Literary studies: ancient, classical Books

Book SynopsisA series which is "a monumental achievement" (Review of English Studies). In 1755 Richard Rawlinson bequeathed his vast collection of books and manuscripts to the Bodleian Library. The manuscripts alone numbered over 5,000, and the 167 of these which contain Middle English prose are indexed in this Handlist. These are divided fairly evenly between religious and secular texts: Rawlinson does not seem to have been interested in any particular genre; if a book was old and deemed to be of historical interest it entered his collection, either as an acquisition or a contemporary transcription. Scriptural and devotional writing is represented by copies of the New Testament, three different works by Rolle and three by Hilton, Love's Mirror, a Primer, Sacerdos Parochialis, The Chastising of God's Children, The Mirror of Our Lady, The Mirror to Lewd Men and Women, excerpts from the works of St Catherine of Siena and St Bridget of Sweden, Mirk's Festial, other sermons,Wycliffite treatises, the only English copy known of William Thorpe's Testimony, prayers, several copies of Pore Caitiff, and more. Secular and political writing includes versions of Mandeville's Travels, John Fortescue's On the Governance of England, translations of two works by Alain Chartier, and The English Conquest of Ireland. There is a rich selection of historical prose, with ten Bruts in whole or part, royal genealogies, accounts of royal weddings and of the coronation of Richard II, descriptions of court etiquette, the deposition of Richard II, the challenge for the English throne of Henry IV and his speech of acceptance. Scientific and utilitarian prose is illustrated by Chaucer's Astrolabe, grammatical treatises, alchemical writings by Lull and Ripley, medical treatises, especially urologies, and, in a lighter vein, extracts from the J.B. Treatiseon hunting and country life, as well as separate works on hawking, angling and gardening. The abundance of recipes, medical, culinary and veterinary, singly and in collection, have been treated in this Handlist in particular detail. Sarah Ogilvie-Thomson is a former lecturer in language and medieval literature at St Edmund Hall, Oxford.Trade ReviewAn impressive and very welcome publication.[T]his large handlist is a tremendous resource for scholarship, especially in the study of non-canonical texts. * THE LIBRARY *The Handlists are an important foundational addition to the field for anyone seeking to find a new research topic or to contextualise an existing one, or embarking on editing a text. * ARCHIVES *As always, this volume of The Index of Middle English Prose will be a valuable resource for many researchers. * MEDIUM AEVUM *

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Book SynopsisFirst full-length critical study of humour in medievalism. The role of laughter and humour in the postmedieval citation, interpretation or recreation of the middle ages has hitherto received little attention, a gap in scholarship which this book aims to fill. Examining a wide range of comic texts and practices across several centuries, from Don Quixote and early Chaucerian modernisation through to Victorian theatre, the Monty Python films, television and the experience of visiting sites of "heritage tourism" such as the Jorvik Viking Museum at York, it identifies what has been perceived as uniquely funny about the Middle Ages in different times and places, and how this has influenced ideas not just about the medieval but also aboutmodernity. Tracing the development and permutations of its various registers, including satire, parody, irony, camp, wit, jokes, and farce, the author offers fresh and amusing insight into comic medievalism as a vehicle for critical commentary on the present as well as the past, and shows that for as long as there has been medievalism, people have laughed at and with the middle ages. Louise D'Arcens is Associate Professor in English Literaturesat the University of Wollongong.Trade ReviewThis is an important book because, if there is a crossover academic topic that appeals to the broader public, comic medievalism is surely it. D'Arcens provides both an insightful investigation into the broad appeal the Middle Ages affords as well as the ideological functions it serves, while also offering quite useful theoretical and pedagogical structures for further inquiry. * JOURNAL OF ENGLISH AND GERMANIC PHILOLOGY *[A] wide-ranging, perceptive and entertaining book. * TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT *D'Arcens should be commended for writing a sophisticated book that explores why the Middle Ages continue to amuse. Highly recommended. * CHOICE *Table of ContentsThe Cervantean Paradigm: Comedy, Madness, and Meta-medievalism in Don Quixote Scraping the Rust from the Joking Bard: Chaucer in the Age of Wit Medievalist Farce as Anti-totalitarian Weapon: Dario Fo as Modern Guillare Pre-modern Camp and Faerie Legshows: Travestying the Middle Ages on the Nineteenth-Century Stage Up the Middle Ages: Performing Tradition in Comic Medievalist Cinema 'The past is a different and fairly disgusting country': The Middle Ages in recent British 'jocumentary' Smelling the Past: Medieval Heritage Tourism and the Phenomenology of Ironic Nostalgia Afterword: Laughing into the Future Bibliography

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Book SynopsisThe notion of what it means to "distort" a text is here explored through a rich variety of individual case studies. Distortion is nearly always understood as negative. It can be defined as perversion, impairment, caricature, corruption, misrepresentation, or deviation. Unlike its close neighbour, "disruption", it remains resolutely associatedwith the undesirable, the lost, or the deceptive. Yet it is also part of a larger knowledge system, filling the gap between the authentic event and its experience; it has its own ethics and practice, and it is necessarily incorporated in all meaningful communication. Need it always be a negative phenomenon? How does distortion affect producers, transmitters and receivers of texts? Are we always obliged to acknowledge distortion? What effect does a distortive process have on the intentionality, materiality and functionality, not to say the cultural, intellectual and market value, of all textual objects? The essays in this volume seek to address these questions,They range fromthe medieval through the early modern to contemporary periods and, throughout, deliberately challenge periodisation and the canonical. Topics treated include Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, Reformation documents and poems, Global Shakespeare, the Oxford English Dictionary, Native American spiritual objects, and digital tools for re-envisioning textual relationships. From the written to the spoken, the inhabited object to the remediated, distortion is demonstrated to demand a rich and provocative mode of analysis. Elaine Treharne is Roberta Bowman Denning Professor of Humanities, Professor of English, Director of the Centre for Spatial and Textual Analysis, and Director of Stanford Technologies at Stanford University; Greg Walker is Regius Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. Contributors: Matthew Aiello, Emma Cayley, Aaron Kelly, Daeyeong (Dan) Kim, Sarah Ogilvie, Timothy Powell, Giovanni Scorcioni, Greg Walker, Claude Willan.Trade ReviewThe interdisciplinary possibilities generated in the volume suggest promising avenues of inquiry now made more accessible by this collection. * PARERGON *Table of ContentsIntroduction - Elaine Treharne The Curious Production and Reconstruction of Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 85 and 86 - Matthew Aiello Through a glass darkly, or, rethinking medieval materiality: a tale of carpets, screens, and parchment - Emma Cayley Distortion, Ideology, Time: Proletarian Aesthetics in the work of Lionel Britton - Aaron Kelly Shakespeare and Korea: Mutual Remappings - Dan Kim Dictionary Distortions - Sarah Ogilvie Where Do Indigenous Origin Stories and Empowered Objects Fit into a Literary History of the American Continent? - Timothy Powell Distortion in Textual Object Facsimile Production: a Liability or an Asset? - Giovanni Scorcionni The Uncanny Reformation: Revenant Texts and Distorted Time in Henrician England - Greg Walker The Presence of the Book - Claude Willan

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Book SynopsisIdeas of translation and adaptation in the middle ages investigated through the lens of the Merlin tradition. The medieval figure of Merlin is intriguing, enigmatic, and riddled with contradictions. Half human, half devil, he possesses a supernatural knowledge that allows him to prophesy the future. This book examines the reinterpretationof Merlin's character in French and Italian Arthurian literature, in which chivalric romance and political prophecy become increasingly intertwined. As the Merlin story crosses the fluid cultural and linguistic boundaries between vernacular dialects on either side of the Alps, the protagonist accumulates histories, futures, and discourses from multiple texts within his omniscient knowledge. From his first appearance in Geoffrey of Monmouth's HistoriaRegum Britanniae, through thirteenth-century French romance, to fifteenth-century Venice, Merlin is the voice of political and spiritual truths that originate beyond the sphere of human comprehension. The study also shows howthe conversion of Merlin's prophetic speech from his omniscient mind into human languages parallels the work of the medieval translator. At the same time, the transmission of the Merlin story between vernacular French and Italiandialects presents an alternative model of translation, one that relies not on the displacement of previous texts, but instead on the accretion of information from text to text. Laura Chuhan Campbell is Assistant Professor of French at Durham University.Trade ReviewCampbell's nuanced analysis demonstrates the multifaced ways in which the contradictions and elaborations of the personality of Merlin are overlaid and subsumed from one version to another, gathering in richness in the process and transcending the usual binary oppositions. * SCRIPTORIUM *This book estalishes a valuable theoretical framework for a new consideration of medieval translation from a hermeneutic perspective and contributes to the debate on the French of medieval Italy. * FRENCH STUDIES *Campbell's work offers an insightful reading of French and Italian versions of Merlin's story and prophecies, focusing on reciprocal relations between vernacular languages and texts. * SPECULUM *Table of ContentsIntroduction Sympathy for a Devil? Merlin's Conception According to Robert de Boron and Paulino Pieri Death of the Author: Merlin's Imprisonment by the Dame du Lac Beyond The Limits of Interpretation: Rewriting Prophetic Discourse in the Estoire de Merlin and the Suite du Merlin 'Ce dit Merlin': Open and Closed Prophecies in the Italian Merlin Tradition Conclusion Appendix 1: Chronology of Primary Texts Appendix 2: Summaries of the Principle Texts Discussed Bibliography

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Book SynopsisA compelling argument that far from developing in a literary vacuum, saga literature interacts in lively, creative and critical ways with one of the central genres of the European middle ages. The relationship between that most popular of medieval genres, the saint's life, and the sagas of the Icelanders is investigated here. Although saga heroes are rarely saints themselves - indeed rather the reverse - they interact with saints in a variety of ways: as ancestors or friends of saints, as noble heathens or converts to Christianity, as innocent victims of violent death, or even as anti-saints, interrogating aspects of saintly ideology. Via detailed readings of a range of the sagas, this book explores how saints' lives contributed to the widening of medieval horizons, allowing the saga authors to develop multiple perspectives (moral, eschatological, psychological) on traditional feud narratives and family dramas. The saint's life introduced new ideals to the saga world, such as suffering, patience and feminine nurture, and provided, through dreams, visions and signs, ways of representing the interior life and of engaging with questions of merit and reward. In dialogue with the ideology of the saint, the saga hero develops into a complex and multi-faceted figure. Siân Grønlie is Associate Professor and Kate Elmore Fellow in English Language and Literature at St Anne's College, Oxford.Trade ReviewThe Saint and the Saga Hero is an inspiring, well-researched and well-written book. It has not left my desk since I was fortunate to get it, and I think it is going to stay there. * EARLY MEDIEVAL EUROPE *Grønlie has produced a study that manages to use its own wide horizons of knowledge to elevate the peripheral and the particular, as only the best scholarship can. * MEDIUM ÆVUM *Grønlie has done a tremendous service to the field of Old Norse-Icelandic, and her monograph will undoubtedly be consulted for years to come as scholars continue to examine the various and complex ways in which the lives of saints shaped saga literature and the characters therein. * SPECULUM *The Saint and the Saga Hero has been a pleasure to read and review. It is a book well served by Grønlie's evident attention to detail, innovative approach to intertextuality, and patient and thoughtful approach to medieval 'genre.' This volume adds a valuable new perspective to the study of Old Norse-Icelandic texts and their interaction with, and place within, wider European literary endeavours. * CERÆ *The Saint and the Saga Hero should be mandatory reading for anyone interested in the Icelandic sagas. No one, after completing it, will be able to deny that in medieval Icelandic writing, "interaction with the saint's life should be recognised as a self-conscious literary act: the saga can only define its owns horizons in interaction with other types of narrative prose" (p. 257). * Catholic Historical Review *Table of ContentsPreface Saints' Lives and Sagas of Icelanders The Failed Saint: Oddr's Óláfr Tryggvason The Confessor, the Martyr and the Convert The Noble Heathen and the Missionary Saint The Outlaw, the Exile and the Desert Saint The Saint as Friend and Patron Conclusion

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Book SynopsisA full-scale survey of crusading lyrics in Old French and Occitan. The crusading movements provoked a vast and diverse mass of reactions in the medieval West. While Latin sources provide official versions of its preaching, organisation and events, the vernacular lyrics of the troubadours and trouvères present a secular perspective, through a cornucopia of on-the-spot responses in France, Occitania, Italy, the Iberian Peninsula, Cyprus, Syria and Greece. This book constitutes the first comprehensive, modern analysis of Old French and Occitan lyric texts relating to the crusades. It brings out their full range, from propaganda for the crusades, to criticisms of crusading and crusaders through vituperation, humour or cynicism, to their use as apretext for political or personal wrangling. It also shows how they shed light on many aspects of medieval life, among them chivalric and courtly values (often in tension with clerical ones), regional politics, sexual behaviour, personal experiences of crusading and captivity, the complex interaction of Christians, Greeks and Muslims, and bafflement in the face of failure and God's imponderable purposes. LINDA PATERSON is Professor Emerita, University of Warwick.Trade Review[A] remarkable achievements....Crusade scholars are in Paterson's debt. * PARERGON *This work is a first-rate critical essay cum edition of crusade poetry that brings this neglected genre to the public eye and offers insightful historical context for a large corpus of medieval songs never before analyzed together. . . . It offers a gold mine of data and analyses and promises to become part of the critical canon in very short order. * H-NET *This synthetic and wide-ranging survey of lyric crusade poetry is accompanied by an impressive digital sourcebook. Both should prove tremendous resources for those teaching and researching the crusades and medieval Latin and vernacular literary traditions. * SEHEPUNKTE *Paterson succeeds in composing a readable, yet richly documented account of the crusades in the medieval lyric imagination. Both non-academic and scholarly readers of medieval literature and history should be indebted to Linda Paterson for both the book and the website. * H-FRANCE *Paterson's monograph, Singing the Crusades, is a magisterial synthesis, in which she puts her detailed knowledge of both primary texts and scholarship at the service of a wider scholarly public. * Tenso *Table of ContentsIntroduction Early Expeditions After Damascus: Reconquest, Settlement and Pilgrimage The Third Crusade [1187-1192] The Aftermath of the Third Crusade The Fourth Crusade and Aftermath The Fifth Crusade, of Damietta, and the Albigensian Crusade Frederick II and the Sixth Crusade The 'False Crusade': The Albigensian war of 1224-1233 The Barons' Crusade, or the Crusade of Thibaut de Champagne The Seventh Crusade, or the First Crusade of Saint Louis The Eighth Crusade, or the Second Crusade of Saint Louis After Saint Louis Conclusion Appendix A. The Words to Say It: The Crusading Rhetoric of the Troubadours and Trouvères Appendix B. Chronology of events and texts Appendix C. Melodies attested in the manuscripts Bibliography

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Book SynopsisThe continued influence and significance of the legend of Arthur are demonstrated by the articles collected in this volume. The enduring appeal and rich variety of the Arthurian legend are once again manifest here. Chrétien's Erec et Enide features first in a case study of the poet's endings and medieval theories of poetic composition. Next follows an essay that comes to the rather surprising-but- convincing conclusion that the "traitor" spoken of in the opening lines of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is neither Aeneas nor Antenor, but Paris. Another essay dealing with Sir Gawain, this time in Malory's Morte Darthur, offers among other things an answer to the question of how Gawain knows the exact hour of his death. Few native Irish Arthurian tales have come down to us: a discussion of "The Tale of the Crop-Eared Dog" shows it to be both bizarre and popular, as witnessed by the many manuscripts in which it is preserved. The materiality of the Arthurian legend is represented here by a detailed treatment of the lead cross supposedly found in the grave of King Arthur at Glastonbury Abbey in 1191. Finally, this volume continues Arthurian Literature's tradition of publishing unfamiliar or previously unknown Arthurian texts, in this instance an original Middle English translation of the story of the sword in the stone, from the Old French Merlin. ELIZABETH ARCHIBALD is Professor of English Studies at Durham University, and Principal of StCuthbert's Society; DAVID F. JOHNSON is Professor of English at Florida State University, Tallahassee. Contributors: Lindy Brady, David Carlton, Neil Cartlidge, Nicole Clifton, Oliver Harris, Richard Moll, Rebecca Newby.Table of ContentsIllusory Ends in Chrétien de Troyes' Erec et Enide - Rebecca Newby Who is the Traitor at the Beginning of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight? - Neil Cartlidge Sir Gawain's Death and Prophecy in Malory's Morte Darthur - Nicole Clifton Late Medieval Irish Kingship, Egerton 1782, and the Irish Arthurian Romance Eachtra an Mhadra Mhaoil ('The Story of the Crop-Eared Dog') - Lindy Brady 'Which I have beholden with most curiouse eyes': The Lead Cross from Glastonbury Abbey - Oliver Harris The Arundel Coronatio Arthuri: A Middle English Sword in the Stone Story from London, College of Arms MS Arundel 58 - David Carlton The Arundel Coronatio Arthuri: A Middle English Sword in the Stone Story from London, College of Arms MS Arundel 58 - Richard Moll

