Search results for ""Medieval Institute Publications""

"Studies in Iconography" is an annual journal hosted by the Index of Medieval Art and published in partnership with Medieval Institute Publications. It presents innovative work on the meaning of images from the medieval world broadly construed, between the fourth century to the year 1600. Past articles have addressed subjects as diverse as Byzantine fresco programs, Carolingian architectural diagrams, Gothic rent books, Jewish ritual images, and Islamicate stucco ornament. We encourage article submissions that offer interdisciplinary, theoretical, or critical perspectives. Works of both established and emerging scholars are welcome. Reviews of selected books on iconography and art history are included in every volume.

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"Studies in Iconography" is an annual journal hosted by the Index of Medieval Art and published in partnership with Medieval Institute Publications. It presents innovative work on the meaning of images from the medieval world broadly construed, between the fourth century to the year 1600. Past articles have addressed subjects as diverse as Byzantine fresco programs, Carolingian architectural diagrams, Gothic rent books, Jewish ritual images, and Islamicate stucco ornament. We encourage article submissions that offer interdisciplinary, theoretical, or critical perspectives. Works of both established and emerging scholars are welcome. Reviews of selected books on iconography and art history are included in every volume. MIP also publishes the journal's associated book series, Studies in Iconography: Themes and Variations.

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At the end of the fifteenth century, Gavin Douglas devised his ambitious dream vision The Palyce of Honour in part to signal a new scope to Scottish literary culture. While deeply versed in Chaucer's writings, Douglas identified Ovid's Metamorphoses as a particularly timely model in the light of contemporary humanist scholarship. For all its comedy, The Palyce of Honour stands as a reminder to James IV of Scotland that poetry casts a powerful light upon the arts of rule. A new edition of David Parkinson’s 1992 book The Palis of Honoure. Medieval Institute Publications at Western Michigan University publishes the TEAMS Middle English Texts series, which is designed to make available texts that occupy an important place in the literary and cultural canon but have not been readily obtainable in student editions. The focus of Middle English Texts is on Middle English literature adjacent to such major authors as Chaucer or Malory. The editions include glosses of difficult words and short introductions on the history of the work, its merits, points of topical interest and brief bibliographies.

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This volume is the first affordable, modern collection of all eleven of the known Middle English Gawain tales, and aims to make these texts accessible to a wider, contemporary audience. These poems-The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle, Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle, The Avowyng of Arthur, The Awyntrs off Arthur, The Knightly Tale of Gologras and Gawain, The Greene Knight, The Turke and Sir Gawain, The Marriage of Sir Gawain, The Carle of Carlisle, The Jeaste of Sir Gawain, and King Arthur and King Cornwall-are united by their common concern with the theme of chivalry. Sir Gawain was by far the most popular of Arthur's knights in medieval England, and the verses collected here offer a window not only into English views on Gawain but also attitudes towards the knightly ideal and chivalry. Incorporating glosses and introductions for each text as well as an extensive glossary, this edition is excellent for students of Middle English romance.

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Technology, Guilds, and Early English Drama is designed to open up a broader scope of study that calls attention to both social organization and material culture as integrally related to the civic drama of England in cities such as Coventry, York, and Chester. It addresses many questions that have been frequently asked about the sources and design of those things that were used in the production of plays. The book will serve as a model for future interdisciplinary research based on records, archaeological finds, evidence from the visual arts, and the playtexts themselves.

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These six poems explore some of the courtly and chivalric themes that preoccupied late medieval Scottish society. The volume includes Sir David Lyndsay's Historie and Testament of Squyer Meldrum, as well as his Answer to the Kingis Flyting; and three anonymous fifteenth-century poems: Balletis of the Nine Nobles, Complaint for the Death of Margaret, Princess of Scotland, and Talis of the Fyve Bestes.

