Juanita Feros Ruys

The medieval world was full of malicious demons: fallen angels commissioned to tempt humans away from God. From demons disguised as beautiful women to demons that took frightening animal-like forms, this book explores the history of thought about demons: what they were, what they could and could not do, and how they affected human lives. It considers the debates, stories, and writing that eventually gave shape to the witchcraze of the early modern period.

Demons in the Middle Ages

Michael W. Champion

Kirk Essary

Before Emotion: The Language of Feeling, 400-1800 advances current interdisciplinary research in the history of emotions through in-depth studies of the European language of emotion from late antiquity to the modern period. Focusing specifically on the premodern cognates of ‘affect’ or ‘affection’ (such as affectus, affectio, affeccioun, etc.), an international team of scholars explores the cultural and intellectual contexts in which emotion was discussed before the term ‘emotion’ itself came into widespread use. By tracing the history of key terms and concepts associated with what we identify as ‘emotions’ today, the volume offers a first-time critical foundation for understanding pre- and early modern emotions discourse, charts continuities and changes across cultures, time periods, genres, and languages, and helps contextualize modern shifts in the understanding of emotions.

Before Emotion: The Language of Feeling, 400-1800

Louise D'Arcens

This volume explores the reciprocal relationships that can develop between medieval women writers and the modern scholars who study them. Medieval women writers discussed include those writing in the vernacular such as Christine de Pizan and Margaret Paston, those writing in Latin such as Hildegard of Bingen, Heloise, and Birgitta of Sweden, and the works transcribed from women mystics such as Margery Kempe, Hadewijch, and Julian of Norwich. Attention is also given to medieval women as the readers, consumers and patrons of written works. Issues considered in this volume include the place of ethics, interestedness and social justice in contemporary medieval studies, questions of alterity, empathy, essentialism and appropriation in dealing with figures of the medieval past, the permeable boundaries between academic medieval studies and popular medievalism, questions of situatedness and academic voice, and the relationship between feminism and medieval studies. Linked to these issues is the interrelation between medieval women and medieval men in the production and consumption of written works both for and about women and the implications of this for both female and male readers of those works today.

Juanita Feros Ruys

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