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Book SynopsisThe first book-length study of the famous pre-1600 library at Corpus Christi College, one of the few college libraries to survive in its original form and with many of its original books in contemporary bindings. The library of Corpus Christi College is one of the most famous of all of those in Oxford and Cambridge. It is one of the few pre-1600 libraries to survive in something like its original form, and the only one still in use as a library. Its main space is still the original room built in 1517, and its furniture, if not original, is still early, most of it dating from 1604. A high proportion of its earliest book-stock, whether print or manuscript, still survives, and there is a wealth of documentation that makes it possible to chart the process of acquisition, especially the major donations of the Founder, Bishop Fox, and first President, John Claymond. And yet there is no modern, book-length study of the College Library. The present volume is intended to provide a scholarly but attractive and readable account of the Library from its conception in the mind of Richard Fox, to the appearance of its earliest surviving catalogue in 1589. It is extensively illustrated, highlighting the rarely-seen original bindings of the early books.Trade ReviewHandsomely produced and illustrated [it] comprises an expert account of the library of Corpus from its conception to the earliest surviving catalogue of 1589. * OXONIENSIA *The book is handsomely produced and illustrated and will be of great use to all those concerned with the contents and physical structure of late medieval and early modern college libraries, and the spread, or attempted spread, of humanism in English universities. * LIBRARY *This attractive and informative book makes a substantial contribution not only to the history of a single library, but to the history and contents of college libraries in general at a time of intellectual and religious ferment. It also makes important contributions to the history of the spread of humanism and protestantism. * SEHEPUNKTE *Thomson's writing has a concise simplicity that makes reading the volume wholly pleasurable; his underlying scholarly rigour is always present. * PARERGON *Thomson's lectures detail the care with which Corpus's herbarii, from Fox and Claymond to its current librarians and archivist, have nurtured, scrubbed, and tended the library since its foundation. A college account from 1596 serendipitously records outlay "for mending the librarie windowes" alongside "Josephe Scaliger de emendacione temporum" (85). If The Fox and the Bees inspires curiosity rather than sating it, it nonetheless provides rich testimony of a moment when to mend a library was to mend the times. * Speculum *Table of ContentsLecture 1: Richard Fox: The Concept and Foundation of the College Lecture 2: John Claymond: Executor of Fox's Erasmian Programme Lecture 3: The Library in the Age of Elizabeth Appendix A: Surviving Books from the College Library to 1589 Appendix B: A Letter of John Claymond to an unidentified old friend Appendix C: A Letter of Thomas Linacre to John Claymond Appendix D: Extracts from the College Accounts relevant to the Library

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Book SynopsisEssays studying the relationship between literariness and form in medieval texts. The twenty-first century has witnessed the re-emergence of various kinds of literary formalism, and one project that characterizes most of these diverse formalisms is the effort to distinguish what is precisely literary about their objects of study. The presumed relation between form and the literary that this project presupposes, however, raises questions that still need to be addressed. What is it about form that produces the category of the literary? What precisely is literary about literary form? Can the literary be defined beyond form? This volume explores these questions in the historical and geographical frame of late medieval Britain, across vaunted literary works such as the Franklin's Tale, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the Towneley Shepherds' Plays, and presumed "non-literary" texts, such as books of hours. By studying texts from a period long priorto literary formalism - indeed, before any fully articulated theory of the literary - the essays gathered here aim to rethink the relationship between form and the literary. Robert J. Meyer-Lee is Margaret W. PepperdeneDistinguished Scholar-in-Residence at Agnes Scott College; Catherine Sanok is an Associate Professor of English and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan. Contributors: Anke Bernau, Jessica Brantley, Seeta Chaganti, Shannon Gayk, Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Andrew Klein, Robert J. Meyer-Lee, Ingrid Nelson, Maura Nolan, Sarah Elliott Novacich, Catherine Sanok, Emily Steiner, Claire M. Waters.Trade ReviewAt its best, this volume shows us what is happening in the work among some of the most professionally creative and ambitious medievalists today. If it lacks the overarching focus of earlier collections on historicism, it offers a welcome testimony to the fact that medieval literary study may be more varied, more open, and (at times) even more wacky than it used to be. And to me, anyway, that is a good thing. * JOURNAL OF ENGLISH AND GERMANIC PHILOLOGY *Excellent contribution. * MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW *In exploring the ways medieval literary writing challenges our modern, primarily Kantian understanding of beauty, these collected essays promise to make us more sensitive readers of medieval aesthetic forms. * STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER *The volume offers a deliberate expansion of formalist approaches to literature, and indeed an opening up of 'literature' itself, through applied focus on medieval form, highlighting the significance of the 'form' to the 'message'. * PARERGON *Strikingly diverse in subject matter and adventurous in method, [the essays] all reconsider form in medieval literature in ways that offer new possibilities for conceiving the category of the literary. This is a singularly valuable and enlightening collection. * SPECULUM *Table of ContentsIntroduction: The Literary through - or beyond? - Form - Catherine Sanok and Robert J Meyer-Lee What's the Use? Marian Miracles and the Workings of the Literary - Claire M. Waters Form's Practice: Lyrics, Grammars, and the Medieval Idea of the Literary - Ingrid Nelson Forms of the Hours in Late Medieval England - Jessica Brantley Rhymed Alliterative Verse in Mise en page Transition: Two Case Studies in English Poetic Hybridity - Andrew Klein Rhymed Alliterative Verse in Mise en page Transition: Two Case Studies in English Poetic Hybridity - Kathryn Kerby-Fulton Idiot Psalms: Sound, Style, and the Performance of the Literary in the Towneley Shepherds' Plays - Shannon Gayk Inaudible Music - Sarah Elliott Novacich Translating Form with Patience - Anke Bernau Terpsichorean Form: Geoffrey Chaucer's Franklin's Tale and Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty - Seeta Chaganti Illusion and Aspect in the Construction of the Face: Chaucerian Individuals, Chaucerian Types - Maura Nolan Collecting, Violence, Literature: Richard of Bury's Philobiblon and the Forms of Literary History - Emily Steiner

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Book SynopsisExcerpts from texts (with translation) from the French of medieval England offer a guide to medieval literary theory. From the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, French was one of England's main languages of literature, record, diplomacy and commerce and also its only supra-national vernacular. As is now recognised, the large corpus of England'sFrench texts and records is indispensable to understanding England's literary and cultural history, the multilingualism of early England, and European medieval French-language culture in general. This volume presents a full, representative collection of texts and facing translations from England's medieval French. Through its selection of prologues and other excerpts from works composed or circulating in England, the volume presents a body of vernacular literary theory, in which some fifty-five highly various texts, from a range of genres, discuss their own origins, circumstances, strategies, source materials, purposes and audiences. Each entry, newly edited from a single manuscript, is accompanied by a headnote, annotation, and narrative bibliography, while a general introduction and section introductions provide further context and information. Also included are essays on French in England and onthe prosody and prose of insular French; Middle English versions of some of the edited French texts; and a glossary of literary terms. By giving access to a literate culture hitherto available primarily only to Anglo-Norman specialists, this book opens up new possibilities for taking English francophony into account in research and teaching. JOCELYN WOGAN-BROWNE is Thomas F.X. and Theresa Mullarkey Chair in Literature, English Department, Fordham University, New York, and formerly Professor of Medieval Literature, University of York; THELMA FENSTER is Professor Emerita of French and Medieval Studies, Fordham University; DELBERT RUSSELL is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of French, University of Waterloo.Trade ReviewDemonstrates the wealth and vibrancy of the French of England [and] situates the French of medieval England as a vernacular that can no longer be dismissed or simply mentioned in passing if one wishes to understand the complex cultural landscape of medieval England.[I]ts impact will be long lasting in the field of medieval studies in England. * SCRIPTORIUM *A landmark achievement in the on-going reassessment of the place of French in medieval English culture...For researchers interested in understanding medieval English literary culture in its multilingual totality, Vernacular Literary Theory from the French of Medieval England will be an indispensable resource. * ANGLIA *A notable, even monumental, achievement.The editors should be congratulated on having produced an enormously valuable work of scholarship. * MEDIUM AEVUM *Table of ContentsGeneral Introduction Establishment of texts and translations, and conventions used Part I Faus Franceis and Dreit Engleis: on Language De Britain ki ore est apelé Engletere / About Britain which is now called England A Nun of Barking Abbey, Le romanz de saint Edward, rei et confessur / The Vernacular Life of St Edward, King and Confessor, 1163-70, and its prose remaniement Wace, Le Roman de Rou / The Romance of Rollo and the Dukes of Normandy Hue de Rotelande, Ipomedon / The Romance of Ipomadon Robert Grosseteste, Le Chasteau d'amour / The Castle of Love Waldef / The Romance of Waldef Walter of Bibbesworth, Tretiz de Langage / How to Speak French Manières de langage: Spoken French for Business 'Quant vus frez a seignours...': Dictaminal Training attributed to Thomas Sampson 'Pur ceo que j'estoie requis...' : Treatise on conveyancing John Barton, Donait françois / The French Donatus Andrew Horn, Qui veut bone electioun faire and La feste royale du Pui, from Liber custumarum / The Book of the Customs of London John Gower, Mirour de l'omme / The Mirror of Humanity Part II Si sa dame ne li aidast: authorship and the patron Benedeit, Le Voyage de saint Brendan / The Voyage of St Brendan Gaimar, L'Estoire des Engleis / The History of the English Adgar/William, Le Gracial / The Book of Grace Guernes de Pont-Ste-Maxence, La Vie de Saint Thomas / The Life of St Thomas Becket Simon of Walsingham, La Vie de sainte Fey virgine et martire / The Life of St Faith, virgin and martyr Robert of Greatham, Miroir ou Evangile des Domnees / Mirror or The Sunday Gospels Herman de Valenciennes, Li Romanz de Dieu et de sa mere / The Romance of God and his Mother Sir Thomas Gray of Heaton, Scalacronica / The Ladder Chronicle Part III Primes dirrum la dreyte fey: the conduct of reading, hearing and seeing Guillaume le Clerc de Normandie, Le Bestiaire divin / The Holy Bestiary La Destructioun de Rome / The Destruction of Rome Pierre d'Abernon de Fetcham, Lumere as lais / Light for Laypeople Apocalypse du manuscrit Lambeth: La Pénitence illustrée / The Lambeth Apocalypse: Penitence Diagram Les Enfaunces de Jesu Crist / The Childhood of Jesus Christ 'Par ceste figure l'en poet savoer...' / 'Using this diagram, one can find out...' John of Hoveden, Rossignos / The Nightingale St Edmund of Canterbury [ascribed], Mirour de seinte eglyse / Mirror of Holy Church Sermons on Joshua Angier of St Frideswide, Dialogues de saint Gregoire / Dialogues of St Gregory the Great William Waddington [ascribed], Le Manuel des pechiez / The Manual of Sins Part IV Ki veult oïr: forming audiences and creating textual communities Wace, La Vie de seint Nicolas / The Life of St Nicholas La Vie de seint Clement / The Life of St Clement the Pope Commentary on the Chant des chanz / Commentary on the Song of Songs Denis Piramus, La Vie Saint Edmund le Rey / The Life of St Edmund the King Thomas of Kent, Le Roman de toute chevalerie /Romance of the Best Chivalry (Alexander the Great) La Seinte Resurreccion / The Holy Resurrection Chardri, La Vie de seint Josaphaz / The Life of St Josaphat Fouke le Fitz Waryn / The Romance of Fouke le Fitz Waryn 'Sicom Aristotele nous dit' / Treatise on Menstruation 'Quant Deus out la femme fete' / Ornatus mulierum Jofroi de Waterford and Servais Copale, Secré de Secrez / The Secret of Secrets Le Miracle de Sardenai / The Miracle at Sardenaia Jean de Mandeville [?], Le Livre des merveilles du monde / The Book of the Wonders of the World 'Coment la Mesun de Crabhus...comencerunt' / 'How they founded the nunnery of Crabhouse' Part V Si come en latyn trovay escrit: the lineage of the text Everart, Distichs of Cato Simund de Freine, Roman de Philosophie / The Romance of Philosophy Sanson de Nantuil, Les Proverbes de Salemon / Commentary on Solomon's Proverbs Rauf de Linham, Kalender/Calender [Robert de Boron, Walter Map, ascribed], L'Estoire del saint Graal / The History of the Holy Grail Walter de la Hove [?], Chronique / The Mohun Chronicle Poème sur l'ancien testament /Poem on the Old Testament Le Débat des hérauts d'armes de France et d'Angleterre / The Debate between the Heralds of France and England Part VI Essays and resources England and French Poetry and Prose in the French of England Middle English Versions of French Entries Lists of Alternative Arrangements of the Entries Glossary of literary terms Bibliography

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Book SynopsisAn invigorating annual for those who are interested in medieval textual cultures and open to ways in which diverse post-modern methodologies may be applied to them. Alcuin Blamires, Review of English Studies New Medieval Literatures is an annual of work on medieval textual cultures, aiming to engage with intellectual and cultural pluralism in the Middle Ages and now. Its scope is inclusive of work across the theoretical, archival, philological, and historicist methodologies associated with medieval literary studies, and embraces both the British Isles and Europe. Essays in this volume engage with real and metaphorical relations between humans and nonhumans, with particular focus on spiders, hawks, and demons; discuss some of the earliest Middle English musical and, it is argued, liturgical compositions; describe the generic flexibility and literariness of medical discourse;consider strategies of affective and practical devotion, and their roles in building a community; and offer an example of the creativity of fifteenth-century vernacular religious literature. Texts discussed include the Old English riddles and Alfredian translations of the psalms; the lives of saints Dunstan, Godric, and Juliana, in Latin and English; Piers Plowman, in fascinating juxtaposition with Hugh of Fouilloy's Aviarium; medical remedybooks and uroscopies, many from unedited manuscripts; and the fifteenth-century English Life of Job. LAURA ASHE is Professor of English at the University of Oxford and Fellow and Tutor at Worcester College, Oxford; PHILIP KNOX is University Lecturer in English and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge; WENDY SCASE is Geoffrey Shepherd Professor of Medieval English Literature at the University of Birmingham; DAVID LAWTON is Professor of English at Washington University in St Louis. Contributors: Jenny C. Bledsoe, Heather Blurton, Hannah Bower, Megan Cavell, Cathy Hume, Hilary Powell, Isabella WheaterTrade ReviewThe book emerges as the product, not merely of the named writers and editors, but of a community of scholars whose assistance most of the authors acknowledge. The reader's effort in comprehending such detailed scholarship will be fully rewarded by the knowledge gained. In this twenty-first century of wars, droughts, terrorism, bushfires, and epidemics, the barbarians may be gathering, but for as long as learned books such as this continue to be published, we can trust in the drawbridge staying safely raised. * Parergon *Table of ContentsArachnopobia and Early English Literature - Megan Cavell Demonic Daydreams: Mind-Wandering and Mental Imagery in the Medieval Hagiography of St Dunstan - Hilary Powell The Songs of Godric of Finchale: Vernacular Liturgy and Literary History - Heather Blurton Sympathy for the Demon: Affective Instruction in the Katherine Group - Jenny C. Bledsoe Peynte it with Aves: Langland's Hawks, covetise, and Hugh of Fouilloy's Aviarium - Isabella Wheater Similes We Cure By: The Poetics of Late Medieval Medical Texts - Hannah Bower The Life of Job: Bible Translation, Poem or Play? - Cathy Hume

