Literary studies: ancient, classical Books

Book SynopsisEssays considering the relationship between Gower's texts and the physical ways in which they were first manifested. The media in which Gower's works were first transmitted, whether in print of manuscript form, are of vital importance to an understanding of both the poet and his audience. However, in comparison with those of his contemporary Chaucer, they have been relatively little studied. This volume represents a major collaboration between specialist scholars in manuscript and book history, and experts in Gower more generally, breaking new ground in approaching Gower through first-hand study of his publications in manuscript and print. Its chapters consider such matters as manuscript and book illumination, provenance, variant texts and editions, scribes, and printers, looking at how, and to what degree, the materiality of the vellum, paper, ink and binding illuminates - and even implicates - the poet and his poetry. MARTHA DRIVER is Distinguished Professor of English and Women's and Gender Studies at Pace University; the late DEREK PEARSALL was Gurney Professor of English Literature, Emeritus, Harvard University; R.F. YEAGER Is Professor of English and Foreign Languages, Emeritus, University of West Florida. Contributors: Stephanie L. Batkie, Julia Boffey, Margaret Connolly, Siân Echard, A.S.G. Edwards, Robert Epstein, Brian W. Gastle, Amanda J. Gerber, Yoshiko Kobayashi, Aditi Nafde, Tamara Peréz-Fernández, Wendy Scase, Karla Taylor, David Watt.Trade ReviewDriver (Pace Univ.), Pearsall (emer., Harvard), and Yeager (emer., Univ. of West Florida) are all major scholars of Gower and medieval book history, and the sophisticated essays they have gathered provide excellent guidance for this tricky matter. Discoveries abound... All these essays will be valuable to specialists, and many will be of wider interest. * CHOICE *Table of ContentsIntroduction - Martha W. Driver and Derek Pearsall and Robert F. Yeager John Gower's Scribes and Literatim Copying - Wendy Scase Looking for Richard: Finding "Moral Gower" in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Hatton 92 - Stephanie L. Batkie A State above All Other: The Recensions of Confessio Amantis and the Anthropology of Sovereignty - Robert Epstein What Lies Beneath - Karla Taylor Earthly Gower: Transforming Geographical Texts and Images in the Confessio Amantis and Vox Clamantis Manuscripts - Amanda J. Gerber Paratextual Deviations: The Transmission and Translation of Gower's Confessio Amantis in the Iberian Peninsula - Tamara Peréz-Fernández "Mescreantz," Schism, and the Plight of Constantinople: Evidence for Dating and Reading London, British Library, Additional MS 59495 - David Watt John Shirley and John Gower - Margaret Connolly Gower between Manuscript and Print - Sian Echard Gower from Print to Manuscript: Copying Caxton in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Hatton 51 - Aditi Nafde A Caxton Confessio: Readers and Users from Westminster to Chapel Hill - Brian Gastle English Poets in Print: Advertising Authorship from Caxton to Berthelet - Julia Boffey In Praise of European Peace: Gower's Verse Epistle in Thynne's 1532 Edition of Chaucer's Workes - Yoshiko Kobayashi George Campbell Macaulay and the Clarendon Edition of Gower - A S G Edwards Bibliography

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Book SynopsisThe Book of Margery Kempe set in the context of medieval medical discourse. Margery Kempe's various illnesses, mental, spiritual and physical, are a recurring theme in her Book. This volume, the first full-length interdisciplinary study from a medical humanities perspective, offers a medicalized reading of Kempe's spirituality in the context of the ubiquitous medieval notion of Christ the Physician, and thus a new way of interpreting the Book itself: as a narrative of Kempe's own engagement with the medical paradigms of which she has previously been a passive subject. Focusing on the interactions of medicine, mysticism and reproduction as a feminist project, the author explores the ontology of female flesh; the productive use of pain, suffering and sickness; and the ethics of a maternal theology based on the melancholic and surrogate activities that underlie Kempe's experience. Structured broadly via a traverse through the life course, the book shows how Kempe's response to suffering is illuminated by the medieval medical discourse by which she is contemporaneously read, and by which she engineers her own construction and understanding of self. It also explores Kempe's persistent attendance to her mystical body and refusal to compromise her instinct to authentically show how she feels.Trade ReviewMargery Kempe's Spiritual Medicine offers a multitude of new starting points for considering the Book of Margery Kempe. Readers will appreciate the monograph's dynamic movement across texts and contexts and its generous engagement with Kempe as a self-defining woman, mystic, and author. Kalas succeeds in showing how Kempe's distinctively feminine embodiment of suffering could assume historically specific meanings and authority. * SPECULUM *This volume provides an illuminative and thoughtful exploration of the way medicalized understandings of female corporeality shaped Kempe's mystical experience. It not only offers a number of exciting, fresh interpretations of Kempe's Book, but also testifies to the multiplicity of ways that medical humanities methodologies can complicate and enrich our understanding of literary text * STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER *The author's close reading of Kempe's life cycle, her Book, and numerous primary documents relating to medicine and health make for a learned and convincing study. This book will be valuable not only to Kempe scholars but also to students and researchers interested in the critical overlap between spirituality, medicine, and the female body in the Middle Ages and beyond. Highly recommended. * CHOICE *Laura Kalas's new study of Margery Kempe within the context of medieval medical thought and practice deserves a place in the pantheon of other transformative studies of Kempe's Book. ...[T]his study establishes important cultural and theoretical grounds for our reading of Kempe's suffering, as well as contributing to the growing field of medical humanities. * THE MEDIEVAL REVIEW *Laura Kalas has set the benchmark in this fine piece of work and has set it high. -- Luke Penkett, The Julian Centre * MAGISTRA *Kalas's study makes an extremely important and highly engaging contribution to existing scholarship on The Book of Margery Kempe and to the field of medical humanities more generally. -- Journal of British StudiesTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. Bleeding the Tears of Melancholia 2. 'Þe mukke' of Marriage and the Sexual Paradox 3. Lost Blood of the Middle Age: Surrogacy and Fecundity 4. Margery Medica: The Healing Value of Pain Surrogacy 5. The Passion of Death Surrogacy 6. Senescent Reproduction: Writing Anamnestic Pain Afterword / Afterlife Select Bibliography Glossary of Medical Terms

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Book SynopsisEssays on the post-modern reception and interpretation of the Middle Ages, To attract followers many professional politicians, as well as other political actors, ground their biases in (supposedly) medieval beliefs, align themselves with medieval heroes, or condemn their enemies as medieval barbarians. The essays in the first part of this volume directly examine some of the many forms such medievalism can take, including the invocation of "blood libels" in American politics; Vladimir Putin's self-comparisons to "Saint Equal-of-the-Apostles Prince Vladimir"; alt-right references to medieval Christian battles with Moslems; nativist Brexit allusions to the Middle Ages; and, in the 2019 film The Kid Who Would be King, director Joe Cornish's call for Arthurian leadership through Brexit. These essays thus inform, even as they are tested by, the subsequent papers, which touch on politics in the course of discussing the director Guy Ritchie's erasure of Wales in the 2017 film King Arthur: Legend of the Sword; medievalist alt-right attempts to turn one disenfranchised group against another; Jean-Paul Laurens's 1880 condemnation of Napoleon III via a portrait of Honorius; Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's extraordinarily wide range of medievalisms; the archaeology of Julian of Norwich's anchorite cell; the influence of Julian on pity in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter book series; the origins of introductory maps for medievalist narratives; self-reflexive medievalism in a television episode of Doctor Who; and sonic medievalism in fantasy video games.Trade ReviewPolitics and Medievalism offers a great deal of thoughtful discussion, not all of which readers may agree with, but one of the purposes of such a volume is to encourage further discussion of issues that have proven fairly combative in other venues. -- ParergonTable of ContentsPreface - Karl Fugelso I: Essays on Politics and Medievalism (Studies) Historical Malapropism and the Medieval Blood Libel in American Politics - Esther Cuenca Putin's Medieval Weapons in the War against Ukraine - Sean Griffin The Battle of Tours and the US Southern Border - Daniel Wollenberg Medievalism, Brexit, and the Myth of Nations - Andrew B.R. Elliott An Arthur for the Brexit Era: Joe Cornish's The Kid Who Would be King - Christopher Jensen II: Other Responses to Medievalism Angle-ing for Arthur: Erasing the Welsh in Guy Ritchie's King Arthur: Legend of the Sword - Mary Behrman Chasing Freyja: Rape, Immigration, and the Medieval in Alt-Right Discourse - Ali Frauman "Things painted on the coarse canvas": Political Polemic in Jean-Paul Laurens's Portrait of the Child Emperor Honorius - Laura E. Cochrane Longfellow and Old English - Jane Toswell Archaeology and Medievalism at Julian of Norwich's Anchorite Cell - Victoria Yuskaitis A Revelation of Love: Christianity, Julian of Norwich, and Medieval Pity in the Harry Potter Series - Laura Varnam In the Beginning Was the Word: How Medieval Text Became Fantasy Maps - Anna Fore Waymack and John Wyatt Greenlee Objectivity, Impossibility, and Laughter in Doctor Who's "Robot of Sherwood" - Usha Vishnuvajjala Sonic Medievalism, World Building, and Cultural Identity in Fantasy Video Games - James Cook

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Book SynopsisCutting-edge and fresh new outlooks on medieval literature, emphasising the vibrancy of the field. 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 the range of European cultures, capaciously defined. Essays in this volume investigate a range of writers from late antiquity to the fifteenth century. They explore encounters between humans and animals in French romance; reflect on what contemporary sound studies can offer to Anglo-French poetry; trace how the reception of Trojan history is influenced by late medieval military practices; attend to the complex multilingualism of a devotional poetry that tests the limits of both language and theology; analyse the ways in which Christ's sexuality upsets religious typology inlate medieval drama; document the lines of national and European affinities found in French poetic manuscripts; and argue for why we should study "ugly" manuscripts of practical instruction not only for what they teach us but alsofor their insights into medieval literacy. Texts discussed include romances such as Chrétien de Troyes's Yvain and Béroul's Tristan; the theologian John of Howden's adaptation of the Philomela legend in his Rossignos; Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde read alongside siege chronicles of the Hundred Years War; Bruder Hans's quadrilingual Ave Maria; the York Corpus Christi Plays; the poetry of Charles d'Orléans; and a group oflate medieval manuscripts which include herbals, account books, and medical treatises. KELLIE ROBERTSON is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University 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; PHILIP KNOX Is University Lecturer inEnglish and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, Contributors: Lukas Hadrian Ovrom, Terrence Cullen, Steven Rozenski, Tison Pugh, Rory G. Critten, Daniel Wakelin.Table of ContentsLion-Keu-Coupé: A Missing Link in Yvain or Le Chevalier au Lion - Lukas Ovrom John of Howden's Rossignos and the Sounds of Francophone Devotion - Terrence Cullen 'Wereyed on every side:' Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and the Logic of Siege Warfare - Daniel Davies 'Ave ave ave [ave]:' The Multilingual Poetics of Exuberance in Bruder Hans - Steven Rozenski Performative Typology, Jewish Genders, and Jesus's Queer Romance in the York Corpus Christi Plays - Tison Pugh Locating Charles d'Orléans: In France, in England, and Out of Europe - Rory Critten Urinals and Hunting Traps: Curating Fifteenth-Century Pragmatic Books - Daniel Wakelin

