The Serpent and the Rose examines the theological and liturgical context for the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception in the Middle Ages, from primary sources in Iberian archives. Its main focus is a study of Marian poetry from Alfonso the Wise and Gonzalo de Berceo through to the poetry collections of the late fifteenth century, showing how poets took themes from the Bible and apocryphal literature, combining them to defend and praise Mary’s conception without sin. Individual chapters assess how they depicted Mary’s prefiguration in the Old Testament by the Woman who defeated the serpent, the young bride of the Song of Songs, or the semi-deity, Wisdom, how they portray her as the mystic rose and as the new Eve.

This volume offers a fascinating insight into the continuities and discontinuities in the formation of identities in the Low Countries and its neighbouring countries. It is an important contribution to the ongoing debates about national and other identities.

This book explores womena (TM)s experiences of pilgrimage in Latin Christendom between 1300 and 1500 C.E. Later medieval authors harbored grave doubts about womena (TM)s mobility; literary images of mobile women commonly accused them of lust, pride, greed, and deceit. Yet real women commonly engaged in pilgrimage in a variety of forms, both physical and spiritual, voluntary and compulsory, and to locations nearby and distant. Acting within both practical and social constraints, such women helped to construct more positive interpretations of their desire to travel and of their experiences as pilgrims. Regardless of how their travel was interpreted, those women who succeeded in becoming pilgrims offer us a rare glimpse of ordinary women taking on extraordinary religious and social authority.

The queenship of the first European Renaissance queen regnant never ceases to fascinate. As fascists to feminists fight over Isabel’s legacy, we ask which recyclings of her image are legitimate or appropriate. Or has this figure taken on a life of her own?

Conceived as another chapter in the European history of religions (Europäische Religionsgeschichte), this book deals with the intense dynamics of the overlapping political, ethnic, and denominational constellations in Reformation and post-Reformation Transylvania. Navigating along multiple narrative tracks, and attempting to treat the religious history of an entire region – over a limited time period – in a differentiated, polyfocal way, the book represents a departure from the master narratives of any singularly oriented religious history. At the same time, the present work seeks to contribute to laying the groundwork at the micro- and meso-contextual level of East-Central European confessionalization processes, and to developing interpretive models for these processes in the region.

Would you like to learn to pray like a medieval Christian? In Mary and the Art of Prayer, Rachel Fulton Brown traces the history of the medieval practice of praising Mary through the complex of prayers known as the Hours of the Virgin. More than just a work of comprehensive historical scholarship, the book asks readers to immerse themselves in the experience of believing in and praying to Mary. Mary and the Art of Prayer crosses the boundaries that modern scholars typically place between observation and experience, between the world of provable facts and the world of imagination, suggesting what it would have been like for medieval Christians to encounter Mary in prayer. Mary and the Art of Prayer opens with a history of the devotion of the Hours or “Little Office” of the Virgin. It then guides readers in the practice of saying this Office, including its invitatory (Ave Maria), antiphons, psalms, lessons, and prayers. The book works on several levels at once. It provides a new methodology for thinking about devotion and prayer; a new appreciation of the scope of and audience for the Hours of the Virgin; a new understanding of how Mary functions theologically and devotionally; and a new reading of sources not previously taken into account. A courageous and moving work, it will transform our ideas of what scholarship is and what it can accomplish.

This book is devoted to medieval Iberian women, readers and writers. Focusing on the stories and texts women heard, visually experienced or read, and the stories that they rewrote, the work explores women’s experiences and cultural practices and their efforts to make sense of their place within their familial networks and communities. The study is based on two methodological and interpretive threads: a new paradigm to represent premodern reading and, a study of women’s writing, or, more precisely, women’s textualities, as a process of creating words but also acts, social practices, emotions and, ultimately, affectus, understood here as the embodiment of the ability to affect and be affected.

This volume explores a range of premodern rulers and their depictions in historiography, literature, art and material culture to gain a broader understanding of their sexualities. It considers the methodologies and motivations of premodern writers and rulers when fashioning royal and elite sexualities and offers new analyses of an array of texts and artwork from across Europe and the wider Mediterranean.

Ambiguous Women in Medieval Art brings together the work of seven researchers who, coming from different perspectives, and in some cases different disciplines, approach the question of ambiguity in relation to different case-studies where the represented women do not follow the ever-present dichotomy exemplified by Eve and Mary. In doing so, they demonstrate the complexities of a topic that is as contemporary as it is ancient. Through them, we can get valuable insights on the understanding and experience of gender in the past and the ways in which these experiences have shaped our own understanding of this topic.

First comprehensive survey of Isabel de Villena (Sor Isabel), the fifteenth-century Spanish nun and writer. Isabel de Villena (1430-1490) is one of the most fascinating women of the Spanish middle ages. Related to the royal family, she became abbess of the Poor Clare convent, the Santa Trinitat, in Valencia in 1462, a position she heldfor almost thirty years until her death. Her treatise on the religious life, Vita Christi, was the first book by a woman to be printed in the kingdom of Aragon. This is the first full-length survey in English of Isabel's life and literary works. The author pays particular attention to the way in which devotion to the Virgin Mary is manifested and described through material culture, on her rich fabrics, brocades, silks, shoes, and crown. The book thus highlights not only Isabel's distinctive contribution to the genre of the Vita Christi, but also reflects the status of Valencia as a centre for trade and producer of silks and velvets at the time, as well as its flourishing shoe-making industry. Lesley K. Twomey is Principal Lecturer, Hispanic Studies, Northumbria University.