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