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This collection of essays examines medieval and early modern perceptions of the marvelous and the monstrous. The essays investigate the nature of those phenomena and how people of these periods experienced them and how they recreated that experience for others. The essays trace the development of representations of marvels and explicate individual incarnations of monster and miracles. They analyze the importance of marvelous difference in defining ethnic, racial, religious, class, and gender identities to ask what legacy the medieval confrontations with marvels left for the modern world. These excellent essays look at issues that have long perplexed readers, such as the meaning of marvels, and whether we can read them in earnest or whether they can be appreciated only as play. The different authors bring their expertise to the fore to discuss the development of thoughts on marvels from the classical tradition through the concept’s development in the medieval and early modern tradition. This collection is essential reading for any analysis of the marvelous in these periods and the state of scholarship surrounding them.

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Shortly after Morton Bloomfield's death in 1987, a number of his friends and colleagues sought a way to honor and preserve his memory. The result was a lecture of more than ordinary interest and more than ordinary prominence, signified by the fact that each would be published for individual circulation and then would be collected, as they are here, to appear in print for a wider audience. The lectures contained here reflect Morton Bloomfield's own wide and varied interests: literature, the history of philosophy, language studies, and Judaic studies. Morton W. Bloomfield's broad learning and personal popularity were unrivaled among his fellow medievalists, and this volume demonstrates the outpouring of those close to him and whom he influenced. The lectures contained within deal with a wide variety of topics, all a fitting tribute to a scholar who touched so many lives.

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Continuing work begun by previous scholars, New Directions in Boethian Studies brings together recent studies from the diverse perspective of recent scholarship published during the first decade of Carmina Philosophiae: Journal of the International Boethius Society, a journal which seeks to make sound editions of texts and commentaries, both Latin and vernacular, more readily available to scholars. The book is divided into five sections according to the following areas of study: 1) aspects of Boethius's Latin De Consolatione Philosophiae, 2) vernacular translations of the Consolatio, 3) multidisciplinary perspectives on Boethius in art and literary history, 4) multidisciplinary perspectives on Boethius in art and literary history, and 5) ongoing efforts to find and edit unpublished translations and major studies of Boethius's works. The study of Boethius, his works, and his influence continues to expand as scholars turn their attention to interdisciplinary and heretofore neglected areas of research. The essays and the critical edition presented in this collection represent the ongoing discussions of established and emerging scholars who are drawn to Boethius, undeniably one of the most central and seminal thinkers in the Western tradition.

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In A Manual of the Writings in Middle English, Amis and Amiloun, Robert of Cisyle, and Sir Amadace are classified by Lillian Herlands Hornstein as Legendary Romances of Didactic Intent. Amis, produced in the East Midlands in the late thirteenth century was well known throughout Europe, but according to Edward Foster, the Middle English version is especially lively, entertaining, and perplexing. Robert of Cisyle was also a common and popular story; like the medieval tragedies recounted in Chaucer's The Monk's Tale, it recounts the story of the fall of a great man and his ultimate triumph once he has been thoroughly humiliated. The stress in Sir Amadace is on material things: Amadace's original plight is material, his succor of the unburied knight is material, the white knight's assistance to him is material, his redemption is material . . . , and his ultimate happiness is material. Second, revised edition

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The eight essays in The Recovery of Old English consider major aspects of the progress of Anglo-Saxon studies from their Tudor beginnings until their coming of age in the second half of the seventeenth century.

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To introduce John Lydgate's landmark poem the Troy Book to students and non-specialist readers, the editor has selected the essential passages from the poem and bridges any gaps with textual summaries. Also included are an introduction, gloss, notes, and a glossary. John Lydgate, a monk of the great Benedictine abbey of Bury St. Edmunds in Suffolk, began composing the poem, an ambitious attempt at recounting the Trojan War in Middle English, in October 1412 on commission from Henry, Prince of Wales (later King Henry V), and completed it in 1420. The poem is an interesting study for those interested in medieval approaches to classical sources, as well as for its often contradictory and complicated take on contemporary chivalry.