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Book SynopsisInvestigations into the heroic - or not - behaviour of the protagonists of medieval romance. Medieval romances so insistently celebrate the triumphs of heroes and the discomfiture of villains that they discourage recognition of just how morally ambiguous, antisocial or even downright sinister their protagonists can be, and, correspondingly, of just how admirable or impressive their defeated opponents often are. This tension between the heroic and the antiheroic makes a major contribution to the dramatic complexity of medieval romance, but it is not an aspect of the genre that has been frequently discussed up until now. Focusing on fourteen distinct characters and character-types in medieval narrative, this book illustrates the range of different ways in which the imaginative power and appeal of romance-texts often depend on contradictions implicit in the very ideal of heroism. NEIL CARTLIDGE is Professor of English Studies at the University of Durham Contributors: Neil Cartlidge, Penny Eley, David Ashurst, Meg Lamont, Laura Ashe, Judith Weiss, Gareth Griffith, Kate McClune, Nancy Mason Bradbury, Ad Putter, Robert Rouse, Siobhain Bly Calkin, James Wade, Stephanie Vierick Gibbs KamathTrade ReviewSheds new light on the romance genre by asking some innovative questions about the nature of the conventional romance protagonist....It should prove a valuable addition to the study of a genre of writing that has still not been fully appreciated. * HORTULUS JOURNAL *Table of ContentsIntroduction - Neil Cartlidge Turnus - Penny Eley Alexander the Great - David Ashurst Hengist - Margaret Lamont Harold Godwineson - Laura Ashe Mordred - Judith Weiss Merlin - Gareth Griffith Gawain - Kate McClune Gamelyn - Nancy Mason Bradbury Ralph the Collier - Ad Putter The Anti-heroic Heart - Stephanie Kamath Crusaders - Robert Rouse Saracens - Siobhain Bly Calkin Ungallant Knights - James Wade Sons of Devils - Neil Cartlidge

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Book SynopsisThe first book in English to examine one of the most important and influential texts from a literary perspective. Le Devisement du Monde (1298), better though inaccurately known in English as Marco Polo's Travels, is one of only a handful of medieval texts that remain iconic today for European cultural history, and Marco Polo is one of only a handful of medieval writers who still enjoys instant name-recognition. Yet there is little awareness of the Devisement's complex history and development. This book examines the text from a fresh, literary viewpoint, drawing upon a range of different disciplines and approaches: philology, manuscript studies, narratology, cultural history, postcolonial studies and theory. It contains comparative readings of multiple versions of the text in French, Italian and Latin, Rather than offering a Eurocentric vision of the world grounded in a sense of the absolute alterity of the non-Christian world as is often asserted, the author shows how the Devisement expounds a sense of the relative nature of difference, crucially positioning Marco uncannily between two worlds (East and West), just as he is positioned awkwardly between two languages, French and Italian, and (in modern reception at least) awkwardly between two literary histories. The author also calls into question traditional accounts of the use of French outside France in the Middle Ages and offers a re-assessment of Marco Polo's position in the evolution of European travel writing. SIMON GAUNT is Professor of French Language and Literature at King's College London.Trade ReviewIn this ground-clearing study, Gaunt cuts through thickets of scholarship, much of it obfuscatory, to bring us a fresh vision. ... Its insights make it indispensable to any future study of Marco Polo. * MEDIEVAL REVIEW *Simon Gaunt's scholarship in this book is, in a word closely associated with his subject, a marvel. Astute and entertaining [his book] thoroughly merits a place in the medievalist's library. * COMITATUS *[This] excellent study of Marco Polo's Devisement du monde provides both an introduction to controversies and complexities that have beset the study of this text in modern times, and an analysis of key aspects of the text. ... [It is] a valuable contribution to the study of Marco Polo specifically, and, more generally, of medieval concepts of linguistic, religious, and cultural alterity, and of European fantasies and knowledge of the Far East. * MEDIUM AEVUM *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Le Devisement du Monde: textual tradition and genre Narrative voice and style: 'ego Marcus Paulo' Language and translation: 'in lingua Galica dicitur' Knowledge, marvels and other religions: 'oculis propriis videt' Diversity and alterity: 'diversarum regionum mundanas diversitates' Conclusion: 'et ipse non notavit nisi pauca aliqua, que adhuc in mente retinebat' Bibliography

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Book SynopsisA collection attesting to the richness and lasting appeal of these short forms of Middle English verse. The body of short Middle English poems conventionally known as lyrics is characterized by wonderful variety. Taking many different forms, and covering an enormous number of subjects, these poems have proved at once attractive andchallenging for modern readers and scholars. This collection of essays explores a range of Middle English lyrics from the thirteenth to the early sixteenth century, both religious and secular in flavour. It directs attention to the intrinsic qualities of these short poems and at the same time explores their capacity to illuminate important aspects of medieval cultural practice and production: forms of piety, contemporary conditions and events, the historyof feelings and emotions, and the relationships of image, song, performance and speech to the written word. The issues covered in the essays include editing lyrics; lyric manuscripts; affect; visuality; mouvance and transformation; and the relationships between words, music and speech. A particularly distinctive feature of the collection is that most of the essays take as a point of departure a specific lyric whose particularities are explored within wider-ranging critical argument. JULIA BOFFEY is Professor of Medieval Studies in the Department of English at Queen Mary University of London; CHRISTIANIA WHITEHEAD is Professor of Middle English Literature at the University of Warwick. Contributors: Anne Baden-Daintree, Julia Boffey, Anne Marie D'Arcy, Thomas G. Duncan, Susanna Fein, Mary C. Flannery, Jane Griffiths, Joel Grossman, John C. Hirsh, Hetta Elizabeth Howes, Natalie Jones, Michael P. Kuczynski, A.S. Lazikani, Daniel McCann, Denis Renevey, Elizabeth Robertson, Annie Sutherland, Mary Wellesley, Christiania Whitehead, Katherine Zieman.Trade ReviewThis is a very recommendable, stimulating and thought-provoking volume which will certainly inspire more research into this fascinating and challenging body of text. * ANGLIA *Table of ContentsIntroduction Editing Issues in Middle English Lyrics - Thomas G. Duncan Moving Lights: An Affective Reading of On leome is in þis world ilist and Church Wall Paintings - Ayoush Lazikani Blood and Chocolate: Affective Layering in Swete Ihesu, now wil I synge - Daniel McCann Textual and Affective Stability in All Other Love is Like the Moon - Michael Kuczynski The Unlikely Landscapes of On God Ureisun of Ure Lefdi - Annie Sutherland 'Adreynt in shennesse': Blood, Shame and Contrition in Quis est iste qui uenit de Edom? - Hetta Elizabeth Howes Ihesus Woundes so Wide and the Fons Vitae: Text, Image and the Manuscript Context - Natalie Jones 'Written in Gold upon a Purple Stain': Mariological Rhetoric and the Material Culture of Aureate Diction - Anne Marie D'Arcy Textual Lyricism in Lydgate's Fifteen Joys and Sorrows of Our Lady - Mary Wellesley Voice and Response: Lyric Rewriting of The Song of Songs - Anne Baden-Daintree Compiling the Lyric: Richard Rolle, Textual Dynamism and Devotional Song in London, British Library, Additional MS 37049 - Katherine Zieman Lyric Interventions in Troilus and Criseyde - Elizabeth Robertson Poems that Speak Volumes: Lydgate's Thoroughfare of Woe, and Lyric as Epitome - Julia Boffey 'Short song is good in ale': Charles d'Orléans and Authorial Intentions in the Middle English Ballade 84 - Denis Renevey All Adam's Children: The Early Middle English Lyric in Oxford, Jesus College, MS 29 (II) - Susanna Fein Musical and Poetic Form in Stond wel, moder, under rode - Christiania Whitehead Tutivillus and the Policing of Speech in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 104 - Mary C. Flannery Have This in Mind: Word and Image in Audelay's Writing - Jane Griffiths 'The Dance of the Intellect among Words': Wyatt's In Eternum and Late Medieval Lyric Practice - Joel Grossman Afterword: The Study of Medieval Lyrics in 1960s Oxford and Today - John C. Hirsh Bibliography

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Book SynopsisAn examination of how greatly the sagas and other literature of Iceland shaped the poems of William Morris. The work of William Morris (1834-1896) was hugely influenced by the medieval sagas and poetry of Iceland; in particular, they inspired his long poems "The Lovers of Gudrun" and Sigurd the Volsung. Between 1868 and 1876, Morris not only translated several major sagas into English for the first time with his collaborator the Icelander Eiríkur Magnússon (1833-1913) but he also travelled on horseback twice across the Icelandic interior, journeys which led him through the best known of the saga sites. By looking closely at his translations of the sagas and the texts on which he based them, the journals of his travels in Iceland, and his saga-inspired long poems and lyric poetry, this book shows how Morris conceived a unique ideal of heroism through engaging with Icelandic literature. It shows the sagas and poetry of Iceland as crucial in shaping his view of the best life a man could live and spurring him on in the subsequent passions on which much of his legacy rests. IAN FELCE gained his PhD from Cambridge University.Trade ReviewFelce gives a nuanced and persuasive account of Morris' personal development toward atheism and socialism through his reading and rewriting of medieval Icelandic literature. * MEDIEVALLY SPEAKING *Felce's immaculate introductory account of Old Norse saga literature should be required reading for all aspiring Morris scholars. * TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT *Morris contributed immensely to the knowledge and dissemination of the literature and culture of medieval Iceland, restoring to England, he believed, its northern heritage, a contribution Felce succeeds in explaining with scholarly detail, sensitive argument, cogent examples, and wide references to previous scholarship. * REVIEW OF ENGLISH STUDIES *Felce makes a strong case that during his first 'Norse period', Morris developed via his encounters with Norse literature an ideal of heroism and secular endurance and action that profoundly affected his subsequent life and social engagement. * ENGLISH *Table of ContentsIntroduction 'The Lovers of Gudrun' and the Crisis of the Grail Quest The Sagas of Icelanders and the Transmutation of Shame Grettir the Strong and the Courage of Incapacity Heimskringla, Literalness and the Power of Craft Sigurd the Volsung and the Fulfilment of the Deedful Measure The Unnameable Glory and the Fictional World Conclusion Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisAn investigation into the depiction and reception of the figure of Alexander in the literatures of medieval Europe. How was Alexander the Great - controversial king, conqueror, explorer, and pupil of Aristotle, the subject of histories, romances, epic poetry, satires, and sermons in most of the languages of Europe and the Middle East - read, written and rewritten during the High Middle Ages? Aiming to illuminate not only the conqueror's history but also the fast-changing and complex literary landscape that existed between 1150 and 1350, this study considers Alexander narratives in Latin, varieties of French and English - the Alexandreis, the Roman d'Alexandre, the Roman de toute chevalerie, and Kyng Alisaunder - to address this vast and wide-ranging question. These important Alexander works are compared with the fortunes of other prestigious inherited tales, such as stories of Arthur and Troy, highlighting the various forms of translatio studii then prevalent across northern France andBritain. The book's historically appropriate focus on Latin, French and English allows it to take a multilingual and comparative approach to linguistic, literary and political cultures, moving away from interpretations driven by post-medieval nationalism to set the expansive phenomenon that is Alexander in its historical and transnational context. VENETIA BRIDGES is Assistant Professor in the Department of English Studies at Durham University.Trade ReviewIn this well-written and cogently argued book, Venetia Bridges raises issues usually swept under the carpet of critical discourse on medieval romance. * FRENCH STUDIES *In addition to fresh readings of Alexander narratives, Bridges's most important contributions are the new terms ('anxious romance,' 'intellectual romance') by which she organizes-or, better, disorganizes-notions of the genre, and her repeated calls to question settled scholarly practice.. [W]ith this book Bridges clears a path for new approaches to medieval literary study and maps ways of getting there. * STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER *This is an exciting topic, and one which will be enthusiastically received by our field. [...] I look forward to seeing future work from Bridges that continues to think in exciting, transnational ways. * MEDIUM AEVUM *This book will be of interest to literary scholars and advanced students in many different fields: medieval Latin, medieval French and Anglo-Norman, and Middle English. Given Venetia Bridges's preoccupation with interpretive questions, it should have broad appeal. * JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL LATIN *Table of ContentsIntroduction Alexander in Antiquity Sic et Non: The Alexandreis and the Ylias Anxious Romance: The Roman d'Alexandre, the Roman de Troie, and Cligès Insular Alexander? The Roman de toute chevalerie and the Roman de Horn English and International? Kyng Alisaunder, Of Arthour and of Merlin, and The Seege or Batayle of Troie Conclusion Appendix 1 Chronology Appendix 2 Narrative Summaries Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisEssays tackling the difficult but essential question of how medievalism studies should look at the issue of what is and what is not "authentic". Given the impossibility of completely recovering the past, the issue of authenticity is clearly central to scholarship on postmedieval responses to the Middle Ages. The essays in the first part of this volume address authenticitydirectly, discussing the 2017 Middle Ages in the Modern World conference; Early Gothic themes in nineteenth-century British literature; medievalism in the rituals of St Agnes; emotions in Game of Thrones; racism in Disney's Middle Ages; and religious medievalism. The essayists' conclusions regarding authenticity then inform, even as they are tested by, the subsequent papers, which consider such matters as medievalism in contemporary French populism; nationalism in re-enactments of medieval battles; postmedieval versions of the Kingis Quair; Van Gogh's invocations of Dante; Surrealist medievalism; chant in video games; music in cinematic representations of the Black Death; and sound in Aleksei German's film Hard to Be a God. Karl Fugelso is Professor of Art History at Towson University in Baltimore, Maryland. Contributors: Aida Audeh, Tessel Bauduin, Matthias Berger, Karen Cook, Timothy Curran, Nickolas Haydock, Alexander Kolassa, Carolyne Larrington, David Matthews, E.J. Pavlinich, Lotte Reinbold, Clare Simmons, Adam Whittaker, Daniel Wollenberg.Trade ReviewMany important and incisive observations are made in this volume, and there is much to stimulate and focus the mind of the scholar on reflexes of 'medieval' in the modern, but these chapters will be most effective if read within a grounded context of nuanced medieval studies, whence generalizing assumptions might be critiqued and challenged * PARERGON *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Medievalism as Colony and Conqueror: Reflections after MAMO - David Matthews Genealogies of the Early Gothic: Forging Authenticity - Nickolas Haydock The Rituals of St. Agnes and the Lure of Authenticity - Clare A Simmons Mediating Medieval(ized) Emotions in Game of Thrones - Carolyne Larrington A Princess of Color amid Whitewashed Medievalisms in Disney's Sofia the First and Elena of Avalor - Elan Justice (E J) Pavlinich The Medievalizing Process: Religious Medievalism and Constructs of Historical Authenticity - Timothy Curran The Breaking Point: Alain de Benoist's Critique of Medieval Nominalism - Daniel Wollenberg "This Most Historic of Locations": Performing Authentic Nationhood at Hastings and Morgarten - Matthias Berger Kingdoms of Infinite Space: Three Responses to the Kingis Quair - Lotte Reinbold Vincent van Gogh, Dante, and the Studio of the South - Aida Audeh Surrealist Medievalism: A Case Study - Tessel Bauduin Introduction to Part III Beyond (the) Halo: Chant in Video Games - Karen Cook A Plague of Medievalism upon You All: Medievalism, Music, and the Plague - Adam Whittaker The Past is a Different Planet: Sounding Medievalism in Aleksei German's Hard to Be a God - Alexander Kolassa

