by Roberta L. Krueger (1993)
This study focusses on the relationship between Old French verse romances and the women who formed a part of their audience, and challenges the commonly held view that all courtly literature promoted the social welfare of the noblewomen to whom romances were dedicated or addressed. Using reader-response theory, feminist criticism, and recent historical studies, Roberta Krueger provides close readings of a selection of texts, both well-known and less well-known, to show an intriguing variety of portrayals of women: misogynistic, idealizing, and didactic. She suggests that romances not only taught their audiences idealized models of masculine and feminine behavior, but also invited their readers to criticize and to resist gender roles
K.M. Grant
In the waning days of winter in 1244, with much of Occitan destroyed by the northern crusaders, Raimon, separated from the now-married Yolanda, tries to find a way to recover the Blue Flame from the the hands of the evil White Wolf, leader of a band of Cathars seeking refuge at the mountain fortress of Montségur.
Shalan Niuman (Sharan Newman) zhu
A medieval scholar examines the historical facts and myths behind the best-selling novel, including discussions on the Templars, the Holy Grail, and the "Apocryphal Gospels."
M. I. Ebbutt
"As the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, a number of books appeared in English dealing with the romantic and fascinating world of myth and legend. Among the few that went on to become minor classics of that genre was M. I. Ebbutt's Hero Myths and Legends of the British Race." "The nine stories selected from the 1910 edition of Ebbutt's book have been reset in a modern typeface, but retaining every detail - content, spelling and orthography - in order to keep the flavour of the time and the nature of Ebbutt's writing. In editing and selecting the stories for inclusion in this version, John Matthews has written an introductory essay to each, providing the background, context and relevant historical or mythological origins of the tales. He also draws on his considerable expertise and knowledge of the subject to provide an overall Introduction to this edition, designed to bring the stories to a new audience worldwide." "As well as the original stories, a selection of the original illustrations has also been included to show the pictorial style used at the time. These have been supplemented by new colour plates, specially painted for this edition by artist and illustrator Peter Komarnyckyj."--BOOK JACKET.
Ann E. Moyer
"Theories of music and its nature, central to many aspects of Renaissance thought, have nonetheless been difficult to integrate into modern scholarship. In Musica Scientia, Ann E. Moyer asserts that the Renaissance discipline must be understood in the terms of other contemporary fields of knowledge." "Moyer begins with a clear and concise historical summary of ancient and medieval musical thought, emphasizing the importance of the Phythagorean teachings about music, transmitted to the medieval world through Boethius's De institutione arithmetica. Describing the factors that, in the late fifteenth century, led scholars and practicing musicians to raise new questions about the discipline and its study, Moyer closely analyzes the writings of the sixteenth-century Italians who debated the nature of music and its relationship to mathematics, the natural sciences, poetry, and rhetoric. Renaissance thinking about music, she shows, wrought a dramatic change in the understanding of the field: scholars came to distinguish between a science of sounding bodies and an art of music, an art to be studied in terms of poetics and the history of taste." "Moyer's book offers a new and systematic treatment of a critical but neglected aspect of Renaissance thought. It makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the classification of knowledge in the Renaissance and of the process by which two competing kinds of analysis--humanistic and mathematical--came to distinguish the modern arts and sciences."--BOOK JACKET.