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What did it mean to be a man in medieval England? Most would answer this question by alluding to the power and status men enjoyed in a patriarchal society, or they might refer to iconic images of chivalrous knights. While these popular ideas do have their roots in the history of the aristocracy, the experience of ordinary men was far more complicated. Marshalling a wide array of evidence—including legal records, letters, medical sources, and the literature of the period—the author of this book plumbs the social and cultural significance of masculinity during the generations born between the Black Death and the Protestant Reformation. He discovers that social relations between men, founded on the ideals of honesty and self-restraint, were at least as important as their domination and control of women in defining their identities. By carefully exploring the social, physical, and psychological aspects of masculinity, the book offers a comprehensive account of the exterior and interior lives of medieval men.

By the end of the nineteenth century, Victorians were seeking rational explanations for the world in which they lived. The radical ideas of Charles Darwin had shaken traditional religious beliefs. Sigmund Freud was developing his innovative models of the conscious and unconscious mind. And anthropologist James George Frazer was subjecting magic, myth, and ritual to systematic inquiry. Why, then, in this quintessentially modern moment, did late Victorian and Edwardian men and women become absorbed by metaphysical quests, heterodox spiritual encounters, and occult experimentation? In answering this question, this book breaks new ground in its consideration of the role of occultism in British culture prior to World War I. Rescuing occultism from its status as an “irrational indulgence” and situating it at the center of British intellectual life, the author argues that an involvement with the occult was a leitmotif of the intellectual avant-garde. Carefully placing a serious engagement with esotericism squarely alongside revolutionary understandings of rationality and consciousness, she demonstrates how a newly psychologized magic operated in conjunction with the developing patterns of modern life. The author details such examples of occult practice as the sex magic of Aleister Crowley, the pharmacological experimentation of W. B. Yeats, and complex forms of astral clairvoyance as taught in secret and hierarchical magical societies such as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

Just as twenty-first-century technologies such as blogs and wikis have transformed the once private act of reading into a public enterprise, devotional reading experiences in the Middle Ages were dependent upon an oscillation between the solitary and the communal. This book uses tools from both literary criticism and art history to illuminate Additional MS 37049, an illustrated Carthusian miscellany housed in the British Library. This revealing artifact, the author argues, closes the gap between group spectatorship and private study in late medieval England. Drawing on the work of W. J. T. Mitchell, Michael Camille, and others working at the image–text crossroads, the book addresses the manuscript's texts and illustrations to examine connections between reading and performance within the solitary monk's cell and also outside. The author reimagines the medieval codex as a site where the meanings of images and words are performed, both publicly and privately, in the act of reading.

During the nineteenth century, Britain became the first gaslit society, with electric lighting arriving in 1878. At the same time, the British government significantly expanded its power to observe and monitor its subjects. How did such enormous changes in the way people saw and were seen affect Victorian culture? To answer that question, this book mounts an ambitious history of illumination and vision in Britain, drawing on extensive research into everything from the science of perception and lighting technologies to urban design and government administration. It explores how light facilitated such practices as safe transportation and private reading, as well as institutional efforts to collect knowledge. And it contends that, contrary to presumptions that illumination helped create a society controlled by intrusive surveillance, the new radiance often led to greater personal freedom and was integral to the development of modern liberal society.