The 59th International Congress on Medieval Studies will take place in a hybrid format Thursday, May 9, through Saturday, May 11, 2024. Find Manchester University Press at Booth 25! You can meet Senior Commissioning Editor Siobhan Pool to discuss all things medieval and commissioning.
You can get 30% off our reading list below using the code ICMS30 for 30% at checkout.
$37.95
£25.00
This study investigates justice and mercy in twelfth-century England, using theological texts, sermons, legal treatises and letter collections to explore how moralists approached questions of judgement and judicial ethics in the foundational period of English common law.
$24.95
£16.99
This book surveys contemporary responses to the Black Death. The sources illustrate the fear that spread with the disease and the diverse ways that such terror influenced social behaviour.
$45.95
£30.00
Tower houses are the definitive building of medieval Ireland. This study investigates their significant social role, which has previously gone underappreciated. Innovative conclusions stem from an interdisciplinary methodology that demonstrates the interconnectedness of society, economics and the environment in medieval culture.
$45.95
£30.00
This book examines the 'fall of the angels' tradition in early medieval sermons, saints' lives, legal documents and Old English biblical poetry. It argues that Anglo-Saxon authors adapted apocryphal and patristic accounts in ways that allowed them to express their ideas concerning ecclesiastical and secular power.
Monastic experience in twelfth-century Germany
$29.95
£20.00
This first English translation of the twelfth-century Chronicle of Petershausen offers an intimate and colourful view of traditional monastic life against the backdrop of contemporary interactions with bishops and lay patrons, the process of monastic reform, and the local and supra-regional disruption driven by the struggle over investiture.
$36.95
£25.00
This volume is the first to study the phenomenon of early medieval militarisation from a wide geographic and disciplinary perspective. It explores the impact of an enhanced role attributed to warfare and the military as characteristic features of a European world in the process of becoming medieval.
$37.95
£25.00
Drawing on the devotional culture of John of FĂ©camp's Norman monastery, Emotional monasticism exposes the monastic roots of medieval affective piety, casts a new light on the devotional life of monks in Europe before the twelfth century and redefines how medievalists should teach the history of Christian devotion.
$44.95
£29.99
This unique textbook introduces undergraduate students to medieval historiography, providing an entry point for the dense scholarship on the period. Volume I covers the post-Roman world, from 450 to 1050.
$37.95
£25.00
The book argues that the temporal privilege of the medieval masks the extent to which the medieval and medievalistic are mutually constitutive and ultimately dependent not on absolutist epistemological claims but on how feelings and temperaments affect the way we approach the Middle Ages.
$45.95
£30.00
Dating Beowulf explores the difficulties and pleasures of intimacy with Beowulf -philological and speculative, playful and serious - and how they organise themselves in an array of interrelated critical practices. Opening avenues for future work, it complicates urgent questions in the discourses of literary theory and Old English studies.
$45.95
£30.00
This book examines major literary texts by and about the Irish in the Middle Ages, providing an analysis of a spatial poetics developed over 600 years. It argues that the Irish theorised anew the concept of 'place' and developed a 'spatial turn' that reconfigured how communities in the Irish Sea region thought about writing, place and identity.
$18.95
£12.99
A practical guide to digital history, which shows just how much can be done without writing any code. This book will give researchers in history or related fields the skills and confidence to approach existing digital resources and to create their own. Assuming no prior knowledge, the guide focuses on hands-on techniques for working with text.
$130.00
£85.00
Transfiguring medievalism explores medieval literature, modern poetry and theologies both medieval and modern to show how bodies can become apparent to the attentive eye as more than they first appear. Bringing together medieval sources with modern lyric medievalism, the book argues for the surprising porousness of time and flesh.
The gift of narrative in medieval England
$36.95
£25.00
This critical study of medieval English romances uses ideas from anthropology and critical theories of the gift to shed light on narratives ranging from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. Written in a style accessible for students as well as scholars, it engages with questions about storytelling, agency, gender and material objects.