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The collection of essays in Translation Theory and Practice in the Middle Ages arose from a translation symposium at the twenty-eighth International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo, Michigan. The authors treat a wide range of topics: translation between Latin and romance languages, the rise of vernacular canonicity, the interplay of Latin and French in the court of France, the theory of translation evident in Alfred the Great's ambitious program of translation of religious works from Latin into Old English, questions of the impact of classical admonitions on medieval translation, interpretive translation used to render traditionally masculine heroes as feminine, the interplay of word and image relating to gender issues, and bilingualism, concluding with translation of medieval texts in the modern era. The scholarship on offer here presents a spectacular collection of modern questions of medieval translation, certainly an essential text for all scholars of related issues.

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The Fool in the Middle Ages and Early Modern period was either a person who capitalized on his natural deficiencies, which were then considered amusing, or a professional entertainer the artificial Fool who specialized in clowning. His distinctive clothing and bauble are known to us through numerous Psalter illustrations where he is shown in connection with Psalm 52, which asserts that The fool has said in his heart there is no God. Attitudes toward the Fool varied, but his place was to become assured on stage, where his role is best known to us through the plays of Shakespeare. The articles in the present volume provide indispensable analyses of the Fool from a number of different perspectives.

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In this fresh, classroom-friendly volume, Margery Kempe, a married woman from fifteenth-century England, dictates her remarkable life story. Far from provincial, this extraordinary woman tells us about her business ventures in Lynn, her spiritual conversion and asceticism, and her travels all around Europe and the Holy Land while on pilgrimage. Kempe presents a splendidly detailed perspective of a woman from the rising middle class of the late Middle Ages, of a frequent pilgrim, and of a would-be saint gifted with spectacular crying. This edition, faithful to the original Middle English text but edited for accessibility to students, includes a gloss, notes, introduction, and a glossary, making The Book of Margery Kempe an excellent choice for any class interested in religion, gender, travel, or even daily life in late medieval Europe.

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Published in cooperation with the Medieval and Renaissance Studies program at the University of Pittsburgh, this collection of essays is drawn from a conference held at the University of Pittsburgh on October 27-28, 1988. The essays explore "the interconnectedness of pilgrimage and crusade, and the central role of these enterprises for the history of European society and thought. . . ." - from the Preface

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This volume makes accessible for students of the Middle Ages Middle English verses about heroic women from the Old Testament. Included are The Storie of Asneth, The Pistel of Swete Susan, The Story of Jephthah and his Daughter, and The Story of Judith. These poems exhibit the attitudes of Late Medieval England towards heroic women, and offer an unusually positive depiction of Judiasm. With extensive notes, glosses, and introductions, these verses are valuable to teachers and students of Middle English.

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Published in cooperation with the Medieval and Renaissance Studies program at the University of Pittsburgh, this collection of essays is drawn from a conference held at the University of Pittsburgh on October 27-28, 1988. The essays explore "the interconnectedness of pilgrimage and crusade, and the central role of these enterprises for the history of European society and thought. . . ." - from the Preface

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This book is the first critical edition of two fascinating but overlooked devotional texts. Each shines its own light on medieval faith. The Holkham Prayers and Meditations (ca.1410) is a rare example of female authorship, written by an unnamed woman to guide a “religious sustir.” Simon Appulby's Fruyte of Redempcyon (1514) is more popular in aim, composed by one of England’s last anchorites to serve his urban community. Both texts are accompanied by extensive notes and introductory essays to aid students and specialists alike.

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"Medieval Prosopography" was founded in 1980 when methodologies of social science were combined with social history in an attempt to explore and explicate the lives of people who, when treated as individuals, often remain obscure. Because relatively few sources were created by or about individuals during the Middle Ages the prosopographical method of analysis of groups of people has lent itself especially well to medieval history. The aim of this annual journal is to provide a venue for work engaged with the methodology of using data drawn from analysis of a group or relationships between individuals to restore to view the lives of those who would otherwise remain unexamined or to yield new insight into the medieval past. Scholarship taking the approach of collective or group biography also falls under the umbrella of prosopography and would be appropriate for the journal. Over the past four decades, "Medieval Prosopography" has published articles on a range of subjects from all periods and places of medieval history. The journal welcomes submissions on topics that relate to prosopography from late antiquity to the sixteenth century. Work on all areas and relevant aspects of the medieval world, including Islam and Byzantium, are welcome. Articles in the major European languages are invited and will be published in their original language.

