Presents an edition of Shakespeare's tragedy, including discussion of its production, language, plot, and author

Product Description: The Great Schism (1378-1417) divided Western Christendom into two groups: those who recognized a pope in Rome and those who recognized one in Avignon. It was a crisis of authority that brought with it spiritual anxiety and political uproar...read more

Product Description: Alison Beach's book on female scribes in twelfth-century Bavaria is based on the belief that the scriptorium was vital to the intellectual revival of the Middle Ages and that women played a role in this renaissance. Beach's focus on manuscript production at three rather different religious houses, and the religious, intellectual, social and economic factors which influenced that production, enables her to draw wide-ranging conclusions of interest to palaeographers as well as others interested in religious and gender history...read more

Product Description: While there has been a great tradition of scholarship in medieval manuscripts, most studies have focused on the details of manuscript production by male copyists. In this study, Cynthia J. Cyrus demonstrates the prevalence of manuscript production by women monastics and challenges current assumptions of how manuscripts circulated in the late medieval period...read more

Visions of the Crusades call up images of knights, soldiers, and priests. However, evidence suggests that many women played an active role in the actions and culture of the Crusades. Gendering the Crusades stands as the first substantial exploration of this comparatively neglected topic. Offering interdisciplinary readings of new and old sources that examine masculinity, gender roles, and historical narratives, these essays show the key roles played by women in the military, politics, and family life. From the Knights Templars' devotion to female saints to Anna Comnena's account of the first Crusade, all of the topics covered in the book look at the way society structures and imagines itself.

In the ninth century, a brilliant young woman named Joan disguised herself as a man so that she could follow her lover into the then-exclusively male world of scholarship. She proved so successful that she ascended the Catholic hierarchy in Rome and was eventually elected pope. Her pontificate lasted two years, until she became pregnant and died after giving birth during a public procession from the Vatican.Or so the legend goes—a legend that was fabricated sometime in the thirteenth century, according to Alain Boureau, and which has persisted in one form or another down to the present day. In this fascinating saga of belief and rhetoric, politics and religion, Boureau investigates the historical and ecclesiastical circumstances under which the myth of Pope Joan was constructed and the different uses to which it was put over the centuries. He shows, for instance, how Catholic clerics justified the exclusion of women from the papacy and the priesthood by employing the myth in misogynist moral tales, only to find the popess they had created turned against them in anti-Catholic propaganda during the Reformation. (view table of contents)

In this remarkable study of over 2,200 female and male saints, Jane Schulenburg explores women's status and experience in early medieval society and in the Church by examining factors such as family wealth and power, patronage, monasticism, virginity, and motherhood. The result is a unique depiction of the lives of these strong, creative, independent-minded women who achieved a visibility in their society that led to recognition of sanctity."A tremendous piece of scholarship. . . . This journey through more than 2,000 saints is anything but dull. Along the way, Schulenburg informs our ideas regarding the role of saints in the medieval psyche, gender-specific identification, and the heroics of virginity." —Library Journal"[This book] will be a kind of 'roots' experience for some readers. They will hear the voices, haunted and haunting, of their distant ancestors and understand more about themselves." —Christian Science Monitor"This fascinating book reaches far beyond the history of Christianity to recreate the 'herstory' of a whole gender." —Kate Saunders, The Independent (view table of contents)

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