Search results for ""medieval institute publications""

Lybeaus Desconus (the Fair Unknown) is the mid-fourteenth-century Middle English version of the classic narrative of the handsome and mysterious young outsider who comes to the court of King Arthur to prove himself worthy of joining Arthur's knights. The young knight is tested in a variety of ways, and in the course of this testing he learns both chivalric codes of conduct and the truth of his parentage. Six extant manuscripts of the poem attest to its popularity, placing it in company with Guy of Warwick, Bevis of Hampton, and Sir Isumbras among the most popular of Middle English Romances. The current edition offers readers a chance to compare two manuscript versions of the poem, one preserved in Lambeth MS 306 and the other in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Naples.

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"Books Most Needful to Know" is the newest edition in the Richard Rawlinson Center's OEN Subsidia series. It includes essays covering topics such as Old English, Old Norse, Anglo-Latin literature, and Early Medieval Ireland.

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Ars musice, composed in Paris during the late thirteenth century, reflects Johannes de Grocheio's awareness of the complexity of the task of describing music. As the editors note in their introduction, "Grocheio is aware of the enormous range of types of music performed in different ways in different places. How can he impose order on this enormous subject matter? He decided to resolve this question by structuring his discussion around the practice of music that he observed in the city of Paris, organized into three main 'branches': music of the people (musica vulgalis), composite or regular, 'which they call measured music' (musica mensurata), and ecclesiastical music (musica ecclesiastica), which he claims derives from the other two (AM 6.2). The originality of Grocheio's treatise has attracted considerable scholarly interest. It has long been recognized as a unique source of information about musical life in medieval Paris. Through his treatise, Grocheio enables a modern reader to become aware of the complex auditory environment of that city in the late thirteenth century as well as of its intellectual vitality at a particularly vibrant moment in its history."

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As Hanks and Jesmok note in their introduction, "pursuing opponents and pursuing love move the Morte's narrative, but the work's richness comes from its romance and tragic elements: the human quest for maturity and fulfillment and those uncontrollable forces that undermine the quest and destroy the dream. Malory's use of myth and magic to explore these themes has received extensive scholarly attention, but his views on and thematic use of Christianity have long needed a closer look."

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Just as Brainard's interests and scholarship crossed several disciplines, the essays collected here acknowledge her range of influence and her inclusive spirit. Performative dance and dance history, social history, and musicological issues are all explored, touching on topics from the later Renaissance back through the Carolingian Empire. The interconnected themes are presented in three sections: first creating the repertory, by looking at the contexts of musical creation; then interpreting it, through the performance, meaning, and social identity of dances; and finally discussing potential reevaluations, based on the location of musical performances, aspects of transcription difficulties and compositional techniques, dance-historical scrutiny, and a comparison of a shared genre in music and dance.

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Gower's imaginative French poetry is now available in a new edition with facing page translation, annotations, and introduction. Gower's Traitié employs the French poetic form of balade, typically used for courtly verses, to avow instead the virtues of loving marriage, characteristic of Gower's signature moralizing. His Cinkante balades confront the tradition of the French Livre de cent balades, by describing the feelings of a young man towards his lady, but eventually offering a praise of love insofar as it is subject to reason and morality. Together the two works offer an excellent introduction to the Anglo-Norman works of Gower and are perfect for classroom use.

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Like the Bible upon which it is based, the metrical paraphrase is unlikely to be a text read cover-to-cover by the faint-hearted. The Paraphrase is, in several ways, a remarkable artifact of the Chaucerian period, one that can reveal a great deal about vernacular biblical literature in Middle English, about readership and lay understandings of the Bible, about the relationship between Christians and Jews in late medieval England, about the environment in which the Lollards and other reformers worked, about perceived roles of women in history and in society, and even about the composition of medieval drama. The Paraphrase-poet's proclamation that he intends to write stories "for sympyll men" (line 19) to understand the Scriptures and be engaged by them—"That men may lyghtly leyre / to tell and undertake yt" (lines 23–24)—thus combines the profit of sacred literature with the pleasure of the secular. This is Horace's utile et dulce ("both useful and pleasing") principle at its clearest, a singular example of the didacticism that characterizes so much of medieval literature, an aesthetic of pedagogic efficacy that is inseparably linked to the essential component of true pleasure in the text.

