes

        Graveyard Gothic is the first sustained consideration of the graveyard as a key Gothic locale. This volume examines various iterations of the Gothic graveyard (and other burial sites) from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first, as expressed in numerous forms of culture and media including poetry, fiction, TV, film and video games. The volume also extends its geographic scope beyond British traditions to accommodate multiple cultural perspectives, including those from the US, Mexico, Japan, Australia, India and Eastern Europe. The seventeen chapters from key international Gothic scholars engage a range of theoretical frameworks, including the historical, material, colonial, political and religious. With a critical introduction offering a platform for further scholarship and a coda mapping potential future critical and cultural developments, Graveyard Gothic is a landmark volume defining a new area of Gothic studies.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        November 1999

        Plays on women

        Anon, Arden of Faver

        by David Bevington, Kathleen McLuskie

        Based on the original and authoritative Revels texts, Plays on women brings together four plays which dramatise the lives of women in Shakespeare's England The only available anthology focusing on women and including the four plays most often discussed. . . . ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        February 1994

        Italian women writing

        by Sharon Wood

        How has it happened that from being politely ignored or marginalized just half a century ago, women writers in Italy are now at the centre of literary activity? To what extent does writing by women reflect the successes and failures of Italy in the post-war period? What form did the feminist movement in Italy take, and how did this affect what - and how - women wrote? And how are women who write responding to a more fragmented post-modern age? These are just some of the questions asked of the relationship between women and fiction in post-war Italy in this anthology. It includes stories by Cialente, Ginzburg, Ortese, Morante, Romano, Maraini and Duranti as well as Bompiani, Sanvitale, Mizzau, Scaramuzzino, Capriolo and Petrignani. The thirteen stories presented offer a range of style and content indicative of the wealth and diversity of writing by women, and their reading is supported by critical notes and an extensive vocabulary. This is a clear and challenging introduction to the rich field of women and fiction in Italy. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        January 2024

        Gothic dreams and nightmares

        by Carol Davison

        Gothic dreams and nightmares is an edited collection on the compelling yet under-theorised subject of Gothic dreams and nightmares ranging across more than two centuries of literature, the visual arts, and twentieth- and twenty-first century visual media. Written by an international group of experts, including leading and lesser-known scholars, it considers its subject in various national, cultural, and socio-historical contexts, engaging with questions of philosophy, morality, rationality, consciousness, and creativity.

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