Description
Book SynopsisAn invigorating annual for those who are interested in medieval textual cultures and open to ways in which diverse post-modern methodologies may be applied to them. Alcuin Blamires, Review of English Studies New Medieval Literatures is an annual of work on medieval textual cultures, aiming to engage with intellectual and cultural pluralism in the Middle Ages and now. Its scope is inclusive of work across the theoretical, archival, philological, and historicist methodologies associated with medieval literary studies, and embraces both the British Isles and Europe. Essays in this volume engage with the relations between humans and nonhumans; the power of inanimate objects to animate humans and texts; literary deployments of medical, aesthetic, and economic discourses; the language of friendship; and the surprising value of early readers' casual annotations. Texts discussed include Beowulf, works by Rolle, Chaucer, Langland, Gower, and Lydgate; lyrics of the Occitan troubadour Marcabru and the French poet Richard de Fournival; and the Anglo-Saxon versions of Boethius's De Consolatione Philosophiae and Augustine's Soliloquia. Wendy Scase is Geoffrey Shepherd Professor of Medieval English Literature at the University of Birmingham; David Lawton is Professor of English at Washington University, StLouis; Laura Ashe is Associate Professor of English at Worcester College, Oxford.
Trade ReviewEliza Zingesser's essay `Pidgin Poetics: Bird Talk in Medieval France and Occitania' won the Society for French Studies Malcolm Bowie Prize 2017 * . *
This is a fine collection of essays, with tantalizing points of comparison across them. For those interested in teasing out ideas around materiality, and how we engage with the medieval world from a twenty-first-century perspective, it is of particular value. * PARERGON *
Table of ContentsThe Lives of Nytenu: Imagining the Animal in the Old English Boethius and Soliloquies - Michael Raby Disruptive Things in Beowulf - Aaron Hostetter Pidgin Poetics: Bird Talk in Medieval France and Occitania - Eliza Zingesser Performing Friendship in Richard Rolle's Incendium Amoris - Robert Jacob McDonie Damaged Goods: Merchandise, Stories, and Gender in Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale - Diane Cady Gower's Bedside Manner - Joseph Stadolnik Vitreous Visions: Stained Glass and Affective Engagement in John Lydgate's The Temple of Glass - Boyda Johnstone The Idle Readers of Piers Plowman in Print - Spencer Strub