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This edition is based upon a new transcription of The Castle of Perseverance, now published with a gloss, notes, glossary, and an introduction, to enable classroom study of this classic morality play. The Castle of Perseverance, like the other surviving morality plays, deals allegorically with the life of man, his struggle against temptation and sin, and his hope of final redemption. The play begins before Mankind's birth and concludes with his salvation after death, presented as a close call, and features both the traditional enemies of Mankind, the World, the Flesh and the Devil, as well as his two advisors, the Good Angel and the Bad Angel. Students of Middle English at all levels will find this edition useful in their studies of medieval morality plays.

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Whereas some literary motifs such as the tyrant, the beggar, and the crone have equivalents in the real world, the Loathly Lady is a creature of the imagination. Yet she is not merely a whimsical fantasy. This volume concentrates on the medieval English Loathly Lady tales, which develop the motif as a vehicle for social ideology. One of the primary agendas of this collection is to promote the non-canonical Loathly Ladies as worthwhile subjects for scholarly consideration. The examinations here of the medieval English Loathly Lady tales engage with a myriad of concerns, including anxieties about virginity and sex, power and assimilation, beauty and beastliness. These broad examinations of this enigmatic literary motif are an excellent contribution to the field and will be of great interest to scholars.

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The twelve essays in this volume proceed from a modern fantasy-epic back in time to oral epics that have been transmitted through the technology of manuscripts, and central in the collection are two articles that address Chaucer's Middle English courtly epic, Troilus and Criseyde. Each, in its own way, presents a global perspective on its subject, whether by comparing texts, by considering textual transmission through translation, or by contrasting medieval issues with developing global movements. . . . These articles are presented as evidence of the international cooperation that has been fostered by the work of Paul Szarmach in the international community of medievalists and of the success of his vision in opening up the borders of a discipline that too long has been Eurocentric and not global in its perspective. - from the Introduction

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What destructive powers did the tongue and its speech have for medievals? It could damn humans through blasphemy. It could occlude penitential knowledge of the self, especially of the misdirected will, by generating excuses for what the medieval clergy regarded as sin. It could disrupt monastic disciplines of meditation or distract parishioners during sermons. It could turn good repute to ill, destroying a woman's chances for marriage, a man's masculine self, a merchant's credit, or a defendant's status in a court of law. However, speech could maintain or restore credit, status, and masculinity, and it could also preserve honor in knights or women, in their particular roles as faithful feudal wives. Many of the essays in The Hands of the Tongue: Essays on Deviant Speech bridge disciplines, with social historians adducing evidence from lyrics, narrative poetry, and plays, or literary historians working from moral theology and biblical exegesis. Certainly the whole set of essays works to remind medievalists that any aspects of medieval culture worth studying must be explored collectively. Together the contributors present a clear picture of what we know about deviant speech in medieval culture, offering a critical perspective on the state of the scholarship.

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The Gloss on Romans is a collection of sources from many periods and places, which accounts for its inconsistencies. And this is what gives the Gloss much of its charm ... The twelfth century was an age of gathering sources and commentaries, in theology (Lombard's Sentences), canon law (Gratian's Decretum), and biblical studies (the Glossa ordinaria). Education began to flourish into what would become universities, where the master's role was to elucidate traditional, authoritative texts. And chief among these was the Bible, not standing alone but with the accompanying Gloss." - from the introduction

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It would not be an exaggeration to observe that in the last two decades Gower studies have developed in response to a widening appreciation of his poetry. On John Gower: Essays at the Millennium represents the third volume of essays originating from sessions of the John Gower Society at the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo, Michigan. The contributions here and in the previous volumes provide insight into the shifts and trends in Gower studies over time. This collection offers a vibrant and fresh view of the field of Gower studies today, making it and its companion volumes an essential set for Gower scholars.

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Gower's achievement in writing substantially in all three primary languages of his time-Anglo-French, English, and Latin-was a source of pride to others and, undoubtedly, to him too: into the final years of his life he continued to produce poetry in all three languages. Certainly there is reason to know these poems for the light they shed on the intense partisanship and events of great moment surrounding the usurpation 1399-1400. It was during these parlous times that Gower composed most of the poems included here. All are important documents historically; but they are also poems admirable equally for their skill and craft. In Praise of Peace is in the same position as the shorter Latin works edited and translated in this volume: ignored, neglected, reduced, or relegated to the dusty realm of footnotes. But there is far more at work in this complex poem, as Gower's verse deftly weaves in and out of the historical, political, social, and religious contexts and controversies of its day. In tone, In Praise of Peace is, if not triumphant, determinedly optimistic. In this light, we might view the poem as a coda to Gower's long career, restating and reinvigorating his famously moral principles about just rule of self and society.