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Book SynopsisA close examination of the prayers in Chaucer's poetry sheds significant new light on his poetic practice. In a culture as steeped in communal, scripted acts of prayer as Chaucer's England, a written prayer asks not only to be read, but to be inhabited: its "I" marks a space that readers are invited to occupy. This book examines the implications of accepting that invitation when reading Chaucer's poetry. Both in his often-overlooked pious writings and in his ambitious, innovative pagan narratives, the "I" of prayer provides readers with a subject-position thatcan be at once devotional and literary - a stance before a deity and a stance in relation to a poem. Chaucer uses this uniquely open, participatory "I" to implicate readers in his poetry and to guide their work of reading. In examining Christian and pagan prayers alongside each other, Chaucer's Prayers cuts across an assumed division between the "religious" and "secular" writings within Chaucer's corpus. Rather, it emphasizes continuities andapproaches prayer as part of Chaucer's broader experimentation with literary voice. It also places Chaucer in his devotional context and foregrounds how pious practices intersect with and shape his poetic practices. These insightschallenge a received view of Chaucer as an essentially secular poet and shed new light on his poetry's relationship to religion.Trade ReviewMegan Murton's very insightful and helpful book is a study of medieval subjectivity. * SPECULUM *This adroit study reveals new pathways around more than a few critical minefields-not least that of "Chaucer as a religious poet"-and its emphasis on Chaucer's creative piety forms a welcome intervention in current historicist models of Chaucer's poetics and late medieval lay spirituality alike. * STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER *In examining Christian and pagan prayers alongside each other, Chaucer's Prayers cuts across an assumed division between the 'religious' and 'secular' writings within Chaucer's corpus. Rather, it emphasizes continuities and approaches prayer as part of Chaucer's broader experimentation with literary voice. It also places Chaucer in his devotional context and foregrounds how pious practices intersect with and shape his poetic practices. These insights challenge a received view of Chaucer as an essentially secular poet and shed new light on his poetry's relationship to religion. * Studi Medievali *Murton skillfully unveils the potential of reading Chaucer as a religious poet involved with the literary nature of devotional writings and the devotional nature of literature. [...] Chaucer's Prayers' significant contribution returns our attention to Chaucer as both a secular and religious poet. -- Journal of Medieval Religious CulturesTable of ContentsIntroduction: Prayer as Performance Chapter 1: Praying to Mary Chapter 2: Praying in Suffering Chapter 3: God of Love and Love of God in Troilus and Criseyde Chapter 4: Praying about Poetry Conclusion: Praying with Chaucer, Performing Chaucer

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Book SynopsisEssays on the performance of drama from the middle ages, ranging from the well-known cycles of York to matter from Iran. 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 here focus on civic theatre and display. Chester, York, Durham and Newcastle, and London. Practicalities are to the fore: what the Drawers of Dee actually did, how the actors in the York Corpus Christi Play knewwhat time it was, the difficulties presented to London pageantry by unauthorised house-extensions and horse-droppings. Even the stately entertainments of a royal tour by James VI & I featured (in Newcastle, of course) negotiationover the monopoly on coal disguised as a historical event in a play about King Alfred and Canute. Ranging further afield is an introduction to the living tradition of Iranian mystery plays, whose history and development have somethought-provoking parallels with those of medieval waggon plays in the West. Finally, the director and producer discuss their 2019 production of John Redford's Wit and Science by Edward's Boys, the first to be played by aboys' company since the sixteenth century.Table of ContentsThe Sun in York (Part Two): Illumination, Reflection, and Timekeeping for the Corpus Christi Play - Meg Twycross Remembering through Re-Enacting: Revisiting the Emergence of the Iranian Ta'zia Tradition - E. Lucy Deacon Welcoming James VI & I in the North-East: Civic Performance and Conflict in Durham and Newcastle - Mark C Chambers Welcoming James VI & I in the North-East: Civic Performance and Conflict in Durham and Newcastle - Gasper Jakovac Salmon-Fishing and Beer-Brewing: The Waterleaders and Drawers of Dee and Chester's Corpus Christi and Whitsun Plays - Ernst Gerhardt Jetties, Pentices, Purprestures, and Ordure: Obstacles to Pageants and Processions in London - Philip Butterworth Staging John Redford's Wit and Science in 2019 - Elisabeth Dutton and Perry Mills

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Book SynopsisA comprehensive guide to a crucial aspect of Old Norse literature. We cannot read literary works without making use of the concept of genre. In Old Norse studies, genre has been central to the categorisation, evaluation and understanding of medieval prose and poetry alike; yet its definition has been elusive and its implications often left unexplored. This volume opens up fundamental questions about Old Norse genre in theory and in practice. It offers an extensive range of theoretical approaches, investigating and critiquing current terms and situating its arguments within early Scandinavian and Icelandic oral-literary and manuscript contexts. It maps the ways in which genre and form engage with key thematic areas within the literary corpus,noting the different kinds of impact upon the genre system brought about by conversion to Christianity, the gradual adoption of European literary models, and social and cultural changes occurring in Scandinavian society. A case-study section probes both prototypical and hard-to-define cases, demonstrating the challenges that actual texts pose to genre theory in terms of hybridity, evolution and innovation. With an annotated taxonomy of Old Norse genres and an extensive bibliography, it is an indispensable resource for contemporary Old Norse-Icelandic literary studies.Trade Review[A]s the extensive listing of works cited indicates, consideration of genre is today a matter of interest to many leading scholars in the Old Norse field, and for anyone in that field concerned with the topic of genre this collection of essays is indeed vital reading. -- Journal of the Australian Early Medieval Assoc.Table of ContentsIntroduction - Massimiliano Bampi and Sif Rikhardsdottir Genre - Massimiliano Bampi Hybridity - Sif Rikhardsdottir Terminology - Lukas Rösli Form - Mikael Males Orality, Textuality and Performance - Judy Quinn Manuscripts and Codicology - Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir The Body Politic - Hans Jacob Orning Geography - Dale Kedwards Time and Space - Torfi H. Tulinius Memory - Pernille Hermann The Human Condition - Stefanie Gropper God(s) - Carolyne Larrington Wisdom - Brittany Schorn Skaldic poetry - Case study: The Poetry of Torf-Einarr Rognvaldsson of Orkney - Erin Goeres Eddic poetry - Case study: Sólarljóð - Carolyne Larrington Þættir - Case study: Stjörnu-Odda draumr - Elizabeth Ashman Rowe Íslendingasogur - Case study: Vatnsdæla saga - Russell Poole Byskupasögur and heilagra manna sögur - Case study - Kevin J. Wanner Romance - Case Study - Jürg Glauser Annotated Taxonomy of Genres

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Book SynopsisNew investigations into Charles d'Orléans' under-rated poem, its properties and its qualities. The compilation Fortunes Stabilnes, the English poetry Charles d'Orléans wrote in the course of his twenty-five year captivity in England after Agincourt, requires a larger lens than that of Chaucerianism, through which it has most often been viewed. A fresh view from another perspective, one that attends to form and style, as well as to the poet's French traditions, reveals a more conceptually complex and innovative kind of poetry than we have seen until now. The essays collected here reassess him in the light of recent work in Middle English studies. They detail those qualities that make his text one of the most accomplished and moving of the late Middle Ages: Charles's use of English, his metrical play, his felicity with formes fixes lyrics, his innovative use of the dits structure and lyric sequences, and finally, above all, his ability to write beautiful poetry. Overall, they bring out the underappreciated contribution made by Charles to the canon of English poetry.Trade Review[T]his is an excellent and very timely contribution to research and scholarship on Charles, which will hopefully form the groundwork for a renewed appreciation and deeper understanding of his unique and exciting English-­language work. * STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER *Charles d'Orléans' English Aesthetic enjoyably and usefully advances our knowledge. The book offers new findings and new arguments; [...] the editors and chapter authors should pat themselves on their backs. -- THE MEDIEVAL REVIEW (TMR)Table of ContentsIntroduction - R.D. Perry The Two Dreams of Charles d'Orleans and the Structure of His English Book - John A. Burrow Charles d'Orleans' Cross-Channel Poetics: The Choice of Ballade Form in Fortunes Stabilnes - Elizaveta Strakhov The English Roundel, Charles's Jubilee, and Mimetic Form - Jenni Nuttall A Grieving Lover: The Work of Mourning in Charles' First Ballade Sequence - B. S. W. Barootes Charles d'Orleans' English Metrical Phonology - Eric Weiskott The English Poetry of a Frenchman: Stress and Idiomacy in Charles d'Orleans - Ad Putter Verb Use in Charles d'Orleans' English - Richard Ingham Charles d'Orleans and His Finding of English - Jeremy J Smith Aureation as Agon: Charles d'Orleans versus John Lydgate - Andrea Denny-Brown Charles d'Orleans, Harley 682, and the London Booktrade - Simon Horobin The Form of the Whole - Philip Knox Select Bibliography

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Book SynopsisAn innovative, interdisciplinary approach to the understudied Icelandic mappae mundi. The Icelandic mappae mundi (maps of the world), drawn between c. 1225 and c. 1400, are contemporary with the breathtaking rise of its vernacular literary culture, and provide important insights into the Icelanders' capacious geographical awareness in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. However, in comparison with those drawn elsewhere, among them the English Hereford mappa mundi, they have received little critical attention. This book explores the Icelandic mappae mundi not only for what they reveal about the Icelanders' geographical awareness, but as complex registers of Icelandic national self-perception and imagining, situating them in their various literary, intellectual, and material contexts. It reveals fully how Icelanders used the cartographic medium to explore fantasies of national origin, their political structures, and place in Europe. The small canon of Icelandic world maps is reproduced here photographically, with their texts presented alongside English translations to enable a wider understanding.Trade ReviewA book that is as important as it is interesting. * IMCoS Journal *This study of mappae mundi and their concomitant texts will certainly be useful to future scholars of all kinds in the tracing of medieval sources and thus improving the "maps" of the routes of ideas bridging the North Atlantic Ocean in the Middle Ages. Kedwards deserves praise for his perseverance in sharing his vast knowledge with us in this fine book. * SPECULUM *Kedwards' study is an important contribution to the field of medieval geographies, this book also shows that maps are so much more than geographical documents and should be considered as part of the wider cultural record. -- Victoria E. H. Walker * Nottingham Medieval Studies *Table of ContentsIntroduction The Icelandic hemispherical world maps The Icelandic zonal map The two maps from Viðey Iceland in Europe Forty Icelandic Priests and a Map of the World Conclusion Map Texts and Translations Bibliography

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Book SynopsisA survey of the rituals of the year in Victorian England, showing the influence of the Middle Ages. What does a maypole represent? Why eat hot cross buns? Did Dick Whittington have a cat? All these questions are related to a larger one that nineteenth-century Britons asked themselves: which was more fun: living in their own time, or living in the Middle Ages? While Britain was becoming the most industrially-advanced nation in the world, many vaunted the superiority of the present to the past-yet others felt that if shadows of past ways of life haunted the present, they were friendly ghosts. This book explores such ghosts and how real or imagined remnants of medieval celebration in a variety of forms created a cultural idea of the Middle Ages. As Britons found, or thought that they found, traces of the medieval in traditions tied to times of the year, medievalism became not only the justification but also the inspiration for community festivity, from Christmas and Boxing Day through Maytime rituals to Hallowe'en, as show in the writings of amongst many others Keats, Browning and Dickens.Trade Review[The] book is awash with fascinating and understudied examples of nineteenth-century medievalism, and is thus a valuable work of scholarly recovery and a thoroughly enjoyable and interesting read. -- PARERGON[An] interesting and very relevant contribution to any study of invented medievalisms. -- FOLKLORETable of ContentsIntroduction: Medievalizing Time 1. The Christian and Not-so-Christian Year 2. Medievalist Calendar Experiments 3. Christmas Becomes a Season 4. Winter Love: St. Agnes and St. Valentine 5. Rites of Spring: Imagining Origins 6. Summer Festivals: Religion in Performance 7. Fragmented Autumn: Harvest-Home to Lord Mayor's Show Epilogue: Christmas Ghosts

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Book SynopsisEssays investigating the question of time, and how it was perceived, both in philosophical/religious terms, and in reality. How was time experienced in the Middle Ages? What attitudes informed people's awareness of its passing - especially when tensions between eternity and human time shaped perceptions in profound and often unexpected ways? Is it a human universal or culturally specific - or both? The essays here offer a range of perspectives on and approaches to personal, artistic, literary, ecclesiastical and visionary responses to time during this period. They cover a wide and diverse variety of material, from historical prose to lyrical verse, and from liturgical and visionary writing to textiles and images, both real and imagined, across the literary and devotional cultures of England, Italy, Germany and Russia. From anxieties about misspent time to moments of pure joy in the here and now, from concerns about worldly affairs to experiences of being freed from the trappings of time, the volume demonstrates how medieval cultures and societies engaged with and reflected on their own temporalities.Table of ContentsIntroduction - Almut Suerbaum and Annie Sutherland I MULTIPLE TEMPORALITIES 1. The Sense of an Ending: Time and Temporality in the Vita Ædwardi regis - Katharine Sykes 2. In Search of Lost Time: Temporal Uncertainty in the Letters of Adam Marsh - Philippa Byrne 3. Temporal Dislocation in Material for Spiritual Exchange - Benjamin Thompson II LYRICAL TIME 4. (Frate) Guittone's Faltering 'Now' - David Bowe 5. From Loss to Capture: Temporality in Cavalcanti, Dante, and Petrarch's Lyrical Epiphanies - Manuele Gragnolati 5. From Loss to Capture: Temporality in Cavalcanti, Dante, and Petrarch's Lyrical Epiphanies - Francesca Southerden 6. Time and Temporality in Mystical Lyric and Strophic Song - Almut Suerbaum III VISIONARY AND LITURGICAL TIME - 7. Out of Time: Temporality and Female Devotion in Thirteenth-Century England - Annie Sutherland 8. 'Ein zeit der gnaden': Time and Temporality in the Christine Ebner Corpus - Jonas Hermann 9. Present Events: The Interactions of Verbal Aspect and Non-Past Tense in Early Church Slavonic - C.M. MacRobert IV THE MATERIALITY OF TIME 10. Time in a Text(ile): Gertrude the Great's Easter Vision - Racha Kirakosian 11. Building a House for Repentance: The Monochrome Passion Cycle of San Nicolò del Boschetto - Jim Harris Bibliography

