English translation of a variety of texts from women's books of hours, with introduction, notes, and an interpretive essay. The book of hours is said to have been the most popular book owned by the laity in the later Middle Ages. This volume brings together a selection of texts taken from books of hours known to have been owned by women. While some will be familiar from bibles or prayer-books, others have to be sought in specialist publications, often embedded in other material, and a few have not until now been available at all in modern editions or translations. The texts arecomplemented by an introduction setting the book of hours in its context, an interpretive essay, glossary and annotated bibliography.

Offering original analysis of the convergence between 'sacred' and 'secular' in medieval works of art and architecture, this collection explores both the usefulness and limitations of these terms for describing medieval attitudes. The modern concepts of 'sacred' and 'secular' are shown to be effective as scholarly tools, but also to risk imposing false dichotomies. The authors consider medieval material culture from a broad perspective, addressing works of art and architecture from England to Japan, and from the seventh to the fifteenth century. Although the essays take a variety of methodological approaches they are unified in their emphasis on the continuing and necessary dialectic between sacred and secular. The contributors consciously frame their interpretations in terms and perspectives derived from the Middle Ages, thereby demonstrating how the present art-historical terminology and conceptual frameworks can obscure the complexity of medieval life and material culture. The resonance among essays opens possibilities for productive cross-cultural study of an issue that is relevant to a diversity of cultures and sub-periods. Introducing an innovative approach to the literature of the field, this volume complicates and enriches our understanding of social realities across a broad spectrum of medieval worlds.

What do they all mean – the lascivious ape, autophagic dragons, pot-bellied heads, harp-playing asses, arse-kissing priests and somersaulting jongleurs to be found protruding from the edges of medieval buildings and in the margins of illuminated manuscripts? Michael Camille explores that riotous realm of marginal art, so often explained away as mere decoration or zany doodles, where resistance to social constraints flourished. Medieval image-makers focused attention on the underside of society, the excluded and the ejected. Peasants, servants, prostitutes and beggars all found their place, along with knights and clerics, engaged in impudent antics in the margins of prayer-books or, as gargoyles, on the outsides of churches. Camille brings us to an understanding of how marginality functioned in medieval culture and shows us just how scandalous, subversive, and amazing the art of the time could be.

Late Medieval and Renaissance art was surprisingly pushy; its architecture demanded that people move through it in prescribed patterns, its sculptures played elaborate games alternating between concealment and revelation, while its paintings charged viewers with imaginatively moving through them. Viewers wanted to interact with artwork in emotional and/or performative ways. This inventive and personal interface between viewers and artists sometimes conflicted with the Church s prescribed devotional models, and in some cases it complemented them. Artists and patrons responded to the desire for both spontaneous and sanctioned interactions by creating original ways to amplify devotional experiences. The authors included here study the provocation and the reactions associated with medieval and Renaissance art and architecture. These essays trace the impetus towards interactivity from the points of view of their creators and those who used them.Contributors include: Mickey Abel, Alfred Acres, Kathleen Ashley, Viola Belghaus, Sarah Blick, Erika Boeckeler, Robert L.A. Clark, Lloyd DeWitt, Michelle Erhardt, Megan H. Foster-Campbell, Juan Luis González García, Laura D. Gelfand, Elina Gertsman, Walter S. Gibson, Margaret Goehring, Lex Hermans, Fredrika Jacobs, Annette LeZotte, Jane C. Long, Henry Luttikhuizen, Elizabeth Monroe, Scott B. Montgomery, Amy M. Morris, Vibeke Olson, Katherine Poole, Alexa Sand, Donna L. Sadler, Pamela Sheingorn, Suzanne Karr Schmidt, Anne Rudloff Stanton, Janet Snyder, Rita Tekippe, Mark Trowbridge, Mark S. Tucker, Kristen Van Ausdall, Susan Ward.

Described by Christopher Marlowe as the 'She-Wolf of France', Isabella was one of the most notorious femme fatales in history. According to popular legend, her angry ghost can be glimpsed among church ruins, clutching the beating heart of her murdered husband. But how did Isabella aquire this reputation? Born in 1292 she married Edward II of England but was constantly humiliated by his relationships with male favourites and she lived adulterously with Roger Mortimer, 1st Earl of March. Had it not been for her unfaithfulness, history might have immortalised her as a liberator- the saviour who unshackled England from a weak and vicious monarch. Dramatic and startling this first full-length biography of Isabella will change the way we think of her and her world forever.

BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from Alison Weir's Mary Boleyn. In this vibrant biography, acclaimed author Alison Weir reexamines the life of Isabella of England, one of history’s most notorious and charismatic queens. Isabella arrived in London in 1308, the spirited twelve-year-old daughter of King Philip IV of France. Her marriage to the heir to England’s throne was designed to heal old political wounds between the two countries, and in the years that followed she became an important figure, a determined and clever woman whose influence would come to last centuries. Many myths and legends have been woven around Isabella’s story, but in this first full biography in more than 150 years, Alison Weir gives a groundbreaking new perspective.

Emma O. Bérat shows the centrality of women's legacies to medieval political and literary thought in chronicles, hagiography, and genealogy.

Women as patrons of the arts: their social status, the sources of their wealth and their motives, together with an examination of the various artefacts which they commissioned.

The author is Helen Gould Sheppard Professor of Art History at New York University , Institute of Fine Arts, and a leading authority on English medieval manuscript illumination. This volume bring together twenty-six of Professor Sandler's studies, focusing on illustrated manuscripts produced in England in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, particularly on the illuminated psalters. The marginal illustrations in these psalters are a topic of particular interest, and there are a number of iconographic studies derived from this material. A separate section deals with the illustrated encyclopedias of the period, particularly the Omne bonum.

Never before have the women of the Capetian royal dynasty in France been the subject of a study in their own right. The new research in Capetian Women challenges old paradigms about the restricted roles of royal women, uncovering their influence in social, religious, cultural and even political spheres. The scholars in the volume consider medieval chroniclers' responses to the independent actions of royal women as well as modern historians' use of them as vehicles for constructing the past. The essays also delineate the creation of reginal identity through cultural practices such as religious patronage and the commissioning of manuscripts, tomb sculpture, and personal seals.