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This volume is conceived as a complement to another Middle English Texts series text, Sherry Reames' Middle English Legends of Women Saints. This selection is intended to be broadly representative of saints' lives in Middle English and of the classic types of hagiographic legend as these were presented to the lay public and less-literate clergy of late medieval England.

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In this translation of glosses on the Song of Songs, Mary Dove offers a readily accessible and inexpensive resource for students and scholars. Anselm of Laon, possibly assisted by his brother Ralph, is credited with compiling the Glossa Ordinaria on the Song of Songs, drawing from earlier commentaries by Origen, Gregory the Great, Bede, Alcuin, Hrabanus Maurus, Haimo of Auxerre, and Robert of Tombelaine as well as contributing his own readings of the text. As Dove notes in her introduction, the text is quite complicated, with each manuscript page divided into three columns - the biblical text in large letters in the center column, with space left for interlinear glosses, and glosses in smaller letters in both the right- and left-hand columns. (This format is not reproduced in this translation.) The number of surviving manuscripts (over seventy) shows that plenty of readers enjoyed the challenges the text offered, and for modern readers, the Glossa Ordinaria is the first place to go to find medieval interpretation of biblical texts.

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The poem, which survives only in the Auchinleck Manuscript, deals with the later years of Guy's life, beginning with his return to Warwick after having established himself on the Continent as a pre-eminent model of knighthood. After his marriage, however, he is stricken by remorse for the very actions that have brought him fame, and he sets out anonymously on a series of pilgrimages of atonement.

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This volume makes available two somewhat neglected yet significant and instructive Middle English alliterative texts that are usually read in conjunction with William Langland's Piers Plowman. The texts, both anonymous, are Richard the Redeless, which concerns the government style of Richard II (1367-1400; reigned 1377-99), and Mum and the Sothsegger, which addresses social issues in the reign of Henry IV (1367-1413; reigned 1399-1413). They should be assigned reading not only for those interested in the later reception of Piers Plowman but also for those seeking to understand literary and historical forces in late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century England. Richard the Redeless (focusing on events in and around 1399) offers an often regretful, sometimes sharp critique of Richard's kingship under the guise of advice; Mum and the Sothsegger provides a satirical look at bureaucratic institutions during Henry's regime. Both works reveal that alliterative poetry in the Piers Plowman tradition continued to be the chief vehicle for political and social criticism at the turn of the fourteenth century.

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Although nearly everyone has heard the name of Robin Hood, few have actually read any medieval tales about the legendary outlaw. Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren set out to correct this discrepancy in their comprehensive collection of all pre-seventeenth-century Robin Hood tales. The editors include such other "outlaw" figures as Hereward the Wake, Eustache the Monk, and Fouke le Fitz Waryn to further contextualize the tradition of English outlaw tales. In this text the figure of Robin Hood can be viewed in historical perspective, from the early accounts in the chronicles through the ballads, plays, and romances that grew around his fame and impressed him on our fictional and historical imaginations. This edition is particularly useful for classrooms, with its extensive introductions, notes, and glosses, enabling students of any level to approach the texts in their original Middle English.

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Studies in the Harley Manuscript is the first comprehensive examination of a manuscript that is of supreme value to literary scholars of medieval English literature. In an Introduction and fifteen essays a team of scholars considers many aspects of the 140 folios of this trilingual miscellany that preserves 121 items (or 122 depending on how one counts) from which we get a strange and privileged glimpse into the rich literary heritage that existed in England prior to the flourishing of vernacular poetry in the Richardian era. As the Contents indicates, the history and composition of the manuscript are considered, as are the Anglo-Norman, English, and Latin compositions that it preserves. This is a companion volume to the three volume complete edition of Harley 2253.

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The Worlde and the Chylde, issued by the press of Wynkyn de Worde in 1521, is one of the very earliest plays published in England. It also has very considerable interest for its adaptation of the Ages of Man iconography, which is extensively treated in the introduction, notes, and illustrations.