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Composed for King Henry VI in the middle of the Wars of the Roses, Of Knyghthode and Bataile adapts the most widely used military manual in the Middle Ages into English verse. That work is here edited by Michael Livingston and Trevor Russell Smith from all four surviving manuscripts, and presented with a contextualizing introduction and copious notes and glosses. Responding to both the evolution of warfare and the historical background of his own time, its anonymous poet produced what one critic has called "one of the most brilliant military poems of the fifteenth century."

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This modernized extract from The Great Chronicle of London covers the reign of England’s first Tudor king, Henry VII (1485-1509). It gives an eye-witness account of events in London, and of news from elsewhere, from the viewpoint of a well-to- do citizen who was closely involved in civic administration. It describes many notable public events: riots and uprisings, executions, coronations, royal marriages and funerals, and ceremonial activities involving the mayor and aldermen. Its year by year entries also cover matters like the weather, the cost of living, taxes, and the effects of building work undertaken in the city. Although its compiler worked to a scheme common to other London chronicles from the period, he was ready to express his own views on a number of matters, and wrote with keen observation and occasional wit.

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One of the most popular mirrors for princes, Christine de Pizan's Epistre Othea (Letter of Othea) circulated widely in England. Speaking through Othea, the goddess of wisdom and prudence, in the guise of instructing Hector of Troy, Christine advises rulers, defends women against misogyny, and articulates complex philosophical and theological ideals. This volume brings together for the first time the two late medieval English translations, Stephen Scrope's precise translation The Epistle of Othea and the anonymous Litel Bibell of Knyghthod, once criticized as a flawed translation. With substantial introductions and comprehensive explanatory notes that attend to literary and manuscript traditions, this volume contributes to the reassessment of how each English translator grappled with adapting a French woman's text to English social, political, and literary contexts. These new editions encourage a fresh look at how Christine's ideas fit into and influenced the English literary tradition.

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This volume is the second of the thirteen in preparation that will offer the first complete scholarly edition of the poetry and music of Guillaume de Machaut, the foremost practitioner of these related arts at the end of the Middle Ages in France. It provides a freshly prepared edition based on the most reliable manuscript of two of Machaut's best known dits, the Remede de Fortune (Remedy for Fortune) and the Confort d'ami (Consolation from a Friend), both of which adapt the central ideas of Boethian philosophy to the love poetry tradition. The French texts are accompanied by facing English translations, and the musical passages are presented in situ in a performance-accessible form.

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These six poems explore some of the courtly and chivalric themes that preoccupied late medieval Scottish society. The volume includes Sir David Lyndsay's Historie and Testament of Squyer Meldrum, as well as his Answer to the Kingis Flyting; and three anonymous fifteenth-century poems: Balletis of the Nine Nobles, Complaint for the Death of Margaret, Princess of Scotland, and Talis of the Fyve Bestes.

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Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, and the Nature of Fame is a characterological study offering new perspectives on Antony and Cleopatra, the most ambiguous of Shakespeare's plays. It also offers new insights about the origins and nature of Shakespeare's imperishable fame. Wide-ranging in its concerns, this monograph promises to make an essential difference in the way scholars view characterizations, fame, Shakespeare's reputation, and the eminence of the celebrated figures of the play.

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In this volume, readers experience, in English translation, the colorful and varied textual fabric of the most important literary and creative repertory of the Middle Ages. The public, organized worship of the Church had a central role in medieval life. Studying its forms and genres allows readers not only to become aware of one of the most important influences on culture and religion, but also to consider these texts, which were widely disseminated and had fundamental effects on daily life.

