Gender has been a powerful and prominent factor affecting relationships of power and social hierarchies throughout history but, as this group of essays shows, there were many other notions of `difference' that intersected with gender within the medieval world. These 11 essays, which are based on research from the fields of history, literary and religious studies, use postcolonial and feminist theory to explore various categories of `difference' in western Christian, Jewish, Byzantine and Islamic worlds. They examine the ways in which concepts of gender and difference were used to constrain and control social behaviour and to undermine identities, and the presence of various forms of resistance to these discourses of difference.