Researching Art in the Middle Ages (HC)

This interdisciplinary volume combines historical records, medical texts, and religious accounts of saints’ lives and miracles, as well as poetry, prose, drama, and manuscript images to demonstrate the varied and complicated attitudes medieval societies had about disability.

v. 2. pt. 1. From the early Christian Era to the "Age of Discovery": from the demonic threat to the incarnation of sainthood -- v. 2. pt. 2. From the early Christian Era to the "Age of Discovery" : Africans in the Christian ordinance of the world
v. 3. pt. 1. From the "Age of Discovery" to the Age of Abolition : artists of the Renaissance and Baroque

Check the Tripod catalog for print copies.

By examining both canonical works, such as van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait and The Goldsmith's Shop (by Petrus Christus) and long-neglected objects, such as combs, badges, and bathhouse murals, and by investigating a wide range of sexualities-same-sex desire, adultery, marriage, courtship, and prostitution-Wolfthal demonstrates how illicit forms of sexuality were linked to the "chaste sexuality" of marriage.

Robert Mills explores the relationship between sodomy and motifs of vision and visibility in medieval culture, on the one hand, and those categories we today call gender and sexuality, on the other. Challenging the view that ideas about sexual and gender dissidence were too confused to congeal into a coherent form in the Middle Ages, Mills demonstrates that sodomy had a rich, multimedia presence in the period and that a flexible approach to questions of terminology sheds new light on the many forms this presence took.

What happens when medieval depictions of gender-crossing saints get refracted through a transgender prism? Focusing on objects and artifacts associated with St. Eugenia of Rome, this article considers the extent to which medieval artists confronted the genderqueer potential of Eugenia's legend.

This book traces the evolution of trafficking patterns: the growth and decline of trafficking routes, the everchanging relationships between traffickers and authorities, and it examines the underlying causes that lead to vulnerability and thus to exploitation. See the Tripod catalog for a print copy.

BMC only