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Book SynopsisFirst entire collection centred on Chaucer's Book of the Duchess, making a compelling case for its importance and value. The Book of the Duchess, Chaucer's first major poem, is foundational for our understanding of Chaucer's literary achievements in relation to late-medieval English textual production; yet in comparison with other works, itstreatment has been somewhat peripheral in previous criticism. This volume, the first full-length collection devoted to the Book, argues powerfully against the prevalent view that it is an underdeveloped or uneven early work, and instead positions it as a nuanced literary and intellectual effort in its own right, one that deserves fuller integration with twenty-first-century Chaucer studies. The essays within it pursue lingering questions as well as new frontiers in research, including the poem's literary relationships in the sphere of French and English writing, material processes of transmission and compilation, and patterns of reception. Each chapter advances an original reading of the Book of the Duchess that uncovers new aspects of its internal dynamics or of its literary or intellectual contexts. As a whole, the volume reveals the poem's mobility and elasticity within an increasingly international sphere of cultural discourse that thrives on dynamic exchange and encourages sophisticated reflection on authorial practice. Jamie C. Fumo is Professor of English at Florida State University. Contributors: B.S.W. Barootes, Julia Boffey, Ardis Butterfield, Rebecca Davis, A.S.G. Edwards, Jeff Espie, Philip Knox, Helen Phillips, Elizaveta Strakhov, Sara Sturm-Maddox, Marion Wells.Trade ReviewThe collection is stimulating and challenging, offering fresh perspectives that should generate new branches of critical dialogue on [Book of the Duchess]. * NOTTINGHAM MEDIEVAL STUDIES *A timely and stimulating group of reflections. * REVIEW OF ENGLISH STUDIES *[T]he variety of essays shows the range of approaches to which The Book of the Duchess responds fruitfully, while their shared focus on metapoetic concerns counteracts the 'fragmented' nature of past work on The Book of the Duchess. * MODERN PHILOLOGY *This collection in its overall effect is resonant with the themes of loss, love, trauma, companionship, creativity, art, compassion, consolation, and death-some weighty and worthy topics that will inspire readers and teachers to look again at BD (and its related sources and analogues) and will perhaps reignite its role in the medieval curriculum as a timeless human story that will appeal meaningfully to twenty-first-century readers, as it has for all its past audiences in its various manifestations from Ovid to Chaucer. * SPECULUM *This collection makes a significant contribution to the literature on Chaucer, medieval rhetoric, political allegory, codicology and book studies, and the works of Guillaume de Machaut. * CHOICE *It is clear that Fumo's commitment to openness and multiplicity is also a commitment to polyvocality of perspectives on and in a poem rich with conceptual, affective, and poetic value.. This book can and should awaken a chorus of new voices on Chaucer's early poem and beyond. * STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Reopening the Book of the Duchess - Jamie C. Fumo Codicology, Text, and the Book of the Duchess - Julia Boffey and A S G Edwards Idleness, Chess, and Tables: Recuperating Fables in Chaucer's Book of the Duchess - B. S. W. Barootes 'Noon other werke': The Work of Sleep in Chaucer's Book of the Duchess - Rebecca Davis Discovering Woe: The Translation of Affect in Chaucer's Book of the Duchess and Spenser's Daphnaïda - Marion Wells Alcyone's Grave: Inscription and Intertextuality in Chaucer, Spenser, and Ovid - Jeff Espie Tribute to a Duchess: The Book of the Duchess and Machaut's Remede de Fortune - Sara Sturm-Maddox 'Hyt am I': Voicing Selves in the Book of the Duchess, the Roman de la rose, and the Fonteinne Amoureuse - Philip Knox 'Counterfeit' Imitatio: Understanding the Poet-Patron Relationship in Machaut's Fonteinne amoureuse and Chaucer's Book of the Duchess - Elizaveta Strakhov The Shock of the Old? The Unsettling Art of Chaucer's Antique Citations - Helen Phillips Response: The Book of the Duchess, Guillaume de Machaut, and the Image of the Archive - Ardis Butterfield Bibliography

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Book SynopsisThe works of four major fifteenth-century writers re-examined, showing their innovative reconceptualization of Middle English authorship and the manuscript book. Thomas Hoccleve, Margery Kempe, John Audelay and Charles d'Orléans present themselves as the makers not only of their texts, but also of the books that transmitted their writing. This new study argues that they elaborated a "self-publishing pose" with the aim of regaining their audiences' confidence in the face of the compromised social, physical and material conditions they inhabited. Dr Critten shows that while the strategies of self-presentation that these authors develop draw on trends in contemporary literature and book history (such as the proliferation of the "go, litel bok" motif and the increasing popularity of the single-author codex), their approach to writing differs fundamentally from that pursued by their immediate predecessors, Chaucer and Gower, and by their most prominent peer, Lydgate. Rather, in their unusual insistence on their co-identity with their manuscripts, they demonstrate a new awareness of the socially instrumental potential of Middle English writing. RORY G. CRITTEN is a Maître d'enseignement et de recherche (lecturer) in the English Department at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland.Trade ReviewCritten adds considerable nuance to established literary-critical positions, and frequently offers fresh insights which no student of Middle English literature should ignore. * MEDIUM AEVUM *Critten does demonstrate an alert literary intelligence and he offers much sensitive literary analysis * TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT *[...] a careful, considered book on an important and understudied topic. Critten succeeds in placing manuscript studies at the heart of literary interpretation. Author, Scribe, and Book contributes substantially to this important field of study. * MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW *In general Author, Scribe and Book lives up to the promises of its title. As a study of 'late medieval English literature' that incorporates excursions into biography and palaeography and analyses of Latin and French texts, it demonstrates the disconnectedness of fifteenth-century writing, an aspect that literary histories tend to downplay. * PARERGON *At its core, Author, Scribe, and Book offers inventive and significant readings of these authors' texts and the manuscripts that contain them. * SPECULUM *The book is well-written, interesting, carefully argued, discriminating in its up-to-date scholarship, and has an interesting main thesis. * JOURNAL OF THE EARLY BOOK SOCIETY *Critten's study is a most welcome addition to the ever-growing body of scholarly works which consider the authorial voice in Middle English from a variety of angles. His analysis is clear and incisive, and pays close attention to codicological and palaeographical detail * ANGLIA *Both [Critten's] careful individual renderings of each medieval author's texts and the new theoretical framework for comprehending philosophies of authorship that he elucidates make Author, Scribe, and Book required reading for any scholar of Middle English poetry, of manuscript studies, or of histories of authorship and literary criticism * STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER *Table of ContentsINTRODUCTION: TOWARDS A HISTORY OF THE SELF-PUBLISHING POSE "YIT FUL FAYN WOLDE I HAUE A MESSAGEER TO RECOMMANDE ME": Thomas Hoccleve's Autograph Books in Fifteenth-Century London and Westminster "HE RED IT OUYR...SCHE SUM-TYM HELPYNG":Collaborating on the Book of Margery Kempe "THIS BOKE I MADE WITH GRET DOLOUR": The Pains of Writing in John the Blind Audelay's Poems and Carols "CONSIDERING THE GRETE SUBTILITE AND CAUTELEUX DISPOSITION OF THE SAID DUC OF ORLIANS": The Political Valence of Charles d'Orléans's English Book of Love Afterword Bibliography

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Book SynopsisA full survey of the "Last Things" as treated in a wide range of Old Norse literature. The hope of salvation and the fear of damnation were fundamental in the Middle Ages. Surprisingly, however, this topic, as reflected in Old Norse literature, has received limited critical attention.This book addresses this lacunain the scholarship, from two major perspectives. Firstly, it examines how the twin themes of damnation and salvation interact with other more familiar and better explored topoi, such as the life-cycle, the moment of death, and the material world. Secondly, it looks at how issues relating to damnation and salvation influence the structure of texts, with regard both to individual scenes and poems and sagas as a whole. The author argues that comparable features and patterns reoccur throughout the corpus, albeit with individual variations contingent on the relevant historical and literary context. A broad range of the literature is considered, including Sagas of Icelanders, Kings' sagas, Contemporary Sagas, Legendary sagas and poems of Christian instruction. HAKI ANTONSSON is Senior Lecturer in Medieval Scandinavian Studies, University College London.Trade ReviewIn his examination of an understudied theme, that of salvation and damnation in Old Norse Literature, Haki Antonsson considers how sub-themes found in a variety of literary genres - sagas of Icelanders, kings' sagas, and religious poetry - reflect basic Christian concerns with the fate of their protagonists in the next world. Although Christian authorship of, and influence on, the sagas has been assumed in scholarship for several decades, its full implications have seldom been realized, and the focus has usually been on individual sagas and episodes in which Christian themes are thought to imply sanctity. In this volume Antonsson demonstrates through meticulous textual analyses how death scenes, biographical patterns, and themes such as betrayal and violent death suggest not that individuals are saints, but that their eventual places in heaven are guaranteed - or prohibited. The volume serves as a welcome and pointed reminder that such issues were just as important for thirteenth-century Icelanders as they were elsewhere in Europe.- -- Margaret Cormack, Professor Emerita in the Department of Religious Studies at College of CharlestonHaki Antonsson has provided in a remarkably wide-ranging work an important contribution to our growing appreciation of the important Christian dimension in Old Norse saga literature. It deserves to be read by serious saga students and scholars but also by those from other fields with an interest in the popular religion of medieval Western Europe. * PARERGON *In addition to well informed interpretations of individual passages, the value of this work lies not least in its breadth and in the author's capacity to bring together texts that are not usually discussed in the same breath. Through his demonstration of how they reflect the concerns of salvation and damnation, he has added a new dimension to our understanding of many a central work in the Old Norse corpus. * Speculum *Table of ContentsIntroduction Confession and Penance Life's Journey Towards Salvation: Salvation and the Biographical Pattern Betrayal Outlaws and Marginal Figures Salvation, Damnation and the Visible World The Hour of Death Last Things and Judgement Day Bibliography

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Book SynopsisFirst full-length study of birds and their metamorphoses as treated in a wide range of medieval poetry, from the Anglo-Saxons to Chaucer and Gower. Birds featured in many aspects of medieval people's lives, not least in their poetry. But despite their familiar presence in literary culture, it is still often assumed that these representations have little to do with the real natural world. By attending to the ways in which birds were actually observed and experienced, this book aims to offer new perspectives on how and why they were meaningful in five major poems -- The Seafarer, the Exeter Book Riddles, The Owl and the Nightingale, The Parliament of Fowls and Confessio Amantis. In a consideration of sources from Isidore of Seville and Anglo-Saxon place-names to animal-sound word lists and Bartholomew the Englishman, the author shows how ornithological truth and knowledge are integral to our understandings of his chosen poems. Birds, he argues, are relevant to the medieval mind because their unique properties align them with important religious and secular themes: seabirds that inspire the forlorn Anglo-Saxon pilgrim; unnamed species that confound riddling taxonomies; a belligerent owl who speaks out against unflattering literary portraits. In these poems, human actions and perceptions are deeply affected by the remarkable flights and voices of birds. MICHAEL J. WARREN is currently Visiting Lecturer at Royal Holloway University, where he gained his PhD.Trade ReviewIn his soaring exploration of the avian, Warren urges us to look beyond the human preoccupations of medieval poetry to see how writers have persistently attempted to...bridge the gap between human and bird, at least temporarily, by inviting us to listen more closely to the melody those 'smale foweles' make all around us. * TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT *Warren's handling of medieval material in a way that reminds us of both the innate value of the species we run the risk of destroying and the dangers of human exceptionalism is a welcome and, moreover, a significant contribution to the field. * MEDIUM ÆVUM *[I]t is not a bad thing for a book to leave readers wanting more when the readings are this perspicacious. ...Birds in Middle English Poetry contributes significantly to ecocritical, literary, and medieval studies. It shows that asking new questions of familiar texts reveals exciting insights into how medieval people understood their natural environment and how allegory operates. It invites us to remember the dynamic importance of birds in the Anthropocene and concludes with a generous glossary of bird names that will facilitate further study. * STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER *Combining ornithological and literary history, this book is an important contribution to environmental history and ecocriticism, unpacking the complex relationships between human and other creatures and their shared environments. * PARERGON *Birds in Medieval English Poetry is a valiant attempt at focussing exclusively on the birds and their special role within the medieval discourse on animals and recommended reading for all interested in matters animal. * ANGLIA *[B]y thinking with actual birds-by suggesting that the birds in these texts might be every bit as real and variable as the human characters-Warren complicates our sense of both the real and the textual. Each is ambiguous, paradoxical, and strange, each interacting unpredictably to tell us something new about the shared world of humans and birds. * Speculum *Table of ContentsIntroduction Native Foreigners: Migrating Seabirds and the Pelagic Soul in The Seafarer Avian Pedagogies: Wondering with Birds in the Exeter Book Riddles A Bird's Worth: Mis-Representing Owls in The Owl and the Nightingale 'Kek Kek': Translating Birds in The Parliament of Fowls Birds' Form: Enabling Desire and Identities in Confessio Amantis Epilogue Glossary: Old and Middle English bird names Bibliography

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Book SynopsisNew approaches to the everlasting malleability and transformation of medieval romance. The essays here reconsider the protean nature of Middle English romance. The contributors examine both the cultural unity of romance and its many variations, reiterations and reimaginings, including its contexts and engagements with other discourses and forms, as they were "rewritten" during the Middle Ages and beyond. Ranging across popular, anonymous English and courtly romances, and taking in the works of Chaucer and Arthurian romance (rarely treated together), in connection with continental sources and analogues, the chapters probe this fluid and creative genre to ask just how comfortable, and how flexible, are its nature and aims? How were Middle English romances rewritten toaccommodate contemporary concerns and generic expectations? What can attention to narrative techniques and conventional gestures reveal about the reassurances romances offer, or the questions they ask? How do romances' central concerns with secular ideals and conduct intersect with spiritual priorities? And how are romances transformed or received in later periods? The volume is also a tribute to the significance and influence of the work of Professor Helen Cooper on romance. Elizabeth Archibald is Professor of English Studies at Durham University; Megan G. Leitch is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Cardiff University; Corinne Saunders is Professor of English andCo-Director of the Centre for Medical Humanities at Durham University. Contributors: Elizabeth Archibald, Julia Boffey, Christopher Cannon, Neil Cartlidge, Miriam Edlich-Muth, A.S.G. Edwards, Marcel Elias, Megan Leitch, Andrew Lynch, Jill Mann, Marco Nievergelt, Ad Putter, Corinne Saunders, Barry Windeatt, R.F. YeagerTrade ReviewWith its variously sophisticated and insightful analyses [this collection] makes a worthy and welcome contribution. * REVIEW OF ENGLISH STUDIES *There is not a single weak link in this excellent collection. All contributions share an interest in romance, generic transformation, and rewriting more broadly, while displaying a rich diversity of approaches and preoccupations. Romance Rewritten is easy to recommend not only to scholars of romance, but to students of Chaucer, Gower, Malory, sixteenth-century printing, or nineteenth-century medievalism as well. * STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER *This edited collection is a well-rounded contribution to the field of medieval literary studies and offers some interesting finds and analyses of works that have been upheld as the best of medieval literature. * PARERGON *This consistently engaging collection is a fitting and deserved tribute to Helen Cooper, confirming the importance and sustained influence of her work. It offers a variety of detailed analyses that will surely be essential reading for specialists, while still remaining accessible to students. * ANGLIA *These scholars, who share with Helen Cooper an unflagging interest in the genre, have produced an outstanding volume of essays, each of which probes facets of its protean and, it must be stressed, inexhaustible nature. * ARCHIV *The thirteen essays in this volume are testament to the range and depth of her [Helen Cooper's] contributions to the field. Collectively, the chapters highlight the multifarious connections between romances, the "family resemblances" that link texts, and the sociopolitical forces that interact with romance impulses to form innovative narratives and critical commentaries on their historical moment, all the while confronting readers with the nebulousness of the very definition of romance. * Speculum *Table of ContentsIntroduction. Middle English Romance: The Motifs and the Critics - Medieval Romance Mischief - Neil Cartlidge Rewriting Chivalric Encounters: Cultural Anxieties and Social Critique in the Fourteenth Century - Marcel Elias Malory's Comedy - Christopher Cannon Beginning with the Ending: Narrative Techniques and their Significance in Chaucer's Knight's Tale - Jill Mann The Riddle of 'Apollonius': 'A Bok for King Richardes Sake' - Robert F. Yeager Malory and the Post-Vulgate Cycle - Elizabeth Archibald Towards a Gestural Lexicon of Medieval English Romance - Barry A Windeatt Giving Freely in Sir Cleges: the Economy of Salvation and the Gift of Romance - Marco Nievergelt From Magic to Miracle: Reframing Chevalere Assigne - Miriam Edlich-Muth Lifting the Veil: Voices, Visions and Destiny in Malory's Morte Darthur - Corinne Saunders The Intelligence of The Court of Love - Ad Putter The Squire of Low Degree and the Penumbra of Romance Narrative in the Early Sixteenth Century - Julia Boffey The Squire of Low Degree and the Penumbra of Romance Narrative in the Early Sixteenth Century - A S G Edwards Contested Chivalry: Youth at War in Walter Scott and Charlotte M. Yonge - Andrew Lynch