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Book SynopsisA fresh new approach to Victorian medievalism, showing it to be far from the preserve of the elite. This book offers a challenge to the current study of nineteenth-century British medievalism, re-examining its general perception as an elite and conservative tendency, the imposition of order from above evidenced in the work of Walter Scott, in the Eglinton Tournament, and in endless Victorian depictions of armour-clad knights. Whilst some previous scholars have warned that medievalism should not be reduced to the role of an ideologically conservative discourse which always and everywhere had the role of either obscuring, ignoring, or forgetting the ugly truths of an industrialised modernity by appealing to a green and ordered Merrie England, there has been remarkably little exploration of liberal or radical medievalisms, still less of working-class medievalisms. Essays in this book question a number of orthodoxies. Can it be imagined that in the world of Ivanhoe, the Eglinton Tournament, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Alfred Tennyson, the working class remained largely oblivious to, or at best uninterested in, medievalism? What, if any, was the working-class medievalist counter-blast to conservatism? How did feminism and socialismdeploy the medieval past? The contributions here range beyond the usual canonical cultural sources to investigate the ephemera: the occasional poetry, the forgotten novels, the newspapers, short-lived cultural journals, fugitive Chartist publications. A picture is created of a richly varied and subtle understanding of the medieval past on the part of socialists, radicals, feminists and working-class thinkers of all kinds, a set of dreams of the Middle Agesto counter what many saw as the disorder of the times.Table of ContentsIntroduction: Towards a Subaltern Medieval Unconscious - David Matthews and Michael Sanders Catholicism and Constitutionalism in William Cobbett's English and Irish Medievalism - Matthew Roberts Resisting Medievalism: The 'Mediaeval Mania' and the Working-Class Press - David Matthews How Radical was Rienzi? The Nineteenth-Century Representation of the Roman Revolutionary Republican in the British Cultural Imagination - Rosemary A. Mitchell Chartism and Medievalism: Retrospective Radicalism in the English Nineteenth Century - Stephen Knight Making Sense of Chartism's Multiple Medievalisms - Michael Sanders Rousing 'the Spirit of Wat Tyler': Chartist Newspaper Portrayals of the Rebel Leader - Stephen Basdeo The Cause of Liberty: Ford Madox Brown, Augustus Welby Pugin and Victorian Medievalism - Colin Trodd Serfs, Saints and Comrades: Working-Class Medievalism and the Narratives of Victorian Socialism - Ingrid Hanson Morbid Solidarity: Remains, Afterlives, and the Commune of Saints - Stuart McWilliams Finding the Present in the Past: Suffrage Medievalism in the Pages of Votes for Women - Carolyn P Collette

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Book SynopsisNew essays examining Bohemia as a key European context for understanding Chaucer's poetry. Chaucer never went to Bohemia but Bohemia came to him when, in 1382, King Richard II of England married Anne, daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles IV. Charles's splendid court in Prague was renowned across Europe for its patronage of literature, art and architecture, and Anne and her entourage brought with them some of its glamour and allure - their fashions, extravagance and behaviour provoking comment from English chroniclers. For Chaucer, a poet and diplomat affiliated to Richard's court, Anne was more muse than patron, her influence embedded in a range of his works, including the Parliament of Fowls, Troilus and Criseyde, the Legend of Good Women and Canterbury Tales. This volume shows Bohemia to be a key European context, alongside France and Italy, for understanding Chaucer's poetry, providing a wide perspective on the nature of cultural exchange between England and Bohemia in the later fourteenth century. The contributors consider such matters as court culture and politics, the writings of Richard Rolle, artistic style, Troy stories, historiographic writing and travel narrative; they highlight the debt Chaucer owed to Bohemian culture, and the affinities between English and Bohemian literary production, whether in the use of Petrarch's tale of Griselde, the iconography of the tapster figure, or satires on the Passion of Christ.Table of ContentsList of Illustrations List of Contributors Acknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction, Peter Brown and Jan Čermák Lines of Communication 1: Richard II, Queen Anne, Bohemia: Marriage, Culture and Politics Michael Bennett 2: Recommended Reading: Richard Rolle in Bohemia Michael Van Dussen 3: The Golden Book of the Knight Wenceslas: Travelling, Piety and Diplomacy in Late-Medieval Europe Marek Suchý Cultural Analogues 4: Making Sense of the Past: Czech and English Vernacular: Histories in the Fourteenth Century Helena Znojemská 5: Beyond Nations: Translating Troy in the Middle Ages Venetia Bridges 6: Mock Passions in England and Bohemia Lucie Doležalová 7: The Evil Tale of Evil Briselda: Griselda's Wicked Counterpart Klára Petříková 8: The Image of the Tapster in England and Bohemia Jan Dienstbier 9: Bohemian and English Painting in the Last Decades of the Fourteenth Century: Tracing the Bohemian Influence Lenka Panušková Rethinking Queen Anne 10: Contextualizing the Legend of Good Women: Some Possible Bohemian Perspectives Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards 11: Humility and Empire: Anne of Bohemia, Chaucer and the Virgin Mary David Wallace General Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisAn examination of four written accounts of medieval pilgrimages to Jerusalem. What do the bursar of Eton College, a canon of Mainz Cathedral, a young knight from near Cologne, and a Kentish nobleman's chaplain have in common? Two Germans, residents of the Holy Roman Empire, and two Englishmen, just as the western horizons of the known world were beginning to expand. These four men - William Wey, Bernhard von Breydenbach, Arnold von Harff, and Thomas Larke - are amongst the thousands of western Christians who undertook the arduous journey to the Holy Land in the decades immediately before the Reformation. More importantly, they are members of a much more select group: those who left written accounts of their travels, for the journey to Jerusalem in the late Middle Ages took place not only in the physical world, but also in the mind and on the page. Pilgrim authors contended in different ways with the collision between fifteenth-century reality and the static textual Jerusalem, as they encountered the genuinely multi-religious Middle East. This book examines the international literary phenomenon of the Jerusalem pilgrimage through the prism of these four writers. It explores the process of collective and individual identity construction, as pilgrims came into contact with members of other religious traditions in the course of the expression of their own; engages with the uneasy relationship between curiosity and pilgrimage; and investigates both the relevance of genre and the advent of print to the development of pilgrimage writing. Ultimately pilgrimage is revealed as a conceptual space with a near-liturgical status, unrestricted by geographical boundaries and accessible both literally and virtually.Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Acknowledgements Editorial Conventions Introduction Genre and Purpose; The Itineraries of William Wey Bernhard von Breydenbach; The Religious Other and Other Religions Curiosity and Pilgrimage; The Case of Arnold von Harff Writing the Holy Land in the Age of Print: Thomas Larke and Bernhard von Breydenbach Conclusion: Ways to be a Pilgrim Appendix: Selected German and English Jerusalem Pilgrim Writers (c.1450-c. 1520) Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisFirst recent full-length analysis of a major medieval poem. The late fourteenth-century English poem Winner and Waster narrates a debate between the forces of avarice (Winner) and generosity (Waster); it ranges widely over a number of major issues in the political life of England during Edward III's reign. This book sets out to re-date the poem from the 1350s to the 1360s, and in so doing to question whether its principal message really revolves (as so much earlier scholarship has insisted) around the state of public order and the costs of warfare in the 1350s. Instead, it proposes that the poem echoes debates about Edward III's ability to maintain concord between the members of his household, to manage the extravagance in clothing that prompted the sumptuary laws of 1363, and to run his peace-time finances of the 1360s in such a way as to guarantee the solvency of the crown. Drawing extensively on the records of parliament and on contemporary chronicles, this volume sets Winner and Waster within the wider context of other complaint literature of the fourteenth century, and characterizes it as one of the most politically - and socially - engaged works of the period.Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Note on Editions List of Abbreviations Introduction Winner and Waster: A Poem on the Times Chivalry and Internationalism: The Garter Feast of 1358 and English Diplomacy during the 1350s and 1360s Treason, Public Order and Dispute Settlement: the Statute of Treasons of 1352 and Royal Arbitration Landed Society, Conspicuous Consumption and the Political Economy: The Sumptuary Laws of 1363 The Private and the Public Spheres: The Royal Household and State Finance under Edward III Satire, Complaint and Authorship: Winner and Waster and the Alliterative Revival of the Fourteenth Century Winner and Waster: Timeliness and Timelessness Appendix 1: Timeline, 1337-1370 Appendix 2: A Modern English Version of Winner and Waster Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisThe adaptation of French texts into medieval Swedish reveals the progress of a Europe-wide literary culture. Translations of French romances into other vernaculars in the Middle Ages have sometimes been viewed as "less important" versions of prestigious sources, rather than in their place as part of a broader range of complex and wider European text traditions. This consideration of how French romance was translated, rewritten and interpreted in medieval Sweden focuses on the wider context. It examines four major texts which appear in both languages: Le Chevalier au lion and its Swedish translation Herr Ivan; Le Conte de Floire et Blancheflor and Flores och Blanzeflor; Valentin et Sansnom (the original French text has been lost, but the tale has survivedin the prose version Valentin et Orson) and the Swedish text Namnlös och Valentin; and Paris et Vienne and the fragmentary Swedish version Riddar Paris och jungfru Vienna. Each is analysed through the lens of different themes: female characters, children, animals and masculinity. The author argues that French romance made a major contribution to the Europeanisation of medieval culture, whilst also playing a key role in the formation of a national literature in Sweden.Trade ReviewIn this groundbreaking study of the reception of French literature in Sweden, Sofia Lodén convincingly shows how extensively Sweden and Europe's north were integrated into the larger medieval European intellectual and courtly currents radiating out of France from the beginning of the twelfth century. -- ArthurianaTable of ContentsIntroduction Europeanization and Medieval Sweden The Maiden, the Lady and the Lion: Le Chevalier au lion Children of Medieval Europe: Floire et Blancheflor Animals, Beastliness and Language: Valentin et Orson Masculinity and Venus: Paris et Vienne Conclusion: Found in Translation

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Book SynopsisComprehensive survey of the legend of Charlemagne in the medieval German-speaking world. The legend of the Frankish emperor Charlemagne is widespread through the literature of the European Middle Ages. This book offers a detailed and critical analysis of how this myth emerged and developed in medieval German and Dutch literatures, bringing to light the vast array of narratives either idealizing, if not glorifying, Charlemagne as a political and religious leader, or, at times, criticizing or even ridiculing him as a pompous and ineffectual ruler. The motif is traced from its earliest origins in chronicles, in the Kaiserchronik, through the Rolandslied and Der Stricker's Karl der Große, to his recasting as a saint in the Zürcher Buch vom Heiligen Karl.Trade ReviewThis useful and fluently written book fulfills its purpose very well: namely to acquaint English-speaking recipients with this part of the far-reaching medieval European literary tradition of Charlemagne, which is sometimes unfamiliar even to Germanists. -- Bernd Bastert * GERMANISTIK *Table of ContentsIntroduction: From the Early Middle Ages to the Late Sixteenth Century 1. The Kaiserchronik: The Emergence of Charlemagne in Chronicle Literature 2. Priest Konrad's Rolandslied and the Glorification of Charlemagne 3. The Stricker's Karl der Große: Adaptation and Innovation of the Myth of Charlemagne in the Thirteenth Century 4. The Myth of Charlemagne in Fourteenth-Century German Literature:The Karl Meinet Compilation 5. Elisabeth von Nassau-Saarbrücken's Königin Sibille: The Double-Edged Sword in the German and the Dutch Prose Version 6. Charlemagne in the Dutch and German Tradition of Malagis 7. Charlemagne as Saint: The Religious Transmutation of the Early Medieval Myth. The Zürcher Buch vom Heiligen Karl (Fifteenth Century) 8. Charlemagne in Middle Dutch and Middle Low German Literature Afterword Bibliography