Roger II and the creation of the Kingdom of Sicily
$37.95
£25.00
This student-friendly volume brings together English translations of the main narrative sources, and a small number of other relevant documents, for the reign of Roger II, the founder of the kingdom of Sicily.
$29.95
£19.99
A source reader covering the first twenty years (1377-97) of Richard II's reign. Includes well-known English chronicles, foreign chronicles, and legal, administrative and financial records with clear and lively commentary and notes to enable readers to make the fullest use of each document.
Riddles at work in the early medieval tradition
$36.95
£25.00
The first collection devoted solely to early medieval riddles, Riddles at work showcases recent research in this popular, new field. It brings together studies of Old English and Latin riddles, authors at various stages of their careers and a range of approaches, aiming to map out both the state of the field now and its future directions.
$36.95
£26.00
This book explores rural societies in western Europe from 700-1050. It focuses on the bottom of the social hierarchy, rejectingviews that see rural society exclusively through the structures of lordship and challenging the teleological idea of the residential group as the prototype of the late-medieval structured community.
Rethinking the Carolingian reforms
$36.95
£25.00
This book sets out to challenge current interpretations of Carolingian culture, and especially its perceived correctio (correction), reform or renaissance. When we consider authors who operated outside the direct sphere of influence of the court, a much more dynamic image of Carolingian culture comes into view.
Borrowed objects and the art of poetry
$29.95
£20.00
This study uses examinations of Exeter riddles, Old English religious verse and Beowulf to formulate the poetics of spolia - creative transformations of martial and architectural plunder serving to signal metatextual reflection.
History through material culture
$18.95
£12.99
Material culture is central to human experience and represents a vital but under-used source for historians. Written in a lively and accessible style, this guide provides clear and practical guidance on how to incorporate the study of objects into historical practice.
Approaches to emotion in Middle English literature
$130.00
£85.00
A significant new account of emotion in Middle English literature, proposing key methodologies for the analysis of feeling and affect in literary texts. It shows how contemporary audiences learned to understand emotion in themselves and others, through empathetic response, the development of fictionality and the emergence of interiority.
$130.00
£85.00
An important re-theorisation of medieval gender and anti-Semitism, centring biblical drama as a source of evidence for lay attitudes towards scriptural time. Interrogating the Christian preoccupation with a superseded Jewish past, the book asks how this model is subverted by characters who experience time differently.
$140.00
£90.00
The chapters of Painful pleasures offer new and worthwhile pathways of examination into medieval culture and invite further analyses into the kinkier side of human sexualities, a side that in fact could not be more central to a study of our culture.
$36.95
£25.00
Bestsellers and masterpieces: The changing medieval canon offers a comparative critique of the development of the 'modern canon' of medieval literature across European and Middle Eastern medieval studies.
White before whiteness in the late Middle Ages
$81.95
£55.00
This ground-breaking book analyses premodern whiteness as operations of fragility, precarity and racialicity across bodily and nonsomatic figurations. It argues that the 'before' of whiteness is less a retro-futuristic temporisation than a set of strategies and discursive praxes that produce and yet delimit a range of medieval ideological regimes.
International law in Europe, 700-1200
$36.95
£25.00
Was there international law in the Middle Ages? This book examines the extent to which such a system of rules was known and followed in the period 700 to 1200. Taking treaties as its main source, it challenges traditional interpretations of the history of international law and how it functioned in a period before fully fledged nation states.
Literatures of the Hundred Years War
$36.95
£25.00
This volume demonstrates how the Hundred Years War (1337-1453) provides a necessary context for late-medieval literature. It shows how war impacted the lives and works of major writers like Geoffrey Chaucer, Christine de Pizan, and Catherine of Siena, while also arguing for a transnational approach that moves beyond the Anglo-French core.
$140.00
£90.00
This book shows how early drama traditions were transformed, re-used and reformed across time to form new relationships with their audiences. Medieval Afterlives offers insight into how sixteenth-century people understood and adapted performance spaces, stage technologies, characterisation, and popular dramatic tropes.
The reign of Edward II, 1307-27
$33.95
£22.99
This volume presents a concise history of the reign of Edward II, as well as essential sources in translation that allow for comparison of the scattered evidence available from this significant period in English history.