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Rabbi Eliezer of Beaugency represents the pinnacle of twelfth-century rabbinic exegesis of the Bible. A proponent of the literal school, Eliezer completely abandoned traditional rabbinic midrash in his explication of biblical texts, and innovated a literary approach that anticipated the fruits of modern scholarship in virtually every paragraph. This volume presents, for the first time in English translation, an extended window into the oeuvre of this master interpreter.

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Many commentaries on the Apocalypse were produced in the early Middle Ages. This book provides translations of two Apocalypse commentaries from the seventh and eighth centuries. On the Mysteries of the Apocalypse of John is part of a large one-volume "Reference Bible" composed about 750. Written probably by an Irish teacher residing in northern France, it answers difficulties arising from the biblical text. The Handbook on the Apocalypse of the Apostle John, attributed erroneously to Jerome and written before 767, contains brief moral and allegorical interpretations of particular words and phrases of the Apocalypse. The introduction highlights the unique features of each commentary and the interrelationship of the three texts.

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The great corpus that is medieval literature contains, at its very center, the tale. These verse and prose fictional narratives, as well as stories that are grounded in some degree of historical truth, are the foundation of what readers, scholars, and enthusiasts often point to as signifiers of the medieval age. These tales - from the skillfully crafted to the more rudimentary and plain - often make familiar to modern readers what seems so distant and foreign about the Middle Ages. This volume of essays focuses on the tale and its ability to create "mirth," what modern audiences would often define as "happiness" or "joy," and the significance that the book has had on the transference of this mirth to audiences. This volume also celebrates the scholarship of Thomas H. Ohlgren, a medievalist whose work encompasses a number of different areas, but at its center lives the power of the tale and its ability to create a lasting impression on readers, both medieval and modern.

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One of a handful of texts written in the twilight years of Henry VI's reign, John Hardyng's first Chronicle, written in 18,782 lines of verse and seven folios of prose, offers a compelling insight into the tastes, hopes, and anxieties of a late fifteenth century gentleman who witnessed -- and all too often participated in -- each of the key events that defined his era. Completed in 1457, Hardyng's initial Chronicle has previously been largely overlooked in comparison to the more condensed second version, written to promote Richard, Duke of York's claim to the throne. Hardyng's interest in Britain's past is typical of the gentry's enthusiasm for historical works, while his concern with war and duty reflects the importance of such matters to men of his rank.

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Oton de Granson, slain in a duel in 1397, was a knight, diplomat, and poet, who lived an active, almost storybook life at or near the center of many of the most important events in the last half of the fourteenth century. He was almost certainly a personal friend to both Chaucer and Eustache Deschamps and among the first and most successful of the poets who were also courtiers. This new translation makes Granson's poetry available again to English readers.

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Composed around 1250 by an unknown author in the region of Orléans, the Vulgate Commentary on Ovid's Metamorphoses is the most widely disseminated and reproduced medieval work on Ovid's epic compendium of classical mythology and materialist philosophy. This commentary both preserves the rich store of twelfth-century glossing on the Metamorphoses and incorporates new material of literary interest, while the marginal glosses in many respects reflect the scholar interests of an early thirteenth-century schoolmaster. The Vulgate Commentary is always transmitted as a series of interlinear and marginal glosses surrounding the text manuscript, whereas other earlier commentaries were independent of a full text of the poem. The Vulgate Commentary exercised a wide-ranging influence on the understanding and presentation of Ovid's Metamorphoses in the High Middle Ages and Renaissance, and the commentary exists in both French and Italian manuscripts.

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A bourde is an English comedic poem similar to a French fabliau but with a moralizing element and less of an emphasis on violence. In this fresh edition of ten Middle English bourdes, Melissa M. Furrow "aims to put funny (or would-be funny) Middle English poems under the eyes of a much broader readership" than the scholarly researchers she appealed to in her earlier edition of many of the same poems. This collection is specifically designed for students, and has contextualizing introductions, copious notes, glosses, and a glossary.

