Sheds new light on how masculinity was understood, lived, performed and viewed during a period of huge change.

Uncovers the female voices, lived experiences, and spiritual insights encoded by the imagery of textiles in the Middle Ages.

Essays on women and devotional literature in the Middle Ages in commemoration and celebration of the respected feminist scholar Catherine Innes-Parker.

Initiates a wider development of inquiries into women's literary cultures to move the reader beyond single geographical, linguistic, cultural and period boundaries.

A lively exploration of the medieval and early modern attitudes towards dance, as the perception of dancers changed from saints dancing after Christ into cows dancing after the devil.

First comprehensive investigation of the major significance of female sinners turned saints in medieval literature.

An examination of female same-sex desire in Chaucer and medieval romance.

Groundbreaking new approach to the idea of treason in medieval England, showing the profound effect played by gender.

Ground-breaking interdisciplinary approach to the medieval manor pre- and post-Conquest.

An exploration of the influence of gender on the workings of memory in the Middle Ages.

Amid saints and sinners, open secrets and queer codes, the mechanisms of confession and the infliction of torture, what is unspeakable in the Middle Ages - and who decides? Aspiring to the ineffable glories of heaven or plunging down to the murky depths of "unmentionable sin", this very functional concept becomes attached to the very good and the very bad in medieval literature and culture. This book investigates the concept and use of the trope of unspeakability from pre-Conquest to late medieval literature in England, and the relationship between that which cannot be said and cultural and social understandings of gender and sexuality. The question of how the unspeakable returns to the realm of discourse drives the exploration of texts, including the Exeter Book, Old English hagiography, Ancrene Wisse, Old French romance, Gower's Confessio Amantis and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Legend of Good Women. Theorising the work this concept performs, asking who the unspeakable works for and who it works on, this study takes in the compulsive confessions of penitent whores and anchorites, the tales of could-be sodomites and crypto-lesbians, the howls of wolf-men (and wolf-women), and the rebellion and rhetoric of the tongueless. These texts show how in representations of gender and sexuality in medieval literature, the unspeakable challenges the voiceless to overcome silence, showing the limits of language, the workings of power and the desire to be heard. Victoria Blud gained her PhD from King's College London and is currently a Research Associate at the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of York.

An exploration of the relations between medical and religious discourse and practice in medieval culture, focussing on how they are affected by gender.

A consideration of the ways in which the past was framed and remembered in the pre-modern world.

The complex relationship between masculinity and religion, as experienced in both the secular and ecclesiastical worlds, forms the focus for this volume, whose range encompasses the rabbis of the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmud, and moves via Carolingian and Norman France, Siena, Antioch, and high and late medieval England to the eve of the Reformation. Chapters investigate the creation and reconstitution of different expressions of masculine identity, from the clerical enthusiasts for marriage to the lay practitioners of chastity, from crusading bishops to holy kings. They also consider the extent to which lay and clerical understandings of masculinity existed in an unstable dialectical relationship, at times sharing similar features, at others pointedly different, co-opting and rejecting features of the other; the articles show this interplay to be more far more complicated than a simple linear narrative of either increasing divergence, or of clerical colonization of lay masculinity. They also challenge conventional historiographies of the adoption of clerical celibacy, of the decline of monasticism and the gendered nature of piety. Patricia Cullum is Head of History at the University of Huddersfield; Katherine J. Lewis is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Huddersfield. Contributors: James G. Clark, P.H. Cullum, Kirsten A. Fenton, Joanna Huntington, Katherine J. Lewis, Matthew Mesley, Catherine Sanok, Michael L. Satlow, Rachel Stone, Jennifer D. Thibodeaux, Marita von Weissenberg

There has been a tendency in scholarship on premodern women and the law to see married women as hidden from view, obscured by their husbands in legal records. This volume provides a corrective view, arguing that the extent to which the legal principle of 'coverture' applied has been over-emphasized. In particular, it points up differences between the English common law position, which gave husbands guardianship over their wives and their wives' property, and the position elsewhere in northwest Europe, where wives' property became part of a community of property. Detailed studies of legal material from medieval and early modern England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Ghent, Sweden, Norway and Germany enable a better sense of how, when, and where the legal principle of 'coverture' was applied and what effect this had on the lives of married women. Key threads running through the book are married women's rights regarding the possession of moveable and immovable property, marital property at the dissolution of marriage, married women's capacity to act as agents of their husbands and households in transacting business, and married women's interactions with the courts. Cordelia Beattie is Senior Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Edinburgh; Matthew Frank Stevens is Lecturer in Medieval History at Swansea University. Contributors: Lars Ivar Hansen, Shennan Hutton, Lizabeth Johnson, Gillian Kenny, Mia Korpiola, Miriam Muller, S. C. Ogilvie, Alexandra Shepard, Cathryn Spence.

New research into medieval women from the Anglo-Saxon to the late medieval period demonstrates their energy, defiance and wit.

A gendered reading of monster and the monstrous body in medieval literature.

First full-length study of the relations between gender and crime in late medieval England.