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Book SynopsisThe genre of medieval romance examined through the lens of their physical and their metrical forms. Romances were immensely popular with medieval readers, as evidenced by their ubiquity in manuscripts and early print. The essays collected here deal with the textual transmission of medieval romances in England and Scotland, combining this with investigations into their metre and form; this comparison of the romances in both their material form and their verse form sheds new light on their cultural and social contexts. Topics addressed include the textualhistory of Sir Orfeo; the singing of Middle English romances; their rhythms and rhyme schemes; their printed transmission from Caxton to Wynkyn de Worde; and the representation of the Otherworld in manuscript miscellanies. AD PUTTER is Professor of Medieval English at the University of Bristol; JUDITH A. JEFFERSON is Research Associate at the University of Bristol. Contributors: Michelle de Groot, Judith A. Jefferson, RebeccaE. Lyons, Carol M. Meale, Donka Minkova, Nicholas Mylkebust, Derek Pearsall, Rhiannon Purdie, Ad Putter, Elizabeth Robertson, Jordi Sánchez-Martí, Thorlac Turville-PetreTrade ReviewThis universally excellent collection is an important contribution to the increasingly sophisticated study of medieval romance and its afterlives. * ANGLIA *This will prove a valuable collection for anyone working on insular romance, verse form, or textual transmission in medieval England. * MEDIUM AEVUM *The volume is well supported, with lists of figures and abbreviations, and a substantial index. * Parergon *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Forms of Transmission of Medieval Romance - Ad Putter and Judith Jefferson King Orphius and Sir Orfeo, Scotland and England, Memory and Manuscript - Rhiannon Purdie The Metre of the Tale of Gamelyn - Derek Pearsall Rhyme Royal and Romance - Elizabeth Robertson The Singing of Middle English Romance: Stanza Forms and Contrafacta - Ad Putter Deluxe Copies of Middle English Romance: Scribes and Book Artists - Carol Meale Is Cheuelere Assigne an Alliterative Poem? - Thorlac Turville-Petre Language Tests for the Identification of Middle English Genre - Donka Minkova The Problem of John Metham's Prosody - Nicholas Myklebust The Printed Transmission of Medieval Romance from William Caxton to Wynkyn de Worde, 1473-1535 - Jordi Sanchez-Marti Compiling Sacred and Secular: Sir Orfeo and the Otherworlds of Medieval Miscellanies - Michelle De Groot The Woodville Women, Eleanor Haute, and British Library Royal MS 14 E III - Rebecca Lyons

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Book SynopsisAn exploration of the medieval mind as a machine, and how it might be affected and immobiled, in textual reactions to the madness of Charles VI of France. At the turn of the fifteenth century it must have seemed to many French people that the world was going mad. King Charles VI suffered his first bout of mental illness in 1392, and he underwent intermittent bouts of frenzy, melancholy and ever-scarcer lucidity until his death in 1422. The king's scarcely mentionable malady was mirrored at every level of social experience, from the irrational civil war through which the body politic tore itself apart, to reports of elevated suicide rates among the common people. In this political environment, where affairs of state were closely linked to the ruler's mental state, French writers sought new ways of representing the psychological dynamics of the body politic. This book explores the innovative mix of organic and inorganic metaphors through which they explored the relationship between mind, body and government at this period; in particular, it considers texts by such authors as Alan Chartier and Charles d'Orléans which describe mental illness and intellectual impairments through the notion of "rust". JULIE SINGER is Associate Professor of French at Washington University, St. Louis.Trade ReviewThough scholars and popularizers have previously written on King Charles's madness and its cultural-historical context the timing as well as the approach of Julie Singer's latest book render it all the more meaningful to us nowadays. No stranger to exploring scientific models for literary texts, Singer also astutely begins by surveying the two more familiar approaches to mental illness, the medical and legal. This is especially valuable, even when treated briefly, because, as she asserts, while information on these aspects is comprehensive enough up through the thirteenth centuries, it remains 'largely in the shadows' for the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. * H-FRANCE. *Julie Singer provides a significant advance in the understanding of the phenomenon [mental illness] through a multilayered analysis of literary texts produced in France in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. [...] It is hoped that more historians will follow Julie Singer's lead in taking medieval metaphor seriously. In this study, the effort is richly rewarded. * Speculum *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Oxidation Before Oxygen Of Metal and Men Une enroullere de sapience: Instituting Princely Virtues at the Court of Charles V Metaphors of the Body Politic Le fer en la playe Alain Chartier's rooil de oubliance Epilogue: Men Without Machines Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisAn exploration of the contours imposed on physical punishment by education, establishing how pedagogues accommodated violence into a system of rules, rituals and objectives. What meanys shall I use to lurne withoute betynge?, asks a pupil in a translation exercise compiled at Oxford in 1460s. One of the most conspicuous features of medieval education is its reliance on flogging. Throughout the period, the rod looms large in literary and artistic depictions of the schoolroom: it appears in teaching manuals, classroom exercises, and even in the iconography of instruction, which invariably personifies Grammatica as a woman brandishing a birch or ferule. However, as this book seeks to demonstrate, the association between teaching and beating was more than simply conventional. Medieval pedagogues and theorists did not merely accept the utility of punishment without question, but engaged with the issue in depth and detail. Almost every conceivable aspect of discipline was subject to intense scrutiny: the benefits it might transmit to learners, the relationship between mental development and physical correction, and the optimal ways in which chastisement should be performed, were all carefully examined. This book unpicks the various levels of this debate. It surveys material from multiple languages and discourses, in order to build up the fullest possible picture of medieval thought and practice. Each chapter addresses a specific aspect of punishment in school: topics include the classical inheritance of medieval teaching, therituals and structures of discipline, theoretical accounts of its effects, and the responses of students themselves to grammar's regimen. As a whole, the study not only exposes the impressive rigour with which beating was defined, but also some of the doubts, paradoxes, and even anxieties that surrounded its usage. At the same time, it also raises larger questions about the presence of violence across medieval culture, and how we might confront it withoutplaying into the reductive stereotype of "a barbaric age". BEN PARSONS is Lecturer in Medieval and Early Modern Literature at the University of Leicester.Trade ReviewThe book is a major milestone and a welcome contribution. The high quality of its copy editing will ensure it is read with pleasure by diverse scholars, including of violence, pedagogy, and penology, as well as by intellectual, medical, religious, and social historians. * SPECULUM *Table of ContentsIntroduction. 'One Whip Drives Them All': Starting School in the 'Violent' Middle Ages 'Beginning with Anger': The Classical and Early Medieval Background The Rules of the Rod: Discipline in Practice 'Lore and Chastising': The Functions of Classroom Discipline 'I Was Beaten and I Beat': Responding to Discipline Conclusion. Mindful Violence: Classroom Discipline and Its Lessons Bibliography

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Book SynopsisThe difficult and nuanced issue of discrimination - race, gender, ethicity, religion - is the focus of this volume. Discrimination has long played a part in medievalism studies, but it has rarely been weaponized as thoroughly and publicly as in recent exchanges. The essays in the first part of this volume respond to that development by examining some of the many forms discrimination has taken in medievalism (studies) relative to race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and ethnicity. These papers thus inform many of the subsequent chapters, which address a wide variety of aspects of medievalism, showing how many cultural areas it touches upon. Subjects include Evelyn Underhill's literary interest in the Arts and Crafts Movement; the Anchoresses of the filmmaker Chris Newby and novelist RobynCadwallader; cinematic battle orations; contemporary representations of Viking helmet horns; modern board-game culture; and Vincent Van Gogh's Studio of the South. The volume also includes a transcription and contextualization ofthe celebrated scholar Helen Waddell's notes on medieval texts. KARL FUGELSO is Professor of Art History at Towson University. Contributors: Carla Arnell, Aida Audeh, Peter Burkholder, Christopher Caldiero,Michael Evans, Jennifer FitzGerald, Jonathan Godsall, Angus J. Kennedy, Nadia Margolis, Lauryn Mayer, Timothy S. Miller, Tison Pugh, Richard Utz, Kim Wilkins, Karen A. Winstead, Helen YoungTrade ReviewThe special focus of this issue on a topic that it is increasingly vital for medievalists to address should garner attention from scholars across medieval studies. * MEDIUM AEVUM *Table of ContentsPreface Freedom to Discriminate - Helen Young "You wouldn't want to be historically inaccurate": Online Responses to Race in Medievalist Television - Michael Evans Medievalism, Antisemitism, and Twenty-First-Century Media: An Update - Richard Utz Mythogyny: Popular Medievalism and Toxic Masculinity - Lauryn S. Mayer The Cool and the Queer in Bugs Bunny's Middle Ages - Tison Pugh Work for the Soul: Medievalism, the Arts and Crafts Movement, and the Development of a Practical Spirituality in Evelyn Underhill's Novel The Gray World - Carla A. Arnell Exhuming the Living Dead: The Anchoresses of Chris Newby and Robyn Cadwallader - Karen A Winstead The King's Speech: Battle Orations in Medieval Film - Peter Burkholder and Jonathan Godsall and Christopher Caldiero Horns: Vikings, Adaptation, Evolution - Kim Wilkins Bidding with Beowulf, Dicing with Chaucer, and Playing Poker with King Arthur: Neomedievalism in Modern Board Gaming Culture - Timothy Miller Vincent van Gogh, the Tre Corone, and the Studio of the South - Aida Audeh A Transcription of Helen Waddell's Notes on the Roman de la Rose and Christine de Pizan: Manuscript Queen's University Belfast 18/1/c - Angus J Kennedy A Transcription of Helen Waddell's Notes on the Roman de la Rose and Christine de Pizan: Manuscript Queen's University Belfast 18/1/c - Nadia Margolis A Transcription of Helen Waddell's Notes on the Roman de la Rose and Christine de Pizan: Manuscript Queen's University Belfast 18/1/c - Jennifer FitzGerald

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Book SynopsisA study of how the use of Ovid in Middle English texts affected Shakespeare's treatment of the poet. The debt owed by Shakespeare to Ovid is a major and important topic in scholarship. This book offers a fresh approach to the subject, in aiming to account for the Middle English literary lenses through which Shakespeare and his contemporaries often approached Greco-Roman mythology. Drawing its principal examples from The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew, Romeo and Juliet, Lucrece, and Twelfth Night, it reinvestigates a selection of moments in Shakespeare's works that have been widely identified in previous criticism as "Ovidian", scrutinising their literary alchemy with an eye to uncovering how ostensibly classical references may be haunted by the under-acknowledged, spectral presences of medieval intertexts and traditions. Its central concern is the mutual hauntings of Ovid, Geoffrey Chaucer, and John Gower in the early modern literary imagination; it demonstrates that "Ovidian" allusions to mythological figures such as Ariadne, Philomela, or Narcissus in Shakespeare's dramatic and poetic works were sometimes simultaneously mediated by the hermeneutic and affective legacies of earlier vernacular texts,including The Legend of Good Women, Troilus and Criseyde, and the Confessio Amantis. LINDSAY ANN REID is a Lecturer in English at the National University of Ireland, Galway.Trade ReviewShakespeare and Ovid are a familiar coupling; so too, to medievalists, are Ovid and the medieval; and the pairing of Shakespeare and the medieval is making its presence increasingly felt. * TRANSLATION AND LITERATURE *Scholarly efforts to rethink the once sacrosanct period-divide between late medieval and early modern English culture have been under way for quite some time now, and the Studies in Renaissance Literature series has made several important contributions to these exertions. Lindsay Ann Reid's Shakespeare's Ovid and the Spectre of the Medieval is the latest-exhibiting the perspicacity, nuance, and scope that we have come to expect from the series. The strength of this study is its dense and challenging close readings of ancient, medieval, and early modern texts. * STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER *Shakespeare's Ovid and the Spectre of the Medieval is a courageous book rectifying the influential oversights by celebrated critics of a canonical writer. With thorough research and probing insights, Reid corrects a distorted understanding of the culture and traditions informing early modern literature, and of Shakespeare himself. * PARERGON *Table of ContentsIntroduction Chaucer's Ghoast, Ovid's 'Pleasant Fables', and the Spectre of Gower Shakespeare's Ovid and Sly's Chaucer Theseus and Ariadne [and her Sister] Philomela and the Dread of Dawn The Cross-Dressed Narcissus Afterword Appendix 1: The Gowerian Riddles of Chaucer's Ghoast Appendix 2: Ariadne's Desertion in Bulleins Bulwarke of Defence Bibliography

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Book SynopsisA comprehensive survey of one of the most important texts of the Middle Ages. Malory's Morte Darthur is now a canonical and widely-taught text. Recent decades have seen a transformation and expansion of critical approaches in scholarship, as well as significant advances in understanding its milieux:textual, literary, cultural and historical. This volume adds to and updates the influential Companion of 1996, offering scholars, teachers and students alike a full guide to the text and the author. The essays it contains provide a synthetic overview of, and fresh perspectives on, the key questions about and contexts connected with the Morte. MEGAN G. LEITCH is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Cardiff University; CORY JAMES RUSHTON is Associate Professor in the Department of English at St Francis Xavier University, Canada. Contributors: Dorsey Armstrong, Thomas Crofts, Siân Echard, Rob Gossedge, Daniel Helbert, Amy Kaufman, Megan Leitch, Andrew Lynch, Catherine Nall, Ralph Norris, Raluca Radulescu, Lisa Robeson, Meg Roland, Cory Rushton, Masako Takagi, Kevin Whetter.Trade ReviewAll essays are written by experts and reflect the erudite and sophisticated engagement these scholars have with Malory's text-its historical, cultural, and political contexts and especially recent theoretical concepts. This volume is required reading for those who wish to go beyond literary formalism. Among the standout and exceedingly current essays are those on gender, emotion, and secular and spiritual concerns in the text. Highly Recommended. * CHOICE *I will not hesitate to recommend the New Companion to undergraduate and graduate students. Taken together, the essays provide engaging and accessible investigations of important topics, issues, and questions relating to the Morte Darthur, and demonstrate a range of ways of reading and approaching the text. * THE RICARDIAN *An invaluable resource, which will doubtless, in turn, lead to further fruitful labour in that fair field. * PARERGON *Table of ContentsIntroduction Malory in Historical Context - Catherine Nall Malory and His Sources - Ralph Norris Writing the Morte Darthur: Author, Manuscript, and Modern Editions - Kevin S Whetter and Thomas Howard Crofts Malory in Literary Context - Megan G. Leitch Malory in Print - Sian Echard Malory and Form - Cory Rushton Malory and Character - Dorsey Armstrong Malory and Gender - Amy S. Kaufman Malory and Emotion - Andrew Lynch Secular Malory - Lisa Robeson Spiritual Malory - Raluca Radulescu Malory and the Wider World - Meg Roland Malory in Wartime Britain - Robert Gossedge Malory in Japan - Masako Takagi Malory in America - Daniel Glynn Helbert

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Book SynopsisA fresh examination of how the seasons are depicted in medieval literature. To the cultures of medieval northwestern Europe, the changing of the seasons was a material and economic reality that strongly informed the labour, travel and ritual calendars. However, while there has been much research into theinterplay between society and its physical surroundings as reflected in medieval literature, the seasonal aspect of this dynamic has hitherto been neglected. This book analyses the narrative and psychological functionsof seasonal settings in the literatures of medieval England and Iceland from the eighth to the fourteenth century, from Beowulf to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Dealing with both the material realities and the figurative functions of the seasonal cycle, it interprets seasonal spaces in myth and literature as conventionalised environments, where society deals with outside threats and powers which manifest themselves in marginal landscapes.Informing its literary investigations with relevant concerns from economic history, patristic doctrine and decision theory, the volume offers a comprehensive new look at the psychology of landscape and season in medieval literature; it also brings out beliefs concerning the seasons and their connections with the supernatural. Paul S. Langeslag is a lecturer of Medieval English Studies at the University of Göttingen, Germany.Trade ReviewA rich and stimulating work, the fruit of wide reading and ambitious scholarship. * MEDIUM AEVUM *A well-written and well-researched book. * ARCHIV FUR DAS STUDIUM DER NEUREN SPRACHEN UND LITERATUREN *A well-written, insightful, and resourceful book, which has much to offer scholars and students working on landscape, environment, and the 'natural' world in various disciplines within medieval studies. * REVIEW OF ENGLISH STUDIES *[Makes] one pause for thought and consideration of how seasonality transports across centuries, nationalities, communities, individuals, and literary genres. * COMITATUS *Drawing together an impressive number of disciplines, including those associated with timekeeping, psychology, climate history, agricultural history, and military history, Langeslag sketches out the physical and mental contexts that surround medieval literatures' presentation of the seasons. * THE MEDIEVAL REVIEW *Table of ContentsIntroduction Myth and Ritual Winter Mindscapes Winter Institutions Summer Adventure

