Elina Gertsman is Assistant Professor of Art History and Art at Case Western Reserve University. She is the author of The Dance of Death in the Middle Ages: Image, Text, Performance (2010), and the editor of Visualizing Medieval Performance: Perspectives, Histories, Contexts (2008).

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• Contents Preface: ‘Going They Went and Wept’: Tears in Medieval Discourse, Elina Gertsman Introduction: Considerations of Weeping and Sincerity in the Middle Ages, Lyn A. Blanchfield Part I: Tears and Image 1: Women Mourners in Byzantine Art, Literature, and Society, Henry Maguire 2: The Eve Fragment from Autun and the Emotionalism of Pilgrimage, Marian Bleeke 3: Weeping Women: Social Roles and Images in 14th century Tuscany, Judith Steinhoff 4: The Paradoxical Rhetoric of Tears: Looking at the Madrid Descent from the Cross, Felix Thürlemann Part II: Tears and Religious Experience 5: A Penitent Prepares: Affect, Contrition, and Tears, Christopher Swift 6: He Cried and Made Others Cry’: Crying as a Sign of Pietistic Authenticity or Deception in Medieval Islamic Preaching, Linda G. Jones 7: Si puose calcina a’ propi occhi: The Importance of the Gift of Tears for Thirteenth-Century Religious Women and their Hagiographers, Kimberley-Joy Knight 8: Weeping as Discourse Between Heaven and Earth: The Transformative Power of Tears in Medieval Jewish Literature, Rachel S. Mikva Part III: Tears and Narrative 9: The Shedding of Tears in Late Anglo-Saxon England, Tracey-Ann Cooper 10: Tears and Trial: Weeping as Forensic Evidence in Piers Plowman, Katherine O'Sullivan 11: A Sorrowful Song: On Tears in Chrétien de Troyes’s Philomena, Irit Kleiman 12: Crying in Public and in Private: Tears and Crying in Medieval German Literature, Albrecht Classen Conclusion: Transmitting Despair by Manuscript and Print, Barbara H. Rosenwein