To read accounts of late medieval banquets is to enter a fantastic world where live lions guard nude statues, gilded stags burst into song, and musicians play from within pies. Such vivid works of art and performance required collaboration among arti...

Gratuitous sex. Graphic violence. Lies, revenge, and murder. Before there was digital cable or reality television, there was Renaissance Italy and the courts in which Italian magistrates meted out justice to the vicious and the villainous, the scabro...

During the Middle Ages in Europe, some sexual and gendered behaviors were labeled "sodomitical"‌ or evoked the use of ambiguous phrases such as the "unmentionable vice" or the "sin against nature". How, though, did these categories enter the field of...

In "Jews, Christians, and the Abode of Islam", Jacob Lassner examines the triangular relationship that during the Middle Ages defined – and continues to define today – the political and cultural interaction among the three Abrahamic faiths. Lassner l...

There have been numerous studies in recent decades of the medieval inquisitions, most emphasizing larger social and political circumstances and neglecting the role of the inquisitors themselves. In this volume, Karen Sullivan sheds much-needed light...

In the late Middle Ages, Europe saw the rise of one of its most virulent myths: that Jews abused the eucharistic bread as a form of anti-Christian blasphemy, causing it to bleed miraculously. The allegation fostered tensions between Christians and Je...

The thirteenth century saw such a proliferation of new encyclopedic texts that more than one scholar has called it the "century of the encyclopedias". Variously referred to as a "speculum", "thesaurus", or "imago mundi" – the term encyclopedia was no...

When eight-year-old Lucrezia Orsina Vizzana (1590-1662) entered one of the preeminent convents in Bologna in 1598, she had no idea what cloistered life had in store for her. Thanks to clandestine instruction from a local maestro di cappella – and des...

"Authoring the Past" surveys medieval Catalan historiography, shedding light on the emergence and evolution of historical writing and autobiography in the Middle Ages, on questions of authority and authorship, and on the links between history and pol...

Witchcraft. Arson. Going AWOL. Some nuns in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy strayed far from the paradigms of monastic life. Cloistered in convents, subjected to stifling hierarchy, repressed, and occasionally persecuted by their male superi...