The Medieval Studies Collection includes 132 titles that offer a comprehensive journey through the medieval period. This digital platform provides global access to essential texts from the Manchester Medieval Sources series and other pivotal translations, serving students and academics worldwide.
The collection offers first-hand accounts illustrating medieval life, many available in English for the first time, and includes texts covering significant historical events such as the Black Death and the Norman invasion. It features extensive introductory and explanatory materials to help users navigate and interpret the sources, as well as resources addressing linguistic challenges and diverse interpretations within these texts.
| Key series |
| Manchester Medieval Studies |
| Manchester Medieval Sources |
| Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture |
| Gender in History |
| Artes Liberales |
| Collection year | Titles |
| 2025 titles | 6 |
| 2023/4 titles | 12 |
| 1991-2022 titles | 104 |
| Total collection | 132 |
| Keywords |
| Law and religion |
| Escapism |
| Literary texts |
| US, European authors |
| Emotion |
| Race |
| Motherhood, female role, shame |
| Kings, monarchs and serfdom |
| Illness |
| Immigration |
| Everyday life, lived experience from below |
| Prejudice, antisemitism |
| Apparatus of power |
| CE period up to c 1500 |
| European history |
| History and archaeology |
| Literary studies: ancient, classical & medieval |
| Literary studies: poetry and poets |
| Literature: history and criticism |
| History of religion |
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Medieval studies collection
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This book re-examines slave trading in the early Middle Ages from a comparative perspective, situating it at the core of economic and political development in northern and eastern Europe. In focusing on the ‘slaving zones’ centred on the British Isles and the Czech lands, it traces the forced migration of enslaved people from the point of capture to their destinations across Europe, the North Atlantic, north Africa, and western Asia. At the crux of the book is the shift of the ninth and tenth centuries prompted by increased demand, principally in the Islamic world. The desire to source more and more slaves led to changes in the practice of warfare to maximise captive taking, the logistics of slave trading, and rulers’ legal and economic relationships with slavery. By spanning the seventh through the eleventh centuries, this study traces the growth, climax, and decline of slave trading in the early Middle Ages and establishes its role as a driver of connectivity.
Hariulf’s history of St Riquier, written at the end of the eleventh century, describes the history of his monastic community in Northern France from its origins in the seventh century until his own time. Although local in its coverage, it illustrates themes essential to an understanding of the Middle Ages: how medieval monks worshipped, the part they played in wider society and the role of relics that were believed to mediate divine power in medieval religious and political experience. In four books Hariulf narrates the life of the founder and patron, Richer, in whom he portrays the virtues to be admired and emulated by the monks; the development of the community under emperor Charlemagne’s friend and adviser, the poet, Angilbert; its period of literary and monastic excellence in the early ninth century and subsequent devastation in a Scandinavian raid. As the narrative approaches his own time, Hariulf’s work becomes a valuable source for the tenth- and eleventh-century history of Northern France, while the abbey’s relations with the local lords of Ponthieu shed light on the emergence of the so-called territorial principalities, which emerged after the break-up of the Carolingian empire. Diplomatic exchanges with Normandy before 1066 about the community’s relic collection are described and the history also provides insights from an early and detached commentator on events surrounding the Norman Conquest of England. As a piece of historical writing, Hariulf’s work shows us how monastic history might be presented to foster a sense of communal identity in a changed and changing society.
This collection brings together a range of methodological approaches to analysing textual and visual representations of premodern royal and elite sexualities. It pushes beyond what has has been (and in some instances still is) a binarised approach to sexualities, whether described as heterosexual or homosexual; licit or illicit; queer or straight and so on. The contributors to this volume present fresh theories and new approaches to the consideration of premodern sexualities and aim to lay down durable foundations for further research and study. Being the richest source for the investigation of premodern sexualities and their representations, their primary evidence base rests upon chronicles, archival materials, artistic production, and literary texts. While building upon previous work, they anticipate that these primary sources will be signposts to further exploration in the fields of royal and elite studies while also advancing wider analyses and interdisciplinary conversations around intersectionality and sexualities more broadly imagined.
Conceiving bodies examines the Old English medical, prognostic and penitential traditions in order to find the reproductive bodies of women in a corpus of literature that frequently participates in the occlusion of such bodies, and indeed such lives. The early medieval medical tradition is refreshingly free of judgement of women’s bodies. Much of the social distaste for bodily processes was laid upon existing texts centuries after their composition, although patriarchal structures underpin the needs and treatments for early reproductive medicine. The language in these texts is far more nuanced than we might expect. Where previous translators and dictionaries have been content to collapse all remedies into general categories like ‘women’s medicine’ or ‘childbirth charms’, the remedies themselves offer treatments that are precise and specific. Because of the lack of close attention to language, translators have often misidentified the functions of these remedies. By differentiating language and treatments for menstruation, fertility, childbirth, stillbirth and abortion, this book reveals the distinct medical concerns of medieval women. While its central content is medieval, the book places early women’s medicine in conversation with the contemporary medical and political treatment of women’s reproductive bodies. Experiences like childbirth, menstrual woes and infertility create a through line by which bodies now may connect in visceral and emotional ways to bodies then. Rather than assuming early medicine consists only of repressive and uninformed superstitions, this book recognises and advocates for the ways in which the medieval tradition makes space for people to determine their own medical reproductive destinies.
