This study offers a typology of the go-between across key texts from antiquity and several medieval literary traditions, analyzing the role of the third party in the poetics of love. The work provides the indispensable context for the study of the significant transformations undergone by the go-between. Legal and scientific sources are taken into account alongside Latin, French, and English literary works and literature of the medieval Islamic period for the critique of differences and intertextual links which inform the conception of the go-between. The case of the Medieval Spanish go-between is given a special attention due to the figure's complex relationship with diverse traditions. The range covered in the work provides a comprehensive view of the figure's trajectory and representation in each text.

This book explores the rich, complex, literary tradition of the medieval go-between. Idealized going between usually leads to marriage and it develops a new dimension of the much debated question of courtly love and woman's part in it. Chaucer's Pandarus's place in this go-between tradition is a tour de force.

"Mediating Fictions examines the variety of strategies that these authors use to deprecate women healers, and in the process, to create early modern "others" to whom the ideal, male physician could be contrasted. Spill, La Celestina, and La Lozana andaluza all attempt to dissuade their readers from seeking the healing service of ordinary women."--BOOK JACKET.

This new Companion introduces the most important medieval vernacular literary genre in Britain and continental Europe.

Love at a Crux presents the emergence of versified love stories in the New Persian language as a crucial event in the history of romance. Using the tale of Vis & Rāmin (w. 1054) as its focal point, the book explores how Persian court poets in the eleventh century reconfigured "myths" and "fables" from the distant past in ways that transformed the love story from a form of evening entertainment to a method of ethical, political, and affective self-inquiry. This transformation both anticipates and helps to explain the efflorescence of romance in many medieval cultures across the western flank of Afro-Eurasia. Bringing together traditions that are often sundered by modern disciplinary boundaries, Love at a Crux unearths the interconnections between New Persian and comparable traditions in ancient and medieval Greek, Arabic, Georgian, Old French, and Middle High German, offering scholars in classics, medieval studies, Middle Eastern literatures, and premodern world literature a case study in literary history as connected history.

This is the first comprehensive resource on the subject of love in the teachings of the world's major religions, cultures, and philosophies. Encyclopedia of Love in World Religions is the first reference work to offer a comprehensive portrait of love in the context of the classic and contemporary literature of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism, as well as other cultures and philosophies. Like no volume published to date, it reveals the full richness of religious teachings on love in all its many forms, exploring an extensive range of topics that offer philosophical, psychological, and religious perspectives to guide the quest for the meaning of love. Encyclopedia of Love in World Religions features approximately 300 subject entries, as well as insightful biographic sketches of preeminent thinkers, all written by a multidisciplinary team of some of the foremost scholars on the subject. Entries examine both general and culture-specific interpretations of love: not just the dichotomy of spiritual and physical love, but the full emotional spectrum of love in relationships and practices. Collectively, they encompass love's integral—and sometimes conflicting—role in shaping beliefs and behavior in a vastly diverse world.

The essays in this volume reflect the wide-ranging interests of John D. North, distinguished historian of science and philosophy. They take up various themes to which he has made important contributions: the development of scientific knowledge and methodology, the style of scientific and philosophical thought, and the uses of scientific knowledge in the making of instruments or the casting of horoscopes. These essays will be of much interest to all historians of science and philosophy.

After an extensive introduction that takes stock of the relevant research literature on Old Age in the Middle Ages and the early modern age, the contributors discuss the phenomenon of old age in many different fields of late antique, medieval, and early modern literature, history, and art history. Both Beowulf and the Hildebrandslied, both Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival and Titurel, both the figure of Merlin and the trans-European tradition of Perceval/Peredur/Parzival, then the figure of the vetula in a variety of medieval French, English, and Spanish texts, and of the Old Man in The Stricker's Daniel, both the treatment of old age in Langland's Piers the Plowman and in Jean Gerson's sermons are dealt with. Other aspects involve late-antique epistolary literature, early modern French farce in light of Disability Studies, the social role of old, impotent men in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Netherlandish paintings, and the scientific discourse of old age and health since the 1500s. The discourse of Old Age proves to have been of central importance throughout the ages, so the critical examination of the issues involved sheds intriguing light on the cultural history from late antiquity to the seventeenth century.

Queering the Medieval Mediterranean analyzes the forgotten exchange of sexualities that was brought forth through the Mediterranean and its bordering landmasses. It highlights the importance of queerness and sexuality developed on the Mediterranean trade routes.