$130.00
£85.00
Practicing shame explores how the literature of medieval England encouraged women to secure their honour by cultivating hypervigilance against shame. The book transforms our understanding of the construction of femininity in the past and offers a new framework for thinking about honourable womanhood now and in the years to come.
Marian maternity in late-medieval England
$130.00
£85.00
Long takes advantage of the fifteenth century's intense interest in the Virgin Mary, the best-documented mother of the medieval period, to examine the constructions and performances of her maternity in devotional texts. This results in revisionist readings that consider maternity as a literate practice and devotional literacy as a maternal one.
Approaching the Bible in medieval England
$29.95
£19.99
Traces how the Bible came to be known by lay people through different mediums. It brings together intellectual and religious history with art history, music, literature and social history to trace how the Bible was sung and preached, revered and studied in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century England.
$37.95
£25.00
Immigrant England tells the story of thousands of people who migrated to later medieval England. The book draws on uniquely rich evidence about the lives of these men and women, and analyses the attitudes of the English to the foreigners in their midst. Essential reading for everyone interested in the historical dimensions of modern debates.
Enacting the Bible in medieval and early modern drama
$130.00
£85.00
The thirteen chapters in this collection open up new horizons for the study of biblical drama by putting special emphasis on multitemporality, the intersections of biblical narrative and performance, and the strategies employed by playwrights to rework and adapt the biblical source material in Catholic, Protestant and Jewish culture.
$52.95
£35.00
A unique collection that offers fresh and original perspectives on some of the most important themes in Frankish history
$130.00
£85.00
This book explores rural societies in western Europe from 700-1050. It focuses on the bottom of the social hierarchy, rejectingviews that see rural society exclusively through the structures of lordship and challenging the teleological idea of the residential group as the prototype of the late-medieval structured community.
$29.95
£19.99
This book examines the relationship between the Capetian monarchs of France and the Crusades, and considers the challenge to political authority that confronted them following their failure to join the early crusades, and their less-than-impressive involvement in later ones.
$37.95
£25.00
Explores and explains stories about the mythic outlaw, who from the middle ages to the present stands up for the values of natural law and true justice.
$130.00
£85.00
This study works with texts in Old English, Middle English and Latin, as well as material and visual culture, to explore how representations of the past created in the British Middle Ages have been reimagined in modernity.
$120.00
£80.00
Assembles a diverse range of texts to encourage and facilitate the study of medieval towns - a fresh incentive following the collapse of the city-based Roman Empire, shaped by the cultural and commercial currents of the time.
$140.00
£90.00
Brings together the latest international research on a crucial figure for all those interested in early medieval European history in general, and Carolingian history in particular.
Heresy and inquisition in France, 1200-1300
$140.00
£90.00
Exposes the inner workings of inquisitions in medieval France through expert translations of primary sources.
Borrowed objects and the art of poetry
$130.00
£85.00
This study uses examinations of Exeter riddles, Old English religious verse and Beowulf to formulate the poetics of spolia - creative transformations of martial and architectural plunder serving to signal metatextual reflection.
The church as sacred space in Middle English literature and culture
$37.95
£25.00
This book places us at the heart of medieval religious life, standing inside the church with the medieval laity in order to ask what it meant to them and why. Drawing on a wide range of theoretical and interdisciplinary approaches, it examines the interplay of vernacular literature, ritual and material culture at the centre of parish life.
Hermits and anchorites in England, 1200-1550
$29.95
£19.99
This book provides an unprecedented range of sources for the solitary life in late-medieval England, including many that have never before been published, alongside a scholarly introduction and commentary by one of the foremost experts in the field.
Medieval women and urban justice
$36.95
£25.00
This is the first in-depth, comparative study of women's access to justice in medieval English towns. It compares the records of Nottingham, Chester and Winchester and a wide range of legal actions to highlight the variable nature of women's legal status in actions that arose from the complex, messy ties of everyday life.