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Book SynopsisAn interdisciplinary approach to sources for our knowledge of the crusades. The interrelation of so-called "literary" and "historical" sources of the crusades, and the fluidity of these categorisations, are the central concerns of the essays collected here. They demonstrate what the study of literary texts can do for our historical understanding of the crusading movement, challenging earlier historiographical assumptions about well-known poems and songs, and introducing hitherto understudied manuscript sources which elucidate a rich contemporary compositional culture regarding the matter of crusade. The volume discusses a wide array of European textual responses to the medieval crusading movement, from the Plantagenet and Catalan courts to the Italy of Charles of Anjou, Cyprus, and the Holy Land. Meanwhile, the topics considered include the connexions between poetry and history in the Latin First Crusade texts; the historical, codicological and literary background to Richard the Lionheart's famous song of captivity; crusade references in the troubadour Cerverí of Girona; literary culture surrounding Charles of Anjou's expeditions; the use of the Mélusine legend to strengthen the Lusignans' claim to Cyprus; and the influence of aristocratic selection criteria in manuscript traditions of Old French crusade songs. These diverse approaches are unified in their examination of crusading texts as cultural artefacts ripe for comparison across linguistic and thematic divides.Trade ReviewThis fine collection of essays is but one product of a truly international consortium of scholars * SEHEPUNKTE *Table of ContentsIntroduction - Ruth Harvey and Simon Thomas Parsons 'Claruit Ibi Multum Dux Lotharingiae': The Development of the Epic Tradition of Godfrey of Bouillon and the Bisected Muslim - Simon John Reflecting and Refracting Reality: The Use of Poetic Sources in Latin Accounts of the First Crusade - Carol Sweetenham Emotions and the 'Other': Emotional Characterizations of Muslim Protagonists in Narratives of the Crusades (1095-1192) - Stephen J. Spencer A Unique Song of the First Crusade?: New Observations on the Hatton 77 Manuscript of the Siège d'Antioche - Simon Thomas Parsons Crusade Songs and the Old French Literary Canon - Luca Barbieri Wielding the Cross: Crusade References in Cerverí de Girona and Thirteenth-Century Catalan Historiography - Miriam Cabre 'Voil ma chançun a la gent fere oïr': An Anglo-Norman Crusade Appeal (London, BL Harley 1717, fol. 251v) - Anna Radaelli Richard the Lionheart: The Background to Ja nus homs pris - Charmaine Lee Charles of Anjou: Crusaders and Poets - Jean Dunbabin Remembering the Crusaders in Cyprus: The Lusignans, the Hospitallers and the 1191 conquest of Cyprus in Jean d'Arras's Mélusine - Helen J. Nicholson Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisCutting-edge and fresh new outlooks on medieval literature, emphasising the vibrancy of the field. 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 the range of European cultures, capaciously defined. Essays in this volume engage with a wide range of subject matter, from as far back as Livy (d.c.AD 12/18) to Erwin Panofsky (d. 1968). They demonstrate that medieval textual cultures is a radically negotiable category and that medieval understandings of the past were equally diverse and unstable.They reflect on relationships between history, texts, and truth from a range of perspectives, from Foucault to "truthiness", a twenty-first-century media coinage. Materiality and the technical crafts with which humans engage withthe natural world are recurrent themes, opening up new insights on mysticism, knighthood, and manuscript production and reception. Analysis of manuscript illuminations offers new understandings of identity and diversity, while a survey of every thirteenth-century manuscript that contains English currently in Oxford libraries yields a challenging new history of script. Particular texts discussed include Chrétien de Troyes's Conte du Graal, Richard Rolle's Incendium amoris and Melos amoris, and the Middle English verse romances Lybeaus Desconus, The Erle of Tolous, Amis and Amiloun, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.Trade ReviewThe seven essays in this collection maintain the high standard of scholarship that typifes the series [...] All the essays in this collection are the fruit of meticulous textual study and intense intellectual engagement. [...] This book will be of equal interest to students of European history, art buffs, textual and literary critics, and manuscript historians. -- PARERGONTable of Contents'Chevaliers estre deüsiez': Genealogy and Historical Sense in Chrétien de Troyes's Conte du Graal - Geneviève Young English Vernacular Script in the Thirteenth Century (c.1175-c.1325) - Matthew Aiello The Manuscript as Agent: The Politics of London, British Library, Additional MS 15268 (Histoire ancienne jusqu'à César) - Johannes Junge Ruhland Repetition, Craft-Knowledge, and Richard Rolle's Creaturely Sublime - Adin Lears Truth-telling and Truthiness in the Middle English Popular Romances - Lucy Brookes Assaying the Deer Drive in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight - Casey Ireland The Past of the Past: Historical Distance and the Medieval Image - Jessica Berenbeim

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Book SynopsisModern theoretical approaches throw new light on the concepts of face and faciality in the Roman de la Rose and other French texts from the Middle Ages. In medieval French literature, faces feature heavily as markers of identity, mood, class, status, and even humanity. The information that they convey can be strategically concealed and revealed, but they are always understood to be legible. This book explores the face as a medieval literary motif and as a modern phenomenon, charting its limits and interrogating the idea of face as a universal signifier. It examines what happens when faces are not legible, when they are found on non-human surfaces, and when they migrate across the human body. It looks at faciality in a series of texts from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, moving from Arthurian tales, through the Roman de la Rose to the fabliaux, as well as examining fourteenth-century manuscripts in which faces appear as disembodied doodles. Reading these texts in conjunction with twentieth-century theories of face and faciality, and considering the ideas behind twenty-first-century face recognition technology, this book argues that faces in the popular imagination tell us less about identity than they do about how we understand and interact with the world around us.Trade ReviewThe breadth and depth of Alice Hazard's work is outstanding. -- MEDIUM AEVUMTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. Levinasian Faces in Arthurian Verse 2. Marginal Faces 3. The visagétité of the Roman de la rose 4. Faces and genitals in the fabliaux Conclusion Bibliography

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Book SynopsisFirst comprehensive investigation of the major significance of female sinners turned saints in medieval literature. During the Middle Ages, the lives of saints such as Mary Magdalen and Mary of Egypt - "holy harlots", women who repented of an early life of licentiousness to become blessed - were hugely popular, for both clerical and laypersons, men and women alike. These legends are rife with paradox: the saints are presented as epitomes of a type of femininity universally accepted as a model for all Christians to emulate in their quest for salvation, but at the same time they constitute marginal figures who could be petitioned in support of unconventional beliefs and lifestyles. The holy harlot's potential to contain the markers of both sainthood and whoredom within a single female body was however rejected in the sixteenth century, and so this fascinating model of sanctity has since been largely overlooked. This book, the first full-length study on the topic, aims to redress the situation, demonstrating that the seapparent outliers transformed mainstream concepts of piety and womanhood. It uses the Old English Martyrology and the Old English Life of Mary of Egypt to show that the early English conceived harlots becoming saints as a move from female to queer rather than as a gender inversion. In the later Middle Ages, "holy harlot" lives in the French of England and in Middle English (including the South English Legendary, the Digby Mary Magdalene, and in lives by John Mirk and Osbern Bokenham) are shown to demonstrate the centrality, from the twelfth-century rise of affective piety, of the harlot saints' femininity as a model for Everyman. They can also be seen as an influence on the writings of such women as Christina of Markyate, Margery Kempe, and Elizabeth Barton, and key to the self-representation of Bernard of Clairvaux and the Wycliffites.Trade Review[S]uperb. [...] Vuille's book is thoroughly researched, cogently argued, and beautifully written. I recommend it to anyone interested in religion and gender in the medieval period. -- MEDIUM AEVUMTable of ContentsIntroduction Chapter 1: "Seo wæs ærest synnecge": The Holy Harlot's Transformations in Old English Hagiography Chapter 2: The Post-Conquest Harlot: Affective Piety and the Romance Genre Chapter 3: Heterodoxy, Patronage, and the Harlot in 14th and 15th Century Hagiography Chapter 4: "She shal byn abyll to dystroye helle": Gender and Authority in the Digby Mary Magdalene/ Chapter 5: Admiranda et Imitanda?/ Emulation of the Holy Harlot Type by Late Medieval Female Mystics Conclusion: Holy or Harlot? The Early Modern Demise of the Saintly Prostitute Appendix: Vernacular Lives of Holy Harlots in Medieval Insular Hagiography Bibliography

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Book SynopsisFirst full-length study of what the manuscript contexts can reveal about early reactions to Chaucer, and in particular his treatment of women. Readers have disagreed for centuries about the way Chaucer represented female voices in his Hous of Fame, Parliament of Foules, Anelida and Arcite, Legend of Good Women, and Book of the Duchess; but little attention has hitherto been paid to the earliest manuscript contexts in which these poems appear -- a gap which this study aims to fill. It demonstrates that, even in unrelated manuscripts, Chaucer's earliest compilers repeatedly create for these poems a mixed-gender audience well versed in the lively French poetic conversation about the problem of a lack of interest on a woman's part: can she legitimately refuse the advances of her suitor on the grounds that men's fin'amor language cannot be trusted? By highlighting this French controversy and its echoes in the English poetry of Chaucer, Hoccleve, Lydgate, Roos, and others, these manuscript compilers construct a Chaucer who participates posthumously in an ongoing literary debate about female voice, female agency, female scepticism, and the false promises of male fin'amor suitors. This book also expands understanding of Chaucer's early reception by showing how the manuscript context of his shorter poems painted a French-centred, woman-friendly picture of his literary interests - a picture that some early printers would subsequently find difficult, and, in extreme cases, actively work to dismiss.Table of ContentsIntroduction Chaucer and the French Lyric Tradition Female Voices, French Frames: MS Gg.4.27 Troilus And Criseyde and the Letter of Cupid: MS Cosin V.ii.13 John Shirley and Chaucer's Anelida: Additional 16165 and Trinity R.3.20 English Female Networks and their Literary Contexts Failures of Conversation in Tanner 346 Games People Play: Gender and Dialogue in Fairfax 16 Afterword: The Legacy of Female Skepticism 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.Table of ContentsIntroduction - Julia Boffey and Christiania Whitehead Editings 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 Mary - 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 Sequence 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 SynopsisEssays on the performance of drama from the Middle Ages, ranging from the well-known cycles of York to matter from Iran. 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. Theatrical performance is central to the groups and communities discussed in this volume, and to their particular and local expressions of faith. The articles presented explore the drama of a variety of different communities from religious orders and houses, through local, medieval and post-medieval lay communities, to contemporary worshippers. Contributors examine complex relationships between theatrical performance and faith, understanding religious theatre as a mode of worship and a method of exploring belief, as well as a site for the study of synchronous and asynchronous connections and fractures within communities. Particular topics addressed include the fragments of play-scripts surviving from the monastery at Mont-St-Michel; the Barking Abbey Easter celebrations; and how the sixteenth-century community which owned the surviving copy of the Towneley plays might have understood them in relation to their own faith. The volume is completed with an exploration of traditional Iranian religious theatre from an ethnographic perspective, in a bid to uncover and understand its very particular effects on the contemporary communities who perform and attend it in the twenty-first century. ELISABETH DUTTON and OLIVA ROBINSON run the Medieval Convent Drama project, based at the University of Fribourg and funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, which provides the impetus for this special issue of Medieval English Theatre. Contributors: Aurélie Blanc, Eleanor Lucy Deacon, George Gandy, Camille Marshall, James StokesTable of ContentsIntroduction - Elisabeth Dutton and Olivia Robinson Fragments of Four Fourteenth-Century Miracle Plays from Mont Saint-Michel - George Gandy Performing Female Authority: Convent Plays and Lay Spectatorship in the Barking Abbey Elevatio and Visitatio Sepulchri Dramatic Ceremonies - Aurélie Blanc Women in Religious Guilds: Performance and Community in Medieval and Tudor England - James Stokes When in Doubt: Thomas Indie and the Mid-Sixteenth-Century Reception of the Towneley Collection - Camille Marshall Ta'ziyeh-khani in Iranian Communities: Muharram AH1439 (AD2017) - E. Lucy Deacon

