The Medieval Python

The cult of the Christ Child flourished in late medieval Europe across lay and religious, as well as geographic and cultural boundaries. Depictions of Christ's boyhood are found throughout popular cul

This book explores how medieval and modern Muslim religious scholars ('ulamā') interpret gender roles in Qur'ānic verses on legal testimony, marriage, and human creation. Citing these verses, medieval scholars developed increasingly complex laws and interpretations upholding a male-dominated gender hierarchy; aspects of their interpretations influence religious norms and state laws in Muslim-majority countries today, yet other aspects have been discarded entirely. Karen Bauer traces the evolution of their interpretations, showing how they have been adopted, adapted, rejected, or replaced over time, by comparing the Qur'ān with a wide range of Qur'ānic commentaries and interviews with prominent religious scholars from Iran and Syria. At times, tradition is modified in unexpected ways: learned women argue against gender equality, or Grand Ayatollahs reject sayings of the Prophet, citing science instead. This innovative and engaging study highlights the effects of social and intellectual

Nicholas of Cusa (1401 64), doctor of canon law, church politician and philosopher, was one of the most important thinkers of 15th century Europe. This year marks the sixth centenary of his birth. Sch

This book examines the sustained interest in legends of the pagan and peripheral North, tracing and analyzing the use of an ‘out-of-Scandinavia’ legend (Scandinavia as an ancestral homeland) in a wide

Fruits of the most recent research on the worlds of the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

This book is the first detailed study of the Cross of Cong, one of Ireland's great national treasures. Made to enshrine a relic of Christ's 'True Cross' in the early 12th century under the patronage o

At their most basic level, liturgical vestments and textiles differentiate the sacred and the profane, the clergy and the laity. Not only are they sacred objects in their own right, being consecrated

Outlines the complex significance of bodies in the late Medieval central Arab Islamic lands. Did you know that blue eyes, baldness, bad breath and boils were all considered bodily 'blights' by Medieva

Of the twenty-five essays in this volume, most were published between 1961 and 2013, but four are printed here for the first time. They represent the work of a great and original scholar in Mediterran

An illustrated collection of plants that could have been grown in a Medieval Herb or Physic Garden in the British Isles. The major focus of this work is England and Scotland, but also touches on Irela

In the last two decades, research on spatial paradigms and practices has gained momentum across disciplines and vastly different periods, including the field of medieval studies. Responding to this a€

Conflicting Identities and Multiple Masculinities takes as its focus the construction of masculinity in Western Europe from the early Middle Ages until the fifteenth century, crossing from pre-Christi

Political Power in Medieval Gwynedd investigates the governance exercised by the princes of Gwynedd on that independent kingdom that existed until the thirteenth century in what is now northwest Wales

The most up-to-date research in the period from the Anglo-Saxons to Angevins.

Addressing the history of the production and reception of the great medieval poem, Piers Plowman, Lawrence Warner reveals the many ways in which scholars, editors and critics over the centuries created their own speculative narratives about the poem, which gradually came to be regarded as factually true. Warner begins by considering the possibility that Langland wrote a romance about a werewolf and bear-suited lovers, and he goes on to explore the methods of the poem's localization, and medieval readers' particular interest in its Latinity. Warner shows that the 'Protestant Piers' was a reaction against the poem's oral mode of transmission, reveals the extensive eighteenth-century textual scholarship on the poem and contextualizes its first modernization. This lively account of Piers Plowman challenges the way the poem has traditionally been read and understood. This title is available as Open Access on Cambridge Books Online and via Knowledge Unlatched.

This book is about a sacred place called Balkh, known to the ancient Greeks as Bactra. Located in the north of today's Afghanistan, along the silk road, Balkh was holy to many. The Prophet Zoroaster i

“A remarkably well-informed and truly innovative study of the way Boccaccio reimagined and rewrote Old French fabliaux in his Decameron.”—Francois Rigolot, Princeton University “Theoretically savvy, a

The book presents a ground-breaking view of the navigational landscape of the Nile in medieval Egypt by drawing on a broad range of sources: medieval Arabic geographies; traveler accounts; archaeology

In 1334, an Italian priest named Opicinus de Canistris fell ill and had a divine vision of continents and oceans transformed into human figures which inspired numerous drawings. While they relate clos

In 1966 Mark Gambier Parry bequeathed to the Courtauld Gallery the art collection formed by his grandfather Thomas Gambier Parry, who died in 1888. In addition to important paintings, Renaissance glas

Few philosophical books have been so influential in the development of Western thought as Aristotle’s Metaphysics. In fourteen substantial essays this volume reconstructs the late medieval reception o

In Flesh Made Word, Emily A. Holmes displays how medieval feminist theologians undermined traditional theology through the incarnational practice of theological writing. Holmes draws inspiration for f

In the Medieval Period the English Channel was an especially perilous stretch of water. It had two distinct (and often conflicting) functions. It was a rich commercial seaway, on which the rising econ

One of the significant developments in scholarship in the latter half of the twentieth century was the awareness among historians of ideas, historians of theology, and medievalists of the importance o

Fruits of the most recent research on the worlds of the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

The St. Albans Psalter is one of the most important, famous, and puzzling books produced in twelfth-century England. It was probably created between 1120 and 1140 at St. Albans Abbey, located on the s

The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe provides a comprehensive overview of the gender rules encountered in Europe in the period between approximately 500 and 1500 C.E. The essays

Demonstrating that similarities between Jewish and Christian art in the Middle Ages were more than coincidental, Cultural Exchange meticulously combines a wide range of sources to show how Jews and Ch

This book is the first full-length study of the royal manors of Crumlin, Esker, Saggart, and Newcastle Lyons (all in south Co. Dublin) in the period 1170 to 1400. Following the conquest of Ireland in

Six hundred years ago, the Czech priest Jan Hus (1371-1415) traveled out of Bohemia, never to return. After a five-year legal ordeal that took place in Prague, in the papal curia, and finally in south

This collection of essays by seven scholars is a straightforward narrative of real world—intellectual, commercial, spiritual, philosophical, scientific, aesthetic—creative engagement among Jews, Musli

This unique examination of medieval medicine as detailed in physician's manuals of the period reveals a more sophisticated approach to the medical arts than expected for the time.

This study examines environmental disasters in the Levant. The data is drawn from contemporary sources. The main aim is to determine the long and short-term repercussions of environmental disasters on

A rare combination of personal and academic, this book showcases the myriad avenues for transcending the boundaries of reality through direct sensory experience.

The question and procedures of integrating children into wider society during the medieval and early modern period are debated across a wide range of contemporary texts, in both print and manuscript f

Selove provides a humorous selection of anecdotes from al-Baghdadi’s The Art of Party-Crashing, a book about enjoying food, flirtation and everyday life in Medieval Iraq. The passages are full of riba

Based on new readings of some of the least-read texts by some of the best-known scribes of later medieval England, Scribal Authorship and the Writing of History in Medieval England reconceptualizes me

In the present collection of articles by Malcolm Parkes two overarching concerns emerge: the palaeography of manuscript books in relation to what Parkes has previously called the 'grammar of legibilit

Between 1066 and their expulsion in 1290, Jews held a key but precarious niche in medieval Britain. Although scholarship on Anglo-Jewish communities has been under-represented compared to that on othe