Autobiographical writings was the inroad to identity formation among female mystics and authors.

Late Medieval Female Subject Consciousness. Italian and English Mystics, Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Beyond
By Stephanie Amsel
Palgrave 2026

Late Medieval Female Subject Consciousness: Italian and English Mystics brings together disparate feminist theoretical approaches to explore the formation of medieval female subject consciousness in writings by female mystics including Angela of Foligno, Catherine of Siena, and Margery Kempe, as well as secular writings of Christine de Pizan, and powerful female characters of Giovanni Boccaccio and Geoffrey Chaucer. The rise of what Amsel calls “medieval female subject consciousness” shows that increased self-awareness and sense of self relates to how the authorship of texts reconstructs traditional female roles, particularly in Italian and English. These writing women challenged prevailing norms as they forged literal and figurative spaces to self-actualize through writing, even if the act of writing was performed by male amanuenses. This book explores how Boccaccio and Chaucer serve as witnesses by creating female characters who reflect changes in women’s writing in late medieval society in Italy and England.

FEATURED PHOTO:

A miniature of the Erythrean Sibyl, writing. British Library, Royal 16 G V f. 23., CC BY-SA

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

• Lo Specchio Spaccato
• From Subaltern to Self-Actualization: Defining Medieval Female Subject Consciousness
• Medieval Women’s Work: Women’s Writing as Intellectual, Productive Work
• Writing the Body in Medieval Texts: Autobiography and Testimonio
• Witnessing Medieval Female Subject Consciousness in Works of Giovanni Boccaccio and Geoffrey Chaucer

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Stephanie Amsel is professor at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, USA

A new book gathers together the results of Ian Wood’s life-long immersion into the events in Burgundy AD 450-535

Burgundy, 450-535.Politics and religion in the Gibichung Province.
By Ian Wood
Series: Saggi di Storia Antica vol 38
“L’Erma” di Bretschneider 2026

This book examines the early medieval Burgundian polity, which attempted in the 5th and 6th centuries to establish itself less than a successor kingdom and more as a Roman province; and did not succeed.
In the final years of the Western Roman Empire and during the following half-century, the valleys of the Rhône and Saône were governed by members of a royal Burgundian family, the Gibichungs. They ruled not as barbarian kings but as Roman magistri militum. Their prominence derived from their association with the magister militum praesentalis Ricimer, and they operated in close cooperation with members of the late Roman senatorial aristocracy, including Sidonius Apollinaris and some of his contemporaries.
This region under their control was a centre of religious and cultural life, distinguished by the works of Sidonius, Claudianus Mamertus, Faustus of Riez, and Avitus of Vienne. The interaction of politics and religion culminated in the foundation of the monastery of Agaune, a major episcopal gathering at Épaone, and the promulgation of an important body of legislation issued by King Sigismund, before collapsing dramatically in the wake of a political crisis caused by the ruler himself. The failure of the Gibichung state in AD 534 marked the end of a remarkable experiment in governmental continuity in post-Roman Gaul.

This book is written by one of the most authoritative scholars of the Early Middle Ages, Ian Wood, Professor Emeritus at the University of Leeds. Renowned for his long-standing engagement with the cultural history and historical anthropology of the Early Middle Ages, Wood here offers a long-awaited full account of events in a region that, during the fifth and early sixth centuries, became entangled in conflicts between the Romans, the Huns, the Franks, the Visigoths, and finally the Ostrogoths. None of these powers appears to have been willing to allow this political gatekeeper to establish itself permanently at the threshold of one of the principal Alpine passes through what is now western Switzerland. Not least, perhaps, because the so-called Burgundian realm represented a genuine experiment in the fusion of Roman and Germanic cultural forms. The realm—if it was ever truly a kingdom, which this book argues it was not—came to an end when it was absorbed into the Frankish Empire in AD 534. As Ian Wood states in his introduction, this is therefore a history written “primarily through the eyes of late Roman aristocrats and those who interacted with them, and not through the perspective of the Völkerwanderung and the Germanic kingdoms”.

 

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Les Burgondes: un royaume oublié au coeur de l’Europe
Favrod, Justin
Pu Polytechnique, Lausanne 2002
French Edition.

The Burgundians, the people of the Nibelungen, left the Rhine at the command of the Romans. They settled around Geneva, where their kings were charged with ensuring military control of the Alpine passes. However, between the fifth and sixth centuries, the Empire they were meant to defend collapsed. In a political movement that transformed Europe, the Burgundian kingdom expanded across parts of what are now France and French-speaking Switzerland and began to exercise independence. This is a fascinating and little-known period, in which the author, through a critical analysis of historical knowledge and a remarkable contribution of his own research, describes the coexistence in this first “Burgundy” of a people from the North and the Gallo-Romans.

