Description
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. -- PARERGON
Table 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
