The playful Middle Ages

Medical Texts and Cultures of Northern Europe is a series which opens up a dedicated forum for comparative work on northern European medieval literature, history, and society and their significance in the modern world. It promotes dialogue between anglophone and continental medievalists and addresses the need for transcultural perspectives on Europe's medical origins in a way that is distinctive both in scope and in academic orientation. The focus is on the medical texts and cultures of the British Isles, northern and central mainland Europe, and Scandinavia. The chronological range of the series is from c. 800 AD to c. 1600 Each volume makes available to an international readership excellent new work, offering ways of readings texts, cultures, and institutions that speak to the contemporary world.

Love play or playing dead, wordplay or playing games the notion of play inhabits all spheres of human activity. This collection of essays brings together international scholars from a range of disciplines to explore aspects of playfulness in the later European Middle Ages. From manuscript to performance and from the domestic to the doctorial, the exuberance and ambiguity of verbal and visual play is interrogated in order to decode layers of meaning in texts and artefacts.

These twelve papers celebrate the work Elaine C. Block, whose dedicated study of misericords has, through countless articles and books, made the riches of this dizzying iconographic resource easily available to scholars for the first time. Her monumental Corpus on Medieval Misericords volume will no doubt inform medieval scholars for generations to come, and those included in the present collection are both proud and graceful to be of the first generation to benefit from her work on this body of carvings which challengingly - and playfully - straddles the sometimes invisible line between the sacred and profane.