The essays in this collection explore the motives and methods of marginalization throughout pre-modern Europe, Japan, the Ottoman Empire, and areas that are now Mexico, Iran, Peru, Syria, and Costa Rica. The authors offer a rich variety of perspectives on precarity and privilege, resistance and hybridity, they unpack the intersections of power, tradition, and difference, and they examine the relationship of marginality to both violence and creativity not only in the global Middle Ages and Renaissance but also in our present moment. While deepening readers' understanding of our antecedents, the collection illuminates the contemporary urgency of being 'ethically awake to the needs, sufferings, sorrows, and dignity of others around the globe'.

Marginality assumes a variety of forms in current discussions of the Middle Ages. Modern scholars have considered a seemingly innumerable list of people to have been marginalized in the European Middle Ages: the poor, criminals, unorthodox religious, the disabled, the mentally ill, women, so-called infidels, and the list goes on. If so many inhabitants of medieval Europe can be qualified as "marginal," it is important to interrogate where the margins lay and what it means that the majority of people occupied them. In addition, we scholars need to reexamine our use of a term that seems to have such broad applicability to ensure that we avoid imposing marginality on groups in the Middle Ages that the era itself may not have considered as such. In the medieval era, when belonging to a community was vitally important, people who lived on the margins of society could be particularly vulnerable. And yet, as scholars have shown, we ought not forget that this heightened vulnerability sometimes prompted so-called marginals to form their own communities, as a way of redefining the center and placing themselves within it. The present volume explores the concept of marginality, to whom the moniker has been applied, to whom it might usefully be applied, and how we might more meaningfully define marginality based on historical sources rather than modern assumptions. Although the volume’s geographic focus is Europe, the chapters look further afield to North Africa, the Sahara, and the Levant acknowledging that at no time, and certainly not in the Middle Ages, was Europe cut off from other parts of the globe.

Tracy Adams: 'Make me chaste and continent, but not yet': A Model for Clerical Masculinity?Victor Scherb: Shoulder Companions and Shoulders in BeowulfLynn Shutters, Lion Hearts, Saracen Heads, Dog Tails: The Body of the Conqueror in Richard Coer de LyonAlbrecht Classen: Women Win the Day: The Female Heroine in Late-Medieval German MaerenMegan Moore: Chretien's Romances of Grief: Widows and Their Erotic BodiesJudith H. Bryce: The Faces of Ginevra de' Benci: Homosocial Agendas and Female Subjectivity in Later Quattrocentro FlorenceElizabeth Schirmer: 'Trewe Men': Pastoral Masculinity in Lollard PolemicRyan Singh Paul: To See and Be Seen: Aemilia Lanyer's Poetics of VisionPaul Hartle: Sleeping with the Menagerie: Sex and the Renaissance Pet

This collection of essays explores the intersection of art and violence in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It will appeal primarily to students and scholars in the fields of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, and will also be of interest to readers with an interest in medieval and early modern art history.

The study of pre-modern anthropology requires the close examination of the relationship between nature and human society, which has been both precarious and threatening as well as productive, soothing, inviting, and pleasurable. Much depends on the specific circumstances, as the works by philosophers, theologians, poets, artists, and medical practitioners have regularly demonstrated. It would not be good enough, as previous scholarship has commonly done, to examine simply what the various writers or artists had to say about nature. While modern scientists consider just the hard-core data of the objective world, cultural historians and literary scholars endeavor to comprehend the deeper meaning of the concept of nature presented by countless writers and artists. Only when we have a good grasp of the interactions between people and their natural environment, are we in a position to identify and interpret mental structures, social and economic relationships, medical and scientific concepts of human health, and the messages about all existence as depicted in major art works. In light of the current conditions threatening to bring upon us a global crisis, it matters centrally to take into consideration pre-modern discourses on nature and its enormous powers to understand the topoi and tropes determining the concepts through which we perceive nature. Nature thus proves to be a force far beyond all human comprehensibility, being both material and spiritual depending on our critical approaches.

This new Companion provides a broad and perceptive overview of the most important vernacular literary genre of the Middle Ages. Freshly commissioned, original chapters from seventeen leading scholars introduce students and general readers to the form's poetics, narrative voice and manuscript contexts, as well as its relationship to the Mediterranean world, race, gender and the emotions, among many other topics. Providing fresh perspectives on the first pan-European literary movement, essays range across a broad geographical area, including England, France, Italy, Germany and the Iberian Peninsula, as well as a varied linguistic spectrum, including Arabic, Hebrew and Yiddish. Exploring the celebration of chivalric ideals and courtly refinements, the volume excavates the tensions and traumas lying beneath decorous surface appearances. An introduction, bibliography of texts and translations as well as chapter-by-chapter reading lists complete this essential guide.

This collection studies the representations of the character of the monarch in literature and cinema. Being a person, an institution, a character archetype and a narrative role, the characters of the monarch and other royal or regal characters oscillate between humanity and the non-human. As such, they are hybrid forms of existence and subjectivity. The authors of this collection explore this hybridity across large spectra of genres, historical periods and cultural contexts. Some of the most prolific and widely read scholars analyze the archetype of the monarch on the page, the stage and the screen. They cover large swathes of intersecting creative and interpretive territories including ancient epic and religious poetry, Arthurian legends, British Renaissance and modern drama, British horror films and Hollywood crime and sports films. This collection also features interviews with six prominent comic book writers and artists, who discuss the influence of classical royal archetypes on their works.