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Book SynopsisAn examination of what dialogues and direct speech in Old Norse literature can convey and mean, beyond their immediate face-value. The vast and diverse corpus of Old Norse literature preserves the language spoken not only by the Vikings, kings, and heroes of medieval Scandinavia but also by outlaws, missionaries, and farmers. Scholars have long recognized that the wealth of verbal exchanges in Old Norse sagas presents the modern reader with the opportunity to speak face-to-face, as it were, with these great voices of the past. However, despite the importance of verbal exchanges in the sagas, there has been no book-length study of discourse in Old Norse literature since 1935. This book meets the need for such a study by offering a literary analysis based on the adjacent field of pragmatic linguistics, which recognizes that speakers often rely upon cultural, situational, and interpersonal context to communicate their meaning. The resulting, context-dependent meaning often deviates from the base semantic and syntactical components of an utterance: speakers hedge, imply, deflect to save face, or obscure meaning to damage an opponent's self-worth. Saga writers, this book argues, were masters of this type of indirectness in speech. It aims therefore to unlock the depth and subtlety of discourse in Old Norse literature and to leave readers with an understanding of how principles of pragmatics were employed throughout the sagas. A wide body of Old Norse materials is examined, including some of the best examples of Íslendingasögur (sagas of Icelanders), such as Brennu-Njáls saga, Laxdœla saga, and Gísla saga Súrssonar, while also giving due attention to Konungasögur (kings' sagas), fornaldarsögur (legendary sagas), and other literature from the medieval North.Trade ReviewIn this remarkable volume, Bryan has laid down a challenge for the Old Norsiverse: we who are less familiar with the concepts of historical pragmatics should welcome the challenge and embrace the toolkit he offers. Our field will be the stronger for it. -- Journal of the Australian Early Medieval Assoc.Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Note on the Text Introduction: Discourse in Old Norse Literature 1. When Questions Are Not Questions 2. The Quarrel of the Queens and Indirect Aggression 3. Sneglu-Halli and the Conflictive Principle 4. Felicity Conditions and Conversion Confrontations 5. Icelanders and Their Language Abroad 6. Proverbs and Poetry as Pragmatic Weapons 7. Speech Situations and the Pragmatics of Gender 8. Manuscript Genealogy and the Diachrony of Pragmatic Usage in Icelandic Sagas Conclusion: Close Context and the Proximity of Pragmatics Afterword Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisFirst modern text and English translation of an important Anglo-Saxon poem dealing with the liturgical year. WINNER of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists 2017 Publication Prize: Best Edition The late tenth-century Old English Metrical Calendar (traditionally known as Menologium) summarises, in the characteristicheroic diction and traditional metre of Old English poetry, the major course of the Anglo-Saxon liturgical year. It sets out, in a methodical structure based on the basic temporal framework of the solar/natural year, the locations of the major feasts widely observed in late Anglo-Saxon England. Such a work could have been a practical timepiece for reading the dates of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, for which it serves as a kind of prologue in the manuscript.The clearly domestic perspective of the poem, which fits in the manuscript context, is also noteworthy, while the poem also reveals various interesting characteristics in its grammar, vocabulary and prosody. This is the firstfull modern edition of the poem, and is accompanied by a facing translation. The introduction provides an extensive discussion of matter, content, style, and context, while the commentary offers further information. The volume also includes the texts and translations of a number of analogous works.Table of ContentsIntroduction The Old English Calendar [Menologium: Text and Translation Appendix 1: The Prose Menologium Appendix 2: Metrical Calendar of York Appendix 3: Félire Adamnáin Appendix 4: Enlaith betha Appendix 5: List of Anglo-Saxon Calendars Appendix 6: Immovable Feasts Marked in Anglo-Saxon Calendars Appendix 7: Vigils in Anglo-Saxon Calendars Appendix 8: Dates of the Solar Turning Points in Anglo-Saxon Calendars Appendix 9: Latin and Old English Month-names in the Old English Written Tradition Glossary Bibliography

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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.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

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Book SynopsisThe first full-length examination of the medieval Charlemagne tradition in the literature and culture of medieval England, from the Chanson de Roland to Caxton. The Matter of France, the legendary history of Charlemagne, had a central but now largely unrecognised place in the multilingual culture of medieval England. From the early claim in the Chanson de Roland that Charlemagne held England as his personal domain, to the later proliferation of Middle English romances of Charlemagne, the materials are woven into the insular political and cultural imagination. However, unlike the wide range of continental French romances, the insular tradition concentrates on stories of a few heroic characters: Roland, Fierabras, Otinel. Why did writers and audiences in England turn again and again to these narratives, rewriting and reinterpreting them for more than two hundred years? This book is the first full-length study of the tradition. It investigates the currency and impact of the Matter of France with equal attention to English and French-language texts, setting each individual manuscript or early printed text in its contemporary cultural and political context. The narratives are revealed to be extraordinarily adaptable, using the iconic opposition between Carolingian and Saracen heroes to reflect concerns with national politics, religious identity, the future of Christendom, chivalry and ethics, and monarchy and treason.Table of ContentsIntroduction: Charlemagne in England: Owning the Legend Acculturating Charlemagne: The Insular Literary Context Charlemagne 'Translated' [i]: The Anglo-Norman Tradition Charlemagne 'Appropriated' [ii]: The Middle English Tradition Re-Imagining the Hero: The Insular Roland and the Battle of Roncevaux Re-Presenting Otherness: The Insular Fierabras Tradition Re-Purposing the Narrative: The Insular Otinel Tradition Conclusion: The Insular Afterlife of the Matter of France Appendix: The Corpus: Texts and Manuscripts Bibliography

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Book SynopsisArthurian Literature has established its position as the home for a great diversity of new research into Arthurian matters. It delivers fascinating material across genres, periods, and theoretical issues. TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT Guest Editors: Sarah Bowden, Susanne Friede and Andreas Hammer This special issue focuses on space and place in Arthurian literature, from a wide range of European traditions. Topics addressed include the connections between quest space and individual spirituality in the Vulgate Queste and Malory's Morte Darthur; penitence in Hartmann's Iwein and Gregorius; parallels in sacred spaces in the Matter of Britain and medieval Ireland; political prophecy in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and The Awntyrs off Arthure A; syntagmatic and paradigmatic spaces in Chrétien's Perceval; spatial significance in Wigalois and Prosa Lancelot; the political meaning of the tomb of King Lot and the rebel kings in Malory's Morte Darthur; and sexual spaces in twelfth-century French romance.Trade ReviewIts tight thematic focus - sacred space and place in Arthurian romance - allows a deeper exploration of the different facets of these texts' sacred spaces ... Such a focus makes this book an essential contribution to the growing body of scholarship on Arthurian spaces and places. -- Mary Bateman * Archiv *Table of ContentsGeneral Editors' Preface List of Contributors Introduction: Sacred Space and Place in Arthurian Romance, Sarah Bowden and Susanne Friede 1. The Church and the Otherworld: Sacred Spaces in the Matière de Bretagne and Medieval Ireland John Carey 2. Sacred Spaces: the Syntagmatic and Paradigmatic construction of Narrated Space in Chrétien's Conte du Graal Susanne Friede 3. Perceiving the Way: Sacred Spaces and Imaginary Pilgrimage in the Vulgate Cycle Queste del Saint Graal and Thomas Malory's 'Tale of the Sankgreal' Martha Claire Baldon 4. Affirming Absence and Embracing Nothing: on the Paradoxical Place of Heterosexual Sex in Medieval French Verse Romance Charlie Samuelson 5. Spaces of Remorse: Penitential Allusions in Iwein Sarah Bowden 6. The Spatial Narratives of Salvation and Damnation in Wigalois and the Prose Lancelot Andreas Hammer 7. 'Fantoum and Fayryȝe': Visions of the End of Arthurian Britain Victoria Flood 8. The Tomb of the Kings: Imperial Space in Arthur's Camelot Cory James Rushton

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Book SynopsisA new analysis of the neglected genre of medieval Biblical poetry. Medieval England had a thriving culture of rewriting the Bible in art, drama, and literature in Latin, French and English. Middle English biblical poetry was central to this culture, and although these poems have suffered from critical neglect, sometimes dismissed as mere "paraphrase", they are rich, innovative and politically engaged. Read in the same gentry and noble households as secular romance, biblical poems borrow and adapt romance plots and motifs, present romance-inflected exotic settings, and share similar concerns: reputation, order, family and marriage. This book explores six poems from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries that retell episodes from the Old Testament: the ballad-like Iacob and Iosep, two lives of Adam and Eve; an alliterative version of the Susanna story, the Pistel of Susan; and the Gawain-poet's Patience and Cleanness. Each chapter identifies new sources and influences for the poems, including from biblical glosses and manuscript illustration. The book also investigates the poems' relationships with contemporary cultures of literature and religion, including with secular romance, and offers new readings of each poem and its cultural functions, showing how they bridge the chasm between medieval Christian England and the Jews and pagans of the pre-Christian Mediterranean world. It also considers reading contexts, arguing that the poems and their manuscripts offer hints about the social class and gender of their household audiences.Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations Note on Translations Introduction 1 Iacob and Iosep: a happy tale of a knightly family 2 Two lives of Adam and Eve: exemplarity after the Fall 3 A Pistel of Susan: beauty in a Babylonian garden 4 Patience: anti-romance 5 Cleanness: household virtues, familiar sins Conclusion Bibliography Index of Manuscripts General Index

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Book SynopsisIdentifies and investigates international medievalism through three distinct strands: "Internationally Nationalist", "Someone Else's Past?", and "Activist Medievalism". Medievalism - the reception of the Middle Ages - often invokes a set of tropes generally considered 'medieval', rather than consciously engaging with medieval cultures and societies. International medievalism offers an additional interpretative layer by juxtaposing two or more national cultures, at least one of which is medieval. 'National' can be aspirational: it might refer to the area within agreed borders, or to the people who live there, but it might also describe the people who understand, or imagine, themselves to constitute a nation. And once 'medieval' becomes simply a collection of ideas, it can be re-formed as desired, cast as more geographically than historically specific, or function as a gateway to an even more nebulous past. This collection explores medievalist media from the textual to the architectural. Subjects range from The Green Children of Woolpit to Refugee Tales, and from Viking metal to Joan of Arc. As the contributors to each section make clear, for centuries the medieval has provided material for countless competing causes and cannot be contained within historical, political, or national borders. The essays show how the medieval is repeatedly co-opted and recreated, formed as much as formative: inviting us to ask why, and in service of what.Table of ContentsList of Illustrations List of Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction, Mary Boyle I. Internationally Nationalist 1. Making up the Middle Ages: Roman Scotland and Medievalism in the Eighteenth Century, Kristina Hildebrand 2. Emma Letherbrow's Gudrun: Kudrun for 'Modern' Victorians, Mary Boyle 3. Nationalism and Colonialism: The Early German Reception of The Tale of Igor's Campaign, Florian Gassner 4. Inhabiting an Unpredictable Past - the Paradoxes of Russian Cultural Historicism, Michael Makin II. Someone Else's Past? 5. The Medievalism of Gregor Jordan's Ned Kelly, Sabina Rahman 6. 'The Northland of Old': The Use and 'Misuse' of (Medieval) Iceland, Hannah Armstrong 7. 'Out of My Country and Myself I Go': A Discourse of the Troubadour in British and Irish Literature, Kayleigh Ferguson 8. 'The old magic of the mind': the Influence of Wales and Medieval Welsh Literature in John Cowper Powys's, Maiden Castle, Felix Taylor III. Activist Medievalism 9. 'Green Growing Pains': the 'Green Children of Woolpit' and Child Refugees, Carolyne Larrington 10. Medievalisms of Welcome: Medieval Englishness and the Nation's Migrant Other in Refugee Tales, Matthias D. Berger 11. Nordic Giants: Using Left-Wing Post-Rock to Deepen Our Understandings of White Supremacist Interpretations of Vikings, Eirnin Jefford Franks 12. 'The Great Original Suffragist': Joan of Arc as a Symbol in the U.S. Women's Suffrage Movement, Suzanne LaVere Index

