Bücher der Reihe Fordham Series in Medieval Studies

Medievalists have long considered topics of cultural contact such as antagonism or exchange between western Europe and the Islamic world and the west's debts to Byzantium. This text aims to pose new questions, exploring how the meeting of cultures promotes historical change.

Medievalists have long considered topics of cultural contact such as antagonism or exchange between western Europe and the Islamic world and the west's debts to Byzantium. This text aims to pose new questions, exploring how the meeting of cultures promotes historical change.

The twenty-five original essays in this remarkable book constitute both a state of the art survey of Dante scholarship and a manifesto for new understandings of one of the world's great poets.

The twenty-five original essays in this remarkable book constitute both a state of the art survey of Dante scholarship and a manifesto for new understandings of one of the world's great poets.

Ecstasy in the Classroom analyzes the early thirteenth century theological discourse about Paul's rapture and other modes of cognizing God. It reconstructs the perceptions of transformation and self they imply, and demonstrate their role in establishing the peculiar professional identity of scholastic theologians compared with other seers of God.

Whose Middle Ages? is an interdisciplinary collection of short, accessible essays intended for the nonspecialist reader and ideal for teaching at an undergraduate level. Each of twenty-two essays takes up an area where digging for meaning in the medieval past has brought something distorted back into the present: in our popular entertainment; in our news, our politics, and our propaganda; and in subtler ways that inform how we think about our histories, our countries, and ourselves. Each author looks to a history that has refused to remain past and uses the tools of the academy to read and re-read familiar stories, objects, symbols, and myths.Whose Middle Ages? gives nonspecialists access to the richness of our historical knowledge while debunking damaging misconceptions about the medieval past. Myths about the medieval period are especially beloved among the globally resurgent far right, from crusading emblems on the shields borne by alt-right demonstrators to the on-screen image of a purely white European populace defended from actors of color by Internet trolls. This collection attacks these myths directly by insisting that readers encounter the relics of the Middle Ages on their own terms.Each essay uses its author's academic research as a point of entry and takes care to explain how the author knows what she or he knows and what kinds of tools, bodies of evidence, and theoretical lenses allow scholars to write with certainty about elements of the past to a level of detail that might seem unattainable. By demystifying the methods of scholarly inquiry, Whose Middle Ages? serves as an antidote not only to the far right's errors of fact and interpretation but also to its assault on scholarship and expertise as valid means for the acquisition of knowledge.