Congratulations to ANZAMEMS members Claire McIlroy and Anne M. Scott on the publication of their new edited collection, Literature, Emotions, and Pre-Modern War: Conflict in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Arc Humanities Press, 2021).

This collection assembles work by some of the foremost English-speaking scholars of pre-modern thought and culture and is the fruit of the Australian Research Council’s ground-breaking Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotion. The impact of war, a human activity that is both public and politically charged, is examined as it affects private human lives caught up in public and political situations. The essays, many of them influenced by the burgeoning field of study in the history of emotions, examine the often unconsidered effects of war—on the individual and on the commune—as revealed in the study of well-known texts such as Beowulf, Piers Plowman, Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, and Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, as well as other lesser-known works that mirror the concerns of the society in which they were conceived. These latter range from the twelfth-century chansons of the Crusades, through the fifteenth-century French and English political works of Alain Chartier, to the twentieth-century anti-war satirical films of Mario Monicelli.

Please find attached below a promotional flyer for 50% off the purchase price for ANZAMEMS members.

ANZAMEMS members wishing to promote their research through the ANZAMEMS newsletter are invited to email the editor, Lisa Rolston.

Congratulations to ANZAMEMS member Adelina Modesti on the publication of her new book, Women’s Patronage and Gendered Cultural Networks in Early Modern Europe. Vittoria della Rovere, Grand Duchess of Tuscany (Routledge, 2020).

This book examines the sociocultural networks between the courts of early modern Italy and Europe, focusing on the Florentine Medici court, and the cultural patronage and international gendered networks developed by the Grand Duchess of Tuscany, Vittoria della Rovere.

Adelina Modesti uses Grand Duchess Vittoria as an exemplar of pan-European ‘matronage’ and proposes a new matrilineal model of patronage in the early modern period, one in which women become not only the mediators but also the architects of public taste and the transmitters of cultural capital. The book will be the first comprehensive monographic study of this important cultural figure.

This study will be of interest to scholars working in art history, gender studies, Renaissance studies and seventeenth-century Italy.

Please find attached below a promotional flyer which includes a discount code for 20% off the purchase price.

ANZAMEMS members wishing to promote their research through the ANZAMEMS newsletter are invited to email the editor, Lisa Rolston.

Congratulations to ANZAMEMS member Amanda McVitty on the publication of her new book, Treason and Masculinity in Medieval England: Gender, Law and Political Culture (Boydell Press, 2020). This presents the first extended study of treason in later medieval England since the 1970s and it makes significant interventions in the fields of legal and political history.

Drawing on evidence from trial records, legislation and chronicles, Treason and Masculinity in Medieval England illuminates the ways in which cultural ideals of masculinity reinforced or subverted government responses to crises of legitimacy, and demonstrates that gender conditioned understandings of treason in the political arena as well as the definitions embedded in statutes and case law. At the same time, it explores the varied ways men defended themselves from accusations of treason by invoking, and in the process helping to transform, shared beliefs about what it meant to be a man in medieval England.

Please find attached below a promotional flyer which includes a discount code for 35% off the purchase price (enter code BB135 at check-out), valid until 31 December.

ANZAMEMS members wishing to promote their research through the ANZAMEMS newsletter are invited to email the editor, Lisa Rolston.

Congratulations to ANZAMEMS member Charles Zika on the publication of a new collection, Feeling Exclusion: Religious Conflict, Exile and Emotions in Early Modern Europe (Routledge, 2019) co-edited with Giovanni Tarantino. The volume features a number of essays by ANZAMEMS members.

Feeling Exclusion: Religious Conflict, Exile and Emotions in Early Modern Europe investigates the emotional experience of exclusion at the heart of the religious life of persecuted and exiled individuals and communities in early modern Europe.

Between the late fifteenth and early eighteenth centuries an unprecedented number of people in Europe were forced to flee their native lands and live in a state of physical or internal exile as a result of religious conflict and upheaval. Drawing on new insights from history of emotions methodologies, Feeling Exclusion explores the complex relationships between communities in exile, the homelands from which they fled or were exiled, and those from whom they sought physical or psychological assistance. It examines the various coping strategies religious refugees developed to deal with their marginalization and exclusion, and investigates the strategies deployed in various media to generate feelings of exclusion through models of social difference, that questioned the loyalty, values, and trust of “others”.

Accessibly written, divided into three thematic parts, and enhanced by a variety of illustrations, Feeling Exclusion is perfect for students and researchers of early modern emotions and religion.

ANZAMEMS members wishing to promote their research through the ANZAMEMS newsletter are invited to email the editor, Lisa Rolston.