Advertisement
Books Features

New Medieval Books: From Foxes to Craft Beer

Five new books about the Middle Ages to tell you about, including on a somewhat forgotten English prince, and what they were saying about animals in Paris.

Reynard the Fox

Retold by Anne Louise Avery

Bodleian Libraries
ISBN: 9781851245550

Excerpt: King Noble the Lion was lord of this watery, blossomy, realm, from the leaden waves of the North Sea to the blue flax of the fields of Ypres. During the bright and holy days of the Whitsun feast, he decided to open his court, issuing forth dozens of mandements and commandments demanding that all animals should attend. And attend they did, streaming along the rough country tracks and gleaming white highways from Mons and Antwerp and Brugge, beasts great and beasts small, fearful and fierce, rich and poor, from gilded castle and low thatched cottage they came, to celebrate Pentecost and to pay their respect and fealty to their glorious, golden-maned ruler. All, that is, except for Reynard the Fox.

Advertisement

Click here to view the publisher’s website

Click here to buy this book on Amazon.com | Amazon.ca | Amazon.co.uk

The Red Prince: The Life of John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster

By Helen Carr

Oneworld Publications
ISBN: 9780861540822

Excerpt: John of Gaunt – What name on the roll of English princes is more familiar? When Sydney Armitage-Smith wrote the first complete biography of John of Gaunt in 1904 his rhetorical question would have had the effect intended: John of Gaunt was, then, a famous, familiar figure, central to English History. In the more than hundred years since Armitage-Smith’s book, though, Gaunt’s position in popular consciousness has somewhat waned. Though his impact on the destiny of the English crown is undeniable, his character, motivations and story are often marginalized. The Black Prince needs no introduction … not so the younger brother whose achievements – political, military, dynastic, cultural – were arguably all more significant.

Click here to view the publisher’s website

Click here to buy this book on Amazon.com | Amazon.ca | Amazon.co.uk

Craft Beer Culture and Modern Medievalism: Brewing Dissent

By Noëlle Phillips

Arc Humanties Press
ISBN: 9781641894623

Excerpt: This book examines a growing subgroup of Canadian and American craft beer industry – medieval-themed breweries and brews – through the stories that craft brewers that tell about themselves and their product. As a scholar of literature and book history, my interest is in how texts are transmitted, presented, and interpreted. In this case, the object in my study is how the discourse that developed in North American craft beer industry deploys medievalism in order to connect with consumers to enhance product value. Such analysis reveals less about the craft beer industry itself or the Middle Ages, and more about North American cultural values and how we see ourselves in relation to an increasingly globalized world. Craft Beer functions as another form of pop culture, even a strange kind of literature.

Advertisement

Click here to view the publisher’s website

Click here to buy this book on Amazon.com | Amazon.ca | Amazon.co.uk

The Intolerant Middle Ages: A Reader

Edited by Eugene Smelyansky

University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 9781487524128

Excerpt: This collection’s title, The Intolerant Middle Ages, does not mean that medieval Europe was more important than later periods or other societies outside Europe. This dangerous but influential misconception was once used to contrast the perceived barbarity of the medieval past with the alleged enlightened progress of more recent centuries, it is intended, instead, to provide students of the Middle Ages with an extensive selection of readings to demonstrate that intolerance became – and subsequently remained – one of the defining features in medieval society.

Click here to view the publisher’s website

Click here to buy this book on Amazon.com | Amazon.ca | Amazon.co.uk

Thinking about Animals in Thirteenth-Century Paris: Theologians on the Boundary Between Humans and Animals

By Ian P. Wei

University of Cambridge Press
ISBN: 9781108830157

Excerpt: This book seeks to understand what masters of theology at the University of Paris in the thirteenth century had to say about similarities and differences between humans and animals. It explores the ways in which they related similarities and differences to each other, holding them in productive tension, so as to construct a boundary between humans and animals, or to query and blur such a boundary.

Click here to view the publisher’s website

Click here to buy this book on Amazon.com | Amazon.ca | Amazon.co.uk

Advertisement