Michael A. RYAN is Associate Professor of History at the University of New Mexico. He received his Ph.D. in 2005 from the University of Minnesota, working under the direction of Professor William D. Phillips, Jr., and Professor Carla Rahn Phillips. His first job was as an Assistant Professor of History at Purdue University, where he earned tenure and promotion to Associate Professor. In 2011, he joined the faculty of the University of New Mexico as Associate Professor of History. He is a specialist in the social, cultural, and intellectual history of the late medieval (fourteenth and fifteenth centuries) Mediterranean Basin, with geographic foci on the Iberian and Italian Peninsulas. His thematic foci include the history of apocalyptic expectations and apprehensions; the intersection of magic, science, and religion; and gender and sexuality. With Karolyn Kinane, he is the co-editor of End of Days: Essays on the Apocalypse from Antiquity to Modernity (McFarland, 2009), the author of A Kingdom of Stargazers: Astrology and Authority in the Late Medieval Crown of Aragon (Cornell, 2011), and the editor of A Companion to the Premodern Apocalypse (Brill, 2016). He is currently working on a new book-length manuscript on the parameters of magical fraud, counterfeiting, and charlatanry, tentatively entitled And You Will See Wonders: Magic, Deceit, and Fraud in Late Medieval Venice.

With Framing Comments by Carol Lansing: Carol Lansing is a Professor of History at the University of California -- Santa Barbara. Her work focuses on the society, politics, and culture in Medieval Italy. Her most recent book, Passion and Order: Restraint of Grief in the Medieval Italian Communes, explores the thirteenth-century Italian city-states imposed laws on how people should grieve at funerals. She analyzes why the laws emphasized histrionic female grief, but in practice stressed not female but male public decorum.She also published The Florentine Magnates: Lineage and Faction in a Medieval Commune and Power and Purity: Cathar Heresy in Medieval Italy. Prof. Lansing also co-edited A Blackwell Companion to the Medieval World.