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One impression that stands out from this collection is the extent to which improvisation was an important factor in all of the arts. As each of the authors assembles a case by ferreting out bits and pieces of information having to do with a single art, the weight of the assembled material lends additional strength to each case. By considering the overall picture that results, as well as that made by each of the individual studies, the reader is able to see much more clearly the role played by improvisation from the late Middle Ages through to the time of Shakespeare and beyond. A careful reading of the essays brings with it the awareness that to ignore improvisation is to distort the art in a major way. In light of the present volume, the very concept of faithful historical re-creation takes on a much broader and more complex character.

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Pearl resists identification by author, date, occasion, or place of composition; still it is almost unanimously hailed as one of the masterpieces of our literature, so skilled is its author, so eloquent its language. It is a story, according to Sarah Stanbury, "of crossing-over, the stepping out from the ordinary life into a parallel universe where things operate by different natural laws: down the rabbit hole, through the wardrobe or looking glass, across the ocean to be shipwrecked on Prospero's island, or more recently, across a bridge to the island of Willow Springs in Gloria Naylor's haunting novel, Mama Day, where the crossing-over moves into a place of memory and hope, the nostalgic space of home as well as Beulah or Eden, the earthly paradise."

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Fifteen years in the making, Ann Eljenholm Nichols's The Early Art of Norfolk: A Subject List of Extant and Lost Art Including Items Relevant to Early Drama is the most comprehensive listing of early art from Norfolk ever compiled. It is based on careful examination of the painted glass, wall paintings, woodcarvings, and other art in the 600 or so churches of this county and also on thorough searching of archival records and antiquarian accounts. The book (double columns, 357 pages, plus plates) will serve as a standard reference source for students of the ecclesiastical arts and also will provide an essential dimension for drama scholars. Appendices treating angels, Norwich Cathedral bosses, apostles and prophets, liturgical estates, painted panels, christocentric sequences, and Te Deum as well, and there are glossaries (including terms used in describing costume) and a contribution by Barbara Green on the antiquaries whose notes provided essential information about lost examples of Norfolk art.

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Gesture and movement on stage in early drama have previously received very little attention in scholarship. The present collection of essays is the first book to present sensible, penetrating, and wide-ranging discussions of the gestural effects that were integral to the early stage. In addition to consideration of the influence of classical rhetoric and reference to medieval texts and documents, the essays carefully bring to bear evidence from the art of the period and hence will be of great importance for those interested in the visual arts as well as the theater; eschewing both the naive methodologies promoted in past criticism and ephemeral theoretical concerns, the book is truly ground-breaking. These essays will need to be perused by every serious theater historian or student of art concerned with the late Middle Ages.

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This volume contains collected papers on medieval England's "names and naming patterns - mostly forenames or Christian names, but with some attention to family names." According to Rosenthal, there are "three lines of assault upon the culture and practice by way of analysis of names and naming" - "micro-social or family dynamic, village life, and limited name stock that confronts us when we tally the range of names that served the bulk of the population."—from the Introduction

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The Assembly of Gods, which was published near the end of the fifteenth century, is an allegorical dream vision poem. It is notable for its strange mixture of both classical and Christian sources, in which the classical pantheon debates over the moral state of an individual, in an attempt to bring Reson and Sensualyte into balance in the individual. This text is suitable for all levels of students with its introduction explaining the cultural and linguistic context of the text, as well as a gloss and notes. This volume is invaluable to those teaching courses on late medieval allegory and dream poems.

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Apocalyptic speculation, in one form or another, is as persistent at the turn of this millennium as it was at the last. The commentaries of Haimo of Auxerre and Thietland of Einsiedeln offer glimpses of two links in [the] unbroken chain of the apocalyptic tradition.

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In this volume, John Metham's classic romance Amoryus and Cleopes is made available to a wider audience of students and teachers of Middle English with its contextualizing introduction, extensive notes, and helpful gloss. This fifteenth century romance, written by John Metham, creatively reworks Ovid's tale of Pyramus and Thisbe's tragic love from his Metamorphoses. Metham draws on a wide variety of popular romances and particularly Chaucer's Ovidian works to create an inventive romance of his own with a decidedly moral aim. This volume will be of interest to students of Middle English romance and all those interested in the literary legacy of Chaucer.

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With its contextualizing introduction, notes, and gloss, this edition makes the Prose Merlin available to any student of Arthurian legend, no matter their level of proficiency in Middle English. Written in the latter half of the fifteenth century, the Prose Merlin is the first work of Arthurian literature written in English prose. The highly original poem, though based upon the French Vulgate cycle tradition of Arthurian legends, is full of episodes, motifs, and characters found nowhere else in the entire Arthurian corpus. Beginning with the story surrounding Merlin’s birth, and charting the course of his fantastical life until his ambiguous death, Prose Merlin is an enchanting text for any class studying Arthuriana.

