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Myth in Early Northwest Europe
Edited by Stephen O. Glosecki (University of Wisconsin at Madison)
This collection of fifteen essays by distinguished scholars addresses a formative era in Northwest Europe, roughly 500–1000 AD. Contemplating the crucible of Western culture, Myth in Early Northwest Europe covers Classical, Celtic, and Carolingian as well as Old Norse, Old English, and several Modern European subjects. The interface between Christian and native religions is directly engaged, along with current myth theory. Since myth interpenetrates all aspects of human expression—contemporary music, dance, and film as well as ancient art—this anthology will interest not only the specialist but also the general reader delighted by Tolkien and devoted to self-realization.

Contributors include:

John D. Niles, University of Wisconsin at Madison: "True Stories and Other Lies"

Craig R. Davis, Smith College: "Theories of History in Traditional Plots"

Stephen O. Glosecki, University of Alabama at Birmingham: "Stranded Narrative: Myth, Metaphor, and Metrical Charms"

Geoffrey Koziol, University of California at Berkeley: "Truth and Its Consequences: Why Carolingianists Don't Speak of Myth"

Michael J. Enright, East Carolina University: "Ritual and Technology in the Iron Age: An Initiation Scene on the Gundestrup Cauldron"

Joseph F. Nagy, University of California at Los Angeles: "Hearing and Hunting in Medieval Celtic Tradition"

Joseph Harris, Harvard University: "Homo necans borealis: Fatherhood and Sacrifice in Sonatorrek"

Roberta Frank, Yale University: "The Lay of the Land in Skaldic Praise Poetry"

Marijane Osborn, University of California at Davis: "Manipulating Waterfalls: Mythic Places in Beowulf and Grettissaga, Lawrence and Purnell"

Geoffrey Russom, Brown University: "At the Center of Beowulf"

John M. Hill, United States Naval Academy: "Gods at the Borders: Northern Myth and Anglo-Saxon Heroic Story"

Gale Owen-Crocker, University of Manchester: "Beast Men: Eofor and Wulf and the Mythic Significance of Names in Beowulf"

Christina Lee, University of Nottingham: "Children of Darkness: Arminius/Siegfried in Germany"

T. A. Shippey, St. Louis University: "Imagined Cathedrals: Retelling Myth in the Twentieth Century"

This is a copublication with Brepols Publishers (ASMAR vol. 21)
and can be purchased in North America through Cornell University Press Services
and outside of North America through Brepols.

Penn State Medieval Studies Number 2
Norris Lacy, general editor

Wind and Water in the Middle Ages: Fluid Technologies from Antiquity to the Renaissance
Edited by Steven A. Walton (The Pennsylvania State University)
Before the engine or generator, wind and water powered everything beyond human or animals’ muscles. Beyond the hydrological and solar cycles responsible for life in the first place, humanity has been singularly successful in harnessing these two natural forces to our will. Water and its power has for millennia formed the lifeblood of communities and such a fundamental resource deserves study as more than just a technology. In the pre-industrial era mills where everywhere: they ground grain, sawed lumber, fulled cloth, pulped paper, pressed cider and olives, and even incorporated gunpowder. Water and wind are oft-neglected prime movers and natural resources that allowed western society to grow at rates other civilizations had not matched. Since the late classical world, western society has taken nearly every opportunity to harness these resources wherever they occur. They were remarkably adaptable and were remarkably stable as well as technologically and socially malleable over time; they were indeed, “fluid technologies.” Waterwheels, water lifting devices, pumps, fountains, windmills, and other hydraulic and pneumatic machinery also flow into one another in their geography, their technology, and their chronologies, their fortunes, as well as in their overall meanings in law, art, politics, economics, and other human endeavors. Further, it is clear that they moved fluidly between cultures: from the Greeks to the Romans, from the Romans to the Arabic world and to the medieval Europeans, and in some cases such as Spain, back and forth between those groups as well. Further, one of the stronger themes throughout this volume is that of continuity, rather than the more common lens of technological revolution through which to see material change. The story of wind and water in the Middle Ages relies primarily upon the constant ebb and flow of these fundamental underlying technologies that kept society functioning. When we regard wind and water in the middle ages, in terms of the larger system of power and use, it becomes clear from these essays that there never was much of a technological rupture in Europe as we have sometimes been taught—rather what had been invented and innovated in the antique world grew, changed, morphed throughout the Middle Ages to provide necessary sustenance and opportunities of industrial capacity. When new inventions certainly did appear during this period (the windmill is the obvious case), they became enmeshed evolutionarily in the network of those earlier systems rather than necessarily triggering a truly revolutionary change in the structure of society. Contributions in this volume range from the Antique world to Elizabethan London; from Egypt and Spain to Ireland and northwestern Germany, and the contributors themselves come from disciplines as far-ranging as history, history of technology, art history, garden history, legal history, environmental history, and literary studies.
2006 / 322 pages / ISBN-10: 0-86698-367-8, ISBN-13: 978-0-86698-367-9 / MR 322 / $55, £39

