Medieval / Renaissance History Archives - The Rocktop Bookshop and Bindery

Medieval / Renaissance History

John Walmsley, edit.. Widows, Heirs and Heiresses in the Late Twelfth Century.

by John Walmsley, edit.

$ 27.00

“This work is a new critical edition and translation of the late-twelfth-century Rotuli de Dominabus et Pueris et Puellis. These records were the result of a little known Domesday-like royal enquiry into the status and assets of widows and wards on estates held directly by the Crown in 1185. As such they were a precursor to the veredicta of the general eyre from the 1230s on and of the extents attached to the Inquisitions Post Mortem from the 1240s. The implications for royal power and control and the machinery which brought them into being no doubt also led to the concerns expressed about inheritance and the treatment of widows and wards in the early clauses of Magna Carta in 1215. Translation of this material in toto makes it an invaluable source book for undergraduate and postgraduate students interested in the economy and society of medieval England and also for those interested in the history of women.”

by Grund, Peter.

$ 32.00

“Adding to the few edited early English texts on alchemy, this book presents an edition of Humfrey Lock’s (fl. 1560s–1570s) treatise on the philosopher’s stone, the miraculous substance that would turn base metals into silver and gold or cure diseases. The substantial introduction weaves together struggles between competing merchant factions in Russia, the Elizabethan court’s fascination with alchemy, and the origins and evolution of Lock’s alchemical treatise. The book offers new insights into the circulation of alchemical texts in early modern England, the reuse and adaptation of alchemical literature, and the emergence of English as a language of science. “

by Hess, Catherine.

$ 45.00

“This book catalogues the Getty Museum’s fine collection of forty-five Italian ceramic objects spanning four hundred years, including a pair of eighteenth-century candlesticks representing mythological scenes, a tabletop with hunting scenes, and, from the 1790s, the beautifully modeled and painted Saint Joseph with the Christ Child. Containing the most recent scientific, historical, and iconographic information about the Museum’s holdings, Italian Ceramics offers a wealth of new information about the Getty Museum’s superb collection of Italian ceramic art.”

by M. Teresa Tavormina.

$ 40.00

“Trinity College Cambridge MS R.14.52 is one of the most important extant witnesses to vernacular medical and scientific writing in late medieval England. This two-volume collection of essays and texts opens with studies of the physical manuscript, its contents and textual relations to other Middle English medical compendia, its scribe, scribal dialect, and the translation strategies of its principal translator, followed by editions of over a dozen texts from the manuscript, nearly all unique and hitherto unpublished. The book concludes with two linguistic appendices, a list of manuscripts cited, an extensive general glossary and specialized glossaries of materia medica and proper names, and a bibliography.

by Ruiz, Juan.

$ 27.00

Ruiz, Juan. The Book of Good Love. State University of New York Press 1970 Hardcover in DJ Like New Like New Unused Octavo 365 pp

“A masterpiece in the tradition of the Decameron and the Canterbury Tales, Juan Ruiz’s fourteenth-century Spanish narrative poem combines the comic and the serious, the bawdy and the practical, the satiric and the tender, the devout and the blasphemous. In a first prose translation, Professors Mignani and Di Cesare succeed in conveying the vitality and sly humor of the original. The poem consists of a loosely unified series of fourteen amorous adventures of the Archpriest of Hita, interlaced with debates, fabliaux, fables, and exempla. Ruiz suggests that while man ought to seek buen amor (true love, or love of God), he is prone to loco amor, or worldly love. The Book proposes to show human folly so that men may be forewarned of the bad and choose the good. The episodes related in the stanzas and in songs in various lyrical styles parody such conventions as courtly love, epic battle, or church ritual. Ruiz was clearly fascinated by the concrete, as well as the allegorical, for his episodes have dates and actual settings, and popular speech is incorporated into his verses. In their introduction, the translators survey the major scholarly studies of the poem and offer their own critical reading of it. Their annotated bibliography and notes to the translation will be useful to students as well as scholars.”

by Pizan, Christine de.

$ 32.00

Pizan, Christine de. The Boke of the Cyte of Ladyes. Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. 2014 Pictorial hardcover. Like New Unused. Octavo 622 pp

“Christine de Pizan attracted an international audience of admirers her during her lifetime, including many readers in England. The Boke of the Cyte of Ladyes (1521) is the earliest English translation of Le Livre de la cité des dames (ca. 1405) and the only version printed in French or English before the twentieth century. Her work stands as an early stronghold against misogynist thinking, with more than one hundred stories about women’s capacity for intelligence and virtue assembled under the auspices of Reason, Rectitude, and Justice to form an allegorical City of Ladies. Modern readers can now rediscover Christine de Pizan’s landmark defense of women in the French and English of its original readers. This new edition offers rich material for scholars interested in gender studies, history, humanism, and the field of Anglo-French literature. The facing page format lets readers closely compare the fifteenth-century Middle French of its female author with the sixteenth-century English text by a male translator. A critical introduction and scholarly annotations enhance its usefulness as a resource for students and critics.”

by Phillips, Jonathan.

