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The present volume is the second in a series of three integrated publications, the first produced in 2013 as Nuns’ Literacies in Medieval Europe: The Hull Dialogue. Like that volume, this collection of essays, focused on various aspects of nuns’ literacies from the late seventh to the mid-sixteenth century, brings together the work of specialists to create a dialogue about the Latin and vernacular texts that were read, written, and exchanged by medieval nuns.

It investigates literacy from palaeographical and textual perspectives, evidence of book ownership and exchange, and other more external evidence, both literary and historical. To highlight the benefits of cross-cultural comparison, contributions include case studies focused on northern and southern Europe, as well as the extreme north and west of the region. A number of essays illustrate nuns’ active engagement with formal education, and with varied textual forms, such as the legal and epistolary, while others convey the different opportunities for studying examples of nuns’ artistic literacy. The various discussions included here build collectively on the first volume to demonstrate the comparative experiences of medieval female religious who were reading, writing, teaching, composing, and illustrating at different times and in diverse geographical areas throughout medieval Europe.

Martin Camargo, Professor of English, Medieval Studies, and Classics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is a beloved teacher, mentor, colleague, and the scholar whose work this collection celebrates. With interests in defining ‘medieval rhetoric’, understanding the history of both literary and bureaucratic epistles, explaining the revival of rhetorical studies in fourteenth-century England, editing texts for teaching the trivium, and excavating performance pedagogies in medieval language classrooms, Carmago has paved the way for scholars in many fields, including educational and institutional history; literature, language, and manuscript studies; and rhetoric in the Middle Ages.

This book pays tribute to his own ground-breaking research by presenting original and inventive new work in many of these fields. Authored by established scholars and innovative new researchers alike, the essays contained in this volume give significant scope to didactic medieval commentaries, theories of medieval rhetoric and language, literary epistles and the ars dictaminis, and poetry of various genres including romances and riddles, as well as to the classroom practices that all of these investigations infer. In keeping with Camargo’s generosity in sharing resources, the authors hope that their essays in turn will provide encouragement and suggestions for further work.

Embrassant toutes les strates du langage, de sa production à sa réception, les formes vers et prose sont dans une tension constante et évolutive, et invitent à s’interroger sur ce qui les sépare et les réunit, d’un point de vue parfois strictement linguistique, parfois plus largement rythmique, générique ou idéologique. Aussi travaillée soit-elle, la question des formes et des usages résiste toutefois à une théorisation générale, en raison de l’ampleur du phénomène et des présupposés culturels qu’elle engage. L’aborder sous l’angle de la rencontre, « rencontre » en son sens premier de « conflit », mais aussi en celui de « cohabitation, dialogue, échange », est une manière de contourner la difficulté. Ces rencontres, au pluriel donc, se produisent en effet dans divers lieux textuels, et à divers moments, du Moyen Âge à la Renaissance, dans une longue période où se dessinent et se formulent en langue française les expériences et les réflexions et où se dévoilent des imaginaires singuliers. Elles s’éclairent en outre à la lumière des pratiques enregistrées dans les langues voisines. La diversité et la complexité des formules révèlent que le jeu des formes est au cœur de l’identité des langues et de l’image mentale qu’elles renvoient.

Catherine Croizy-Naquet

est professeur de Littérature du Moyen Âge à l’Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3, ses recherches portent essentiellement sur la littérature narrative médiévale, romans et récits historiques, en vers et en prose.

Michelle Szkilnik

est professeur de Littérature du Moyen Âge à l’Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3, ses recherches portent sur le roman arthurien et sur la littérature de la fi n du Moyen Âge.

This is the third volume of the series “Rewriting the Middle Ages in the Twentieth Century”, focused this time on the medieval political thought.

This book offers an overview of the national and transnational traditions of the historiography and studies the main questions and the background of this discipline in the last century.

Essays for this new volume focus on the subject’s life, intellectual and academic training; discuss major works and historiographical heritage; and locate the medievalists who have contributed to the better understanding of medieval political thought, through their work in medieval studies. This interdisciplinary resource aims to include medievalists from different fields: history, art, literature, theology, among others.

Régine Le Jan a marqué de son empreinte l’histoire du haut Moyen Âge. Son oeuvre a accompagné l’évolution de la discipline historique depuis plus de quarante ans. Au gré de ses publications, de colloques, de programmes de recherche, de son enseignement, elle a donné à l’histoire du haut Moyen Âge des orientations inédites. Pour lui rendre hommage, ses collègues, amis et élèves se sont inspirés de quelques-uns de ses thèmes de recherche privilégiés au fil de trente articles rassemblés ici. Dans ce volume est d’abord envisagée l’importance de la famille et des liens de parenté dans les relations de pouvoir au haut Moyen Âge, rappelant l’ouvrage fondateur que fut sa thèse Famille et Pouvoir dans le monde franc (Publications de la Sorbonne, 1995). Sont ensuite évoquées celles dont elle a si bien montré le rôle essentiel par l’évocation de figures de femmes médiévales, tout en rappelant comment a continué à peser sur elles tout le poids d’une discrimination qui se poursuit pendant toute la période. Enfin, les auteurs reviennent sur l’usage des émotions et du vocabulaire de la haine et de l’amitié, dont la place ne cesse de croître à la fois dans les domaines social et politique au fil du haut Moyen Âge.