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New Perspectives on the Man of Sorrows is a collection derived from the symposium on the Man of Sorrows the editors organized and held at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, Winter 2011, which itself emerged from the exhibition "Passion in Venice: Crivelli to Tintoretto and Veronese; The Man of Sorrows in Venetian Art", co-curated by Puglisi and Barcham at the Museum of Biblical Art, New York. The essays included here investigate an assortment of issues and problems raised by the Man of Sorrows, a figure charged with profound spiritual, metaphorical, and symbolic meaning that traveled across Europe, populated all the arts, and permeated numerous religious contexts as it soared in popularity in the West from the late Middle Ages into the Renaissance and beyond. Five essays cover a wide group of subjects and five focus in particular on Venice. The authors of these studies represent different approaches, methods, and interests and explain several artistic schools, traditions, and periods, proposing new perspectives on this remarkable image. The Man of Sorrows was able to adapt to external circumstances, to the constraints of different media, exigencies of changing milieus, the requirements of patrons, and the needs of the devout, and is therefore of interest to just as wide an audience today as ever.

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The editors of this volume use its title to honor Bonnie Wheeler for her many scholarly achievements and to celebrate her wide-ranging contributions to medieval studies in the United States. There are sections on Old and Middle English Literature, Arthuriana Then and Now, Joan of Arc Then and Now, Nuns and Spirituality, and Royal Women. As the editors note in the introduction, the volume "confirms Bonnie's commitment to the multidisciplinary study of the Middle Ages" and affirms her conviction "that the medieval and the modern are best viewed not as 'the past' and 'the present' but as interpenetrative categories."

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The feast of Corpus Christi, celebrated annually on Thursday after Trinity Sunday, was devoted to the Eucharist, and the normal practice was to have solemn processions through the city with the Host, the consecrated wafer that was believed to have been transformed into the true body and blood of Jesus. In this way the "cultus Dei" thus celebrated allowed the people to venerate the Eucharistic bread in order that they might be stimulated to devotion and brought symbolically, even mystically into a relationship with the central moments of salvation history. Perhaps it is logical, therefore, that pageants and plays were introduced in order to access yet another way of visualizing and participating in those events. Thus the "invisible things" of the divine order "from the creation of the world" might be displayed. The York Corpus Christi Plays, contained in London, British Library, MS. Add. 35290 and comprising more than thirteen thousand lines of verse, actually represent a unique survival of medieval theater. They form the only complete play cycle verifiably associated with the feast of Corpus Christi that is extant and was performed at a specific location in England.

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In the introduction to her study of twenty-eight French nonbiblical hagiographic mystery plays from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Hamblin notes that "this approach is intended to strengthen a comparative analysis of relatively similar texts created within a particular cultural setting. [The plays'] somewhat parallel narrative and performative structures facilitate their comparison as performance remnants ... To that end, the first three chapters of this study will investigate the cultural contexts in which these plays were produced and performed, as well as the cultural content that spoke to and for the communities that created them. In two subsequent chapters, the performance features of these remnants, verbal and nonverbal, textual and supratextual, will be compared in search of evidence of a collective performance history ... My hope is ... to suggest a more performative reading of the works within recognized cultural parameters by examining a set number of saints' plays across cultural, thematic, and performance lines."

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This work—a parallel-text edition that contains all four versions of Piers Plowman—constitutes a major enterprise of textual scholarship and will provide for students of Langland a modern equivalent to Skeat's standard edition of 1886. This revised and corrected three-volume set is specifically designed to facilitate study of the parallel text (Volume 1) alongside both the textual notes (Volume 2, part 1) and the commentary/glossary (Volume 2, part 2), and is intended to make the entire edition available to as many students of Langland as possible.

