Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women

9 best books like Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Caroline Walker Bynum): Silencing the Past, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present, Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary, Living Gently in a Violent World: The Prophetic Witness of Weakness, Eleanor of Aquitaine: Queen of France, Queen of England, The Ties That Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages, Feudal Society, Volume 1

Silencing the Past

Author	Michel-Rolph Trouillot
ISBN	0807043117

If Marx, Foucault, and Howard Zinn wrote a book together, it would probably look something like Michel-Rolph Trouillot's Silencing the Past. This isn't a slur, though; as you can tell from my five-star rating, I obviously appreciated the book, its author's cobbled personal reflections plus broader...

Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present

Author	Lillian Faderman
ISBN	0688133304

I found this book wholly fascinating and compelling, yet sad. It tells the story of love between women and how perceptions and prejudices have shaped it across the centuries. As it was first published in 1981, the subtitle is no longer accurate. The lesbian-feminist movement of the 1970s is the last...

Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy

Author	Judith C. Brown
ISBN	0195042255

The discovery of the fascinating and richly documented story of Sister Benedetta Carlini, Abbess of the Convent of the Mother of God, by Judith C. Brown was an event of major historical importance. Not only is the story revealed in Immodest Acts that of the rise and fall of a powerful woman in a church community...

Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary

Author	Marina Warner
ISBN	0394711556

You are my light; my life’s illumination: you are my refuge, O mother!
Please don’t forsake me, Virgin Mary, you abode of kindness...

So runs one of the popular film songs from my youth – and it pretty much symbolises what the Virgin means to me.

Kerala, unlike other states...

Living Gently in a Violent World: The Prophetic Witness of Weakness

Author	Stanley Hauerwas
ISBN	0830834524

How are Christians to live in a violent and wounded world? Rather than contending for privilege by wielding power and authority, we can witness prophetically from a position of weakness. The church has much to learn from an often overlooked community--those with disabilities. In this fascinating...

Eleanor of Aquitaine: Queen of France, Queen of England

Author	Ralph V. Turner
ISBN	0300119119

Eleanor of Aquitaine’s extraordinary life seems more likely to be found in the pages of fiction. Proud daughter of a distinguished French dynasty, she married the king of France, Louis VII, then the king of England, Henry II, and gave birth to two sons who rose to take the English throne—Richard...

The Ties That Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England

Author	Barbara A. Hanawalt
ISBN	0195045645

Barbara A. Hanawalt's richly detailed account offers an intimate view of everyday life in Medieval England that seems at once surprisingly familiar and yet at odds with what many experts have told us. She argues that the biological needs served by the family do not change and that the ways fourteenth-...

Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages

Author

David Nirenberg

In the wake of modern genocide, we tend to think of violence against minorities as a sign of intolerance, or, even worse, a prelude to extermination. Violence in the Middle Ages, however, functioned differently, according to David Nirenberg. In this provocative book, he focuses on specific attacks...

Feudal Society, Volume 1

Author	Marc Bloch
ISBN	0226059782

What I particularly enjoy about Bloch's study is the sense of feudal Europe as dynamic. Institutions are changing while different areas are developing in different ways and influencing each other. Waves of immigrant Magyars, Vikings and Muslims are sweeping, sailing and galloping in from the edges...