In Peasants, Warriors, and Wives, Keith Moxey examines woodcut images from the German Reformation that have often been ignored as a crude and inferior form of artistic production. In this richly illustrated study, Moxey argues that while they may not satisfy received notions of "art," they nevertheless constitute an important dimension of the visual culture of the period. Far from being manifestations of universal public opinion, as a cursory acquaintance with their subject matter might suggest, such prints were the means by which the reformed attitudes of the middle and upper classes were disseminated to a broad popular audience.

Whilst most historical investigations of ethnic and religious minorities concentrate on a single town or particular group, this volume offers a much broader geographical and chronological view. Looking at towns across western, and particularly, eastern Europe from the late antique period to the fifteenth century, these papers illustrate the changing nature of questions of identity, perception, legal status and relations between groups, together with the ways in which these elements were affected by the external political regimes and ideologies to which towns were inevitably subjected.

"Concentrating on the militarised borderlands of eastern France, this book examines the disjuncture between the patriotic expectations of elites and the sentiments expressed in folksongs, folktales and popular imagery, in which issues of sexuality, violence and separation took far greater prominence. Hopkin follows the soldier through his life-cycle, from greenhorn recruit to grizzled veteran, to show how the peasant conscript was separated from his previous life and re-educated in military mores (and the response that this transformation elicited from his family and community)."--BOOK JACKET.

Books have rarely been written about the history of any emotion except love and shame, and this volume is the very first on the meaning of anger in the Middle Ages. Well aware of modern theories about the nature of anger, the authors consider the role of anger in the social lives and conceptual universes of a varied and significant cross-section of medieval people: monks, saints, kings, lords, and peasants. They are careful to distinguish between texts (the sources on which historians must rely) and the reality behind the texts. They are sensitive, as well, to the differences between ideals and normative behavior. The first eight essays in the volume focus on anger in the Latin West, while the last two turn to the fringes of Europe (the Celtic and Islamic worlds) for purposes of comparison. Barbara H. Rosenwein concludes the volume with an essay on modern conceptions of anger and their implications for understanding its role in the Middle Ages. The essays reveal much that is new about medieval rituals of honor and status and illuminate the rationales behind such seemingly irrational practices as cursing, feuding, and the punishment of blinding.

This collection of sixteen essays deals with the role of magic, religion and witchcraft in European culture, 1450-1650, and the critical role of the visual in that culture. It covers the relationship of humanism and magic; the intersection of religious ritual, orthodoxy and power; the discursive links between the visual language of witchcraft and contemporary anxieties about sexuality and savagery. The introductory chapter urges us to exorcise our tendency to reduce historical experiences of the demonic to forms of unreason created in a distant past. Only then can we understand the role of the demonic in our historical definition of the self and the other. Richly illustrated with 112 images, the book will interest historians and art historians.

Exploring the rich variety of pictorial rhetoric in early modern northern European genre images, this volume deepens our understanding of genre's place in early modern visual culture. From 1500 to 1700, artists in northern Europe pioneered the category of pictures now known as genre, portrayals of people in ostensibly quotidian situations. Critical approaches to genre images have moved past the antiquated notion that they portray uncomplicated 'slices of life,' describing them instead as heavily encoded pictorial essays, laden with symbols that only the most erudite contemporary viewers and modern iconographers could fully comprehend. These essays challenge that limiting binary, revealing a more expansive array of accessible meanings in genre's deft grafting of everyday scenarios with a rich complex of experiential, cultural, political, and religious references. Authors deploy a variety of approaches to detail genre's multivalent relations to older, more established pictorial and literary categories, the interplay between the meaning of the everyday and its translation into images, and the multifaceted concerns genre addressed for its rapidly expanding, unprecedentedly diverse audience.

Broadside ballads-folio-sized publications containing verse, a tune indication, and woodcut imagery-related cautionary tales, current events, and simplified myth and history to a wide range of social classes across seventeenth century England. Ballads straddled, and destabilized, the categories of public and private performance spaces, the material and the ephemeral, music and text, and oral and written traditions. Sung by balladmongers in the streets and referenced in theatrical works, they were also pasted to the walls of local taverns and domestic spaces. They titillated and entertained, but also educated audiences on morality and gender hierarchies. Although contemporaneous writers published volumes on the early modern controversy over women and the English witch craze, broadside ballads were perhaps more instrumental in disseminating information about dangerous women and their acoustic qualities. Recent scholarship has explored the representations of witchcraft and malfeasance in English street literature; until now, however, the role of music and embodied performance in communicating female transgression has yet to be investigated. Sarah Williams carefully considers the broadside ballad as a dynamic performative work situated in a unique cultural context. Employing techniques drawn from musical analysis, gender studies, performance studies, and the histories of print and theater, she contends that broadside ballads and their music made connections between various degrees of female crime, the supernatural, and cautionary tales for and about women.

This volume addresses the changing relationships between women and armed forces from antiquity to the present: eight chapters review the existing literature, an extended picture essay visually documents women’s military work, and eight chapters illustrate more restricted topics.

Using evidence from contemporary printed images, Smith examines the attitudes of Christian Europe to the Ottoman Empire and to Islam. She also considers the relationship between text and image, placing it in the cultural context of the Reformation and beyond.