As anyone who has read Chaucer's Canterbury Tales knows, Middle English literature is rife
with sexually explicit language and situations. Less canonical works can be even more …

Men and women struggling for control of marriage and sexuality; narratives that focus on
trickery, theft, and adultery; descriptions of sexual activities and body parts, the mention of …

From their beginnings, campuses emerged as hotbeds of traditions and folklore. American
college students inhabit a culture with its own slang, stories, humor, beliefs, rituals, and …

In this book, Curtis Gruenler proposes that the concept of the enigmatic, latent in a wide
range of medieval thinking about literature, can help us better understand in medieval terms …

This book exposes the ways in which ostensibly normative sexualities depend upon
queerness to shore up their claims of privilege. Through readings of such classic texts as …

Many people have contributed to this volume. I wish to express my gratitude to Nicholas
Spadaccini for his support and to Nelsy Echavez-Solano for her collaboration. I am also …

In contrast to the vernacular literary traditions of France, Italy and England, comic tales in
verse flourished in late medieval Germany, providing bawdy entertainment for larger …

H arry Bailly is a man's man. He serves as “governing figure, as ruler, as king” of the
Canterbury pilgrimage, 1 and he also represents a “figure of bourgeois masculinity,” 2 as …

This dissertation probes the dark side in the Italian Renaissance and Baroque art by
examining images of witchcraft. While these images may seem to deviate from the humanist …

The shrew-taming story, a master plot of both Eastern and Western folklore and literature, is
centered on the problem of establishing the appropriate power dynamic between a married …