Search results for ""Medieval Institute Publications""
Medieval Institute Publications The Shewings of Julian of Norwich
This fascinating first-person account of the visions experienced by the anchoress Julian of Norwich in May of 1373 is remarkable for its vivid prose and as an example both of early autobiographical writing in the vernacular and of a spiritual document. This practical edition includes a gloss, an introduction, notes, and a glossary, making it valuable to students of Middle English and medieval mysticism alike.
£17.50
Medieval Institute Publications Women and Monasticism in Medieval Europe: Sisters and Patrons of the Cistercian Reform
A selection of documents, translated primarily from medieval Latin but occasionally from Old French, that shows how religious women and their patrons managed resources to make monastic communities - particularly a variety of Cistercian communities - work. The records help us reconstruct how nuns and abbesses of Cistercian communities in the thirteenth century organized and kept records, managed their properties, responded to attempts at usurpation, and balanced their lives between devotional practices, which were part of their cloistered world, and family and social responsibilities beyond the convent walls.
£13.61
Medieval Institute Publications Moral Love Songs and Laments
In this volume, Fein presents highly emotional Middle English lyrics to a new audience of students and teachers of the Middle Ages. These Middle English poems, drawn widely from two hundred years of literary tradition, lead readers in devotion to God by invoking an emotional response to God's love. In this meditative tradition, readers would be brought closer to intellectually understanding God through their affective responses. With its copious footnotes, introductions, and glosses, this volume is ideal for classes on medieval spirituality and English lyrical poetry alike.
£17.50
Medieval Institute Publications Women, Marriage, and Family in Medieval Christendom: Essays in Memory of Michael M. Sheehan, C.S.B.
The eleven essays offered in Women, Marriage, and Family in Medieval Christendom reflect the spirit and originality of Father Michael M. Sheehan, for whom the volume was collected. The essays consider three thematic categories that were dominant in most of Sheehan's own scholarly work: the role, position, and contributions of medieval women; the development of Christian marriage, especially in the High Middle Ages; and the secular family with its legal and emotional relationships. A close reading of the papers, particularly those concerned with the themes of marriage and the family, reveal what we can designate as the Sheehan school of social history. The collection expands on several of Sheehan's research areas, and while it shows a considerable interest in medieval England, it does not disregard the Continent. The volume is a worthy tribute to Sheehan and will be of great interest to students of social and legal history, women's history, the development of marriage, and the idea of the family.
£35.12
Medieval Institute Publications Sir Perceval of Galles and Ywain and Gawain
This volume contains the only known English version of Chrétien de Troyes's romance of the naïve knight Perceval, Sir Perceval of Galles. The work uses Perceval's ridiculous behavior as a late medieval satire of courtliness. Accompanying this tale is Ywain and Gawain, a translation of a second Chrétien poem, Le Chevalier au lion. Unlike Sir Perceval, this poem extols the virtues of chivalry and honor. These complementary works form an excellent introduction to Middle English Arthurian romance, as they include editing, glosses, introductions, and a very helpful glossary for beginning students.
£17.50
Medieval Institute Publications Magister Paulus Niavis: Epistole breues, Epistole mediocres, Epistole longiores
Rand H. Johnson's edition of the Latin letters of the late fifteenth-century German schoolmaster Paulus Niavis brings to light the life and thought of a teachers whose career spanned an era of radical curriculum reform in the arts faculties at schools and universities, where the centuries-old program of scholasticism was being replaced by a program based on the Italian studia humanitatis. Niavis's letters, written after his academic conversion, reflect the blending of Italian and German humanism. While Niavis expresses praise and admiration for classical Latinity, his letters also offer examples from late antique, medieval, and scholastic sources. Johnson's careful treatment of Niavis's thoughts offers us a window into the methods of a humanist forerunner and pioneer in his native Saxony. Niavis's consideration of his own cultural moment represents a particular insight into the great educational changes on the ground at an important moment in the history of the German classroom.