Fantastic histories explores the historically and politically contingent nature of medieval fairy belief, approached through the lens of a single case study: the fairy lover or mother as she was integrated within ostensibly historical contexts. From the writings of Walter Map, Gerald of Wales, and Gervase of Tilbury to the romances associated with the serpentine fairy Mélusine, the founder and dynastic mother of the house of Lusignan (texts responsive to these earlier Latin mirabilia), it uncovers the principles of historical discernment applied to these narratives and their relative historical positioning. Approaching a significant chapter in the medieval development of, and relationship between, history and romance, it explores the interpenetration of the two, asking where a particular discourse (rather than genre) might dominate and determine the horizon of reader expectations.
This book examines how the spatial, characterization, and staging traditions of early drama were transformed over time, as well as the inherent capability of the traditions themselves to transform space, audience, time, and belief. It presents ten new chapters by specialists in the field of early English drama. The collection, which includes an Afterword by Theresa Coletti, is unique in its focus on the dramaturgical and cultural traditions that shaped and were shaped by early English drama until the closing of the theatres in 1642. By framing its argument in terms of traditions, this collection moves beyond long-standing biases imposed by period categories, thereby addressing the continuities of early English drama that persisted in the face of cultural and religious change. Scholars still use the terms ‘medieval’ and ‘early modern’ to distinguish between theatrical practices before and after the onset of religious conflict and the emergence of professional playhouses in England. Yet this period division has obscured much of what was most vital and lasting in the drama of the age, and, most crucially, the things which survived, were transformed, or repurposed for active use in new contexts. Through examining connections and transformations, the chapters of this book seek to refine and deepen our understanding of the richness and singularity of early English drama beyond the period divide: its copiousness, versatility, and playfulness.
This ground-breaking book explores key methods for investigating emotions in medieval literary texts, proposing innovative approaches, drawing upon psychological theory, ‘history of emotions’ research and close critical reading, to uncover the emotional repertoire in play in English literary culture between 1200 and 1500. The extensive Introduction lays out medieval philosophical and physiological theorisations of emotion, closely bound up with cognitive processes. Following chapters investigate the changing lexis for emotion in Middle English, examining how translations from French affect the ways in which feelings are imagined. Bodily affect, both involuntary displays and deliberate gesture, is discussed in detail. Performativity – getting things done with emotions – and performance are shown to become interlinked as more sophisticated models of selfhood emerge. Concepts of interiority and the public persona, the self and self-presentation complicate the changing modes through which feeling is expressed. Literary texts are pre-eminently devices for producing emotion of various kinds; the book proposes ways of tracing how authors incorporated techniques for eliciting emotions into their narratives and their effects on their audiences. By the end of the medieval period two vital developments had expanded the possibility for varied and complex emotional expression in texts: the development of the long-form romance, encouraged by the advent of printing, and the concept of autofiction; new possibilities emerged for authors to write the emotional self.
This volume demonstrates how the Hundred Years War (1337–1453) provides a necessary context for late medieval literature. Many of the major writers of the period, in a variety of different languages, lived either all or most of their lives under the shadow of war, including Geoffrey Chaucer, Christine de Pizan, Giovanni Boccaccio and Bridget of Sweden. The essays collected here investigate how authors use strategies including translation, adaptation and allegory in order to respond to the war. Simultaneously, they make a case for reconsidering how literature like women's visionary writing or lyric poetry, not generally seen as war literature, form part of the broader context of European warfare. As it extends the boundaries of what counts as war literature, the volume also moves beyond the traditional Anglo-French framing of the conflict by considering authors enmeshed in the conflict through proxy battles, diplomatic ties and ideological disputes. While covering English and French writers explicitly writing to the war, like John Lydgate or Alain Chartier, it also explores the war writing of prominent Welsh, Scottish and Italian authors, like Dafydd ap Gwilym, Walter Bower and Catherine of Siena. The book models a synthetic and transnational literary history of conflict that will pave the way for future scholarship in earlier and later periods. The chapters in this volume show how literature did more than reflect the realities of the Hundred Years War; it was also a crucial site for contesting the claims of war as literary writers crafted ways to actively intervene in the conflict.
This ground-breaking book analyses premodern whiteness as operations of fragility, precarity and racialicity across bodily and nonsomatic figurations. It examines works such as The Book of the Duchess, Pearl, The King of Tars and others, arguing that while whiteness participates crucially in the history of racialisation in the late medieval West, it does not denote or connote skin tone alone. Deploying diverse methodologies, the book asks how premodern whiteness as a representational trope both produces and delimits a range of medieval ideological regimes: courtly love and beauty, masculine subjectivity, Christian salvation, chivalric prowess, labour and consumption, social ethics or racialised European identity. The ‘before’ of whiteness, presupposing essence and teleology, is less a retro-futuristic temporisation – one that simultaneously looks backward and faces forward – than a discursive figuration of how white becomes whiteness. Fragility delineates the limits of ruling ideologies in performances of mourning as self-defence against perceived threats to subjectivity and desire; precarity registers the ruptures within normative values by foregrounding the unmarked vulnerability of the body politic and the violence of cultural aestheticisation; and racialicity attends to the politics of recognition and the technologies of enfleshment at the systemic edge of life and nonlife, of periodisation and of racial embodiment. If whiteness has hardened into an identity politics defined by skin tone alone, this book argues that it has not always been so. Operations of whiteness may generate differences that fabricate, structure and connect the social world, but these operative differences of whiteness are never transparent, stable or permanent.
This study investigates the lack of clarity about medieval English depictions of the Virgin Mary’s maternal practices, examining both well-known and esoteric devotional texts, images, plays, theology, and architecture to flesh out how medieval Christians in England understood her status and behaviors as a mother. It considers manuscript contexts and geography, politics as well as prayers, as it wrestles with how and why Mary’s devotees tried to imitate her maternity, and how the late medieval Church and its sympathizers revised the maternal Mary to suit lay preferences.