Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title Unveiling Eve is the first feminist inquiry into the Hebrew poetry and prose forms cultivated in Muslim and Christian Spain, Italy, and Provence in the eleventh through fourteenth centuries. In the Jewish Middle Ages, writing was an exclusively male competence, and textual institutions such as the study of scripture, mysticism, philosophy, and liturgy were men's sanctuaries from which women were banished. These domains of male expertise—alongside belles lettres, on which Rosen's book focuses—served as virtual laboratories for experimenting with concepts of femininity and masculinity, hetero- and homosexuality, feminization and virilization, transvestism and transsexuality. Reviewing texts as varied as love lyric, love stories, marriage debates, rhetorical contests, and liturgical and moralistic pieces, Tova Rosen considers the positions and positioning of female figures and female voices within Jewish male discourse. The idolization and demonization of women present in these texts is read here against the background of scripture and rabbinic literature as well as the traditions of chivalry and misogyny in the hosting Islamic and Christian cultures. Unveiling Eve unravels the literary evidence of a patriarchal tradition in which women are routinely rendered nonentities, often positioned as abstractions without bodies or reified as bodies without subjectivities. Without rigidly following any one school of feminist thinking, Rosen creatively employs a variety of methodologies to describe and assess the texts' presentation of male sexual politics and delineate how women and concepts of gender were manipulated, fictionalized, fantasized, and poeticized. Inaugurating a new era of critical thinking in Hebrew literature, Unveiling Eve penetrates a field of medieval literary scholarship that has, until now, proven impervious to feminist criticism.

Figuring the Feminine examines the female body as a means of articulating questions of literary authority and practice within the cultural spheres of the Iberian Peninsula (both Romance and Semitic) as well as in the larger Latinate literary culture. It demonstrates the centrality in medieval literary culture of the gendering of rhetorical and hermeneutical acts involved in the creation of texts and meaning, and the importance of the medieval Iberian textual tradition in this process, a complex multicultural tradition that is often overlooked in medieval literary scholarship. This study adopts an innovative methodology informed by current theories of the body and gender to approach Hispanic literature from a femininst perspective. Jill Ross offers new readings of medieval Hispanic texts (Latin, Castilian, and Hebrew) including Prudentius' Peristephanon, Gonzalo de Berceo's Milagros de Nuestra Señora, Shem Tov of Carrión's Battle Between the Pen and the Scissors, and several others. She highlights ways in which these texts contribute to the understanding of gender in medieval poetics and foreground questions of literary and cultural import. Figuring the Feminine argues that the bodies of women are crucial to the working out of such questions as the unsettling shift from orality to literacy, textual instability, cultural dissonance, and the resistance to cultural and religious hegemony.

Conducted from a premillennial and pretribulational point of view, this study of the Book of Revelation explores the theme that America ultimately will separate from Israel and what prophetically will happen.

The basic concept of this book is that in spite of the borrowed Arabic poetical values, medieval Hebrew poetry stubbornly distanced itself from Arabic poetry. The conclusive result of an in-depth comparative examination is that Hebrew poetry combined selective Arabic poetical values with ethical Jewish values to create a distinctive poetical school.

This collection of essays offers an inquiry into the complex interaction between exegesis and poetry that characterized medieval and early modern Karaite and Rabbanite treatment of the Bible in the Islamic world, the Byzantine Empire, and Christian Europe. Discussing a variety of topics that are usually associated with either exegesis or poetry in conjunction with the two fields, the authors analyze a wide array of interactions between biblical sources and their interpretive layers, whether in prose exegesis or in multiple forms of poetry and rhymed prose. Of particular relevance are mechanisms for the production and transmission of exegetical traditions, including the participation of Jewish poets in these processes, an issue that serves as a leitmotif throughout this collection.

First published in 2006, Women and Gender in Medieval Europe examines the daily reality of medieval women from all walks of life in Europe between 450 CE and 1500 CE. This reference work provides a comprehensive understanding of many aspects of medieval women and gender, such as art, economics, law, literature, sexuality, politics, philosophy and religion, as well as the daily lives of ordinary women. Masculinity in the middle ages is also addressed to provide important context for understanding women's roles. Additional up-to-date bibliographies have been included for the 2016 reprint. Written by renowned international scholars and easily accessible in an A-to-Z format, students, researchers, and scholars will find this outstanding reference work to be a valuable resource on women in Medieval Europe.

Medieval European literature was once thought to have been isolationist in its nature, but recent scholarship has revealed the ways in which Spanish and Italian authors – including Cervantes and Marco Polo – were influenced by Arabic poetry, music, and philosophy. A Sea of Languages brings together some of the most influential scholars working in Muslim-Christian-Jewish cultural communications today to discuss the convergence of the literary, social, and economic histories of the medieval Mediterranean. This volume takes as a starting point María Rosa Menocal's groundbreaking work The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History, a major catalyst in the reconsideration of prevailing assumptions regarding the insularity of medieval European literature. Reframing ongoing debates within literary studies in dynamic new ways, A Sea of Languages will become a critical resource and reference point for a new generation of scholars and students on the intersection of Arabic and European literature.