Attractive marginal illustrations in this celebrated psalter show scenes of life in medieval England: the annual cycle of growing crops, domestic animals, sports, pastimes, entertainers and musicians.

One of the most appealing & arresting of medieval manuscripts, the Luttrell psalter was commissioned in the 1320s by a wealthy Lincolnshire landowner, Sir Geoffrey Luttrell of Irnham. Painted in vibrant colour, embellished with gold & silver, the vitality & inventiveness of its decoration is almost unique.

What is the status of visual evidence in history? Can we actually see the past through images? Where are the traces of previous lives deposited? Michael Camille addresses these important questions in Mirror in Parchment, a lively, searching study of one medieval manuscript, its patron, producers, and historical progeny. The richly illuminated Luttrell Psalter was created for the English nobleman Sir Geoffrey Luttrell (1276-1345). Inexpensive mechanical illustration has since disseminated the book's images to a much wider audience; hence the Psalter's representations of manorial life have come to profoundly shape our modern idea of what medieval English people, high and low, looked like at work and at play. Alongside such supposedly truthful representations, the Psalter presents myriad images of fantastic monsters and beasts. These patently false images have largely been disparaged or ignored by modern historians and art historians alike, for they challenge the credibility of those pictures in the Luttrell Psalter that we wish to see as real. In the conviction that medieval images were not generally intended to reflect daily life but rather to shape a new reality, Michael Camille analyzes the Psalter's famous pictures as representations of the world, imagined and real, of its original patron. Addressed are late medieval chivalric ideals, physical sites of power, and the boundaries of Sir Geoffrey's imagined community, wherein agricultural laborers and fabulous monsters play a similar ideological role. The Luttrell Psalter thus emerges as a complex social document of the world as its patron hoped and feared it might be.

Taking in a wide range of visual and textual materials, Linda Kalof in Looking at Animals in Human History unearths many surprising and revealing examples of our depictions of animals.

The majority are accompanied by their names, written out in middle English, offering an almost unparalleled source of vernacular bird names in common use during the generation after Chaucer wrote his Canterbury Tales." "This is the first time that all birds form the Sherborne Missal have been reproduced together in sequence and this beautifully illustrated book provides an insight into a fascinating aspect of England's natural history in the middle ages."--BOOK JACKET.

Provides a comprehensive overview of the gender rules encountered in Europe in the period between approximately 500 and 1500 C.E.

The university is indigenous to Western Europe and is probably the greatest and most enduring achievement of the Middle Ages. Much more than stodgy institutions of learning, medieval universities were exciting arenas of people and ideas. They contributed greatly to the economic vitality of their host cities and served as birthplaces for some of the era's most effective minds, laws and discoveries. This survey traces the growth of the largest medieval universities of Bologna, Paris, and Oxford, along with the universities of Cambridge, Padua, Naples, Montpellier, Toulouse, Orleans, Angers, Prague, Vienna and Glasgow. Covering the years 1179-1499, this work discusses common traits of medieval universities, their major figures, and their roles in medieval life.