The annals of Lampert of Hersfeld
$120.00
£80.00
Lampert is widely regarded as 'the unrivalled master among medieval historians' and 'a superb story-teller', noted for his vivid characterisation and narrative. This English translation of his work is of the greatest value to teachers and students of medieval history and also of interest to the general reader of European literature.
$130.00
£85.00
Difficult Pastscombines book history, reception history and theories of cultural memory to explore how Reformation-era audiences used medieval literary texts to construct their own national and religious identities. In doing so, it challenges narratives that separate manuscript and print, Catholic and Protestant, or medieval and Renaissance.
$140.00
£90.00
This book investigates the role of 'texts' - including books, maps, stones and caskets - in the conveyance and transformation of knowledge throughout the Middle Ages. It contains original contributions by top medievalists, who explore the topic from different yet complementary angles, offering interdisciplinary approaches to a variety of subjects.
The reign of Edward II, 1307-27
$130.00
£85.00
This volume presents a concise history of the reign of Edward II, as well as essential sources in translation that allow for comparison of the scattered evidence available from this significant period in English history.
$130.00
£85.00
This is the most complete translation ever attempted of these moral tales, and will be a valuable source text for all scholars and students of medieval literature.
The divorce of King Lothar and Queen Theutberga
$37.95
£25.00
The first published translation of Hincmar's treatise - a key source for studying ninth-century political history and the ideology of kingship.
The Knight and the Barrel (Le Chevalier au barisel)
$130.00
£85.00
This is the first English translation of the canonical Old French text Le Chevalier au barisel. It includes the original text and a facing-page translation, as well as an extensive introduction and notes.
$130.00
£85.00
This volume looks at how Leif Eiriksson's visit to Vinland around the year 1000 has been reimagined in the modern era, taking on a range of media from scholarly works on history and mythology to novels, films and comic books. More broadly, it asks why medieval contact has become a modern cultural touchstone.
$130.00
£85.00
This study investigates the 'exceptional' staging of the life of Catherine of Siena by a female actor and a female patron in 1468 Metz. Integrating new approaches to drama, gender and patronage, it offers an original paradigm of female performance that positions women at the core of public culture.
$140.00
£90.00
A groundbreaking, interdisciplinary study of roads and wayfinding in medieval England, Wales, and Scotland. It looks afresh at the relationship between the road as a material condition of daily life and the formation of local and national communities.
Confronting crisis in the Carolingian empire
$37.95
£25.00
This is the translation of an extraordinary and enigmatic narrative of Carolingian history, which should interest historians of politics, religion and literature in equal measure. Radbertus' 'Epitaph for Arsenius' is both a personal and a political text, written with twenty years of hindsight, by an author is also an actor in his own work.
$37.95
£25.00
This book examines one hundred years of historical debate on the English peasantry in the later Middle Ages, exploring the influences and changes to peasantry society, economy and culture.
$130.00
£85.00
The heat of Beowulf reexamines the aesthetics of the longest surviving Old English poem through the poetics of twentieth-century poets Jack Spicer, arguing that the aesthetics of Beowulf entangle vulnerable human corporeality in the non-human world, rendering perceptible what otherwise remains insensible.
The illusion of the Burgundian state
$36.95
£25.00
This innovative book explores Burgundian history and historiography while offering a complete synthesis covering the nature of politics in medieval Europe and the formation of the medieval state.
Heresy and inquisition in France, 1200-1300
$37.95
£25.00
Exposes the inner workings of inquisitions in medieval France through expert translations of primary sources.
$29.95
£19.99
Assembles a diverse range of texts to encourage and facilitate the study of medieval towns - a fresh incentive following the collapse of the city-based Roman Empire, shaped by the cultural and commercial currents of the time.
$37.95
£25.00
Brings together the latest international research on a key medieval writer and thinker
$130.00
£85.00
This is the first book in English to provide a comprehensive examination of the hospital movement that arose and prospered in northern Italy between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries.
$120.00
£80.00
Immigrant England tells the story of thousands of people who migrated to later medieval England. The book draws on uniquely rich evidence about the lives of these men and women, and analyses the attitudes of the English to the foreigners in their midst. Essential reading for everyone interested in the historical dimensions of modern debates.
