This book interprets Jesus Christ as a complicated, disunified literary character in Middle English literature, where he appears variously as king, traitor, victorious conqueror, sacrificial lamb, heroic knight, lover, and spouse--often as several contradictory figures in a single work. These tropes derive from Scripture, doctrines about Christ's two natures, and theories of redemption. This book examines the full range of representations in Southern Passion, Northern Passion, Pepysian Gospel Harmony, Stanzaic Life of Christ, Cursor Mundi, Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, Sir John Mandeville’s Book, the York Play, and Julian of Norwich's Revelation of Love. Although Christ's two natures are well represented in existing scholarship, many traditions have been overlooked, including commonplace treatments of Christ as both a traitor and king, conqueror and sacrificial lamb, hero and lover. As writers call upon audiences to feel compassion for Jesus's suffering, they almost universally express antipathy toward his Jewish torturers, complicating our ideas about affective piety. In these works, the Virgin Mary is less exemplary for her compassion than for her understanding of doctrine. In short, this book offers new perspectives on vernacular Christology between about 1275 and 1475. Theresa Tinkle is a Professor within the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan, USA, as well as Director of the Gayle Morris Sweetland Center for Writing. Previous publications include Medieval Venuses and Cupids: Sexuality and Hermeneutics in English Poetry (1996) and Gender and Power in Medieval Exegesis (Palgrave, 2010). Theresa’s academic training and publications include the study of medieval English and Latin literature, the medieval reception of the Bible, gender and sexuality studies, paleography and manuscript studies, composition and pedagogy, and disability studies.

According to a longstanding interpretation, book religions are agents of textuality and logocentrism. This volume inverts the traditional perspective: its focus is on the strong dependency between scripture and aesthetics, holy books and material artworks, sacred texts and ritual performances. The contributions, written by a group of international specialists in Western, Byzantine, Islamic and Jewish Art, are committed to a comparative and transcultural approach. The authors reflect upon the different strategies of »clothing« sacred texts with precious materials and elaborate forms. They show how the pretypographic cultures of the Middle Ages used book ornaments as media for building a close relation between the divine words and their human audience. By exploring how art shapes the religious practice of books, and how the religious use of books shapes the evolution of artistic practices this book contributes to a new understanding of the deep nexus between sacred scripture and art.

Vol. 4 covers the late Roman period to the rise of Islam. Focuses especially on the growth and development of rabbinic Judaism and of the major classical rabbinic sources such as the Mishnah, Jerusalem Talmud, Babylonian Talmud and various Midrashic collections.

In World History as the History of Foundations, 3000 BCE to 1500 CE, Michael Borgolte investigates the origins and development of foundations from Antiquity to the end of the Middle Ages. In his survey foundations emerge not as mere legal institutions, but rather as “total social phenomena” which touch upon manifold aspects, including politics, the economy, art and religion of the cultures in which they emerged. Cross-cultural in its approach and the result of decades of research, this work represents by far the most comprehensive account of the history of foundations that has hitherto been published.

Visualizing Sensuous Suffering and Affective Pain in Early Modern Europe and the Spanish Americas is a trans-cultural collection of studies on visual treatments of the phenomena of suffering and pain in early modern culture. Ranging geographically from Italy, Spain, and the Low Countries to Chile, Mexico, and the Philippines and chronologically from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries, these studies variously consider pain and suffering as somatic, emotional, and psychological experiences. From examination of bodies shown victimized by brutal public torture to the sublimation of physical suffering conveyed through the incised lines of Counter-Reformation engravings, the authors consider depictions of pain and suffering as conduits to the divine or as guides to social behaviour; indeed, often the two functions overlap.