Ruth Evans

Sarah Salih

Anke Bernau

The variety of subjects and disciplines represented here testify both to the elusiveness of virginity and to its lasting appeal and importance. Medieval Virginities shows how virginity's inherent ambiguity highlights the problems, contradictions and discontinuities lurking within medieval ideologies.

Medieval Virginities

Sam Riches

This collection brings together two flourishing areas of medieval scholarship: gender and religion. It examines gender-specific religious practices and contends that the pursuit of holiness can destabilise binary gender itself. Though saints may be classified as masculine or feminine, holiness may also cut across gender divisions and demand a break from normally gendered behaviour. This work of interdisciplinary cultural history includes contributions from historians, art historians and literary critics and will be of interest not only to medievalists, but also to students of religion and gender in any period.

Men, Women and Saints in Late Medieval Europe

Gender and Holiness

Karl Fugelso

Joshua Davies

Essays examining the complex intertwining and effect of medievalism on modernity - and vice versa.

Medievalism and Modernity

Medieval virginity theory explored through study of martyrs, nuns and Margery Kempe.

Versions of Virginity in Late Medieval England

Julian Weiss

An examination of the ideas of space and place as manifested in medieval texts, art, and architecture.

The Spaces and Places of Medieval Culture

Locating the Middle Ages

Late medieval English culture was fascinated by the figure of the pagan, the ancestor whose religious difference must be negotiated, and by the pagan's idol, an animate artefact. In romances, histories and hagiographies medieval Christians told the story of the pagans, focussing on the absence or presence of pagan material culture in the medieval world to ask whether the pagan era had completely ended or whether it might persist into the Christian present. This book reads the imagined history of the long term relationship between pagan and Christian through quasi-factual fifteenth-century Middle English writings. John Lydgate's Troy Book describes the foundation of a Troy that is at once London's ancestor and a vision for its future; he, John Capgrave and Reginald Pecock consider how pagans were able to build idols that attracted spirits to inhabit them. The hagiographies of Osbern Bokenham, Alexander Barclay, Capgrave and Lydgate describe the confrontation of saint and idol, and the saint's appropriation for Christians of the city the pagans built. Traces of the pagan appeared in the medieval present: Capgrave, Lydgate and John Metham contemplated both extant and lost artefacts; Lollards and orthodox writers disputed whether Christian devotional practice had pagan aspects; and Mandeville's Travels sympathetically imagined how pagans might explain themselves. Dr SARAH SALIH is Senior Lecturer in Medieval English, King's College London.

Sarah Salih

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