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The second of two volumes dedicated to the memory of Paul Remy and having as theme the scientific domain to which he had dedicated his research for nearly forty years: the Occitan literature and language.

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De Ore Domini: Preacher and Word in the Middle Ages is a volume of thirteen essays, constituting a series of chapters in the history of preaching. The essays present a diversity of historical periods, audiences, and methodologies. Ranging in time from the 700s to 1511, they cover a space that stretches from Johannes Herolt’s Germany to Ramon Llull's Mallorca, from Bede's England to the Italy of Bernadino of Siena and Egidio da Viterbo. As the title suggests, the mouth of the Lord spoke with many voices, and the contributors to this volume provide important examinations of individual preachers, genres, and sources of sermons. Commentary and analyses are made of materials from the symbolic and allegorical to the practical and dogmatic, and even the educational. Further, the essays discuss how sermons were used at different periods and how they addressed different audiences. The studies illustrate new methods and concerns in the field of sermon studies, and, collectively, they point to a central problem in the historiography of sermons and preaching. The collection offers insights into modern approaches to studying medieval sermons and will be of interest to scholars of medieval religion, preaching, and culture.

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Cotton Claudius B.iv, an illustrated Old English Hexateuch that is among the treasures of the British Library, contains one of the first extended projects of translation of the Bible in a European vernacular. Its over four hundred images make it one of the most extensively illustrated books to survive from the early Middle Ages and preserve evidence of the creativity of the Anglo-Saxon artist and his knowledge of other important early medieval picture cycles. In addition, the manuscript contains the earliest copy of Aelfric's Preface to Genesis, a work that discusses issues of translation and interpretation.

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The commentary of Rabbi Ezra ben Solomon of Gerona (d. ca. 1245) on the Song of Songs is one of the most important texts of the first clearly identified circle of Kabbalists, those operating in the Catalonian town of Gerona at the middle of the thirteenth century.

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Beginning in 1987, the yearbook was the preeminent venue for scholarship on "Piers Plowman"; on related poems in the tradition of didactic alliterative verse and on the historical, religious, and intellectual contexts in which such poems were produced in late medieval England. Each volume contains essays, reviews and an annotated bibliography.

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The third Morton W. Bloomfield Lecture, delivered at Harvard University in 1993.

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This edition contains two poems valuable to the study of satire of social abuses in the fourteenth century: Wynnere and Wastoure and The Parlement of the Thre Ages. Both combine two genres of medieval poetry: dream visions and poetic debates. As the editor observes, the poem's perspectives are truly dizzying: on the one hand, economics, politics, ethics and social relations are seen as an interrelated set of universal, timeless principles; on the other, they appear as actual, contingent conditions that have resulted from specific acts in history. The editions include notes, glosses, an introduction, and a glossary, making them accessible to beginning and advanced students in Middle English alike.

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Beginning in 1987, the yearbook was the preeminent venue for scholarship on "Piers Plowman"; on related poems in the tradition of didactic alliterative verse and on the historical, religious, and intellectual contexts in which such poems were produced in late medieval England. Each volume contains essays, reviews and an annotated bibliography.

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Early Christianity understood the destruction of the Second Temple (70 C.E.) as the immediate outcome of the Jewish rejection of Jesus, a view later reinforced by the perception of permanent Jewish degradation evident in the continued exile and inferior status of Jews in the societies that hosted them. Aware of this view, Jews of Western Christendom interpreted their suffering in more triumphal ways. Hebrew narratives of the First Crusade (1096) depict the Christian understanding of Crusader attacks on Jewish communities as part of the ongoing degradation of Jews and evidence that they ought to convert to Christianity. Two important Hebrew sources, the Mainz Anonymous and the Solomon bar Simson Chronicle, counter this view with the perspective of a glorification of Jewish martyrdom found in the same events. By the mid-thirteenth century, the argument that Jewish suffering was a result of God's rejection of the Jews was paramount to Christian efforts to win over Jews in forced debates and forced sermons - instruments employed by such converts as Friar Paul and Alfonso of Valladolid. Jewish authors, such as Nahmanides (in his famous debate with Friar Paul) and Rabbi Mordechai ben Joseph of Avignon, asserted that Christian claims of divine favor were erroneous, and that God's promise of redemption for Jews was still valid. These methods to resist Christian assertions of superiority and affirm the grandeur of Jewish experience were essential for the continuity of Jewish life in the Middle Ages.

