For centuries, the Feast of Fools has been condemned and occasionally celebrated as a disorderly, even transgressive Christian festival, in which reveling clergy elected a burlesque Lord of Misrule, presided over the divine office wearing animal masks or women's clothes, sang obscene songs, swung censers that gave off foul-smelling smoke, played dice at the altar, and otherwise parodied the liturgy of the church. Afterward, they would take to the streets, howling, issuing mock indulgences, hurling manure at bystanders, and staging scurrilous plays. The problem with this popular account—intriguing as it may be— is that it is wrong.In Sacred Folly, Max Harris rewrites the history of the Feast of Fools, showing that it developed in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries as an elaborate and orderly liturgy for the day of the Circumcision (1 January)—serving as a dignified alternative to rowdy secular New Year festivities. The intent of the feast was not mockery but thanksgiving for the incarnation of Christ. Prescribed role reversals, in which the lower clergy presided over divine office, recalled Mary's joyous affirmation that God "has put down the mighty from their seat and exalted the humble." The "fools" represented those chosen by God for their lowly status.The feast, never widespread, was largely confined to cathedrals and collegiate churches in northern France. In the fifteenth century, high-ranking clergy who relied on rumor rather than firsthand knowledge attacked and eventually suppressed the feast. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century historians repeatedly misread records of the feast; their erroneous accounts formed a shaky foundation for subsequent understanding of the medieval ritual. By returning to the primary documents, Harris reconstructs a Feast of Fools that is all the more remarkable for being sanctified rather than sacrilegious.

Winner of the Booker Prize A historical novel set in the eighteenth century, Sacred Hunger is a stunning, engrossing exploration of power, domination, and greed in the British Empire as it entered fully into the slave trade and spread it throughout its colonies. Barry Unsworth follows the failing fortunes of William Kemp, a merchant pinning his last chance to a slave ship; his son who needs a fortune because he is in love with an upper-class woman; and his nephew who sails on the ship as its doctor because he has lost all he has loved. The voyage meets its demise when disease spreads among the slaves and the captain's drastic response provokes a mutiny. Joining together, the sailors and the slaves set up a secret, utopian society in the wilderness of Florida, only to await the vengeance of the single-minded, young Kemp.

Sacred and Immoral: On the Writings of Chuck Palahniuk, edited by Jeffrey A. Sartain, combines the efforts of an international list of writers to explore the depths of Chuck Palahniuk’s fiction. Scholars have paid attention Palahniuk’s premiere novel, Fight Club, for years. Sacred and Immoral is the first anthology dedicated to scholarship focused on Palahniuk’s work following Fight Club, which he has been producing at an average of a book a year for thirteen years. By collecting the work of an interdisciplinary group of scholars under a single cover, Sacred and Immoral extends the reach of Palahniuk scholarship beyond any previous publication. Sacred and Immoral provides the single most comprehensive and useful scholarly resource to date for anyone wishing to examine Chuck Palahniuk’s fiction in an academic context. Some of the anthology’s chapters situate Palahniuk’s work within existing generic conventions, while other chapters are concerned with the theoretical underpinnings of Palahniuk’s writing and the philosophical implications of his work. With eleven new critical analyses of Palahniuk’s later novels, Sacred and Immoral drastically expands the range and depth of academic inquiry into Palahniuk’s fiction commensurate with the prominent and exciting position Palahniuk’s work occupies in contemporary culture. Sacred and Immoral also includes a new interview with Chuck Palahniuk, conducted by literary scholar Matt Kavanagh. Finally, Sacred and Immoral boasts the most complete primary and secondary bibliographies of Palahniuk-related materials to date. Sacred and Immoral is not an attempt to have the last word on Chuck Palahniuk’s literature. Rather, this volume is a springboard for other projects that relate to Palahniuk’s writings. The anthology provides a critical framework for Palahniuk’s later literature that students, teachers, and researchers can use in their own classrooms and writing.

In Praise of Folly is an essay written in Latin in 1509 by Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam and first printed in 1511. Inspired by Italian humanist Faustino Perisauli's De Triumpho Stultitiae, it is a satirical attack on superstitions and other traditions of European society as well as on the western Church. Erasmus revised and extended the work, which he originally wrote in the space of a week while sojourning with Sir Thomas More at More's estate in Bucklersbury. In Praise of Folly is considered one of the most notable works of the Renaissance and played an important role in the beginnings of the Protestant Reformation.

This is a truly paradigm-shifting study that reads a key text in Latin Humanist studies as the culmination, rather than an early example, of a tradition in university drama. It persuasively argues against the common assumption that there was no "drama" in the medieval universities until the syllabus was influenced by humanist ideas, and posits a new way of reading the performative dimensions of fourteenth and fifteenth-century university education in, for example, Ciceronian tuition on epistolary delivery. David Bevington calls it "an impressively learned discussion" and commends the sophistication of its use of performativity theory.

Originally published in 1960, paints a picture of what life was like in Renaissance Florence. It examines private and public life of Florentine citizens, governance and defence; the life of women; domestic arrangements; ritual and ceremony, siege and plague.