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Is birdsong music? The most frequent answer to this question in the Middle Ages was resoundingly "no." In Sung Birds, Elizabeth Eva Leach traces postmedieval uses of birdsong within Western musical culture. She first explains why such melodious sound was not music for medieval thinkers and then goes on to consider the ontology of music, the significance of comparisons between singers and birds, and the relationship between art and nature as enacted by the musical performance of late-medieval poetry. If birdsong was not music, how should we interpret the musical depiction of birdsong in human music-making? What does it tell us about the singers, their listeners, and the moral status of secular polyphony? Why was it the fourteenth century that saw the beginnings of this practice, continued to this day in the music of Messiaen and others?Leach explores medieval arguments about song, language, and rationality whose basic terms survive undiminished into the present. She considers not only lyrics that have their singers voice the songs or speech of birds but also those that represent other natural, nonmusical, sounds such as human cries or the barks of dogs. The dangerous sweetness of birdsong was invoked in discussions of musical ethics, which, because of the potential slippage between irrational beast and less rational woman in comparisons with rational human masculinity, depict women's singing as less than fully human. Leach's argument comes full circle with the advent of sound recording. This technological revolution-like its medieval equivalent, the invention of the music book-once again made the relationship between music and nature an acute preoccupation of Western culture.

How did medieval people make sense of their surroundings, and how did this change over the years as understanding and knowledge expanded? This new Seminar Study is designed to familiarise students of medieval history with the ways in which medieval people interpreted the world around them – how they rationalised their observations, and why they developed the models for understanding that they did. Most importantly, it shows how ideas changed over the medieval period, and why. With extensive primary source material, this book builds up a picture using medieval encyclopedias, prose literature and poetry, records of estate management, agricultural treatises, scientific works, annals and chronicles, as well as the evidence from art, architecture, archaeology and the landscape itself. An excellent introduction for undergraduate students of Medieval history, or for anyone with an interest in the medieval natural world.

Illuminated with illustrations, an exploration of medieval manuscript production that offers insight into both the early history of the book and life in the Middle Ages. This book takes the reader on an immersive journey through medieval manuscript production in the Latin Christian world. Each chapter opens with a lively vignette by a medieval narrator—including a parchment maker, scribe, and illuminator—introducing various aspects of manuscript production. Sara J. Charles poses the question “What actually is a scriptorium?” and explores the development of the medieval scriptorium from its early Christian beginnings through to its eventual decline and the growth of the printing press. With the written word at the very heart of the Christian monastic movement, we see the immense amount of labor, planning, and networks needed to produce each manuscript. By tapping into these processes and procedures, The Medieval Scriptorium helps us to experience medieval life through the lens of a manuscript maker.

This interdisciplinary handbook provides extensive information about research in medieval studies and its most important results over the last decades. The handbook is a reference work which enables the readers to quickly and purposely gain insight into the important research discussions and to inform themselves about the current status of research in the field. The handbook consists of four parts. The first, large section offers articles on all of the main disciplines and discussions of the field. The second section presents articles on the key concepts of modern medieval studies and the debates therein. The third section is a lexicon of the most important text genres of the Middle Ages. The fourth section provides an international bio-bibliographical lexicon of the most prominent medievalists in all disciplines. A comprehensive bibliography rounds off the compendium. The result is a reference work which exhaustively documents the current status of research in medieval studies and brings the disciplines and experts of the field together.