A seminal article published by Giles Constable in 1953 focused on the genesis and expansion in scope of the Second Crusade with particular attention to what has become known as the Syrian campaign. His central thesis maintained that by the spring of 1147 the Church “viewed and planned” the Second Crusade as a general Christian offensive against and the Muslims of Syria and the Iberian Peninsula and the pagan Wends of the southern Baltic lands. Constable's work remains extremely influential and provides the framework for the recent major works published on this extraordinary twelfth-century phenomenon. This volume aims to readdress scholarly predilections for concentrating on the venture in the Near East and for narrowly focusing on the accepted targets of the crusade. It aims instead to place established, contentious, and new events and concepts associated with the enterprise in a wider ideological, chronological, geopolitical, and geographical context.

Jason T. Roche is a Lecturer in Medieval History at Manchester Metropolitan University. His research interests cover the history of the crusades and the Latin East and the topography of medieval Anatolia and the Near East.

Janus Møller Jensen is head of department at Nyborg Castle, Museums of Eastern Funen, Denmark. His main research interests cover the history and historiography of the Crusades and Scandinavian medieval history.

This volume explores the relationships and interactions between medieval urban populations and their rural counterparts across north western Europe from the seventh to sixteenth centuries. This theme has become increasingly fragmented in recent decades, resulting in scholars being largely unaware of developments outside their own areas. The present volume brings together historians and archaeologists in order to highlight the varied ways in which town–country interactions can be considered, from perspectives that include economy, politics, natural environment, material culture, and settlement hierarchy. As a whole, the papers offer innovative interdisciplinary perspectives on the topic that create a new platform from which to understand more fully the complex, bilateral relationships in which both urban and rural spheres were able to influence and challenge each other. Contributions are wide-ranging, from the activities of elite, aristocratic groups in and around individual towns, to large-scale surveys covering wide areas. With coverage from the North Sea to the western Baltic, the book will be relevant to a range of disciplines including archaeology, history, and geography, and is aimed towards both advanced students and established scholars.

This book investigates how medieval and early modern Europeans constructed, understood, and articulated emotions. The essays trace concurrent lines of influence that shaped post-Classical understandings of emotions, through overlapping philosophical, rhetorical, and theological discourses. They show the effects of developments in genre and literary, aesthetic, and cognitive theories on depictions of psychological and embodied emotion in literature. They map the deeply embedded emotive content inherent in rituals, formal documents, daily conversation, communal practice, and cultural memory. The contributors focus on the mediation and interpretation of pre-modern emotional experience in cultural structures and institutions - customs, laws, courts, religious foundations - as well as in philosophical, literary, and aesthetic traditions.

The volume thus represents a conspectus of contemporary interpretative strategies, displaying close connections between disciplinary and interdisciplinary critical practices drawn from historical studies, literature, anthropology and archaeology, philosophy and theology, cognitive science, psychology, religious studies, and gender studies. The essays stretch from classical and indigenous cultures to the contemporary West, embracing numerous national and linguistic groups. They illuminate the complex potential of medieval and early modern emotions in situ, analysing their involvement in subjects as diverse as philosophical theories, imaginative and scholarly writing, concepts of individual and communal identity, social and political practices, and the manifold business of everyday life.

There has long been a tendency among monastic historians to ignore or marginalize female participation in monastic life, but recent scholarship has begun to redress the balance, and the great contributions made by women to the religious life of the Middle Ages are now attracting increasing attention. This interdisciplinary volume draws together scholars from Spain, Italy, France, the Low Countries, Germany, Transylvania, Scandinavia, and the British Isles, and offers new insights into the history, art history, and material culture, and the religiosity and culture of medieval religious women.

The different chapters within this book take a comparative approach to the emergence and spread of female monastic communities across different geographical, political, and economic settings, comparing and contrasting houses that ranged from rich, powerful royal abbeys to small, subsistence priories on the margins of society, and exploring the artistic achievements, the interaction with neighbours and secular and ecclesiastical authorities, and the spiritual lives that were led by their inhabitants. The contributors to this volume address issues as diverse as patronage and relationships with the outside world, organizational structures, the nature of Cistercian observance and identity among female houses, and the role of male authority, and in doing so, they seek to shed light on the divergences and commonalities upon which the female religious life was based.