FORTHCOMING Fall 2024
The United States is a spiritual wasteland—a two-party dictatorship that worships money and that eats human beings alive, where racial and gender oppression attack the body, and where partisan polarization stifles the mind. In The Gentrified City of God, A.W. Strouse—a promiscuous gay Catholic and a scholar of the Middle Ages—brings together radical queer anarchism[…]
Published: 02/28/2023
In the winter of 476 AD, the Ostrogoths, hungry and exhausted from wandering for months along the barren confines of the Byzantine Empire, wrote to Emperor Zeno in Constantinople requesting permission to enter the walled city of Epidaurum and just kinda crash and charge their phones. Closer to home, Orpheus walks Eurydice through a suburban[…]
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[…]
Published: 06/04/2020
From Kehinde Wiley to W.E.B. Du Bois, from Nubia to Cuba, Willie Doherty’s terror in ancient landscapes to the violence of institutional Neo-Gothic, Reagan’s AIDS policies to Beowulf fanfiction, this richly diverse volume brings together art historians and literature scholars to articulate a more inclusive, intersectional medieval studies. It will be of interest to students[…]
Published: 03/26/2020
The field of disability studies significantly contributes to contemporary discussions of the marginalization of and social justice for individuals with disabilities. However, what of disability in the past? The Medieval Disability Sourcebook: Western Europe explores what medieval texts have to say about disability, both in their own time and for the present. This interdisciplinary volume[…]
Published: 08/23/2018
Are you a Lone Medievalist? Working medievalists are often the only scholar of the Middle Ages in a department, a university, or a hundred-mile radius. While working to build a body of focused scholarly work, the lone medievalist is expected to be a generalist in the classroom and a contributing member of a campus community[…]
Published: 05/13/2015
In the world of My Gay Middle Ages, Chaucer and Boethius are the secret-sharers of A.W. Strouse’s “gay lifestyle.” Where many scholars of the Middle Ages would “get in from behind” on cultural history, Strouse instead does a “reach around.” He eschews academic “queer theory” as yet another tedious, normative framework, and writes in the[…]