Buy Books: Browse by Season: Spring 2019

These essays explore the various manifestations of the heroine in medieval French literature and her multiple relationships with discourse, both medieval and modern. From a discussion of 12th-century saints’ lives to an examination of 15th-century farce, they span the Middle Ages, both chronologically and generically. Focused yet considering a wide range of texts, they shine new light on the heroine and how she behaves, including how she herself uses discourse.

Based on a study of more than 2,100 gravestones and monuments in North America and the United Kingdom erected between the seventeenth and late twentieth centuries, David Stewart expands the use of nautical archaeology into terrestrial environments. He focuses on those who make their living at sea--one of the world's oldest and most dangerous occupations--to examine their distinct folkloric traditions, beliefs, and customs regarding death, loss, and remembrance. 

Sugar, coffee, corn, and chocolate have long dominated the study of Central American commerce, and researchers tend to overlook one other equally significant commodity: alcohol. Often illicitly produced and consumed, aguardiente (distilled sugar cane spirits or rum) was central to Guatemalan daily life, though scholars have often neglected its fundamental role in the country's development. 

Most research into humans' impact on the environment has focused on large-scale societies; a corollary assumption has been that small scale economies are sustainable and in harmony with nature. The contributors to this volume challenge this notion, revealing how such communities shaped their environment--and not always in a positive way.

The love of looking, or scopophilia, is a common motif among female figures in medieval art and literature where it is usually expressed as a motherly or sexually interested gaze--one sanctioned, the other forbidden. Sandra Summers investigates these two major variants of female voyeurism in exemplary didactic and courtly literature by medieval German authors.

While the subject of citizenship has often been examined from a sociological, historical, or legal perspective, historical archaeologists have yet to fully explore the material aspects of these social boundaries. The Archaeology of Citizenship uses the material record to explore what it means to be an American.

In Exile and Revolution, Gerald Poyo provides a comprehensive account of how his great-great-grandfather spurred the working-class community of Key West to transform their roles as supporting cast to become critical actors in the struggle for Cuban independence.

In Uncommonly Savage, award-winning historian Paul Escott considers the impact of internecine violence on memory and ideology, politics, and process of reconciliation.

By highlighting the cooperation that occurred between progressive activists from the Popular Front to the 1960s, Swindall adds to our understanding of the intergenerational nature of civil rights and anticolonial organizing.

In Brazilian Propaganda, Nina Schneider examines the various modes of official, and unofficial, propaganda used by an authoritarian regime.