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Book SynopsisAn invigorating annual for those who are interested in medieval textual cultures and open to ways in which diverse post-modern methodologies may be applied to them. Alcuin Blamires, Review of English Studies New Medieval Literatures is an annual of work on medieval textual cultures, aiming to engage with intellectual and cultural pluralism in the Middle Ages and now. Its scope is inclusive of work across the theoretical, archival, philological, and historicist methodologies associated with medieval literary studies, and embraces both the British Isles and Europe. Essays in this volume trace institutional histories, examining the textual and memorial practices of religious institutions across the British Isles; explore language games that play with meaning in Anglo-French poetry; examine the interplay of form and matter in Italian song; position Old Norse sagas in an ecocritical and a postcolonial framework; consider the impact of papal politics on Middle English poetry; and read allegorical poetry as a privileged site for asking fundamental questions about the nature of the mind. Texts discussed include lives of St Aebbe of Coldingham, with a focus on the twelfth-century Latin Vita and its afterlives; a range of Latin and vernacular works associated with institutional houses, including the Vie de Edmund le rei by Denis Piramus and the Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis; both the didactic and lyrical writings of Walter de Bibbesworth; the trecento Italian caccia, especially examples by Vincenzo da Rimini and Lorenzo Masini;Bárðar saga, Egils saga, and other Old Norse works that reveal the traces of encounters with a racial other; John Gower's Confessio Amantis, in striking juxtaposition with late-medieval accounts of ecclesiastical crisis; and Alain Chartier's Livre de l'Espérance. PHILIP KNOX Is University Lecturer in English and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge; KELLIE ROBERTSON is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at theUniversity of Maryland; WENDY SCASE is Geoffrey Shepherd Professor of Medieval English Literature at the University of Birmingham; LAURA ASHE is Professor of English at the University of Oxford and Fellow and Tutor at Worcester College, Oxford. Contributors: Daisy Delogu, Thomas Hinton, Thomas O'Donnell, Daniel Remein, Jamie L. Reuland, Zachary Stone, Christiania Whitehead.Table of ContentsA Scottish or English Saint? The Shifting Sanctity of St Aebbe of Coldingham - Christiania Whitehead Monastic History-Writing and Memory in Britain and Ireland: A Methodological Reassessment - Thomas O'Donnell Language, Morality and Wordplay in Thirteenth-Century Anglo-French: The Poetry of Walter de Bibbesworth - Thomas Hinton Open Form and Canonic Matter in Trecento Song - Jamie L. Reuland 'Uninhabited': Eco-Colonial Anxieties in Late Medieval Icelandic Saga - Daniel Remein 'Between tuo stoles': The Western Schism and the English Poetry of John Gower (1378-1414) - Zachary Stone Cognition and Conversion in Alain Chartier's Livre de l'Esperance - Daisy Delogu

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Book SynopsisFirst full-length study of these crucial buildings in the Morte, looking at the interplay between characters and space. Castles play an integral part in Malory's Morte Darthur; Camelot, Tintagel, Joyous Gard, and Dover, for example, are the crucial backdrop to the action and both host and shape the story as it moves through them. But despitethis, Malory's castles have received limited scholarly attention. As the first monograph to look extensively at either castles or space in Malory, this book aims to fill that gap. It reads the Morte through its castles - their architecture, structural and symbolic significance, and geographical locations, together with their political, communal, ritual, domestic, and martial functions. The book also traces the mutual development of space and identity in the text, looking at Malory's Arthurian community in and around castle space, both as individuals and as a group; for example, it considers Arthur's political success through his use of space, and shows how crucial Camelot and its hall are to the fellowship of knights. Overall, the volume suggests a better understanding of the community's central organising body, the Round Table, and offers important re-readings of a number of episodes and characters. MOLLY A. MARTIN is Associate Professor and Chair of the English Department at the University of Indianapolis.Trade ReviewMolly Martin's Castles and Space in Malory's 'Morte Darthur' offers a sustained and generative insight into the representation and literary function of castle-spaces across the Morte, and also provides a model and resource upon which others can draw. -- PARERGONMartin's book offers a truly fresh way of reading Malory and other Arthurian and medieval literature. The style is scholarly yet accessible, so the book will interest scholars at all levels. The wide-ranging bibliography makes the book an especially valuable resource for students. Highly Recommended. * CHOICE *Martin's thesis helps to elucidate several key characters and spaces in Malory's Morte, thereby offering the Malory community much to think upon. * MEDIUM AEVUM *Castles and Space generally presents an accessible, nuanced, and clever exploration of castle spaces and their many functions in Malory's Morte Darthur. It is most definitely a worthwhile investment for both new and experienced scholars eager to explore this novel theoretical frame for studying Malory's text. * Comitatus *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Into the Castle Castles as Political Centers Castles and Community Identity Castles and Ritual Castles and the Domestic Sphere Castles as Prisons Castles at War Afterword: Beyond the Castle Gate Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisEssays on aspects of early drama. Medieval English Theatre is the premier journal in early theatre studies. Its name belies its wide range of interest: it publishes articles on theatre and pageantry from across the British Isles up to the opening of the London playhouses and the suppression of the civic mystery cycles, and also includes contributions on European and Latin drama, together with analyses of modern survivals or equivalents, and of research productions of medieval plays. The articles in this fortieth volume engage with the key communities for early theatre: royalty, city and household, and religious institutions. Topics include the Royal Entry of Elizabeth Woodville into Norwich (1469); Henry VIII's Robin Hood entertainment for Catherine of Aragon; the sun's contribution to stage effects in the York Corpus Christi Play: the engagement with local worthies in Mankind; and the convent drama of Huy, in the Low Countries. Contributors: Aurélie Blanc, Philip Butterworth, Clare Egan, John Marshall, Olivia Robinson, Michael Spence, Meg Twycross.Table of ContentsProducing the Journal over Forty Years - Meg Twycross William Parnell, supplier of staging and ingenious devices, and his role in the visit of Elizabeth Woodville to Norwich in 1469 - Philip Butterworth William Parnell, supplier of staging and ingenious devices, and his role in the visit of Elizabeth Woodville to Norwich in 1469 - Michael Spence The Huy Nativity from the Seventeenth to the Twenty-First Century: Translation, Play-Back, and Pray-Back - Olivia Robinson The Huy Nativity from the Seventeenth to the Twenty-First Century: Translation, Play-Back, and Pray-Back - Aurélie Blanc A 'Gladnes' of Robin Hood's Men: Henry VIII Entertains Queen Katherine - John Marshall Reading Mankind in a Culture of Defamation - Clare Egan The Sun in York (Part One): Illumination, Reflection, and Timekeeping for the Corpus Christi Play - Meg Twycross

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Book SynopsisNew approaches to religious texts from the Middle Ages, highlighting their diversity and sophistication. From the great age of pastoral expansion in the thirteenth century, to the revolutionary paroxysms of the English Reformation, England's religious writings, cultures, and practices defy easy analysis. The diverse currents of practice and belief which interact and conflict across the period - orthodox and heterodox, popular and learned, mystical and pragmatic, conservative and reforming - are defined on the one hand by differences as nuanced as the apophatic and cataphatic approaches to understanding the divine, and on the other by developments as profound and concrete as the persecution of declared heretics, the banning and destruction of books, and the emergence of printing. The essays presented in this volume respond to and build upon the hugely influential work of Vincent Gillespie in these fields, offering a variety of approaches, spiritual and literary, bibliographical and critical, across the Middle Ages to the Protestant Reformation and beyond. Topics addressed include the Wycliffite Bible; the Assumption of the Virgin as represented in medieval English culture; Nicholas Love and Reginald Pecock; and the survival of latemedieval piety in early modern England. LAURA ASHE is Professor of English Literature and Tutorial Fellow, Worcester College, Oxford; RALPH HANNA is Professor of Palaeography (emeritus), Keble College, Oxford. Contributors: Tamara Atkin, James Carley, Alexandra da Costa, Anne Hudson, Ian Johnson, Daniel Orton, Susan Powell, Denis Renevey, Michael G. Sargent, Annie Sutherland, Nicholas Watson, Barry Windeatt.Trade ReviewFor scholars engaged in the field(s) embraced by the title this book will be indispensable. The acumen of the editors and contributors is complemented by the high standard of production by the publisher. * PARERGON *Table of ContentsÞe Wohunge of ure Lauerde and the House Without Walls - Annie Sutherland The Original Audience and Institutional Setting of Edmund Rich's Mirror of Holy Church: The Case for the Salisbury Canons - Nicholas Watson The Category of the Poetic and the Work of Roger Bacon - Daniel Orton Earlier Version/Later Version - in the Wycliffite Bible is that the only choice? - Anne Hudson Patterns of Circulation and Variation in the English and Latin Texts of Books I and II of Walter Hilton's Scale of Perfection - Michael G. Sargent Assumptions: The Virgin's Ends in Medieval English Culture - Barry A Windeatt Mediating Voices and Texts: Nicholas Love and Reginald Pecock - Ian Johnson Santa Zita and Biblioteca Statale di Lucca, MS 3540 - Susan Powell 'Syre, we neuer yet tasted ne haue not dronke of our best wyne': Late Medieval Popular Religion and the Sermon for the Feast of the Holy Name of Jesus - Denis Renevey 'An hard bone for ye fleshly mynded to gnaw vppon': reading habits in contention - Alex da Costa Reading Late-Medieval Piety in Early Modern England - Tamara Atkin John Leland on William, Lord Mountjoy's Lost Manuscript of the Annals of the Mysterious John, Abbot of B. - James Carley Vincent Gillespie: A Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisAn investigation into two important Saints Lives provides a window into the Anglo-Saxon perception of the non-human world. The question of the relationship between humanity and the non-human world may seem a modern phenomenon; but in fact, even in the early medieval period people actively reflected on their own engagement with the non-human world, with such reflections profoundly shaping their literature. This book reveals how the Anglo-Saxons themselves conceptualised the relationship, using the Saints Lives of Cuthbert and Guthlac as a prism. Each saint is fundamentally linked to a specific and recognisable location in the English landscape: Lindisfarne and Farne for Cuthbert, and the East Anglian fens and the island of Crowland for Guthlac. These landscapes of the mind were defined by the theological and philosophical perspectives of their authors and audiences. The world in all its wonder was Creation, shaped by God. When humanity fell in Eden, its relationship to this world was transformed: cold now bites, fire burns, andwolves attack. In these Lives, however, saints, the holy epitome of humanity, are shown to restore the human relationship with Creation, as in the sea-otters warming Cuthbert's frozen feet, or birds and fish gathering to Guthlac like sheep to their shepherd. BRITTON ELLIOTT BROOKS is Project Assistant Professor at the University of Tokyo, Centre for Global Communication Strategies.Trade Review[An] important addition to the Nature and Environment in the Middle Ages series and the broader field of medieval environmental humanities. * NOTTINGHAM MEDIEVAL STUDIES *This book is ideally suited for scholars of early medieval England and especially experts in Old English literature and biblical exegesis, though it offers imaginative case studies to a broader audience that demonstrate what we might plausibly call "ecological thinking" in the early Middle Ages. * H-ENVIRONMENT *[T]his book is a learned, important contribution to the ways in which early medieval hagiographers were attuned to the natural world and drew on it in connection to sanctity. -- A. Joseph McMullen * Journal of British Studies *In its technical aspects, the monograph has much to offer to early career medievalists interested in the study of hagiographical sources. In its assessment of the texts, Brooks's work not only exhibits a refined model of hagiographic textual analysis, but it also demonstrates the means by which contemporary exegetical material is deployed in these to extract underlying meanings. * Comitatus *Restoring Creation will be of interest to scholars of hagiography, ecocriticism, and Anglo-Saxon England, as it provides not only a strong argument for understanding Creation in the various vitae of Cuthbert and Guthlac but also a useful methodology that emphasizes reliance upon Anglo-Saxon theology over modern theory. [...]The book is well-structured, points are clearly articulated, and ample close readings of key passages are provided. * Revista Española de Filosofía Medieval *Restoring Creation is an interesting, well-written, and thoroughly researched volume, and Brooks is to be commended for his attention to detail and convincing exegeses of his focus texts. * Parergon *In each textual discussion, it demonstrates a breadth of research and a depth of perception that produces not only useful findings but is stimulating for further work. -- Simon Thomson * TOEBI Newsletter *Table of ContentsIntroduction Monastic Obedience and Prelapsarian Cosmography: The Anonymous Vita Sancti Cuthberti Ruminative Poetry and the Divine Office: Bede's Metrical Vita Sancti Cuthberti Bede's Exegesis and Developmental Sanctity: The Prose Vita Sancti Cuthberti Enargaeic Landscapes and Spiritual Progression: Felix's Vita Sancti Guthlaci Landscape Lexis and Creation Restored: The Old English Prose Life of Guthlac and Guthlac A Conclusion: Afterlives of Cuthbert and Guthlac Bibliography

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Book SynopsisA fresh approach to the works and manuscripts of this influential monk, whose writings synthesised some of the finest minds of the period. A thousand years and more ago, with Vikings ravaging the coastlines and the millennium drawing nigh, a monk named Ælfric embarked on studies that would make him the most erudite, prolific, and influential author writing in English before Chaucer. What drove Ælfric was no desire to leave his mark on history, however, but the belief that he held a treasure on which the temporal and eternal welfare of his contemporaries depended: knowledge of the rich moral teachings of the early Christian church. What he produced was an astonishing synthesis of some of the finest minds in history, conveyed with remarkable authorial transparency and an elegantly simple style. While there is much we know about Ælfric, both from his own self-disclosure and the wealth of surviving manuscripts containing work by him, there is also much that muddies the waters: his feverish pace of simultaneous composition, his habit of reshaping and repurposing his writings, the staggering complexities of textual transmission, and competing scholarly interpretive voices. This volume seeks to take it all into account, setting forth a comprehensive picture of work and the manuscripts in which it may be found. Integrating scholars' best understanding to date and framing new avenues for inquiry, it offers a launching point for new research into this pivotal figure of early England. AARON J KLEIST is Professor of English at Biola University.Trade Review[A] considerable contribution to the field, and will serve not only as a reference work, but also as a starting point for new questions and perspectives in the fields of Old English, manuscript studies, and the literary, theological and intellectual history of early medieval England. -- EARLY MEDIEVAL EUROPEThe Chronology and Canon will certainly replace Clemoes 1959 as our first point of reference for decades to come. Professor Kleist has paved the way for a new generation of Ælfric studies. * ANGLIA *Kleist's clear and precise overviews and expository notes force reconsideration of what constitutes an "Ælfrician" text. * CHOICE *

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Book SynopsisFirst full-scale guide to the origins and development of the early printed book, and the issues associated with it. The history of the book is now recognized as a field of central importance for understanding the cultural changes that swept through Tudor England. This companion aims to provide a comprehensive guide to the issues relevant to theearly printed book, covering the significant cultural, social and technological developments from 1476 (the introduction of printing to England) to 1558 (the death of Mary Tudor). Divided into thematic sections (the printed booktrade; the book as artefact; patrons, purchasers and producers; and the cultural capital of print), it considers the social, historical, and cultural context of the rise of print, with the problems as well as advantages of the transmission from manuscript to print. the printers of the period; the significant Latin trade and its effect on the English market; paper, types, bindings, and woodcuts and other decorative features which create the packaged book; and the main sponsors and consumers of the printed book: merchants, the lay clientele, secular and religious clergy, and the two Universities, as well as secular colleges and chantries. Further topics addressed include humanism, women translators, and the role of censorship and the continuity of Catholic publishing from that time. The book is completed with a chronology and detailed indices. VINCENT GILLESPIE is J.R.R. Tolkien Professor of English Literature and Language at the University of Oxford; SUSAN POWELL held a Chair in Medieval Texts and Culture at the University of Salford, and is currently affiliated to the Universities of London and York. Contributors: Tamara Atkin, Alan Coates, Thomas Betteridge, Julia Boffey, James Clark, A.S.G. Edwards, Martha W. Driver, Mary Erler, Alexandra Gillespie, Vincent Gillespie, Andrew Hope, Brenda Hosington, Susan Powell, Pamela Robinson, AnneF. Sutton, Daniel Wakelin, James Willoughby, Lucy WoodingTrade ReviewEach chapter is richly referenced and densely informative and I can quite see that this volume will become (if it is not already) the go-to compendium for students of early printed books, of book history more generally, and of reading and reception studies and histories in medieval and early modern Britain and beyond. * ENGLISH HISTORICAL REVIEW *The Companion is a book about books that adds to the character and history of early print by weaving together a set of essays and notes that delight in the details and make much of the early printed resources available in the British Isles and on the Continent; its contribution to the field is theatrically embodied in the weight of the pages that dictate the force of our grip. * COMITATUS *Authoritative. * LIBRARY *A Companion to the Early Printed Book in Britain, 1476-1558 is an essential volume and deserves a place on every shelf. This is a book that no one will regret acquiring and whose insights should definitively shape future discussion of this subject. * THE MEDIEVAL REVIEW *Offers a useful overview of print in this period, while pointing to the high stakes of some key issues. * HUNTINGDON LIBRARY QUARTERLY *The editors are to be congratulated in pulling together such a significant amount of the recent academic endeavor within this fascinating field of study. * SIXTEENTH CENTURY JOURNAL *