£19.25
Medieval Institute Publications King Arthur's Death: The Middle English Stanzaic Morte Arthur and Alliterative Morte Arthure
Professor Benson's edition of the Stanzaic Morte Arthur and the Alliterative Morte Arthure has been long out of print. Benson's edition of these important Middle English poems is here revised and updated by Professor Edward E. Foster, taking into account recent scholarship, to once again be available and accessible to students. The romances included here are two of the best, most significant Arthurian romances in Middle English, which complement each other in terms of style and content. While the Alliterative Morte Arthure belongs to the Alliterative Revival movement, replete with details of fourteenth century warfare, the Stanzaic Morte Arthur represents a briefer, quicker-paced, yet more sentimental English adaptation of the French Mort Artu. This edition—with contextualizing introductions, helpful glosses, plentiful notes, and useful glossary—comprises a great introduction to Middle English Arthuriana for students of the Middle Ages.
£22.00
Medieval Institute Publications The Salt of Common Life: Individuality and Choice in the Medieval Town, Countryside, and Church: Essays Presented to J. Ambrose Raftis
The essays within this volume, produced in honor of J. Ambrose Raftis, are united by two themes significant in Raftis's career: a belief in the fundamental individuality of medieval English men and women, and a belief in their ability to make choices. However much environment, custom, social structure, and even biology might constrain or otherwise affect personal behavior, the men and women who appear in the often laconic entries of medieval court rolls were distinctive, one-of-a-kind persons, and their actions-their deeds and their misdeeds, their triumphs and their failures, their fortunes and their follies-were often the result of choices they had made. That is the medieval world of J. Ambrose Raftis, and it is that world, and that vision, that this book honors.
£22.00
Medieval Institute Publications The Centre and Its Compass: Studies in Medieval Literature in Honor of Professor John Leyerle
This collection of essays was released in honor of John Leyerle, a scholar to whom all medievalists in North America, and many beyond, owe a great debt. As a teacher, scholar, and administrator, Leyerle has been a leader in the rise and renewal of medieval studies on this continent in the past thirty years. The essays in this volume encompass his broad academic interests and interdisciplinary approach to scholarship, with a range of contributors from Canada, the United States, and abroad.
£30.00
Medieval Institute Publications The Lover's Confession: A Translation of John Gower's Confessio Amantis
John Gower's Confessio Amantis (The Lover's Confession) is one of the most important English works of the Fourteenth Century. Within its frame of the lovesick lover's confession are well over a hundred stories, mainly derived from classical mythology, the Bible, and history which exemplify the Middle Ages. Echoing the octosyllabic line of the original, this is the first translation of the entire (33,000-line) poem, including its Latin verses and glosses.
£71.39
Medieval Institute Publications Wills and Testaments in Medieval England from the Thirteenth to the Sixteenth Century
This volume explores the will-making process in late medieval England for all levels of society. Wills are some of the most studied records of the late Middle Ages and capture the evidence of what people owned and the patterns of family relationships. These documents, compiled by Robert A. Wood from several archives and city records, cast a light on many aspects of medieval life, including gender distinctions and the heavy influence of the church. Included are wills from widows, tradespeople and artisans, clergy, and high-ranking wealthy people. Through these sources Wood is able to show how wills, inventories and testaments prepared people and their souls for the afterlife.
£56.50
Medieval Institute Publications The Miracle of Theophilus by Gautier de Coinci
The legend of Theophilus is a widely disseminated medieval miracle story. A good man gives in to Vain Glory, sells his soul to the Devil, has a terrible crisis of conscience, and is saved by the Virgin. The story is translated into most European languages and appears in stained glass, sculpture, and manuscripts. Gautier de Coinci writes the longest version of the legend; its colourful details reveal the medieval period's deep fear of hell and the Devil and its high hopes in the Virgin and the Church. Gautier de Coinci (1177–1236) was a French abbot and musical arranger, chiefly known for his devotion to the Virgin Mary. This is the first English translation of Gautier de Coinci's pre-Faustian version of the legend of Theophilus. It is presented in a facing-page translation with the original Old French, along with a full introduction and notes.