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Book SynopsisAn important text from the "twelfth-century Renaissance" of history writing re-evaluated, drawing out its complex representations of monarchs from Cnut to William Rufus. Geffrei Gaimar's Estoire des Engleis is its author's sole surviving work. His translation and adaptation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, expanded with a number of lengthy interpolations which appear to draw upon oral traditions and other, unknown written sources, is all that remains of an ambitious history which once reached back as far as Jason and the Golden Fleece. However, the extent of Gaimar's achievement - as poet, historian, and translator - has been obscured by a tendency among scholars to dismiss him as a writer of romance masquerading as history, his work riddled with guesswork, errors, and outright fabrications. This volume aims to challenge such views of Gaimar by providing the first holistic study of his Estoire's incisive commentary upon kingship: its virtues, vices and conflicting models, as applied to rulers such as Edgar "the Peaceable", Cnut, and the ill-fated William Rufus. One good king, for Gaimar, is much like another. A bad king, by contrast, is vividly characterised as ineffectual, tyrannical, or both. Gaimar, a product of that extraordinary period in medieval English culture often termed the "twelfth-century Renaissance'" blends history with literary tropes to yield a sophisticated account of the invasions, betrayals, and familial conflicts that shaped his England's history.Trade ReviewWheeler's study of Gaimar's work is not merely a reappraisal of the 'Estoire', but the first in-depth analysis of Gaimar's portrayal and role of kingship based on 12th-century concepts of kingship. [...] Select bibliography and index are helpful tools and, like Wheeler's study as a whole, invite fresh readings of and approaches to Gaimar's 'Estoire des Engleis'. * Das Mittelalter *Table of ContentsIntroduction Chapter 1: Models of kingship: Haveloc and his foes Chapter 2: The tyranny of desire: Edgar, Ælfthryth, and Edward Chapter 3: Divine will: Cnut, Godwine, and Hastings Chapter 4: The boar and the bear: Hereward and William Rufus Conclusion

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Book SynopsisEssays considering the representation and perception of hell in a variety of texts. Narratives of a descent to the underworld, of the sights to be seen and the punishments meted out there, have kept a hold on the popular imagination for millennia. The legacy from doctrinal warnings and the deep-set literary markers that identify a place of suffering and alienation continue to stimulate creative exchange and critical thinking. Such work takes risks: it braves the dark and questions the past. The contributions in this volume reflect on the exigency of hell in the stories that we tell. They consider the transfer and repurposing of motifs across genres and generational divides, and acknowledge the sustained immediacy of physical and psychological landscapes of hell. The essays span a wide chronological range and apply various contemporary critical approaches, including cognitive science, performance studies and narratology. This cross-period analysis is complemented by interviews with three creative practitioners: Jeya Ayadurai, director of "Hell's Museum" in Singapore, the actor Lisa Dwan, who is acclaimed for her dramatisation of Samuel Beckett's late works, and the writer David Almond. From ancient myth and early English sermons to mid-twentieth-century surrealism and current responses to terrorist activities and environmental damage, the literature of hell engages with issues of immediate relevance and asks its audiences to reflect on their cultural history, the meaning of social justice and the nature of embodied existence.Table of ContentsIntroduction, Margaret Kean PART I: Cum Timor et Tremore: Landscapes for Hell Folk Horror: Hell and the Land in Old English Homilies for Rogationtide, Helen Appleton Pandæmonium as Parallax: Metropolitan Underworlds and Anarchist Clubs in Nineteenth-Century London and its Literature, Charlotte Jones Hell's Museum, Singapore, Interview: Jeya Ayadurai PART II: Out into this World: Sensory Hells The Taste of Food in Hell: Cognition and the Buried Myth of Tantalus in Early Modern English Texts, Laura Seymour Hell's Kitchen: Underworlds in Leonora Carrington's Down Below and The Hearing Trumpet, Hannah Silverblank Samuel Beckett's Not I, Interview: Lisa Dwan PART III: Mind the Gap: Telling the Tale Terra tremens: Katabasis in Seamus Heaney's District and Circle (2006), Rachel Falconer Whirlpools, Black Holes and Vortical Hells in Literature, Jonathan R. Olson The Song of Orpheus, Interview: David Almond

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Book SynopsisAn examination of hagiographical traditions and their impact. Icelanders venerated numerous saints, both indigenous and from overseas, in the Middle Ages. However, although its literary elite was well acquainted with contemporary Continental currents in hagiographic compositions, theological discussions, and worship practices, much of the history of the learned European networks through which the Icelandic cult of the saints developed and partially survived the Lutheran Reformation remains obscure. The essays collected in this volume address this lacuna by exploring the legacies of the cult of some of the most prominent saints and holy men in medieval Iceland (the Virgin Mary along with SS Agnes of Rome, Benedict of Nursia, Catherine of Alexandria, Dominic of Caleruega, Michael the Archangel, Jón of Hólar, Þorlákr of Skálholt, Lárentíus of Hólar, and Guðmundr the Good), using evidence drawn from Old Norse-Icelandic and Latin hagiographic literature, homilies, prayers, diplomas, sacred art, place-names, and church dedications. By placing the medieval Icelandic cult of the saints within its wider European context, the contributions trace new historical routes of cultural transmission and define the creative processes of the accommodation and adaptation of foreign hagiographic sources and models in medieval and early modern Iceland. They provide a clear picture of an Icelandic hagiographic literature and culture that celebrates the splendour of the saints; they also show how an engaging literary genre, which became immensely popular on the island throughout the Middle Ages and beyond, was created.Trade ReviewThis collection, though, certainly counts as fine work: it is a wonderful testimony to the vibrancy of recent research on the cults of saints in Iceland and its potential for giving us new insights into literary culture both in the early twelfth century and into the Reformation and beyond. -- Siân Grønlie * Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies *Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Notes on Contributors Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations 1 Introduction: The Splendor of the Saints DARIO BULLITTA Rannsǫkun heilagra bóka: The Search for Holy Books 2 Medieval Icelandic Hagiography: The State of the Art KIRSTEN WOLF 3 An Old Norse Adaptation of an All Saints Sermon by Maurice de Sully STEPHEN PELLE 4 The Tuscan Provenance of Framfǫr Maríu DARIO BULLITTA Heilagir byskupar: Holy Bishops 5 Latin Oratory at the Edge of the World: The Fragments of Gizurr Hallsson's *Gesta Scalotensis ecclesie presulum and the *Vita sancti Thorlaci GOTTSKÁLK JENSSON 6 Three Scenes from Jóns saga helga: A Typological Mode of Thought in Early Icelandic Hagiography HAKI ANTONSSON 7 Lárentíus saga byskups: Between History and Historiography FULVIO FERRARI 8 Remembering Saints and Bishops in Medieval Iceland ÁSDÍS EGILSDÓTTIR Heilagir karlar ok englar: Holy Men and Angels 9 Þat vóro lavg munka: A Reading of Benedikts saga in Light of the Regula sancti Benedicti MAURO CAMIZ 10 The Lore of St Dominic in Medieval Iceland and Norway SIMONETTA BATTISTA 11 The Veneration of St Michael in Medieval Iceland MARGARET CORMACK Heilagar meyjar: Holy Maidens 12 Katrínarhólar: St Catherine's Hills, Milk, and Mount Sinai HELGI ÞORLÁKSSON 13 St Agnes of Rome in Late Medieval and Early Modern Icelandic Verse NATALIE M. VAN DEUSEN Bibliography Index of Manuscripts General Index

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Book SynopsisA consideration of the metaphor of water in religious literature, especially in relation to women. Women are frequently depicted as unpredictable, difficult to categorise and prone to transformation in medieval religious writings. Water is equally elusive: rivers, wells and seas slip and slide out of the readers' grasp as they alter in metaphorical meaning. This book considers a large span of watery images in a small cluster of late-medieval devotional writings by and for women, in order to explore the association between women and water in the medieval religious imagination. Using writings by Aelred of Rievaulx, Julian of Norwich and a number of anonymous translators - as well as medical, scientific, and encyclopaedic works - it argues for water as an all-purpose metaphor with a particularly resonance for them. Its chapters are organised around a number of particular usages of water as a means of mediation and exchange between the human and the divine, from crossing a stream to dissolving in the peaceful sea of God's love. Through analysis of such recurring tropes, this book reveals that whilst water can be used to hint at transformation of the soul, and greater access to the divine, male authors also use the very same metaphorical material to regulate such access for their female readers.Trade ReviewHetta Elizabeth Howes' Transformative Waters in Late-Medieval Literature will change your opinion on and imagination of a great many medieval themes, and fundamentally shift your idea of what water does and can do in medieval literature. * Women's History Review *This elegant new book offers engaging, and often original, insights. -- Journal of Religious HistoryTransformative Waters is exceptionally readable, offering a fresh perspective on an understudied genre of medieval text. -- Times Literary SupplementTable of ContentsList of Abbreviations Introduction: In Search of Transformative Waters Chapter One: A Very 'Able' Element Chapter Two: Cleaning the Soul Chapter Three: Speech and Scripture Chapter Four: Transformative Immersion Chapter Five: Blood and Water Conclusion: Reading Water Bibliography Index Acknowledgements

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Book SynopsisAn exciting new approach to one of the most important texts of medieval Europe. The story of the Trojan War has been told and retold across the ages, from Homer's Iliad and Virgil's Aeneid to recent film and television adaptations. The peoples of medieval Europe were especially enthralled with the tale of the siege of the great city by the Greeks, and by the fourteenth century virtually every royal house in Europe traced its ancestry to some long-ago Trojan warrior. The medieval West, however, had no access to Homer, and though Virgil was certainly read, the most influential version of the Troy story for centuries was that recounted in the Roman de Troie, by Benoît de Sainte Maure. This massive poem in Old French claimed to be a translation of two eyewitness accounts of the War, both actually late antique forgeries, but it is in reality a largely original tapestry of chivalric exploits, elaborate descriptions and marvellous creatures such as centaurs and Amazons. The love story of Troilus and Briseida was invented in its pages, later inspiring Boccaccio, Chaucer and Shakespeare. The huge popularity of the Roman de Troie allowed medieval dynasties to create new kinds of political authority by extending their pedigrees back into days of legend, and was an essential element in the inauguration of a new genre, romance. This book uses approaches from theories of translation and temporality to develop its analysis of the Roman de Troie and its context. It reads the text against Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain to argue that Benoît is a participant in the Anglo-Norman invention of a new kind of history. It develops readings grounded in both gender studies and queer theory to demonstrate the ways in which the Roman de Troie participates in the invention of romance time, even as it uses its queer characters to cast doubt upon the optimistic genealogical fantasies of romance. Finally, it argues that the great series of ekphrastic passages so characteristic of the Roman de Troie operate as lieux de mémoire, epitomizing the potential of poetry to stop time, at least in the moment. The author also provides an overview of the complex manuscript tradition of the Roman de Troie in support of the contention that the text deserves to be central to any study of medieval literature.Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction: Trojan Time Machines Chapter 1: A Cupboard in Athens: Translating Troy Chapter 2: A Very Old Book, or How to Predict the Past Chapter 3: Ladies' Time Chapter 4: Queer Time for Heroes Chapter 5: Hector in the Alabaster Chamber: Ekphrasis and its Discontents Conclusion: Trojan Futurities Appendix: The Manuscript Tradition of the Roman de Troie Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisTwo crucial genres of medieval literature are studied in this outstanding collection. The essays in this volume honour the distinguished career of Professor Elizabeth Archibald. They explore two areas that her scholarship has done so much to illuminate: medieval romance, and Arthurian literature. Several chapters examine individual romances, including Emaré, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Roman de Silence. Others focus on wider concerns in romances and related works in Middle English, Latin, French, German and Icelandic, from a variety of perspectives. Later chapters consider Arthurian material, with a particular emphasis on hitherto unexamined aspects of Malory's Morte Darthur. It thus, fittingly, reflects the range of linguistic and literary expertise that Professor Archibald has brought to these fields.Table of ContentsElizabeth Archibald: An Appreciation A. S. G. Edwards Introduction: Learning, Romance and Arthurianism Helen Cooper 1. Silence in Debate: The Intellectual Nature of the Roman de Silence Venetia Bridges 2. From Sorceresses to Scholars: Universities and the Disenchantment of Romance Megan G. Leitch 3. The Island of Sicily and the Matter of Britain Aisling Byrne 4. Romance Repetitions and the Sea: Brendan, Constance, Apollonius Helen Cooper 5. Emaré: The Story and its Telling A. C. Spearing 6. Dark Nights of Romance: Thinking and Feeling in the Moment Corinne Saunders 7. 'This was a sodeyn love': Ladies Fall in Love in Medieval Romance Carolyne Larrington 8. Noise, Sound and Silence in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Jordi Sánchez-Marti 9. 'What maner a knight ... is that semyth in so many dyvers coloures?' Armorial Colours, Quasi-Heraldry, and the Disguised Identity Motif in Sir Gowther, Ipomadon A, and Malory's Tale of Sir Gareth of Orkeney Michael J. Huxtable 10. The Body Language of Malory's Le Morte Darthur Barry Windeatt 11. 'Spirituall thynges': Human-Divine Encounters in Malory Andrew Lynch 12. Malory's Morte Darthur and the Bible E. D. Kennedy 13. Arthurian Literature in the Percy Folio Manuscript Neil Cartlidge 14. Dutch, French and English in Caxton's Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye Ad Putter Bibliography of Elizabeth Archibald's Writings Index Tabula Gratulatoria