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The first of two volumes dedicated to the memory of Paul Remy and having as theme the scientific domain to which he had dedicated his research for nearly forty years: the Occitan literature and language.

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This book will serve as an invaluable research tool for students and scholars with an interest in art relating to early drama, as well as those whose interests lie more in local art history, specifically that of Chester. Though it may not contain the bumper-crop of surviving subject-art as a city such as York possesses, Chester nevertheless holds much of value and interest, as the list in this book aptly demonstrates. Richly illustrated and carefully arranged, this book is a tremendous catalog of surviving subject-art and will reward any scholar who pulls it from the bookshelf.

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Despite a good deal of research and writing concerning the development and intellectual transformation in the period of the early university, the subject remains in many respects enigmatic. This collection of essays in honor of Otto Gründler tackles many of the questions that run to the heart of the early university. The volume will be of interest to scholars of the period as well as anyone familiar with issues of today's academic profession, as the questions that confronted the early university are not so unfamiliar today: What exactly is the "life of the mind"? What should one learn in a university? What is learning itself "good for"? What is a discipline, and is it possible for disciplines to reinforce each other? Can some university disciplines be identified as givens, as forming an unquestionably self-evident basis for university study? And even that most basic question: What is a university after all? This collection of essays from experts in a range of fields confronts these questions in a broad, satisfying way that expands and clarifies the questions that are as relevant today as they were in the thirteenth century.

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Despite a good deal of research and writing concerning the development and intellectual transformation in the period of the early university, the subject remains in many respects enigmatic. This collection of essays in honor of Otto Gründler tackles many of the questions that run to the heart of the early university. The volume will be of interest to scholars of the period as well as anyone familiar with issues of today's academic profession, as the questions that confronted the early university are not so unfamiliar today: What exactly is the "life of the mind"? What should one learn in a university? What is learning itself "good for"? What is a discipline, and is it possible for disciplines to reinforce each other? Can some university disciplines be identified as givens, as forming an unquestionably self-evident basis for university study? And even that most basic question: What is a university after all? This collection of essays from experts in a range of fields confronts these questions in a broad, satisfying way that expands and clarifies the questions that are as relevant today as they were in the thirteenth century.

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This book brings together and translates from the medieval Latin a series of commentaries on the biblical book of Ruth, with the intention of introducing readers to medieval exegesis or biblical interpretation. . . . Ruth is the shortest book of the Old Testament, being only four chapters long. It is partly for this reason that it lends itself so well to a short book introducing medieval exegesis; but it is also of interest in itself. Ruth poses a number of exegetical problems, including the basic one of why such an odd book, in which God never appears as an actor, and with a central character who was not an Israelite but a Moabite outsider, and a woman at that, should find a place in the canon of Scripture.

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This fresh classroom edition of the Middle English poems of Laurence Minot, with its introduction, gloss, notes, and glossary, enables students of all levels to encounter Minot's poetry. A difficult figure to identify, Laurence Minot wrote a set of eleven poems celebrating English victories against the French between 1333 and 1352, soon after the conclusion of said victories. This volume offers students valuable insights into fourteenth-century English poetry and an inimitable English poet's perspective on the Hundred Years' War.

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This volume is the first to make the Middle English Breton lays available to teachers and students of the Middle Ages. Breton lays were produced by or after the fashion of Marie de France in the twelfth century and claim to be "literary versions of lays sung by ancient Bretons to the accompaniment of the harp." The poems edited in this volume are considered distinctly "English" Breton lays because of their focus on the family values of late medieval England. With the volume's helpful glosses, notes, introductions, and appendices, the door is opened for students to study Middle English poetry and the medieval family alike.

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This new edition makes available to students of English romance and of the Matter of Britain two significant Middle English Arthurian romances: Lancelot of the Laik and Sir Tristrem. The former, a late fifteenth century romance, tells of the adventures of Lancelot, bearing many similarities to the Vulgate Prose Lancelot, but also includes a lengthy section of political advice. The latter is an uncourtly, parodic poem about the knight Tristrem. With its introductions, glosses, notes, and glossary, this accessible edition enables students to enrich their sense of the texture of English treatments of the vast body of legends that grew around the court of Arthur.

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