Bücher der Reihe Fordham Series in Medieval Studies

Clearly written, this incisive critical study opens a new analytic window not only to the rhetoric of medieval Italian poetry but also to a richer understanding of one of the most important strands of medieval European culture.

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.

Rashi's commentary and the Glossa Ordinaria both developed in the late eleventh and early twelfth century with no known contact between them. Nevertheless, they shared a way of reading text that shaped their interpretations of the near-sacrifice of Isaac. This work compares them both with each other and their respective sources to show their similarity.

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.

This volume offers studies on medieval education in the formal academic sense typical of schools and universities, and in a broader cultural sense that includes law, liturgy, and the religious orders of the high Middle Ages. Essays explore the transmission of knowledge during the middle ages in various kinds of educational communities.

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.

King Alfonso VIII of Castile: Government, Family and War brings together a diverse group of scholars whose work concerns the reign of Alfonso VIII (1158-1215). This was a critical period in the history of the Iberian peninsula, when the conflict between the Christian north and the Moroccan empire of the Almohads was at its most intense, while the political divisions between the five Christian kingdoms reached their high-water mark. From his troubled ascension as a child to his victory at Las Navas de Tolosa near the end of his fifty-seven-year reign, Alfonso VIII and his kingdom were at the epicenter of many of the most dramatic events of the era.Contributors: Martin Alvira Cabrer, Janna Bianchini, Sam Zeno Conedera, S.J., Miguel Dolan Gómez, Carlos de Ayala Martínez, Kyle C. Lincoln, Joseph O'Callaghan, Teofi lo F. Ruiz, Miriam Shadis, Damian J. Smith, James J. Todesca