Interethnic harmony was regulated by a law issued by King Gundobad. Gradually, the linguistic boundary between French and German took shape and has endured to the present day. Here the past takes on the face of a royal family whose tribulations—marked by bloodshed, wisdom or fury, success or disaster—are inscribed in the broader transition from Antiquity to the Middle Ages

 

Les Burgondes: Ier – VIe siècles apr. J.-C.
By Katalin Escher
Errance, Paris 2021
French edition

A Germanic people originating in what is now Poland, later settled on the Rhine and then in the Rhône valley of Gaul, the Burgundians inscribed their name both in the geography of Europe—where a “Burgundy” still exists today as the heir to several kingdoms—and in its great epic traditions, such as that of the Nibelungen. They were among the principal actors in the period of the Great Invasions in the West. This book takes stock of current knowledge concerning this people.

Drawing on ancient sources, it reconstructs the three major phases of Burgundian history: a kind of “preface” extending from their origins to their settlement on the Rhine (established by no later than the beginning of the fifth century); the “first” Rhine kingdom, whose destruction by the Huns in 436 inspired the Nibelungen cycle and certain Scandinavian sagas; and finally the “second” Rhône kingdom, which marked the apogee of Burgundian power before being incorporated into the Frankish kingdom in 534. For each of these periods, the archaeological remains that constitute the material traces of the Burgundian people are presented, with particular emphasis on the second kingdom. Consideration is also given to linguistic and toponymic evidence.

This study makes it possible to sketch as faithful a portrait as possible of the Burgundian people, who, at the end of their historical trajectory, became a constituent element of the French and Swiss populations. At the same time, it highlights the importance of their interactions with other major actors of Late Antiquity: the Huns, destroyers of the first kingdom; the Goths; the Alamanni; the Alans; and the late Roman world, which the second kingdom both extended and replaced. The composite culture of Burgundian Gaul in the fifth and sixth centuries, shaped by these various influences, reflects a period of intense interaction and the formation of new identities.

FEATURED PHOTO:

Vase of St. Martin at St. Maurice d’Agaune. Source: Wikipedia.The myth is, the vases was gifted to the Monastry at Agaune by St. Martin of Tours. Likely, hoever it was a gift from Sigismund while king to his new abbey. The core of the vase is from the 2. century BC, while the setting is likely to have been worked at the end of the 5th century. Thus, the vase illustrates the point made by Ian Wood that the Burgundian politi was a cultural patchwork.

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Silks, spices, fruits, jewels, glass… desired and coveted exotica were luxury products out of Syria in the Late Middle Ages. New Book by Myerson tells the story

The Desire for Syria in Medieval England
by E. K. Myerson
Cambridge University Press 2025

This book explores how desire for Syrian luxury goods reshaped English culture in the late Middle Ages. Focusing on the circulation of commodities known collectively as Syriana—sweet wines, spices, silks, jewels, and minerals—it shows how international trade connected England to the eastern Mediterranean and embedded the Levant deeply within English imagination, material life, and systems of meaning.

The study is anchored in a dramatic historical event. In June 1458, two English merchant ships returning from the Levant were attacked by pirates off the coast of Malta. Their captain, the Bristol merchant Robert Sturmy, was killed, and a cargo worth an extraordinary sum was seized. Recovered through legal records and inventories, this lost shipment provides a point of entry into a wider history of commerce, violence, longing, and cultural encounter.

Using this incident as a lens, the book reconstructs the afterlives of Syrian goods in medieval England. These commodities, once associated with the Holy Land and later traded through the markets of the Mamluk Empire, carried layered meanings: sacred, medicinal, aesthetic, and erotic. They circulated not only through ports and marketplaces, but also through texts, images, recipes, churches, workshops, and domestic spaces.

Drawing on archival research alongside art history, literary analysis, and theoretical perspectives, the book argues that Syriana functioned as a powerful cultural category. It shaped English art and language, transformed practices of medicine, cuisine, craft, and religion, and revealed an ambivalent relationship to the East—marked by fascination, appropriation, and desire as much as by fear or hostility.

By following these goods and the fantasies attached to them, the book reframes medieval England as a place formed through global entanglements. It shows how commerce and imagination worked together to produce enduring ideas about luxury, difference, and power—ideas whose legacies continue to shape the present.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

E. K. Myerson is an artist, writer, and curator, currently studying at the Royal College of Art. His academic and creative writing has appeared in publications including GLQ, The TLS, Wasafiri Magazine, New Medieval Literatures, postmedieval, and Wellcome Collection Stories. He received his PhD in medieval literature from Birkbeck College in 2022, and have held postdoctoral fellowships at the Wellcome Trust / ISSF Fund, the Parker Library, and Emmanuel College, Cambridge.

FEATURED PHOTO:

Port of Genoa 1481. By Christoforo Grassi. © Galata Maritime Museum. Source: Wikipedia

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Medieval recordkeeping and financial management in the high and later Middle Ages was witnessed by  numerous accounts. New book provides an introduction to this source material

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