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Book SynopsisA redefinition of the animal's relationship to sound and language in French texts from medieval England. The barks, hoots and howls of animals and birds pierce through the experience of medieval texts. In captivating episodes of communication between species, a mandrake shrieks when uprooted from the ground, a saint preaches to the animals, and a cuckoo causes turmoil at the parliament of birds with his familiar call. This book considers a range of such episodes in Old French verse texts, including bestiaries, treatises on language, the Life of Saint Francis of Assisi and the Fables by Marie de France, aiming to reconceptualize and reinterpret animal soundscapes. It argues that they draw on sound to produce competing perspectives, forms of life, and linguistic subjectivities, suggesting that humans owe more to animal sounds than we are disposed to believe. Texts inviting readers to listen and learn animal noises, to seek spiritual consolation in the jargon of birds, or to identify with the speaking wolf, create the conditions for an assertion of human exceptionalism even as they simultaneously invite readers to question such forms of control. By asking what it means for an animal to cry, make noise, or speak in French, this book provides an important resource for theorizing sound and animality in multilingual medieval contexts, and for understanding the animal's role in the interpretation of the natural world.Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Introduction Sound Milieus: Memory and Sound in Philippe de Thaon's Bestiary Sound Zones: Linguistic Subjectivity in Bibbesworth's Tretiz de langage Soundscape and Form-of-Life: The Life of Saint Francis of Assisi Soundscape Perspectives: Mouths, Muzzles, and Beaks in Marie de France's Fables Coda: 'Sumer is icumen in', Response and Recall Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisNew approaches to a range of Old English texts. Throughout her career, Professor Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe has focused on the often-overlooked details of early medieval textual life, moving from the smallest punctum to a complete reframing of the humanities' biggest questions. In her hands, the traditional tools of medieval studies -- philology, paleography, and close reading - become a fulcrum to reveal the unspoken worldviews animating early medieval textual production. The essays collected here both honour and reflect her influence as a scholar and teacher. They cover Latin works, such as the writings of Prudentius and Bede, along with vernacular prose texts: the Pastoral Care, the OE Boethius, the law codes, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and Ælfric's Lives of Saints. The Old English poetic corpus is also considered, with a focus on less-studied works, including Genesis and Fortunes of Men. This diverse array of texts provides a foundation for the volume's analysis of agency, identity, and subjectivity in early medieval England; united in their methodology, the articles in this collection all question received wisdom and challenge critical consensus on key issues of humanistic inquiry, among them affect and embodied cognition, sovereignty and power, and community formation.Trade ReviewThese are fine essays which celebrate a fine scholar. The conclusion to the volume summarises the work nicely: 'In the chapters of this volume can be seen the diversity and brilliance of Katherine's legacy; it is a truly fitting tribute to her as a scholar and a mentor.' So it is. -- Paul Cavill * TOEBI Newsletter *Table of ContentsIntroduction Jacqueline Fay, Rebecca Stephenson, and Renée R. Trilling Part I: Affect and Embodied Cognition in Medieval Didactic Texts 1. Prudentius's Apotheosis and Hamartigenia in Early Medieval England Leslie Lockett 2. Wonders Never Cease in the Old English Boethius Nicole Guenther Discenza 3. The Desiring Mind: Embodying Affect in the Old English Pastoral Care Jennifer A. Lorden 4. Adam and Eve's Hands and Eyes: Covering the Face in the Junius Manuscript Benjamin A. Saltzman 5. Hawk Taming and Humanity in The Fortunes of Men Stacy S. Klein Part II: Sovereignty, Power, and English Textual Identities 6. A Taste for the Law: The Preface to Alfred's Law Code and Hannah Arendt's Reading of Kant Emily V. Thornbury 7. The Bodies Politic: Conflict, Consent, and English Identity During Godwin's Exile Jacob Hobson 8. Abraham Wheelock, Agent of Anglicanism, and the Deployment of Old English Texts in the 1643 Edition of Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People Timothy Graham Part III: Acts of Public Record in Making and Sustaining Communities 9. Writings Among the Ruins: The Peterborough Chronicle and the House Archive Scott T. Smith 10. St. Rumwold and the Social Network of Belief Miranda Wilcox 11. Holy Women on Display in Ælfric's Lives of Saints Jonathan Davis-Secord Overview of Career Visible Mód: The Scholarship of Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe Maura Nolan The Writings of Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe Bibliography Index Tabula Gratulatoria

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Book SynopsisEssays on the use, and misuse, of the Middle Ages for political aims. Like its two immediate predecessors, this volume tackles the most pressing and contentious issue in medievalism studies: how the Middle Ages have been subsequently deployed for political ends. The six essays in the first section directly address that concern with regard to Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges's contemporaneous responses to the 1871 Commune; the hypocrisy of the Robinhood App's invocation of their namesake; misunderstood parallels and differences between the Covid-19 pandemic and medieval plagues; Peter Gill's reworking of a major medieval Mystery play in his 2001 The York Realist; celebrations of medieval monks by the American alt-right; and medieval references in twenty-first-century novels by the American neo-Nazi Harold A. Covington. The approaches and conclusions of those essays are then tested in the second section's seven articles as they examine widely discredited alt-right claims that strong kings ruled medieval Finland; Norse medievalism in WWI British and German propaganda; post-war Black appropriation of white jousting tournaments in the Antebellum South; early American references to the Merovingian Dynasty; Rudyard Kipling's deployment of the Middle Ages to defend his beliefs; the reframing of St. Anthony by Agustina Bessa-Luís's 1973 biography of him; and post-medieval Portuguese reworkings of the Goat-Foot-Lady and other medieval legends.Table of ContentsI: Politics and Medievalism (Studies) Public Medievalism: Fustel de Coulanges and the Case for "Diplomatic Negotiations" - Elizabeth Emery Rob from the Rich: The Neomedievalism of the Robinhood Stock App - Valerie B. Johnson Pandemic Politics: Deploying the Plague - M. J. Toswell Peter Gill and the Queering of the York Realist - Kevin J. Harty To be a Monkish Man: Medievalism, Monasticism, Education, and Gender in the United States' Culture Wars - Jacob Doss Political Fictions: The "Aryan" Medievalisms of Harold A. Covington - Helen Young II: Other Responses to Medievalism The Ancient Finnish Kings and their Swedish Archenemy: Nationalism, Conspiracy Theories, and Alt-Right Memes in Finnish Online Medievalism - Reima Välimäki and Heta Aali The Politics of Norse Medievalism in the British Press During the First World War - Grace Khuri A Tournament of Black Knights - Alexandria, Virginia, 1865 - Emancipationists Mobilize the Medieval - Whitney Leeson "Eternal Legends of the Crimes of Man": The Merovingian Dynasty in Early American Media (1720-1820) - Gregory I. Halfond Writing, Men, Empire: Kipling's Medievalist Imagination - Richard Utz Agustina Bessa-Luís's Reinvention of St. António: A Loving Saint without an Altar - Ana Maria Machado Celtic Imaginary: From Medieval Dama-Pé-de-Cabra to Nineteenth-century Patriotic Versions - Angélica Varandas

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Book SynopsisA new exploration of the complexities and resolutions at play in the writings of Marguerite de Navarre, offering insights into how her work reflected the turbulence, uncertainties, and assurances of her historical period. Marguerite de Navarre was a Renaissance princess, diplomat, and mystical poet. She is arguably best known for The Heptameron, an answer to Boccaccio's Decameron, a brilliant and open-ended collection of short stories told by a group of men and women stranded in a monastery. The stories explore love, desire, male and female honour, individual salvation, and the iniquity of Franciscan monks, while the discussions between the storytellers enact and embody the tensions, ideologies, and prejudices underlying the stories. Marguerite herself was deeply involved in the debates and conflicts of her time. Her work reflects the turbulence, uncertainties, and assurances of her historical period, as the Renaissance re-imagined the past and the Reformation re-made the church, and represents her original and sometimes provocative position on these questions. This book presents The Heptameron and its investigations into gender relations, the nature of love, and the nature of religious faith in the context of the intellectual, religious, and political questions of the sixteenth century, setting it alongside Marguerite's other writings: her poetry, plays, and diplomatic letters. In chapters on communities, religion, politics, gender relationships, desire, and literary technique, it explores the complexities and resolutions of Marguerite's writing and her world. It aims to offer a guide to the critical tradition on Marguerite's work along with new readings of her texts, revealing both the historical specificity of her writing and its continuing relevance.Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Note on Names and Editions Editions of Reference Introduction: A Brief Literary and Historical Chronology Chapter 1 Communities Chapter 2 Religion Chapter 3 Politics Chapter 4 Women and Men Chapter 5 Desire Chapter 6 Form and Technique Conclusion: Print and Public Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisNew and fresh assessments of Malory's Morte Darthur. The essays here are devoted to that seminal Arthurian work, Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur. Developments of papers first given at the 'Malory at 550: Old and New' conference, they emphasise here the second part of its remit. Accordingly, several contributors focus new attention on Malory's style, using his stock phrases, metaphors, characterization, or manipulation of sources to argue for a deeper appreciation of his merits as an author. If, as others illustrate, Malory is a much better artist than his twentieth-century reputation allowed, then there is a renewed need to re-assess the vexed question of the possible originality of his 'Tale of Sir Gareth of Orkeney'. Similarly fresh approaches underlie those essays re-examining Malory's attitude to time and the sacred in 'The Sankgreal', the manner in which the ghosts of Lot and his sons highlight potential failures in the Round Table Oath, or the pleasures and pitfalls of Arthurian hospitality. The remaining contributions argue for new approaches to Malory's narrative gaps, Launcelot's status as a victim of sexual violence, and the importance of rejecting Victorian moral attitudes towards Gwenyvere and Isode, moralizing that still informs much recent scholarship addressing Malory's female characters. Contributors: Joyce Coleman, Elizabeth Edwards, Kristina Hildebrand, Cathy Hume, David F. Johnson, Megan Leitch, Andrew Lynch, Molly A. Martin, Cory James Rushton, † Fiona Tolhurst, Michael W. TwomeyTable of ContentsIntroduction: The Tournament at Mapplemalleoré: Malory at 550 Cory James Rushton 1. Malory and the Stock Phrase Joyce Coleman 2. The Artistry of Malory's Mercantile Metaphors: Good, Generosity, and the Source of 'The Tale of Sir Gareth' Megan G. Leitch 3. 'A grete bourder and a passynge good night': Sir Dinadan: 'Gareth with a Twist' David F. Johnson 4. Moonlight in the Nocturnal Typology of Malory's Morte Darthur Michael W. Twomey 5. 'That shall nat ye know for me as at nighty': Cognitive Narratology and Filling Malory's Gaps Cathy Hume 6. 'On a tyme': Action and Temporality in Malory's 'Sankgreal' Andrew Lynch 7. Hospitality in Malory Elizabeth Edwards 8. The Haunting of the Orkneys and Malory's Arthurian Project Molly A. Martin 9. 'I love nat to be constreyned to love': Launcelot and Coerced Sex Kristina Hildebrand 10. Eradicating Victorian Backreading: Re-reading Malory's Gwenyvere through Gaynour and Isode Fiona Tolhurst

