Speaking of the moor

from Alcazar to Othello

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title "Speak of me as I am," Othello, the Moor of Venice, bids in the play that bears his name. Yet many have found it impossible to speak of his ethnicity with any certainty. What did it ...

The measure of woman

Law and female identity in the Crown of Aragon

By the end of the Middle Ages, the ius commune-the combination of canon and Roman law-had formed the basis for all law in continental Europe, along with its patriarchal system of categorizing women. Throughout medieval Europe, women regularly found themselves in court, suing or being ...

Medieval Italy

texts in translation

Eds. Katherine L. Jansen, Joanna Drell, Frances Andrews. Medieval Italy gathers together an unparalleled selection of newly translated primary sources from the central and later Middle Ages, a period during which Italy was famous for its diverse cultural landscape of urban towers and fortified castles ...

Middle Eastern terrorism

from Black September to September 11

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title Since the first airplane hijacking by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in September 1970, Middle Eastern terrorists have sacrificed innocent human lives in the name of ideology. From Black September to the Munich ...

Muslims and global justice

Over the course of his distinguished career, legal scholar Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im has sought to reconcile his identity as a Muslim with his commitment to universal human rights. In Muslims and Global Justice, he advances the theme of global justice from an Islamic perspective ...

Order and chivalry

knighthood and citizenship in late medieval castile

Knighthood and chivalry are commonly associated with courtly aristocracy and military prowess. Instead of focusing on the relationship between chivalry and nobility, Jesus D. Rodriguez-Velasco asks different questions. Does chivalry have anything to do with the emergence of an urban bourgeoisie? If so, how? And ...

Witchcraft and magic in the Nordic Middle Ages

Stephen A. Mitchell here offers the fullest examination available of witchcraft in late medieval Scandinavia. He focuses on those people believed to be able-and who in some instances thought themselves able-to manipulate the world around them through magical practices, and on the responses to these ...

Violence and belief in late antiquity

militant devotion in Christianity and Islam

"In Violence and Belief in Late Antiquity, Thomas Sizgorich seeks to understand why and how violent expressions of religious devotion became central to the self-understandings of both Christian and Muslim communities between the fourth and ninth centuries. Sizgorich argues that the cultivation of violent martyrdom ...

Religion and profit

maravians in early America

Catalysts in the birth of evangelicalism, the Moravians supported their religious projects through financial savvy, a distinctive communalism at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and transatlantic commercial networks. This book traces the Moravians' evolving projects, arguing that imperial war, not capitalism, transformed Moravian religious life.

Holy warriors

the religious ideology of Chivalry

The medieval code of chivalry demanded that warrior elites demonstrate fierce courage in battle, display prowess with weaponry, and avenge any strike against their honor. They were also required to be devout Christians. How, then, could knights pledge fealty to the Prince of Peace, who ...

Tabula picta

painting and writing in medieval law

Translated by Monique Dascha Inciarte and Roland David Valayre; Foreword by Roger Chartier. Who owns the tabula picta, the painted tablet? The owner of the tablet? Or to the person who painted it? This meticulous analysis of how medieval jurists responded to these questions is ...

Law and the illicit in medieval Europe

In the popular imagination, the Middle Ages are often associated with lawlessness. As historians have long recognized, however, medieval culture was characterized by an enormous respect for law, legal procedure, and the ideals of justice and equity. Many of our most important modern institutions and ...

Gender and christianity in medieval europe

new perspectives

In "Gender and Christianity in Medieval Europe", six historians seek to explain the convergence of religion and gender in medieval Christendom. Collectively their essays explore how medieval people professed Christianity, how they performed gender, and how the two coincided. Many of the daily religious decisions ...

The sex lives of saints

an erotics of ancient hagiography

"Brilliant and important...From page one she challenges approaches to hagiography that dismiss ascetic desire as the sublimation of sexuality and a pathological hatred of the body."--Theological Studies "Countering the assumption that ascetics repress, sublimate, or even eradicate sexual desire, this fine book detects ...

Periodization & sovereignty

how ideas of feudalism and secularization govern the politics of time

Despite all recent challenges to stage-oriented histories, the idea of a division between a "medieval" and a "modern" period has survived, even flourished, in academia. "Periodization and Sovereignty" demonstrates that this survival is no innocent affair. By examining periodization together with the two controversial categories ...

Speaking of the moor

from Alcazar to Othello

"Speak of me as I am," Othello, the Moor of Venice, bids in the play that bears his name. Yet many have found it impossible to speak of his ethnicity with any certainty. What did it mean to be a Moor in the early modern ...

The insight of unebelievers

Nicholas of Lyra and christian reading of jewish tect in the later middle ages

In the year 1309, Nicholas of Lyra, an important Franciscan Bible commentator, put forth a question at the University of Paris, asking whether it was possible to prove the advent of Christ from scriptures received by the Jews. This question reflects the challenges he faced ...

The crusades and the christian world of the East

rough tolerance

In The Crusades and the Christian World of the East, Christopher MacEvitt marshals an impressive array of literary, legal, artistic, and archeological evidence to demonstrate how crusader ideology and religious difference gave rise to a mode of coexistence he calls "rough tolerance." The twelfth-century Frankish ...

Hitler´s face

the biography of an image

In Hitler's Face Claudia Schmolders reverses the normal protocol of biography: instead of using visual representations as illustrations of a life, she takes visuality as her point of departure to track Adolf Hitler from his first arrival in Munich as a nattily dressed young ...

Souls in dispute

converso identities in Iberia and the jewish diaspora, 1580-1700