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This collection of essays is designed to capitalize on the success of Seamus Heaney' prize-winning translation of Beowulf, which bridges the gap between the ivory tower where most who study Beowulf reside and lay readers drawn to the poem because of Heaney's reputation, the review in the New York Times Book Review, the Whitbread Prize for poetry, and even perhaps the attractive and eye-catching cover. The book is conceived in three parts. The first section explores translations into modern English and languages other than English; the second explores issues of oral theory and performance; the third offers a wide selection of reviews of Heaney's Beowulf written by Anglo-Saxonists. A DVD of readings of the first fifty-two lines of Beowulf in Old English, Czech, Spanish, Icelandic, Hungarian, and Italian, and selections from Turkish and Asian epics accompanies the volume.

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Friedrich Neumann described Thomasin's Der Welsche Gast as a linguistic phenomenon without comparison within the corpus of German literature of the Hohenstaufen period. In the didactic literature of the time, Der Welsche Gast does indeed occupy a unique position. . . . [It] betrays the heavy hand of the clerical moralist who moves from providing the younger members of his audience with a primer for proper social etiquette in his early verses to a meticulous analysis of what he clearly viewed as the appropriate ethical code for the nobility of his time, often presented against the backdrop of a thundering condemnation of the state of contemporary affairs. . . . [T]he work remains a remarkable product of an important period in German literature and indeed in medieval European culture; it may be argued with considerable justification that Der Welsche Gast is the most significant didactic work of the German High Middle Ages. Unique in its own time, yet apparently valued by Thomasin's contemporaries and immediately succeeding generations, it belongs very much to its own age, yet, like so much of the literature of the German Middle Ages, it touches chords in the modern reader which cannot and should not be ignored.

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It has long been noted that the prestige and power of the church were steadily growing in the period of the late Byzantine empire, a tendency that was complex, multifaceted, and sometimes ambivalent. The essays in this collection seek to shed light on various aspects of the church's role in late Byzantine society, especially on the relationship between the church and the lay world and the response of individuals to the challenges faced by Orthodoxy. The volume is divided into three sections: (1) Politics, Society, and the Economy; (2) Intellectual Life and Ideology; and (3) The Church and the Turkish Conquests. By exploring these different areas, the essays in this volume contribute to scholarly understanding of how the church was embedded into the fabric of late Byzantine society and intellectual life.

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The Hero Recovered: Essays on Medieval Heroism in Honor of George Clark brings together studies concerning heroes and heroisms in Old English, Old Icelandic, Middle English, and modern literature as a tribute to the scholarship and teaching of George Clark. The thirteen essays in this collection appear in print here for the first time.

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Originally delivered as a lecture at the Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, this volume was published in 2002 as "Ælfric von Eynsham und seine Zeit," introducing, as Gneuss says, "an Anglo-Saxon author . . . who was the first, and for a long time the only, master of prose written in English."

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On several counts, one particular collection of French lyrics made in France in the late fourteenth century, University of Pennsylvania MS 15, is the most likely repository of Chaucer's French poems. It is the largest manuscript anthology extant of fourteenth-century French lyrics in the formes fixes (balade, rondeaux, virelay, lay, and five-stanza chanson) with by far the largest number of works of unknown authorship.

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Despite its title, Caxton's Game and Playe of the Chesse does not, in fact, have much to say about a game or about playing it ... Instead, the work uses the chessboard and its pieces to allegorize a political community whose citizens contribute to the common good. Readers first meet the king, queen, bishops (imagined as judges), knights, and rooks, here depicted as the king's emissaries. They are then introduced to the eight different pawns, who represent trades that range from farmers to messengers ... Paired with each profession is a list of moral codes ... These pairings reinforce the idea of a kingdom organized around professional ties and associations, ties that are in turn regulated by moral law. - from the Introduction

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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 Temple of Glas takes the form of an elusive and suspenseful-but for that reason all the more sensational-dream vision that demands close attention to detail and the dynamic way in which the meaning of events unfolds. Seducing readers with possibilities remains what the poem does best, and that special magnetism speaks not only to the provenance and textual history of Lydgate's text but also to its literary qualities.

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