This study traces how medieval audiences judge bodies from Doomsday visions to beauty contests. Employing cultural and formalist approaches, this study breaks new ground on the historical obsession about ends and changes, reflected in different genres spanning several hundred years.

This book is an innovative study of humour and the body in Juan Ruiz's Libro de Buen Amor (1330), using modern analytical techniques to examine the place of the Libro's bawdy and grotesque in relation to secular and sacred culture.

This study explores the extraordinary afterlife of the Spanish legend of King Roderick and La Cava in plays, poems, novels and operas from the Eighth century to the present day.

This book uses the methodologies of cultural studies and the history of the book to show how editors and readers of the Sixteenth through the early Nineteenth century successively remade Piers Plowman and its author according to their own ideologies of the Middle Ages.

This collection examines the cultural and intellectual dimensions of war and its resolution between Han Chinese and the various ethnically dissimilar peoples surrounding them during the crucial 'middle period' of Chinese history.

Bringing the skills of a literary historian to the subject, Brian Moloney considers the genesis of Saint Francis of Assisi's Canticle of Brother Sun to show how it works as a carefully composed work of art. The study examines the saint's life and times, the structure of the poem, the features of its style, and the range of its possible meanings.

Analyzing the renowned Saint Birgitta of Sweden from the perspectives of power, authority, and gender, this probing study investigates how Birgitta went about establishing her influence during the first ten years of her career as a living saint, in 1340–1349.

The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were times of tumultuous change in medieval Europe; they witnessed the Black Death, the Great Papal Schism, heightened fears of the apocalypse, and the elimination of Spain's non-Christian population. Few figures were as widely and as intimately involved in late medieval Europe's struggles as Saint Vincent Ferrer. Perhaps the foremost preacher of his day, Ferrer spent the final two decades of his life traversing Europe, preparing the world for its imminent destruction. Saint Vincent Ferrer (d. 1419), His World and Life reassesses the controversial preacher's motives, methods, and impact, tracing Ferrer's journey from obscure logician to angel of the apocalypse, as he came to be known. At the same time, the book offers new insights into the depth and breadth of late medieval apocalyptic anticipation, and into the processes that ultimately led to the expulsions of Spain's Jews and Muslims.

Strange Beauty provides a new perspective on early Celtic stories of the Otherworld and their relevance to today's ecological concerns, arguing for a contemporary re-reading of the Otherworld trope in relation to physical experience.

This book presents waste as an aesthetic category that introduces an arsy-versy world where detritus is precious. This aesthetic is applied in the second part to etymology, poking through the 'paternal dungheaps' of words, and tracing their origins not to Eden but to Babel, puns, and word play.