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Book SynopsisAn exciting new collection of essays exploring the startling variety of transformations of Old Norse texts, and their legacy in later literary cultures. The "Viking Age" of medieval Scandinavia, with its heathen religion and heroic literature, continues to fascinate readers, writers, students, scholars, poets, artists, and creators of all kinds around the world. This cultural legacy is preserved in Old Norse literature, much of it composed and produced in Iceland, an island with a unique position in relation to the ebb and flow of religions, institutions, and empires. The chapters in this book examine many topics in Old Norse literature: the mysterious personas of the god Odin, the strange origins of poetry and scholarship, the cryptic lore of the elusive dwarfs, the fame of the dragon-slayer Sigurd and the defiant "Sworn Brothers", the early settlement of Iceland, trade in the medieval north, and the history of literary production. Several contributors upend traditional interpretations of their topics, while others offer new insights into the rich modern artistic reception of Norse myth. These studies reveal the striking resilience and adaptability of Old Norse narrative traditions, which retain their timeless appeal through a startling variety of contexts and changes in form.Table of ContentsList of Illustrations List of Contributors Foreword: Old Norse and the Porous Boundaries of Medievalism, Tom Shippey Acknowledgements Note on the Text Introduction, Christopher Crocker and Dustin Geeraert 1. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in Medieval Iceland: Saga Realism and the Sworn Brothers, Ármann Jakobsson 2. The Malleability of the Past: Íslendingabókas Narrative History, Martina Ceolin 3. Women's Work and Material Culture in Medieval Iceland: Gender, Narrative, and Cloth Production, Meghan Korten 4. Vafþrúðnismál, from Parchment to Print: Stability and Change in the Transmission of Eddic Poetry, Andrew McGillivray 5. The Odinic Motif: The Wanderer in the Mist, Ryan E. Johnson 6. What has Darwin to do with Óðinn? Shapeshifting, God, and Nature in the 'Great Story of the North', Dustin Geeraert 7. Madness, Mythology, and Mitteleuropa: Günter Grass's Transformation of Old Norse Myth in The Tin Drum, Heather O'Donoghue 8. Once More, with Fiction: Transforming Myth in Gerður Kristný's Blóðhófnir and The Eddic Poem Skírnismál, Christopher Crocker Afterword: Ethnographic Medievalisms, M.J. Toswell Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisA fresh and sympathetic investigation of the depiction of wolves in early medieval literature, recuperating their reputation. The best-known wolves of Old English literature are the Beasts of Battle, alongside ravens and eagles as ravenous heralds of doom who haunt the battlefield in the hope of fresh meat plucked from still-warm bodies. Yet to reduce these animals to mere corpse-scavengers is to deny that they are frequently imbued with a variety of far more nuanced meanings elsewhere in the corpus. Two such meanings are inherited from ancient and medieval European lupine motifs: the superstition that the wolf could steal a person's speech, and the perceived contiguous natures of wolves and human outlaws. Tracing the history of these associations and the evidence to suggest that they were known to writers working in early medieval England, this book provides new, animal-centric readings of Wulf and Eadwacer, Abbo of Fleury and Ælfric's Passiones Eadmundi, and Beowulf, placing these texts within a lupine literary network that transcends time and place. By exploring the intricate, contradictory, and even sympathetic depictions of the wolves and wolf-like entities found within these texts, this book banishes all notions of the medieval wolf as the one-dimensional, man-eating creature that it is so often understood to be.Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Note on the Text Abbreviations Introduction: The Wolf in this Story 1 A Lexicological Survey of Lupine Outlaws 2 The Superstition of the Speech-Stealing Wolf 3 A Wolfish Way of Reading Wulf and Eadwacer 4 Abbo, Ælfric, and the Wolf in Edmund's Story 5 The Speech-stealing weargas and wulfas of Beowulf Conclusion: The Stories Wolves Tell Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisA new look at how reading was practised and represented in England from the seventh century to the beginnings of the print era, finding many kinships between reading cultures across the medieval longue durée. Even as it transforms human cultures, routines, attention spans, and the wiring of our brains, the media revolution of the last few decades also urges a reconsideration of the long history of reading. The essays in this volume take a new look at how reading was practised and represented in England from the seventh century to the beginnings of the print era, using texts from Aldhelm to Malory and Wynkyn de Worde, arguing that whether unpicking intricate Latin, contemplating image-texts, or participating in semiotically-rich public rituals, reading cultivated and energized the subject's values, perceptions, and attitudes to the world. Part I, "Practices of Reading", asks how writers, scribes and artists engaged readerly attention through textual layout, poetic form, hermeneutic difficulty, or images, while Part II, "Politics of Reading", explores how different textual communities manipulated the anxieties and opportunities for education, moral improvement or entertainment associated with reading; particular topics addressed include Bible translation and exegesis, page layout, literary form and readerly practice, fiction, hermeneutics, and performance. Although it understands reading as culturally and technologically localized, the book finds many kinships between reading cultures across the medieval longue durée and the literatures and literacies that proliferate today. Contributors: Amy Appleford, Michelle De Groot, Daniel Donoghue, Andrew James Johnston, Andrew Kraebel, Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe, Catherine Sanok, Samantha Katz Seal, James Simpson, Emily V. Thornbury, Kathleen Tonry, Kathryn Mogk Wagner, Nicholas Watson, Erica Weaver, Anna Wilson.Table of ContentsIntroduction - Daniel Donoghue, James Simpson, Nicholas Watson, Anna Wilson PART I. PRACTICES OF READING 1. Literally, What Did Medieval Readers See? - Daniel Donoghue 2. Reading for the Ornament: Repetition and Structure in the Old English Exodus - Emily Thornbury 3. A Canterbury School of Literary Theory: Aldhelm's De virginitate, the Liber monstrorum, and (Un)Reliable Fictions - Erica Weaver 4. About Face: Addressing the Vernicle in Late Medieval England - Catherine Sanok 5. Ascetic Reading - Amy Appleford 6. Prayer at Plough: Medieval Reading Practices and the Work of the Paternoster - Kathryn Mogk Wagner PART II. POLITICS OF READING 7. Who Reads Now? The Anxieties of Millennial Reading: The 2019 Morton W. Bloomfield Lecture - Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe 8. The Jewish Reader: A Medieval Antitype - Samantha Katz Seal 9. Biblical Compilation, Regional Reading and Tailored Texts: The Making of Selwyn College MS 108 L. 1 - Andrew Kraebel 10. Reading the Fair Maid of Astolat: Editorial Practice, Performative Emotionality and Communal Forms of Reading - Andrew James Johnston 11. Marx Goes Fishing: The Temporalities of Idleness - Kathleen Tonry 12. Shining Cities: Communal Reading and the New Jerusalem from Maidstone to McCain - Michelle De Groot Bibliography A Note on the Bloomfield Conferences General Index

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Book SynopsisThis volume, the first collection of essays devoted to Hoccleve since 1996, both confirms his importance in shaping the English poetic tradition after Chaucer's death and demonstrates the depth of ongoing critical interest in Hoccleve's work in its own right. The Middle English poet Thomas Hoccleve, known particularly for his entertainingly biographical verse describing life as a Privy Seal clerk in early fifteenth-century Westminster, is now recognised as a key figure in the literature of later medieval England. This volume, the first collection of essays devoted to Hoccleve since 1996, both confirms his importance in shaping the English poetic tradition after Chaucer's death and demonstrates the depth of ongoing critical interest in Hoccleve's work in its own right. Chapters explore the idiosyncratic forms of his two principle works, The Regiment of Princes and Series, as well as Hoccleve's distinctive imagery of moving feet, of swelling and bursting bodies, and of the actions of personified Death. Other essays consider the presence of the figure of the woman reader, the part played by the codex in posthumous literary sanctification, the links between Hoccleve's formulary of model letters and documents and his own verse, and the mutually informing relations of Hoccleve's minor poetry and major works. They are preceded by a substantial introduction, considering contemporary responses to Hoccleve in the light of current trends in literary criticism and surveying the reception of his works between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries.Table of ContentsList of Illustrations List of Contributors Acknowledgments Note on Quotations List of Abbreviations Introduction: Hoccleve Then and Now, Jenni Nuttall and David Watt Part I: Form in Context 1 Historicising Hoccleve's Metre, Nicholas Myklebust 2 Speech Acts and Conversation in the Series, A. Arwen Taylor 3 Hoccleve and the Logic of Incompleteness, R. D. Perry 4 A 'troubly dreme drempt al in wakynge': Hoccleve's Nearly-Dream Poem, Laurie Atkinson Part II: Reading Life 5 Hoccleve's Series and the Unanticipated Woman Reader, Michelle Ripplinger 6 Hoccleve, Swelling and Bursting, Spencer Strub 7 'Ransakid' by Death: Body, Soul and Image in Hoccleve's 'Learn to Die', Stephanie Trigg Part III: Writing Life 8 Hoccleve's Formulary and the Matter of Everyday Life, Taylor Cowdery 9 Hoccleve's Feet: The Kinaesthetic Imaginary in Hoccleve's Writings, Helen M. Hickey 10 Curatorial Hoccleve: Spiritual and Codicological Illumination in the Regiment of Princes, Ruen-chuan Ma 11 Reading Through: Major/Minor Hoccleve, Sebastian J. Langdell Index

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Book SynopsisExplores the myriad ways in which alchemy was conceptualised by adepts and sceptics alike, from those with recourse to a fully functioning laboratory to those who did not know their pelican from their athanor! The language of alchemy (the art of transmuting metals and manufacturing pharmaceutical medicine) is defined by obscure imagery, authorial play and dense knottiness, tempting curious readers to unpick its impenetrable promises. From the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, alchemical literature was read, interpreted and reimagined both by those with recourse to a fully functioning laboratory and those who did not know their pelican from their athanor. Recent studies by historians of science have succeeded in decoding the difficult language of these texts, revealing the replicable chemical procedures behind their metaphors. However, as a literary investigation of alchemy, this book explores more fluid understandings of the art in the period. Through an analysis of medieval and early modern texts and manuscript cultures, the volume explores the myriad ways in which alchemy was conceptualised in this period, by adept and sceptic alike. From Geoffrey Chaucer's mockery of the impotence of alchemical 'pryvetee' in The Canterbury Tales, and John Gower's macrocosmic hope for societal amelioration in the Confessio Amantis, to Elias Ashmole's angelic alchemy in the Theatrum chemicum britannicum, it explores the natural philosophy that underpinned such diverse representations of this 'slidynge science', proffering a theory of 'alchemical hermeneutics' as a conspiratorial way of reading that sees alchemy in all.Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Acknowledgements Editorial Practice List of Abbreviations Introduction Chapter 1. Ignotum Per Ignocius: Literatures of Alchemical Impotence Sinners, Tricksters and Fools: Conceptions of Alchemists in the Fourteenth Century Playing with Obscurity: Chaucer's Manipulation of the Tabula chemica and the Liber de secretis naturae Impotent Alchemical 'Pryvetee' Chapter 2. Alchemical Theories of Social Reform Roger Bacon's Holistic Alchemy John Gower's Moral Alchemy Thomas Norton's Alchemical King Chapter 3. British Library, MS Harley 2407 Recipe-Poems Gnomic Poems Theoretical Poems Conceit-Poems Chapter 4. Alchemical Hermeneutics Augustine and Medieval Hermeneutics Alchemical Afterlives He that Hath Ears to Hear Conclusion Bibliography

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Book SynopsisAnnual volume on medieval textual cultures, engaging with intellectual and cultural pluralism in the Middle Ages, showcasing the best new work in this field. 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 the range of European cultures, capaciously defined. Essays in this volume engage with widely varied themes: law and literature; manuscript production, patronage, and aesthetics; real and imagined geographies; gender and its connections to narrative theory and to psychoanalysis. Investigations range from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries, from England to the eastern Mediterranean. New arguments are put forward about the dating, context, and occasion of Geoffrey Chaucer's Boece, while the narrative dynamics of Chaucer's "Franklin's Tale" and "Tale of Melibee" are examined from new perspectives. The topography of the Holy Lands appears both as a set of emotional sites, depicted in the Prick of Conscience in its account of the end of the world, and as co-ordinates in the cultural imaginary of medieval the wine-trade. Grendel's mother emerges as the invisible and unavowable centre of male heroic culture in Beowulf, and the fourteenth-century St Erkenwald is brought into contact with the community-building project of the medieval death investigation. Finally, the late medieval Speculum Christiani is revealed to be a work with deep aesthetic investments when read through the framework of how its medieval scribes encountered and shaped that work.Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Editors' Note List of Abbreviations 1. A Paradox, (Un)Identified: Grendel's Mother and the Lacanian Real Ann Hubert 2. What Christ Might Say: Adapting the Last Judgment in the Prick of Conscience and Humbert's De Dono Timoris Ellen Ketels Rentz 3. 'At Jherusalem hyt ys goyd wyne': The English Taste for the Sweet Blood of the Holy Land Eleanor Myerson 4. The Bright Body: St. Erkenwald's Death Investigation Elise Wang 5. The Occasion of Chaucer's Boece Alastair J. Minnis and Tim William Machan 6. 'We axen leyser and espace': Narrative Grace in Chaucer's Franklin's Tale and Melibee Rebecca Davis 7. The Shapes of the Speculum Christiani: Scribal Technique and Literary Aesthetics in Fifteenth-Century England Bernardo S. Hinojosa

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