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Book SynopsisJohn Gower's poetry offers an important and immediate response to the turbulent events of his day. The essays here examine his life and his works from an historical angle, bringing out fresh new insights. The late fourteenth century was the age of the Black Death, the Peasants' Revolt, the Hundred Years War, the deposition of Richard II, the papal schism and the emergence of the heretical doctrines of John Wyclif and the Lollards. These social, political and religious crises and conflicts were addressed not only by preachers and by those involved in public affairs but also by poets, including Chaucer and Langland. Above all, though, it is in the verse of John Gower that we find the most direct engagement with contemporary events. Yet, surprisingly, few historians have examined Gower's responses to these events or have studied the broader moral and philosophical outlook which he used to make sense of them. Here, a number of eminent medievalists seek to demonstrate what historians can add to our understanding of Gower's poetry and his ideas about society (the nobility and chivalry, the peasants and the 1381 revolt, urban life and the law), the Church (the clergy, papacy, Lollardy, monasticism, and the friars) gender (masculinity and women and power), politics (political theory and the deposition of Richard II) and science and astronomy. The book also offers an important reassessment of Gower's biography based on newly-discovered primary sources. STEPHEN RIGBY is Emeritus Professor of Medieval Social and Economic History at the University of Manchester; SIAN ECHARD is Professor of English, University of British Columbia. Contributors: Mark Bailey, Michael Bennett, Martha Carlin, James Davis, Seb Falk, Christopher Fletcher, David Green, David Lepine, Martin Heale, Katherine Lewis, Anthony Musson, Stephen Rigby, Jens Röhrkasten.Trade ReviewA rich and substantial addition not only to Gower scholarship but also to our knowledge of late fourteenth-century England. * SEHEPUNKTE *Historians on John Gower provides a superb reassessment of how Gower's work might be read in its historical context. * REVIEW OF ENGLISH STUDIES *These original and focused essays will be of great interest to both students and scholars of Gower. * MEDIUM AEVUM *[T]his is an impressive collection that contributes substantially to Gower studies, and to our understanding of the historical contexts for much late medieval English literature generally. * SPECULUM *The fourteen essays (plus a calendar of life records) are informed by consistent awareness of parallels between Gower's works, on the one hand, and chronicles and documentary records on the other, accompanied by careful attention to previous scholarship, judicious cross-referencing between the essays, a comprehensive index, and illustrative figures in color and black and white. The John Gower that emerges from the essays is not an unfamiliar one-a traditionalist moral poet-but one that is more nuanced and more ambivalent in his outlooks, perhaps, than is usually observed. * JOHN GOWER NEWSLETTER *Historians on John Gower [...] is a major contribution to Gower studies as well as to researchers interested in the pivotal historical moment in which the poet lived and worked. This is a collection that brings "imaginative literature" together with historical documentation to provide a more comprehensive view of one of the most important public voices of the time. * STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER *It is not an exaggeration to say that this will immediately be a requisite volume for anyone working on Gower. [...] [I]t provides such rich ground to explore. * THE YEARBOOK OF LANGLAND STUDIES *Historians on John Gower, a large, sturdy, and often foundational (or, at times, re-foundational) set of essays on Gower's life, works, contexts, and outlooks demonstrates many of the virtues of the disciplinary crossover into "history" that literary scholars often invite or instigate but that rarely come from the other side. [...] The results here are excellent. * Journal of British Studies *Table of ContentsPreface: Gower in Context - Sian Echard and Stephen Rigby Chronology of Gower's Life Records - Martha Carlin Gower's Life - Martha Carlin Gower's Works - Stephen Rigby Nobility and Chivalry - David Green The Peasants and the Great Revolt - Mark Bailey Towns and Trade - James Davis Men of Law - Anthony Musson The Papacy, Secular Clergy and Lollardy - David N Lepine Monastic Life - Martin Heale The Friars - Jens U. Rohrkasten Women and Power - Katherine J. Lewis Masculinity - Christopher Fletcher Political Theory - Stephen Rigby Gower, Richard II and Henry IV - Michael J Bennett Natural Sciences - Seb Falk Select Bibliography

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Book SynopsisA powerful claim for the virtues of a more thoughtful and collegiate approach to the academy today. This book offers a response to the culture of metrics, mass digitisation, and accountability (as opposed to responsibility, or citizenship) that has developed in higher education world wide, as exemplified by the UK's Research Excellence Framework exercise (REF), and the increasing bureaucracy that limits the time available for teaching, research, and even conversation and collaboration. Ironically, these are problems that will be solved only by academicsfinding the time to talk and to work together. The essays collected here both critique the culture of speed in the neoliberal university and provide examples of what can be achieved by slowing down, by reclaiming research and research priorities, and by working collaboratively across the disciplines to improve conditions. They are informed both by recent research in medieval studies and by the problematic culture of twenty-first century higher education. The contributions offer very personal approaches to the academic culture of the present moment. Some tackle issues of academic freedom head-on; others more obliquely; but they all have been written as declarations of theacademic freedom that comes with slow thinking, slow reading, slow writing and slow looking and the demonstrations of its benefits. CATHERINE E. KARKOV is Professor and Chair of Art History at the University of Leeds. Contributors: Lara Eggleton, Karen Jolly, Chris Jones, James Paz, Andrew Prescott, Heather PulliamTrade ReviewNo doubt, a subset of medievalists will savor this little collection of essays because of its ideological aggressiveness. * SEHEPUNKTE *The case studies in this volume will be of particular interest to medieval literary scholars and art historians, but not only them. Reading it is also a pleasure, because you can tell how much reflection and effort has gone into the articles. [...] Extremely valuable. * Historischen Zeitschrift *Bringing together voices from across literary studies, history, art history, and digital humanities, Slow Scholarship is a dynamic, frank, contribution to ongoing conversations in medieval studies and higher education. -- TOEBI NewsletterKarkov and her contributors' full-throated recognition that academic performance, whether it be scholarship or instruction, needs time to age and mature seems both freeing and subversive. [The book's] honest and thorough look at an emerging scholarly approach makes it a worthwhile acquisition for any university library. * Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching (SMART) *Slow Scholarship fits into many research landscapes at once. It is also a courageously political book that does not shy away from making an intervention in the current state of academia. * SPECULUM *Table of ContentsSlow Collaborations Introduction: A Slow and Ongoing Collaboration - Catherine E. Karkov Research as Folly, or, How to Productively 'Ruin' Your Research - Lara Eggleton Slow Words Translating The Order of the World in My Own Time - James Paz Relining The Grave: A Slow Reading of MS Bodley 343, fol. 170r - Chris Jones Slow Looking Rethinking Slow Looking: Encounters with Clonmacnoise - Heather Pulliam Thinking about Stone: An Elemental Encounter with the Ruthwell Cross - Catherine E. Karkov Slow Manuscripts Letter by Letter: Manuscript Transcription and Historical Imagination - Karen Louise Jolly Slow Digitisation and the Battle of the Books - Andrew Prescott

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Book SynopsisFirst major study of the representation of Minerva in the Middle Ages, giving insights into classical reception. Images of Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom, appear frequently in medieval literature, derived from antique culture and literature; redemptress, mistress of the liberal arts, patroness of princes, idol, and Venus' ally. Throughout the high to late Middle Ages, Peter Abelard, Guido delle Colonne, John Gower, Geoffrey Chaucer, and Christine de Pizan, among others, drew on and developed these images, but they are particularly prevalent in a number of fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century English and Scots allegorical and dream-vision poems, including John Lydgate's Reson and Sensuallyte and Temple of Glas, the anonymous Court of Sapience and Assembly of Gods, James I's Kingis Quair, Charles d'Orleans' Fortunes Stabilnes, and William Dunbar's Golden Targe. This book offers the first full-length examination of these depictions, bringing out the receptionof classical culture. Via close readings of the various poets, it enables us to understand how her figure was used, and also, and most importantly, to interpret and transform the poetic and cultural traditions from which she springs. WILLIAM F. HODAPP is Professor of English and Coordinator of Medieval and Renaissance Studies at The College of St. Scholastica, Duluth, Minnesota.Trade ReviewIn this rich, wide-ranging study Hodapp demonstrates just how complex and multivalent the figure of Minerva was in medieval English and Scots literature. * HISTORY *Thee volume can be recommended. It illumines classical and medieval civilization alike. Its intimate and sympathetic regard for older poetry and wisdom makes it a book to be welcomed and used. * MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW *As a whole, the book is a welcome addition to studies of ancient Roman myth, medieval Latin literature, and medieval and early modern English and Scots literature. * SPECULUM *In The Figure of Minerva Professor Hodapp has attempted a huge project; for those scholars interested in the theoretical and historical contexts for analysis of Minerva in medieval literature, it is a rich resource. * MEDIEVAL REVIEW *Such a clear, schematized approach to a labyrinthine complex of historical traditions is impressive... [Hodapp] penetrates the legends of the goddess with the professional, keen-eyed swordstroke of factuality, uncovering things that, like a Grecian urn, tease us out of thought. * STUDIES IN MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE TEACHING *Table of ContentsIntroduction The Roman Minerva and Elements of Medieval Classicism The Sapiential Tradition: Minerva as Redemptress The Martianus Tradition: Minerva as Mistress of the Liberal Arts The Patrona Tradition: Minerva as Protectress and Benefactor The Patristic Tradition: Minerva as Idol The Ovidian Tradition: Minerva as Venus' Ally Conclusion Bibliography

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Book SynopsisThe medieval in the modern world is here explored in a variety of media, from film and book to gaming. Medievalism - the ways in which post-medieval societies perceive, interpret, reimagine, or appropriate the Middle Ages - permeates popular culture. From Disney princesses to Game of Thrones, medieval fairs to World of Warcraft, contemporary culture keeps finding new ways to reinvent and repackage the period. Medievalism itself, then, continues to evolve while it is also subject to technological advances, prominent invocations in political discourse,and the changing priorities of the academy. This has led some scholars to adopt the term "neomedievalism", a concept originating in part from the work of the late Umberto Eco, which calls for new avenues of inquiry into the wayswe think about the medieval. This book examines recent evolutions of (neo)medievalism across multiple media, from Tolkien's Lord of the Rings to the film Beowulf and medieval gaming. These evolutions can take the form of what one might consider to be pop culture objects of critique (art, commodity, amusement park, video game) or academic tools of critique (monographs, articles, lectures, university seminars). It is by reconciling theseseemingly disparate forms that we can better understand the continual, interconnected, and often politicized reinvention of the Middle Ages in both popular and academic culture. KELLYANN FITZPATRICK is an affiliated researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology.Trade Review[Fitzpatrick's work makes] worthwhile contributions to the field and and demonstrate[s] the breadth of this subject. -- FOLKLOREIn this excellent volume Fitzpatrick (Georgia Institute of Technology) explores why academics and creators of literature, film, television, and gaming platforms continue to mine, represent, repurpose, and appropriate the history and culture of the Middle Ages. Highly Recommended. * CHOICE *The ultimate value of this book for scholars is for us to be consciously thinking about books, films, and games as artifacts of neomedievalism in our teaching and our research. Doing so will open new horizons for what we can know about the medieval world and how we study it. * SPECULUM *Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. The Academy and the Making of Neomedievalism 2. Tolkien: From Medieval Studies to Medievalist Fantasy 3. Hollywood Genders the Neomedieval: Sleeping Beauty/Beowulf/Maleficent 4. Game of Thrones: Neomedievalism and the Myths of Inheritance 5. Magic: The Gathering and the Markets of Neomedievalism 6. Digital Gaming: Coding a Connective Neomedievalism Bibliography

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Book SynopsisFirst English translation of an important twelfth-century romance, giving an account of the Trojan war and its consequences. Benoît de Sainte-Maure's Roman de Troie, dating to around 1165, is, along with the Roman de Thèbes and the Roman d'Eneas, one of the three "romances of antiquity" (romans d'antiquité). These romances launched the plots, themes and structures of the genre, then blossoming in the hands of authors such as Chrétien de Troyes. As an account of the Trojan War, Benoît's work is of necessity a poem about war and its causes, how it was fought and what its consequences were for the combatants. But the author's choice of the octosyllabic rhyming couplet, his fondness for description, his ability to recount the intensity of personal struggles, and above all his fascination with the trials and tribulations of Love, which affect some of the work's most prominent warriors (among them Paris and his love for Helen, and Troilus and his love for Briseida), all combine to fashion this romance - in which events from long ago are presented as a reflection of the poet's own feudal and courtly worlds. This translation, the first into English, aims to bring the poem and the author to a wider audience. It is accompanied by an introduction and notes.Trade ReviewWinner of the 2018 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Award * . *[A] clear and accessible translation of Benoît's twelfth-century Roman de Troie that will serve as the standard English-language version of the medieval French text for the foreseeable future. * THE MEDIEVAL REVIEW *The translators, eminent medievalists both, have crafted a compelling narrative that is scrupulously faithful to the original and perhaps even more vivid and powerful . . . The translators' expertise is evident in every component of the book-not only their translation, but also the dense introduction. Essential. * CHOICE *

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Book SynopsisFirst modern edition and translation of the homilies of one of the most important religious figures of his time. Ælfric of Eynsham stands supreme as a distinguished homilist, translator, and moralist - one whose writings were sought by the most powerful churchmen and landed warlords of his day. In his sermons, the dead are raised to life, innocents are betrayed, civilizations come to ruin, prophecies are finally fulfilled, and sorrow is swallowed up in salvation. He offers guidance regarding sex, financial counsel, botanical excursuses, etymological asides, lions cowed by roosters, arch-heretics disemboweled, and seemingly inconsequential figures receiving everlasting crowns. He also considers the origin of Antichrist, recounts supernatural visions of damnation and deliverance, teases out the tension between predestination and free will, explores the multifarious nature of the soul, seeks to categorize creation, and presses the boundaries of conceptual capacity in describing the divine nature. Treatises take up such subjects as the Holy Spirit, cognition, penitence, and proper comportment. Private prayers appear alongside public declarations of the Christian faith found in the Paternoster and the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds. The thirty-one texts presented here, with facing translations, span the course of his career: Old English and Latin, ordinary and alliterative prose, pithy prayers and exhaustive exegesis. Nine appear in print for the first time; others for the first time in well over 100 years. Introductions to the texts offer overviews of the content, composition, and circulation of each work, using the fruits of the latest research to envision real-world contexts for their use in specific places, among particular groups, and by certain individuals. Meanwhile, the commentary traces Ælfric's role in the history of ideas, examining his relationship to over 100 sources, 200 other Ælfrician works, and over 1,000 biblical passages; it seeks to clarify Ælfric's compositional aims and further to establish the authorship and date of these remarkable writings from early England.Table of ContentsVOLUME I Preface Acknowledgements Abbreviations Sigla for Cited Ælfrician Manuscripts Dates for Cited Ælfrician Works Editorial Conventions Conventions Used in the Commentaries HOMILIES The Proper of the Season 1. Christmas: Sermo in natale Domini et de ratione anime ('A Sermon on the Lord's Nativity and the Nature of the Soul') 2. Christmas: In natali Domini ('On the Lord's Nativity') 3. Friday after the Fourth Sunday in Lent: Erat quidam languens Lazarus ('There was a certain sick man, Lazarus' [John 11.1-45]) Lazarus I Lazarus II Lazarus III 4. Friday after the Fifth Sunday in Lent: Collegerunt ergo pontifices ('The chief priests therefore gathered' [John 11.47-54]) 5. Third Sunday after Easter: Modicum et iam non uidebitis me ('A little while and then you will not see me' [John 16.16-22]) 6. Third Sunday after Easter: Be ðam Seofanfealdan Ungifa ('Concerning the Sevenfold Evil Gifts') The Proper of the Saints 7. Assumption of Mary (15 August): De sancta uirginitate, uel de tribus ordinibus castitatis ('Concering Holy Virginity, or Concerning the Three Orders of Chastity') 8. Nativity of Mary (8 September): Natiuitas sanctae Mariae uirginis ('The Nativity of the Holy Virgin Mary') VOLUME II HOMILIES The Common of the Saints 9. A Confessor: Sermo in natale unius confessoris ('A Sermon for the Feast-day of a Confessor') 10.Dedication of a Church: Sermo in dedicatione æcclesiæ ('A Sermon for the Dedication of a Church') Unspecified occasions 11.Esto consentiens aduersario ('Be in agreement with your adversary' [Matthew 5.25]) 12.Menn Behofiað Godre Lare ('People Need Good Teaching') Appendix 1: Læwede Menn Behofiað Godre Lare ('Lay People Need Good Teaching') Appendix 2: Et hoc scientes tempus ('And [do] this, knowing the time' [Romans 13.11]) 13.De uirginitate ('Concerning Virginity') 14.De creatore et creatura ('Concerning the Creator and Creation') 15.De sex etatibus huius seculi('Concerning the Six Ages of the World') VARIA 16.De septiformi spiritu ('Concerning the Sevenfold Spirit') 17.Be þam Halgan Gaste ('Concerning the Holy Spirit') 18.De cogitatione('Concerning Thinking') 19.In quadragesima, de penitentia ('In Lent, concerning Penitence') Appendix 1: Gelyfst Ðu on God ('Do you believe in God') Appendix 2: Læwedum Mannum is to Witane ('The Laity are to Know') Appendix 3: Se Hælend Crist ('Christ the Savior') 20.Læwedum Mannum is to Witenne('The Laity are to Know') 21. Gebedu on Englisc ('Prayers in English') 22. Se Læssa Creda('The Shorter Creed') [Apostles' Creed] 23. Mæsse Creda('The Mass Creed') [Nicene Creed] 24. Pater noster('The Lord's Prayer') Works Cited Index