$ 27.00

Phillips, Jonathan. The Life and Legend of the Sultan Saladin. Yale University Press 2019 Hardcover in DJ Like New/Like New Unused Octavo 478 pp

“When Saladin recaptured Jerusalem from the Crusaders in 1187, returning the Holy City to Islamic rule for the first time in almost ninety years, he sent shockwaves throughout Christian Europe and the Muslim Near East that reverberate today.

It was the culmination of a supremely exciting life, fraught with challenges and contradictions but blessed occasionally with marvellous good fortune. Born into a significant Kurdish family in northern Iraq, Saladin shot to power in faraway Egypt thanks to the tutelage of his uncle. Over two decades, this warrior and diplomat fought under the banner of jihad, but at the same time worked tirelessly to build an immense dynastic empire that stretched from North Africa to Western Iraq. Gathering together a turbulent and diverse coalition he was able to capture Jerusalem, only to trigger the Third Crusade and face his greatest adversary, King Richard the Lionheart.” GoodReads

by Catherine Richardson.

$ 37.00

Catherine Richardson. Domestic Life and Domestic Tragedy in Early Modern England : The material life of the household. Manchester University Press 2006 Hardcover in DJ Like New /Like New Unused. Octavo 235 pp

“This book reconstructs one aspect of that imaginative process. It considers a range of printed and documentary evidence – the majority previously unpublished – for the way ordinary individuals thought about their houses and households. It then explores how writers of domestic tragedies engaged those attitudes to shape their representations of domesticity. It therefore offers a new method for understanding theatrical representations, based around a truly interdisciplinary study of the interaction between literary and historical methods”

by Lifshitz, Felice.

$ 32.00

Lifshitz, Felice. Religious Women in Early Carolingian Francia. Fordham University Press 2014 Hardcover in DJ Like New/Like New Unused Octavo 349 pp

“Religious Women in Early Carolingian Francia , a groundbreaking study of the intellectual and monastic culture of the Main Valley during the eighth century, looks closely at a group of manuscripts associated with some of the best-known personalities of the European Middle Ages, including Boniface of Mainz and his beloved, abbess Leoba of Tauberbischofsheim. This is the first study of these Anglo-Saxon missionaries to Germany to delve into the details of their lives by studying the manuscripts that were produced in their scriptoria and used in their communities. The author explores how one group of religious women helped to shape the culture of medieval Europe through the texts they wrote and copied, as well as through their editorial interventions. Using compelling manuscript evidence, she argues that the content of the women’s books was overwhelmingly gender-egalitarian and frequently feminist (i.e., resistant to patriarchal ideas). This intriguing book provides unprecedented glimpses into the feminist consciousness of the women’s and mixed-sex communities that flourished in the early Middle Ages.”

by Laurel Amtower and Dorothea Kehler.

$ 22.00

Laurel Amtower and Dorothea Kehler. The Single Woman in Medieval and Early Modern England : Her Life and Representation. Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies 2003 Hardcover in DJ Like New/Like New Unused Octavo 242 pp

“The eleven essays are arranged under four sub-headings, designed to examine by turn the celebration of celibacy, the deferral of marriage, the liminality of widowhood, and finally the significance of virginity (this last sub-section would likely make more sense if placed at the beginning rather than at the end of the volume).

Part I: Celebrating Celibacy focusses on the medieval period, with essays on Anglo-Norman single woman saints (Jane Zatta), variations on the fifteenth-century legends of St. Katherine of Alexandria (Paul Price), and Malory’s use of the single woman as a determining signifier of the masculine (single man) virtue of chivalry (Dorsey Armstrong).

Part II: Repudiating Marriage considers the versatility of money-lending as an occupation that allowed late Tudor and Stuart Englishwomen to remain single by choice (Judith M. Spicksley), and John Lyly’s alternatives to marriage as a generic conclusion for comedy in the Elizabethan court (Jacqueline Vanhoutte). Women

Part III: Imaginary Widowhood includes Amtower’s and Jeanie Grant Moore’s re-assessments of Chaucer’s widows, and Allison Levy’s examination of widow portraiture as an expression of masculine anxiety in the Restoration period. Amtower’s consideration of Chaucer’s Dido and Cleopatra (from Legend of Good Women), Criseyde, and the Wife of Bath as widows, presents a wide-ranging set of characteristics for this sub-category of the single woman. From pathetic to noble, from self-silenced iconic figures to more or less successful speakers, the widow for individually determined status.

Part IV: Sexuality and Revirgination traces the connections between female desire and its representations in virginal women. Perhaps the most compellingly nuanced essay in the collection, by Tracey Sedinger, considers how “[w]omen were usually represented as strangely ‘class-less’…even though their virtue implicitly signified an elevated social status” in versions of maidservant-lady relationships in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (Book 4), Spenser’s Faerie Queene (Book 2), and Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing . Sedinger, unlike some of the other authors in this collection, notes explicitly the anachronism of some feminist approaches to the medieval and early modern female subject, which places priority on agency as a contingency of subjectivity.” Seventeenth Century News

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