First published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

"A great virtue of this reader is the length of its selections--not just snippets, but long enough portions for students to get a real sense of how the text works." - Ruth Mazo Karras, University of Minnesota

Examining the poetry and practice of courtly love and the mores of aristocratic marriages, Duby shows the Middle Ages to be male-dominated. Women were regarded as symbols, as figures of temptation who paradoxically had no desires of their own. Duby argues that the structure of sexual relationships took its cue from the family and from feudalism - both bastions of masculinity

This updated edition collects an extensive range of evidence for how people in the European Middle Ages thought about the emotional state of love, the physical act of sex, and the social institution of marriage. Included are extracts from literary and theological works, medical and legal writings, conduct books, chronicles, and letters. These texts discuss married couples who are not having sex, and unmarried ones who are. We encounter marriages for creating alliances, marriages for love, and promises of marriage made in the hope of obtaining sex. Learned texts discuss the etymology of sexual terms and the medical causes of difficulties in conceiving. There are accounts of clandestine marriages, sexual violence, the madness of love-melancholy, and much more. By drawing on diverse voices and presenting less accessible material, this sourcebook provides a nuanced view of how medieval people thought about these subjects and questions the similarities and differences between their perspectives and our own. With an expanded range of texts, wider geographical scope, suggestions for further reading, and updated explanatory material to reflect changes in scholarship in over two decades, this edition is an invaluable resource for students interested in sexuality, gender, and relationships in the Middle Ages.

This updated edition collects an extensive range of evidence for how people in the European Middle Ages thought about the emotional state of love, the physical act of sex and the social institution of marriage. Included are extracts from literary and theological works, medical and legal writings, conduct books, chronicles and letters. These texts discuss married couples who are not having sex, and unmarried ones who are. We encounter marriages for creating alliances, marriages for love and promises of marriage made in the hope of obtaining sex. Learned texts discuss the etymology of sexual terms and the medical causes of difficulties in conceiving. There are accounts of clandestine marriages, sexual violence, the madness of love-melancholy, and much more. By drawing on diverse voices and presenting less accessible material, this sourcebook provides a nuanced view of how medieval people thought about these subjects and questions the similarities and differences between their perspectives and our own. With an expanded range of texts, wider geographical scope, suggestions for further reading and updated explanatory material to reflect changes in scholarship in over two decades, this edition is an invaluable resource for students interested in sexuality, gender, and relationships in the Middle Ages.

First published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

By reading two bodies of literature not normally read together - the outlaw literature and espionage literature - Conor McCarthy shows how these genres represent and critique the longstanding use of legal exclusion as a means of supporting state power. Texts discussed range from the medieval Robin Hood ballads, Shakespeare's history plays, and versions of the Ned Kelly story to contemporary writing by John le Carre, Don DeLillo, Ciaran Carson and William Gibson.