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Book SynopsisThe continued influence and significance of the legend of Arthur are demonstrated by the articles collected in this volume. The rich vitality of both the Arthurian material itself and the scholarship devoted to it is manifested in this volume. It begins with an interdisciplinary study of swords belonging to Arthurian and other heroes and of the smithswho made them, assessed both in their literary contexts and in "historical" references to their existence as heroic relics. Two essays then consider the use of Arthurian material for political purposes: a discussion of Caradog's Vita Gildae throws light on the complex attitudes to Arthur of contemporaries of Geoffrey of Monmouth in a time of political turmoil in England, and an investigation into borrowings from Geoffrey's Historia in a chronicle of Anglo-Scottish relations in the time of Edward I, a well-known admirer of the Arthurian legend, argues that they would have appealed to the clerical élite. Romance motifs link the subsequent pieces: women and their friendships in Ywain and Gawain, the only known close English adaptation of a romance by Chrétien, and the mixture of sacred and secular in The Turke and Gawain, with fascinating alchemical parallels for a puzzling beheading episode. This is followed by a discussion of the views on native and foreign sources of three sixteenth-century defenders of Arthur, John Leland, John Prise and Humphrey Llwyd, and their responses to the criticisms of Polydore Vergil. In twentieth-century reception history, John Steinbeck was an ardent Arthurian enthusiast: an essay looks at the significance of his annotations to his copy of Malory as he worked on his adaptation, The Acts of King Arthur and his Noble Knights. The volume moves to even more recent territory with an exploration of the adaptations of Malory and other Arthurian writers that occur in the comic books by Geoff Johns about Arthur Curry, aka Aquaman, King of Atlantis. The book is completed by a reprint of a classic essay by Norris Lacy on the absence and presence of the Grail in Arthurian texts from the twelfth century on.Trade ReviewThe 35th volume of Arthurian Literature easily reaches the high standard set by previous entries, while covering a wide range of literary and historical texts in new and compelling ways. * Anglia *Table of ContentsArthurian Swords I: Gawain's Sword and the Legend of Weland the Smith - Richard Barber Rex rebellis et vir pacificus: Civil War and Ecclesiastical Peacekeeping in the Vita Gildae of Caradog of Llancarfan - Andrew Rabin Once and Future History: Textual Borrowing in an Account of the First War of Scottish Independence - Christopher Michael Berard 'Me rewes sore': Women's Friendship, Affect and Loyalty in Ywain and Gawain - Usha Vishnuvajjala The Sacred and the Secular: Alchemical Transformation in The Turke and Sir Gawain - Natalie Goodison 'The native place of that great Arthur': Foreignness and Nativity in Sixteenth-Century Defences of Arthur - Mary Bateman John Steinbeck's 'Wonder-Words' - Elaine Treharne and William J. Fowler The Once and Future King of Atlantis: The Arthurian Figure in Geoff Johns's Aquaman: Death of a King - Carl B. Sell Arthur and/or the Grail - Norris J. Lacy

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Book SynopsisNew perspectives on one of the most important medieval poets. The essays in this volume pay tribute to the distinguished career of Professor R.F. Yeager. Appropriately for one who has done so much to advance scholarship and critical debate on this poet, they focus on John Gower. The approaches taken range widely, from poetics to palaeography, from close critical interpretation to ecocriticism, offering important new readings of Gower and his age. Particular topics addressed include Gower's revisions to the Tale ofRosiphilee; theological and philosophical positions within Gower's work; the violence of manuscript images of Confessio Amantis; and the views of a fellow poet on Gower - Edward Thomas.Trade ReviewThe book provides a varied and interesting take on Gower, with several outstanding contributions, and it pays a fitting tribute to the honorand. * Journal of the Early Book Society *Table of ContentsIntroduction - Susannah Chewning Edward Thomas on Gower - A S G Edwards The Sutherland Fragment of Gower's Confessio Amantis - Derek Pearsall Incarnational Making in Vox Clamantis II - Stephanie L. Batkie and Matthew W. Irvin Patriarchy, Family and Law in Gower's Confessio Amantis - Russell Peck Gower's Ballades for Women - Peter Nicholson John Gower and the Artists of M. 126 - Martha W. Driver Gower in Striped Sleeves: Mirour de l'Omme as Gower's Early Humanism - Andrew Galloway What's in a Name? History, Genre, and Political Speech in Gower's Chronica Tripertita - David A. Roberts Studies in Gower's Age: Ciceronian Echoes in Confessio Amantis - William Rogers Gower's Light: the Ecology of "De Lucis scrutino" - Natalie Grinnell Gower, Chaucer, and the "Treuthe of Prestehode" - Michael Kuczynski "To Hear an Old Man Sing": Apollonius, Pericles, and the Age of Gower - Roger A. Ladd The Constraints of Justice in Gower's "Lawyerly Habit of Mind" - Brian Gastle A Poet at Work: John Gower's Revisions to the Tale of Rosiphilee - Richard Firth Green A Personal Tribute to Robert F. Yeager - Susannah Chewning Bibliography of R. F. Yeager's Writings General Bibliography

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Book SynopsisFirst full-length investigation into Canadian literary medievalism as a discrete phenomenon. The essays in this volume consider what is original and distinctive about the manifestation of medievalism in Canadian literature and its origins and its subsequent growth and development: from the first novel published in Canada written by a Canadian-born author, Julia Beckwith Hart's St Ursula's Convent (1824), to the recent work of the best-selling novelist Patrick DeWitt (Undermajordomo Minor, published in 2015). Topics addressed include the strong strain of medievalist fantasy itself in the work of the young-adult author Kit Pearson, and the longer novels of Charles de Lint, Steven Erikson, and Guy Gavriel Kay; the medievalist inclinations of Archibald Lampman and W.W. Campbell, well-known nineteenth-century Canadian poets; and the often-studied Wacousta by John Richardson, first published in 1832. Chapters also cover early Canadian periodicals' engagement with orientalist medievalism; and works by twentieth-century writers such as the irrepressible Earle Birney, the witty and intellectual Robertson Davies, and the fascinating and learned Margaret Atwood.Trade ReviewMedievalism in English Canadian Literature from Richardson to Atwood is not only a rare, but also valuable contribution to medievalist studies in the context of Canada and Canadian literature. * Studia Anglica Posnaniensia *While a collection such as this clearly has importance for other scholars studying either medievalism more widely, or the specific writers examined, it also offers some perceptive insights into medieval or quasi-medieval models and motifs that helped to shape Canadian social and cultural institutions, particularly during the formative decades of the Dominion, from parliamentary architecture to the physical and intellectual construction of universities. These insights are nicely and concisely brought together by Toswell and Czarnowus in their well-written Introduction. -- British Journal of Canadian StudiesTable of ContentsIntroduction: English Canadian Medievalism - Jane Toswell and Anna Czarnowus "Men of the North": Archibald Lampman's Use of Incidents in the Lives of Medieval Monarchs and Aristocrats - David Bentley "Going Back to the Middle Ages": Tracing Medievalism in Julia Beckwith Hart's St. Ursula's Convent and John Richardson's Wacousta - Agnieszka Klis-Brodowska John Richardson's Wacousta and the Transfer of Medievalist Romance - Anna Czarnowus A Canadian Caliban in King Arthur's Court: Materialist Medievalism and Northern Gothic in William Wilfred Campbell's Mordred - Brian Johnson Orientalist Medievalism in Early Canadian Periodicals - Laurel Ryan The Collegiate Gothic: Legitimacy and Inheritance in Robertson Davies' The Rebel Angels - David Watt Earle Birney as Public Poet: a Canadian Chaucer? - Jane Toswell "That's what you get for being food": Margaret Atwood's Symbolic Cannibalism - Dominika Ruszkiewicz Lost in Allegory: Grief and Chivalry in Kit Pearson's A Perfect, Gentle Knight - Cory Rushton Remembering the Romance: Medievalist Romance in Fantasy Fiction by Charles de Lint and Guy Gavriel Kay - Sylwia Borowska-Szerszun Medievalisms and Romance Traditions in Guy Gavriel Kay's Ysabel - Ewa Drab The Medieval Methods of Patrick DeWitt: Undermajordomo Minor - Michael Fox

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Book SynopsisWinner of the Best First Monograph from the International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England (ISSEME) 2021. An examination of the Old English medical collections, arguing that these texts are products of a learned intellectual culture. Four complete medical collections survive from Anglo-Saxon England. These were first edited by Oswald Cockayne in the nineteenth century and came to be known by the names Bald's Leechbook, Leechbook III, the Lacnunga, and the Old English Pharmacopeia. Together these works represent the earliest complete collections of medical material in a western vernacular language. This book examines these texts as products of a learned literary culture. While earlier scholarship tended to emphasise the relationship of these works to folk belief or popular culture, this study suggests that all four extant collections were probably produced in major ecclesiastical centres. It examines the collections individually, emphasising their differences of content and purpose, while arguing that each consistently displays connections with an elite intellectual culture. The final chapter considers the fundamentally positive depiction of doctors and medicine found within literary and ecclesiastical works from the period and suggests that the high esteem for medicine in literate circles may have favoured the study and translation of medical texts.Trade ReviewKesling occupies the unenviable position of having produced the first monograph on pre-Conquest medical texts since 1993 in a field that has yielded much scholarly work in the twenty-seven years since Cameron's Anglo-Saxon Medicine. She has done a more than admirable job synthesizing scholarship throughout, and her bibliography is excellent. * Journal of British Studies *In her Medical Texts in Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture, Emily Kesling breaks from this habit of thinking of these manuscripts as a single corpus, and instead focuses on each of the major Anglo-Saxon medieval texts individually. As such, her book should now be considered required reading for anyone researching one of these manuscripts. * Speculum *Table of ContentsIntroduction Bald's Leechbook: A Medical Compendium Elves, the Demonic, and Leechbook III The Lacnunga and Insular Grammatica The Old English Herbarium and the Monastic Reform Medicine in Anglo-Saxon England Appendix A: Bald's Leechbook and its Latin Source Material Appendix B: B.Parallel Passages in the Lacnunga and MS CCCC 41 Bibliography

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Book SynopsisA strikingly original approach to Beowulf, linking its structure to the dynastic life-cycle. The original audience of Beowulf was steeped in ancient Scandinavian royal legend. But for modern readers of the poem, these traditions are frustratingly obscure and confusing. This book argues that Beowulf is a dynastic drama centred on the fortunes of three great royal houses, the Scyldings, Scylfings and Hrethlings. At the centre of the poem is the Geatish hero, whose adventures provide the link between these three dynasties. By unravelling the web of Scandinavian royal legends known to the work's original audience, the volume allows the modern reader to appreciate better the role of the monsters as portents of dynastic and national crises. It begins by offering a new interpretation of the work's structure based on the principle of the dynastic life-cycle, providing explanations for features of the poem that have never been satisfactorily explained, most famously its many digressions and episodes. Highlighting the work's often-overlooked originality, it then proposes that the poet created a fictionalized monster-slaying hero and inserted him into royal legend in order to dramatize specific moments of dynastic crisis. Finally, it brings into focus the poet's debt to biblical paradigms of kingship and considers how the Anglo-Saxons came to read Beowulf as their own Book of Kings.Trade ReviewAs a thematic study of Beowulf, Dynastic Drama is an outstanding work. [...]. It is certain that Dynastic Drama will continue to be an essential reference work for many years to come. -- PARERGONThis is an important work that provides a great deal to consider, discuss and debate. * PAUL MORTIMER, WULFHEODENAS *The Dynastic Drama of Beowulf is a learned and stimulating book that should have a major impact on Beowulf studies. This book does something that has rarely been done before: it develops a coherent interpretation of the entirety of Beowulf through a series of close readings that are philologically and historically plausible. In an era of ephemeral scholarship, Leneghan has triumphed over time and written a book that will last. * ANGLIA *Each chapter, as well as the whole book, is very well organised, which makes his discussion both convincing and easy to follow. The volume deals in detail with many of the major issues that have been debated in earlier scholarship on Beowulf. [...] It will surely become a must-read in the field of Beowulf studies. * TOEBI NEWSLETTER *This rich study offers a compelling reading and will be of great interest to scholars of early medieval thinking about kingship and succession, comparative work on Old English and Scandinavian literature, religious and poetic syncretism, and of course Beowulf itself. * Review of English Studies *Table of ContentsFamily Trees: The Dynasties of Beowulf Dramatis Personae Introduction: Reading Beowulf as a Book of Kings Chapter One: The Dynastic Life-Cycle and the Structure of the Poem Chapter Two: Shaping the Dynastic Drama Chapter Three: The Role of the Monsters in the Dynastic Drama Chapter Four: Beowulf and Biblical Kingship Conclusion: Reading the Dynastic Drama in Anglo-Saxon England Appendices Bibliography

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Book SynopsisThe movement of the pilgrims in the Tales explored both practically and metaphorically, showing it to be an expression of identity. The Canterbury Tales is a collection of stories told by pilgrims en route to Canterbury; but how does their movement shape the world around them, and how are they shaped by their world? This volume seeks to answer these questions by exploring expressions of mobility in Chaucer's frame narrative and tales. Combining the theoretical and historical methods of literary analysis with the interpretive tools of cultural geography and ecocriticism, it argues that movement is the medium through which identity is performed in The Canterbury Tales. This unique interdisciplinary approach shows how physical and ideological mobilities shape and are shaped by geographical, ecological, sociopolitical, and gendered identities. As human and more-than-human bodies cross borders and dissolve boundaries, they contribute to a fluid, permeable, and hybrid world that challenges traditional perceptions of boundedness, security, and fixity. By examining this kinesis alongside contexts including medieval bridge building, economics, and biology, this book reveals a rich exchange between word and world. In the end, The Canterbury Tales emerges as an amalgam of lived experience and the poetic imagination that both chronicles and constructs a world in the process of becoming.Trade ReviewWright elegantly brings together this wide-ranging and insightful account of mobility and identity, which will be of interest beyond the field of Chaucer studies and Middle English for its valuable discussions of the way in which mobility mediates our views and experiences of the world around us. -- MEDIUM AEVUMTable of ContentsIntroduction: Moving across, in, and as the World Chapter One: Economic Mobilities in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales Chapter Two: Building Bridges to Canterbury Chapter Three: Rocking the Cradle and Quiting the Knight Chapter Four: "Translating" Female Bodies and (En)Gendering Mobility Conclusion: Mobilizing Medieval and Modern Identities Bibliography

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