£72.00
Medieval Institute Publications Medieval Ecocriticisms Volume 1: Special Issue: Weather
In recent years, medieval studies has seen a flourishing of new ecocritical and environmental inquiries to literature, art and culture. These new approaches, drawing upon the material, spatial and post-human turns in humanities research, have directed scholarly attention to representations and histories of the non-human, and to the inarguable necessity of studying both human/human and human/non-human interactions in texts and cultures. Medieval Ecocriticisms is the first regular venue dedicated to medieval ecocritical studies. It seeks out the most current and innovative interdisciplinary approaches to the study of literature and the environment in the global Middle Ages.
£70.00
Medieval Institute Publications "Blandin de Cornoalha", A Comic Occitan Romance: A New Critical Edition and Translation
This volume presents the first widely available edition in English of the medieval romance Blandin de Cornoalha, accompanied by a translation and introduction to the work. Composed in the second half of the fourteenth century by an anonymous author, the story offers an early recording of the Sleeping Beauty folktale, incorporated into the adventures of two knights. Many elements in this romance from the south of France are comic, suggesting that Blandin is not simply a tale of knights in battle, but also a parody of medieval romance in general.
£30.00
Medieval Institute Publications The Owl and the Nightingale: And the English Poems of Jesus College MS 29 (II)
An edition and accompanying translation of this late C13th anthology of early Middle English verse. In addition to the original text and Modern English translations, the edition contains a substantial scholarly introduction, notes and a substantial bibliography. Oxford, Jesus College, MS 29 (II), a thirteenth-century manuscript, contains the longest surviving English verse sequence from the period between the Exeter Book and the Harley Lyrics. The sequence is varied in subject, with poems of religious exhortation set beside others of secular pragmatism. Included are: The Owl and the Nightingale, Poema Morale, The Proverbs of Alfred, Thomas of Hales’s Love Rune, The Eleven Pains of Hell, the prose Shires and Hundreds of England, the lengthy Passion of Jesus Christ in English, and twenty-one additional lyrics, most of them uniquely preserved in this manuscript and presented here with accompanying translations in Modern English and scholarly introduction and apparatus. This scholarly presentation of the text is designed for both research and classroom use, intended for teachers, scholars and students.
£110.00
Medieval Institute Publications Henry VII's London in the Great Chronicle
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.
£61.00
Medieval Institute Publications The Digby Mary Magdalene Play
The Digby Play of Mary Magdalene is a rare, surviving example of the Middle English saint play. It provides a window on the deep embedding of biblical drama and performance in late medieval devotional practices, social aspiration and critique, and religious discourses. Fully annotated and extensively glossed, this edition adds to the METS Drama series an essential resource for the study of late medieval English religious drama.
£69.50
Medieval Institute Publications The Towneley Plays
The Towneley plays are a collection of biblical plays in the Huntington Library's MS HM 1, a manuscript once owned by the Towneley family of Towneley Hall, Lancashire. Once thought to constitute a cycle of plays from the town of Wakefield in Yorkshire's West Riding, the collection includes some of the best-known examples of medieval English drama, including the much-anthologized Second Shepherds Play.
£87.00
Medieval Institute Publications Drama and Sermon in Late Medieval England: Performance, Authority, Devotion
This full-length study investigates how sermons and vernacular religious drama worked as media for public learning, how they combined this didactic aim with literary exigencies, and how plays acquired and reflected authority. The interrelation between sermons and vernacular drama, formerly assumed to be a close one, is addressed from historical connections, performative aspects, and the portrayal of penance. The work demonstrates the subtly different purposes and contents and outlines the unique ways in which they operate within late medieval England.
