Classics, Medieval & Renaissance 2012 - University of Toronto ...

MEDIEVAL
The Ends of the Body
Identity and Community in Medieval Culture
LITERATURE
NEW
Edited by Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Jill Ross
Drawing on Arabic, English, French, Irish, Latin and
Spanish sources, the essays share a focus on the
body’s productive capacity – whether expressed
through the flesh’s materiality, or through its role in
performing meaning.
The collection is divided into four clusters.
‘Foundations’ traces the use of physical remnants of
the body in the form of relics or memorial monuments
that replicate the form of the body as foundational
in communal structures; ‘Performing the Body’ focuses
on the ways in which the individual body functions
as the medium through which the social body is
maintained; ‘Bodily Rhetoric’ explores the poetic
linkage of body and meaning; and ‘Material Bodies’
engages with the processes of corporeal being,
ranging from the energetic flow of humoural liquids
to the decay of the flesh.
Together, the essays provide new perspectives
on the centrality of the medieval body and underscore
the vitality of this rich field of study.
Suzanne Conklin Akbari is a professor in the
Department of English and the Centre for Medieval
Studies at the University of Toronto. Jill Ross is a
professor in the Centre for Comparative Literature
and the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University
of Toronto.
Approx. 312 pp / 12 illustrations / 6 x 9 / December 2012
Cloth 978-1-4426-4470-0 $70.00 (£48.99)
the ends of the body
identity and community
in medieval culture
edited by suzanne conklin akbari and jill ross
Author, Reader, Book
Medieval Authorship in Theory and Practice
NEW
Edited by Stephen Partridge and Erik Kwakkel
Bringing into conversation several kinds of scholarship
on medieval authorship, the essays in Author,
Reader, Book examine interrelated questions raised
by the relationship between an author and a reader,
the relationships between authors and their antecedents,
and the ways in which authorship interacts with the
physical presentation of texts in books.
The broad chronological range within this volume
reveals the persistence of literary concerns that remain
consistent through different periods, languages,
and cultural contexts. Theoretical reflections, case
studies from a wide variety of languages, examinations
of devotional literature, and analyses of works that
are more secular in focus come together in this volume
to transcend linguistic and disciplinary boundaries.
Stephen Partridge is an assistant professor in the
Department of English at the University of British
Columbia. Erik Kwakkel is a lecturer in the Institute
for Cultural Disciplines at Leiden University.
‘Author, Reader, Book is a resource of significant value
to medievalists interested in narrative, authorship,
and manuscript culture.’
Joan Grenier-Winther, Washington State University
Approx. 336 pp / 11 illustrations / 6 x 9 / April 2012
Cloth 978-0-8020-9934-1 $75.00 (£48.00)
Sacred and Profane in Chaucer
and Late Medieval Literature
Essays in Honour of John V. Fleming
Edited by Robert Epstein and William Robins
Literary depictions of the sacred and the secular
from the Middle Ages are representative of the
era’s widely held cultural understandings related to
religion and the nature of lived experience. Using
late Medieval English literature, including some of
Chaucer’s writings, these essays do not try to define
a secular realm distinct and separate from the divine
or religious, but instead analyse intersections of the
sacred and the profane, suggesting that these two
categories are mutually constitutive rather than
antithetical. Taken together, the work suggests
that the domain of the sacred, as perceived in the
Middle Ages, can variously be seen as having a
hierarchical or a complementary relationship to the
things of this world.
Robert Epstein is an associate professor in the
Department of English at Fairfield University.
William Robins is an associate professor in the
Department of English and the Centre for Medieval
Studies at the University of Toronto.
256 pp / 6 x 9 / 2010
Cloth 978-1-4426-4081-8 $60.00 (£41.99)
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