Rethinking the Carolingian reforms
$140.00
£90.00
This book sets out to challenge current interpretations of Carolingian culture, and especially its perceived correctio (correction), reform or renaissance. When we consider authors who operated outside the direct sphere of influence of the court, a much more dynamic image of Carolingian culture comes into view.
$36.95
£25.00
This study investigates the affective agency of the book, through the emotional literacy training that a single codex provided a late-medieval English household. It demonstrates how MS Ashmole 61 affirms both the physical and moral agency of nonhumans, who fashion spiritually generous and socially mindful human household members.
The narrative grotesque in medieval Scottish poetry
$120.00
£85.00
The narrative grotesque introduces a new framework for reading medieval texts that rupture conventional poetic boundaries and create unsettling fusions of poetic forms and narratological subjectivities.
$130.00
£85.00
Drawing on the devotional culture of John of FĂ©camp's Norman monastery, Emotional monasticism exposes the monastic roots of medieval affective piety, casts a new light on the devotional life of monks in Europe before the twelfth century and redefines how medievalists should teach the history of Christian devotion.
Household knowledges in late-medieval England and France
$130.00
£85.00
This book examines how the late-medieval household acted as a sorter, user and disseminator of information. Considering the reciprocal relationship between the domestic experience and its cultural expression, contributors provide a fresh illustration of the imaginative scope of the late-medieval home and its centrality to cultural production.
The politics of Middle English parables
$130.00
£85.00
This study explores how writers reconciled provocative biblical stories with late-medieval culture. Highlighting the many variations and points of conflict across renditions of the same story, the book unfolds a creative theological discourse through which writers attempted to re-construct Christian belief and practice.
$130.00
£85.00
This book works from the premise that the tremendous diversity of Old English medical texts requires an equally diverse range of interpretative methodologies. Taking a case study approach, it offers close readings tailored to individual remedies, drawing from biology, rhetoric, archaeology, folkloristics and disability studies.
$36.95
£25.00
This book addresses the vexed status of literary value, focusing on everyday scholarly and pedagogical activities, using Chaucer studies as a case in point. It explores how we may reconcile literary value's inevitability with its uncertainties and complicities, seeking to forge a viable rationale for literary studies generally.
$89.95
£60.00
Bede the Scholar distils a decade of research by leading scholars on the Northumbrian monk, the Venerable Bede (c. 673-735). Considering his place within the wider intellectual developments of the early medieval world, the book demonstrates the centrality of the Bible to Bede's writings and the coherence and clarity of his scholarly programme.
Jacopo da Varagine's Chronicle of the city of Genoa
$37.95
£25.00
This is the first English translation of Jacopo da Varagine's Chronicle of the city of Genoa. It broadens the available literature in English on medieval Italian urban life, providing an engaging introduction to medieval Genoa, civic culture, Dominican composition and the 'historical Jacopo'.
$130.00
£85.00
Bestsellers and masterpieces: The changing medieval canon offers a comparative critique of the development of the 'modern canon' of medieval literature across European and Middle Eastern medieval studies.
The gift of narrative in medieval England
$130.00
£85.00
This critical study of medieval English romances uses ideas from anthropology and critical theories of the gift to shed light on narratives ranging from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. Written in a style accessible for students as well as scholars, it engages with questions about storytelling, agency, gender and material objects.
Writing the Welsh borderlands in Anglo-Saxon England
$37.95
£25.00
An ambitious book which argues that the March of Wales, as it existed as a legally defined space in the period after 1066, had a long pre-history as a place of encounter and interchange from the early Anglo-Saxon period. It is argued that this frontier space was not inevitably a zone of ethnic conflict, but one where hybrid identities could exist.
Encountering The Book of Margery Kempe
$36.95
£25.00
This innovative volume harnesses the interdisciplinarity and flexibility of 'encounter' to provide dynamic readings The Book of Margery Kempe in the twenty-first century. Incorporating thirteen original chapters and a critical introduction, it offers myriad exciting approaches to this important and ever-surprising medieval text.
