Imprint: Tangent
FORTHCOMING Fall 2023
The mask is the classic disguise. But as humanity’s alter ego, it reveals as much as it conceals. Why are masks so often creepy, even outside of horror movies? Can a mask change expression while you’re wearing it? How much of someone’s self can inhabit a mask? Why would anyone make a plaster cast of[…]
Imprint: Tangent
FORTHCOMING Fall 2023
Abandoned by his community, doomed to a solitary existence with his voice as sole companion: can Sophocles’ Philoctetes still speak to us? What do his screams have to say? This book juxtaposes a new adaptation of Sophocles’ play with an essay describing the process of bringing it to life in a world on the brink[…]
Imprint: Tangent
FORTHCOMING Winter 2023
Can attending to poetic form help us imagine a radical politics and bridge the gap between pressing contemporary political concerns and an ancient literature that often seems steeped in dynamics of oppression? The corpus of the fifth-century Athenian playwright Aristophanes includes some of the funniest yet most disturbing comedies of Western literature. His work’s anarchic[…]
Imprint: Gracchi Books
FORTHCOMING Spring 2022
Social and Intellectual Networking in the Early Middle Ages seeks to expand our understanding of early medieval connectivity by interrogating social and intellectual collaborations, competitions and communications among persons, places, things and ideas in the European and Mediterranean West during the second half of the first millennium AD. In so doing, its contributors explore the[…]
Imprint: Brainstorm Books
FORTHCOMING Winter 2023
Chaucer’s Comic Providence presents readings of five of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales that dramatize sexual division and the lack of rapport between the sexes. These readings are founded on the psychoanalytic thinking of Jacques Lacan in his rereading of Freud and are motivated by Thormann’s conviction that Chaucer understood what psychoanalysis would come to study as[…]
Imprint: Gracchi Books
Published: 02/17/2022
The establishment of Christianity in the late- and post-Roman world caused an economic as well as a religious revolution, but, while a great deal of attention has been paid to the religious developments of the period, the impact of the establishment of the Church on the economy has attracted remarkably little attention. The Christian Economy[…]
Imprint: Gracchi Books
Published: 08/18/2022
In his Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (circa 731 CE), Bede says that he will write his account of the past of the English following only vera lex historiae (the true law of history). Whether explicitly or implicitly, historians narrate the past according to conceptions of what constitutes historical truth that emerge in the use of[…]
Published: 12/17/2020
The Old Icelandic text The Saga of Þórður kakali survives today as part of the fourteenth-century compilation The Saga of the Sturlungar. In extant form, The Saga of Þórður kakali is a biography of Þórður kakali Sighvatsson (c.1210–56) – chieftain, royal retainer, and sheriff – and covers the periods 1242–50 and 1254–56, providing an interesting[…]