Widows, Heirs, and Heiresses in the Late Twelfth Century: The Rotuli de Dominabus et Pueris et Puellis
Edited and translated by John Walmsley
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 of 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 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.
2006 / 146 pages / ISBN-10: 0-86698-353-8, ISBN-13: 978-0-86698-353-2 / MR 308 / $41, £33)

Medieval Constructions in Gender and Identity: Essays in Honor of Joan M. Ferrante
Edited by Teodolinda Barolini (Columbia University)
Contributed by ten distinguished scholars—Joan Cadden, Anne L. Clark, Margaret Aziza Pappano, Susan L. Einbinder, Roy Rosenstein, Laura Kendrick, H. Wayne Storey, Sarah Spence, Suzanne Conklin Akbari, and Teodolinda Barolini—the essays in this volume address medieval constructions in gender and identity. Sharing an interest in women and identity formation, these essays range through time, covering the period from the tenth through the fifteenth century, and across languages, discussing sources in Latin, Italian, French, Occitan, English, and Hebrew. They range also through a variety of cultural settings: from nunneries in Germany, Italy, France, and England to a Jewish community in France; from the Provence of the troubadours and the England of Chaucer to the Florentine scribal circles in which Dante’s Vita nuova was copied. Commissioned in honor of Joan M. Ferrante, Ferrante’s pioneering contribution to the history of women and their representation is a connecting thread through this volume.
2005 / 208 pages / ISBN-10: 0-86698-337-6, ISBN-13: 978-0-86698-337-2 / MR 293 / $41, £33

Penn State Medieval Studies Number 1
Norris Lacy, general editor

The Medieval Marriage Scene: Prudence, Passion, Policy
Edited by Sherry Roush (The Pennsylvania State University) and Cristelle Baskins (Tufts University)
Medieval Marriage: Prudence, Passion, Policy brings together expert scholarship on fictive, artistic, legal, ethical, and economic facets of the institution of marriage across Europe between roughly 500 and 1550. The twelve contributors draw on a tremendous wealth of scholarship on medieval marriage produced over the past thirty years (including Duby, Gies, Brookes, Sheehan, Brundage, Herlihy, Molho, and Klapisch-Zuber) to challenge preconceived notions of marriage and related topics (such as widowhood, the family, and mystical marriage), appealing to a broad spectrum of students and scholars of the European Middle Ages.
2005 / 232 pages / ISBN-10: 0-86698-343-0, ISBN-13: 978-0-86698-343-3 / MR 299 / $40, £30

Translating Desire in Medieval and Early Modern Literature
Edited by Heather Hayton (Guilford College) and Craig A. Berry (Independent Scholar)
The noun translatio is—among other things—simply the Latin form of the word “metaphor,” and thus an age-old figure for using one thing to talk about something else. The twelfth-century poetic theorist Geoffrey of Vinsauf tells the aspiring writer that the figure of translatio “serves you as a mirror, for you see yourself in it and recognize your own sheep in another’s field.” Mirroring the self and recognizing the familiar in the foreign are also common ways of talking about desire. The essays in this volume take these two kindred principles of translation and desire and map out what happens in pre-modern literature when desire itself is translated from one realm of discourse to another.
2005 / 254 pages / ISBN-10: 0-86698-338-4, ISBN-13: 978-86698-338-9 / MR 294 / $45, £34