Hrotsvit von Gandersheim and the political uses of astrology / Joan Cadden -- Under whose care? the Madonna of San Sisto and women's monastic life in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Rome / Anne L. Clark -- Sister acts : conventual performance and the visitatio sepulchri in England and France / Margaret Aziza Pappano -- On the borders of exile : the poetry of Solomon Simhah of Troyes / Susan L. Einbinder -- Ubi sunt? Three lost (and found) ladies in troubadour lyric / Roy Rosenstein -- Lives and works : Chaucer and the compilers of the troubadour songbooks / Laura Kendrick -- Following instructions : remaking Dante's Vita nova in the fourteenth century / H. Wayne Storey -- The straits of empire : Sicily in Vergil and Dante / Sarah Spence -- Woman as mediator in medieval depictions of Muslims : the case of Floripas / Suzanne Conklin Akbari -- Lifting the veil? notes toward a gendered history of early italian literature / Teodolinda Barolini -- Afterword : in praise of a nonpareil colleague / Robert W. Hanning