The monograph series Oxford Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture showcases the plurilingual and multicultural quality of medieval literature and actively seeks to promote research that not only focuses on the array of subjects medievalists now pursue in literature, theology, and philosophy, in social, political, jurisprudential, and intellectual history, the history of art, and the history of science but also that combines these subjects productively. It offers innovative studies on topics that may include, but are not limited to, manuscript and book history; languages and literatures of the global Middle Ages; race and the post-colonial; the digital humanities, media and performance; music; medicine; the history of affect and the emotions; the literature and practices of devotion; the theory and history of gender and sexuality, ecocriticism and the environment; theories of aesthetics; medievalism. This volume examines Latin and vernacular writings that formed part of a flourishing culture of mystical experience in the later Middle Ages (ca. 1150DS1400), including the ways in which visionaries within their literary milieu negotiated the tensions between personal, charismatic inspiration and their allegiance to church authority. It situates texts written in England within their wider geographical and intellectual context through comparative analyses with contemporary European writings. A recurrent theme across all of these works is the challenge that a largely masculine and clerical culture faced in the form of the various, and potentially unruly, spiritualities that emerged powerfully from the twelfth century onward. Representatives of these major spiritual developments, including the communities that fostered them, were often collaborative in their expression. For example, holy women, including nuns, recluses, and others, were recognized by their supporters within the church for their extraordinary spiritual graces, even as these individual expressions of piety were in many cases at variance with securely orthodox religious formations. These writings become eloquent witnesses to a confrontation between inner, revelatory experience and the needs of the church to set limitations upon charismatic spiritualities that, with few exceptions, carried the seeds of religious dissent. Moreover, while some of the most remarkable texts at the centre of this volume were authored (and/or primarily read) by women, the intellectual and religious concerns in play cut across the familiar and all-too-conventional boundaries of gender and social and institutional affiliation.

Essays challenging the orthodox opinion of anchorites as entirely divorced from the world around them.

Translation and facing text of an important female-authored work from the late middle ages.

This volume offers original readings of Piers Plowman and rethinks the genre of allegorical narrative in the Middle Ages. It presents five studies of allegorical narratives with implications for different aspects of medieval culture.

This title provides a new account of the literary history of fourteenth-century England, arguing that many of this period's most distinctive literary experiments emerge through a productive dialogue with the 'Romance of the Rose', a jointly-authored medieval French poem.

Monasticism, in all of its variations, was a feature of almost every landscape in the medieval West. So ubiquitous were religious women and men throughout the Middle Ages that all medievalists encounter monasticism in their intellectual worlds. While there is enormous interest in medieval monasticism among Anglophone scholars, language is often a barrier to accessing some of the most important and groundbreaking research emerging from Europe. The Cambridge History of Medieval Monasticism in the Latin West offers a comprehensive treatment of medieval monasticism, from Late Antiquity to the end of the Middle Ages. The essays, specially commissioned for this volume and written by an international team of scholars, with contributors from Australia, Belgium, Canada, England, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States, cover a range of topics and themes and represent the most up-to-date discoveries on this topic.

"How does the soul relate to the body? Through the ages many religions and intellectual movements have posed answers to this question. Many have gravitated to the notion of the subtle body, positing some kind of subtle entity that is neither soul nor body, but some mixture of the two. This book traces the history of this idea from the late Roman empire to the present day, touching on how philosophers, wizards, scholars, occultists, psychologists, and mystics have engaged with the idea over the past two thousand years. The book begins in the late Roman Empire, moving chronologically through the Renaissance, British project of colonial Indology, development of Theosophy and occultism in the 19th century through to the Euro-American counterculture of the 1960's and 70's"--

This volume of essays focuses on how individuals living in the late tenth through fifteenth centuries engaged with the authorizing culture of the Anglo-Saxons. Drawing from a reservoir of undertreated early English documents and texts, each contributor shows how individual poets, ecclesiasts, legists, and institutions claimed Anglo-Saxon predecessors for rhetorical purposes in response to social, cultural, and linguistic change. Contributors trouble simple definitions of identity and period, exploring how medieval authors looked to earlier periods of history to define social identities and make claims for their present moment based on the political fiction of an imagined community of a single, distinct nation unified in identity by descent and religion. Contributors are Cynthia Turner Camp, Irina Dumitrescu, Jay Paul Gates, Erin Michelle Goeres, Mary Kate Hurley, Maren Clegg Hyer, Nicole Marafioti, Brian O’Camb, Kathleen Smith, Carla María Thomas, Larissa Tracy, and Eric Weiskott. See inside the book.

A comparative study of Boccaccio's Decameron and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales that explores the differences and similarities between the worlds that are portrayed by each text, with a focus on the strategies and limits of personal agency, and the significance and social dynamics of story-telling.