The illusion of the Burgundian state
$140.00
£90.00
This innovative book explores Burgundian history and historiography while offering a complete synthesis covering the nature of politics in medieval Europe and the formation of the medieval state.
$130.00
£90.00
Medieval literary voices explores literary voice in relation to its authorial, scribal and socio-political settings. It reveals how literary voices evoke voices lurking beyond the text - the absent authorial voice, the traces of scribal voices and the aural soundscape of the uttered text - and how they mediate embodied life and material presence.
$140.00
£90.00
This volume on Norman Italy (southern Italy and Sicily, c. 1000-1200) honours the pioneering scholarship of Graham A. Loud. An international group of scholars reassesses the paradigm by which Norman Italy has been understood, addressing subjects across four key themes: historiographies, identities and communities, religion and Church, and conquest.
$130.00
£85.00
The book argues that the temporal privilege of the medieval masks the extent to which the medieval and medievalistic are mutually constitutive and ultimately dependent not on absolutist epistemological claims but on how feelings and temperaments affect the way we approach the Middle Ages.
$120.00
£80.00
This unique textbook introduces undergraduate students to medieval historiography, providing an entry point for the dense scholarship on the period. Volume I covers the post-Roman world, from 450 to 1050.
$130.00
£85.00
This book examines the 'fall of the angels' tradition in early medieval sermons, saints' lives, legal documents and Old English biblical poetry. It argues that Anglo-Saxon authors adapted apocryphal and patristic accounts in ways that allowed them to express their ideas concerning ecclesiastical and secular power.
$130.00
£85.00
This book examines major literary texts by and about the Irish in the Middle Ages, providing an analysis of a spatial poetics developed over 600 years. It argues that the Irish theorised anew the concept of 'place' and developed a 'spatial turn' that reconfigured how communities in the Irish Sea region thought about writing, place and identity.
Annotated Chaucer bibliography
$130.00
£85.00
An extremely thorough, expertly compiled and crisply annotated comprehensive bibliography of Chaucer scholarship between 1997 and 2010
$45.95
£30.00
Examines the teaching of the theology of Christ's ascension in Anglo-Saxon literature, offering the only comprehensive examination of how patristic ascension theology is transmitted, adapted and taught to Anglo-Saxon audiences
Confronting crisis in the Carolingian empire
$120.00
£80.00
This is the translation of an extraordinary and enigmatic narrative of Carolingian history, which should interest historians of politics, religion and literature in equal measure. Radbertus' 'Epitaph for Arsenius' is both a personal and a political text, written with twenty years of hindsight, by an author is also an actor in his own work.
$130.00
£85.00
This book examines the relationship between the Capetian monarchs of France and the Crusades, and considers the challenge to political authority that confronted them following their failure to join the early crusades, and their less-than-impressive involvement in later ones.
$140.00
£90.00
This new collection of translations represents the first attempt to offer a representative sample of Wyclif's Latin works in translation in a single volume.
Northern memories and the English Middle Ages
$130.00
£85.00
This book argues that the image of medieval England created by writers of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries was deeply informed by medieval and modern Scandinavia. Protestant and monarchical, the Scandinavian region became an image of Britain's noble past and an affirmation of its current global status.
$120.00
£80.00
This book examines one hundred years of historical debate on the English peasantry in the later Middle Ages, exploring the influences and changes to peasantry society, economy and culture.
Sleep and its spaces in Middle English literature
$130.00
£85.00
This book shows how sleep and the spaces in which it takes place animate ethical codes and emotive scripts, shaping a range of medieval English genres. In particular, it demonstrates the significance of sleep-related motifs to Middle English romance and offers a more embodied understanding of dream visions by Chaucer, Langland and the Pearl-poet.
Writing the Welsh borderlands in Anglo-Saxon England
$130.00
£85.00
An ambitious book which argues that the March of Wales, as it existed as a legally defined space in the period after 1066, had a long pre-history as a place of encounter and interchange from the early Anglo-Saxon period. It is argued that this frontier space was not inevitably a zone of ethnic conflict, but one where hybrid identities could exist.