Two of the most fascinating religious figures in medieval literature are Chaucer's Prioress, Madame Eglentyne, and the Archpriest of Hita's Dona Garoza, from his Libro de Buen Amor. Over the years literary critics have interpreted these characters in a variety of ways: from gentle, mildly sinning creatures, to religious failures, to purposefully ambiguous figures with both characteristics. Daichman begins her discussion by focusing on the medieval nunnery as a social institution and finds abundant historical evidence of indecorous behavior among the nuns. Who were the women most likely to transgress their vows? What were the most common transgressions? Why did these women choose convent life in the first place? What we learn is that many women were sent to the convent against their will, or they chose to go there for reasons unrelated to religious vocation. What Daichman has done is trace the pattern of a long-forgotten literary convention, the profligate nun, reviewing first the works of the medieval moralists and satirists on the subject, and then the popular literature of the time with special emphasis on the "chanson de nonne" and the fabliau. She proves the stock character of the Wayward Nun to be as traditional as that of the Gluttonous Monk, the Disobedient Wife, or the Cuckolded Husband. In developing her premise that the profligate nun of the Middle Ages is not an isolated literary occurrence, but the reflection of the woman in the nunnery, Daichman also provides us with a deepened understanding of two well-known literary figures, Dona Garoza and Madame Eglentyne.

This reference is a comprehensive guide to literature written 500 to 1500 A.D., a period that gave rise to some of the world's most enduring and influential works, such as Dante's Commedia, Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, and a large body of Arthurian lore and legend. While its emphasis is upon medieval English texts and society, this reference also covers Islamic, Hispanic, Celtic, Mongolian, Germanic, Italian, and Russian literature and Middle Age culture. Longer entries provide thorough coverage of major English authors such as Chaucer and Sir Thomas Malory, and of genre entries, such as drama, lyric, ballad, debate, saga, chronicle, and hagiography. Shorter entries examine particular literary works; significant kings, artists, explorers, and religious leaders; important themes, such as courtly love and chivalry; and major historical events, such as the Crusades. Each entry concludes with a brief biography. The volume closes with a list of the most valuable general works for further reading.

Historians of sexuality have often assumed that medieval people were less interested in sex than we are. But people in the Middle Ages wrote a great deal about sex: in confessors' manuals, in virginity treatises, and in literary texts. This volume looks afresh at the cultural meanings that sex had throughout the period, presenting new evidence and offering new interpretations of known material. Acknowledging that many of the categories that we use today to talk about sexuality are inadequate for understanding sex in premodern times, the volume draws on important recent work in the historiography of medieval sexuality to address the conceptual and methodological challenges the period presents. A Cultural History of Sexuality in the Middle Ages presents an overview of the period with essays on heterosexuality, homosexuality, sexual variations, religious and legal issues, health concerns, popular beliefs about sexuality, prostitution and erotica.

Every poet arrives at some sense of how language works. Chaucer's engagement, like that of the greatest literary figures, goes beyond the brilliant, skilful use of language as a tool of expression, beyond what we usually call "talent." He brings to the creative use of signification a sophisticated philosophical questioning of the very nature of language, of how we know and how we signify. Chaucer and Language argues that Chaucer's work points to answers to these questions, emphasizing that in various ways Chaucer made language itself the subject of his writing. The polyvalent nature of signs and the ambiguity this makes possible are discussed as one aspect of Chaucer's use of language as subject, as is irony. Chaucer's extension of the concept of language to include relics and the Eucharist, his exploitation of equivocation and the lie, and the semiotic dimensions of his poetic themes are also treated. These issues derive directly from the long tradition of mediaeval sign theory and anticipate the major issues of the modern theory of signs that is semantics.

This ambitious and vivid study in six volumes explores the journey of a single, electrifying story, from its first incarnation in a medieval French poem through its prolific rebirth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Juggler of Notre Dame tells how an entertainer abandons the world to join a monastery, but is suspected of blasphemy after dancing his devotion before a statue of the Madonna in the crypt; he is saved when the statue, delighted by his skill, miraculously comes to life. Jan Ziolkowski tracks the poem from its medieval roots to its rediscovery in late nineteenth-century Paris, before its translation into English in Britain and the United States. The visual influence of the tale on Gothic revivalism and vice versa in America is carefully documented with lavish and inventive illustrations, and Ziolkowski concludes with an examination of the explosion of interest in The Juggler of Notre Dame in the twentieth century and its place in mass culture today. In this volume Jan Ziolkowski follows the juggler of Notre Dame as he cavorts through new media, including radio, television, and film, becoming closely associated with Christmas and embedded in children’s literature. Presented with great clarity and simplicity, Ziolkowski's work is accessible to the general reader, while its many new discoveries will be valuable to academics in such fields and disciplines as medieval studies, medievalism, philology, literary history, art history, folklore, performance studies, and reception studies.

Beginning with the spectacle of hysteria, moving through the perversions of fetishism, masochism, and sadism, and ending with paranoia and psychosis, this book explores the ways that conflicts with the Oedipal law erupt on the body and in language in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, for Chaucer’s tales are rife with issues of mastery and control that emerge as conflicts not only between authority and experience but also between power and knowledge, word and flesh, rule books and reason, man and woman, same and other – conflicts that erupt in a macabre sprawl of broken bones, dismembered bodies, cut throats, and decapitations. Like the macabre sprawl of conflict in the Canterbury Tales, this book brings together a number of conflicting modes of thinking and writing through the surprising and perhaps disconcerting use of “shadow” chapters that speak to or against the four “central” chapters, creating both dialogue and interruption.

Brides of Christ is a study of professed nuns and life in the convents of colonial Mexico.