All of her sixteen works are analyzed in this book to make clear her messages concerning the spiritual lives of individuals and the political lives of the powerful."--BOOK JACKET.

Hrotsvit wrote stories, plays, and histories during the reign of Emperor Otto the Great (962-973). 12 original essays survey her work, showing historical roots and contexts, Christian values, and a surprisingly modern grappling with questions of identity and female self-realization.

The relationship between the Catholic Church and theatre has a long and complicated history. This collection of fourteen critical essays seeks to demystify the ties--both practical and ideological--that have long bound Catholicism to theatrical production. This volume offers insights into medieval theatre, Jesuit drama, ballet and opera, modern stagings of medieval liturgical drama, Lorca and Lope de Vega as Catholic playwrights, Italian Catholic women's drama, Catholic play-wrighting and acting, and the unique challenges of teaching theatre in Catholic universities.

Called by Renaissance humanist Conrad Celtes "the German Sappho," Hrotswitha (ca. 935–1000) was a prolific author who wrote eight legends in verse, two historical epics, and six plays in rhythmic prose. This bilingual edition contains the complete Latin text with facing English translation of her six plays, Gallicanus, Dulcitius, Callimachus, Abraham, Paphnutius, and Sapientia. The Latin text, from the 2001 Teubner edition of Hrotswitha's works, appears with a facing English translation. The translations are adaptations for the stage, and include stage directions, which have been added in order to facilitate reading and performance. Students, historians, and lovers of drama will find much to enjoy. In 1501 Celtes published Hrotswitha's works, which he found in a forgotten manuscript, along with eight woodcut illustrations by Dürer and other contemporary artists, three of which are reprinted in this bilingual edition. The influence of ancient and classical Latin authors is evident in the style of Hrotswitha's Latin. Her plays present a Christian alternative to Terence's six plays. Based on the lives of saints and martyrs and featuring monks, nuns, hermits, and other religious figures, all of Hrotswitha's plays show, as she says in her Preface to the Plays, "weak women who triumph and cause strong men to retreat in confusion."

Christian-Muslim Relations, a Bibliographical History 2 (CMR2) is the second part of a general history of relations between the faiths. Covering the period from 900 to 1050, it comprises a series of introductory essays, together with the main body of more than one hundred detailed entries on all the works by Christians and Muslims about and against one another that are known from this period. These entries provide biographical details of the authors where known, descriptions and assessments of the works themselves, and complete accounts of manuscripts, editions, translations and studies. The result of collaboration between leading scholars in the field, CMR2 is an indispensable basis for research in all elements of the history of Christian-Muslim relations.

The complex relationship between psychic structures, social norms, and aesthetic representations is a challenge for every analysis of the historical manifestations of human desire. Pangs of Love and Longing: Configurations of Desire in Premodern Literature sets out to provide a deeper understanding of this relation by an assessment of linguistic and artistic configurations of desire in European literature from Antiquity to the Early Modern period. The aim is to explore historic continuities and ruptures in attitudes towards sexuality, pleasures and bodies, as these are represented in a variety of cultural forms, in order to demonstrate the plurality of premodern desire – and, ultimately, to offer fresh perspectives on our present reality. The seventeen scholars participating in the anthology bring together theories and assessments from different areas of the Humanities – German, French, Italian, Spanish, English, and Comparative Literature, History of Ideas and of Art, Theology, Philosophy and Gender Studies. They are all engaged in cross-disciplinary activities at universities in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, and they all participate in the Scandinavian network “Configurations of Desire in Premodern Literature” initiated in 2010.

This collection builds on the foundational work of Penelope D. Johnson, John Boswell's most influential student outside queer studies, on integration and segregation in medieval Christianity. It documents the multiple strategies by which medieval people constructed identities and, in the process, wove the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion among various individuals and groups. The collection adopts an interdisciplinary approach, encompassing historical, art historical, and literary perpsectives to explore the definition of personal and communal spaces within medieval texts, the complex negotiation of the relationship between devotee and saint in both the early and the later Middle Ages, the forming of partnerships (symbolic, economic, devotional, etc.) between men and women across medieval Europe's considerable gender divide, and the ostracism of individuals and groups through various means including imprisonment, violence, and their identification with pollution. Contributors include: Diane Peters Auslander, Constance Hoffman Berman, Elizabeth A.R. Brown, Alexandra Cuffel, Anne M. Schuchman, Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg, Katherine Allen Smith, Kathryn A. Smith, Christina Roukis-Stern, Susan Valentine, Susan Wade, and Scott Wells.