£78.00
Medieval Institute Publications Portraits of Human Monsters in the Renaissance: Dwarves, Hirsutes, and Castrati as Idealized Anatomical Anomalies
At the center of this interdisciplinary study are court monsters - dwarves, hirsutes, and misshapen individuals - who, by their very presence, altered Renaissance ethics vis-à-vis anatomical difference, social virtues, and scientific knowledge. The study traces how these monsters evolved from objects of curiosity, to scientific cases, to legally independent beings. The works examined here point to the intricate cultural, religious, ethical, and scientific perceptions of monstrous individuals who were fixtures in contemporary courts.
£87.00
Medieval Institute Publications The Katherine Group (MS Bodley 34): Religious Writings for Women in Medieval England
The Katherine Group brings together for the first time newly edited and translated versions of three dynamic saints' lives, The Lives of Saints Katherine, Margaret and Juliana; a quirky but rhetorically persuasive guide to virginity, Hali Meidenhad; and a psychologically astute sermon, Sawles Warde ("The Guardianship of the Soul"). These works are important witnesses to the development of Middle English writing after the Conquest and to the rigorous anchoritic spiritual life pursued by female recluses in medieval England.
£35.00
Medieval Institute Publications Sir Torrent of Portingale
Sir Torrent of Portingale is a romance written to entertain fifteenth-century audiences with action-packed tales of love and adventure. It is a story about the lovers Torrent, a young knight from Portugal, and Desonell, the feisty and resourceful daughter of a tyrannical king. Adventures include fights with dragons, giants, and savage beasts; perilous sea journeys; magic horses and swords; sieges and wars in the Holy Land. This new edition collates the surviving manuscript and print fragments with commentary and notes.
£13.61
Medieval Institute Publications Lydgate's Fabula duorum mercatorum and Guy of Warwyk
The Fabula Duorum Mercatorum, a romance that in its Boethian sensibility and treatment of love and friendship bears comparison to Chaucer's great works Troilus and Criseyde and The Knight's Tale, is one of Lydgate's most accomplished works. In Guy of Warwick, Lydgate breaks with romance tradition, presenting the heroic English knight-pilgrim and his last great battle against the dread giant Colbrond from an historical point of view.
£17.50
Medieval Institute Publications Vernacular Traditions of Boethius's De consolatione philosophiae
Vernacular Traditions of Boethius's "De consolatione philosophiae" provides an overview of the widespread reception and influence of Boethius's masterpiece in England and Germany, as well as in the Netherlands, Italy, Poland, Catalonia, and Byzantium. As this work demonstrates, Boethius is not only a significant Roman author but also a significant translator and adaptor of works written originally in Greek, placing him firmly as an important figure at the moment of transition from antiquity to the Middle Ages. As the two introductory articles in this collection affirm, Boethius is recognized as "the last of the Romans" and the "first of the Scholastics." Attested by the articles and the edition in this volume, Boethius's modern influence is global in its importance, not only through the dissemination of his theological and scholalry works, but through the many vernacularizations of his final testament to the world, his Consolatio.
£25.00
Medieval Institute Publications The Complete Harley 2253 Manuscript, Volume 2
British Library MS Harley 2253 is one of the most important literary works to survive from the English medieval era. In rarity, quality, and abundance, its secular love lyrics comprise an unrivaled collection. Intermingled with them are contemporary political songs as well as delicate lyrics designed to inspire religious devotion.
£35.00
Medieval Institute Publications Aribo, De musica and Sententiae
Music was central to the medieval church's public worship: it was the essential medium of the Mass and the Divine Office. In this new critical edition, T. J. H. McCarthy presents the Latin text and the first English translation of Aribo's musical treatise, De musica and Sententiae. Written between 1070 and 1078, it is concerned with the workings of the liturgical music that Aribo and his contemporaries called Gregorian chant, and builds off of and responds to several contemporary treatises by Abbot Bern of Reichenau and his pupil Herman, Abbot William of Hirsau, Frutolf of Michelsberg, and Theoger of Metz. In the first new edition of the treatise in over sixty years, McCarthy addresses not only new approaches to the study of music history but newly discovered manuscripts of the treatise, paying careful attention to the diagrams that are integral to the coherence of the treatise.
£30.00
Medieval Institute Publications Accessus ad auctores: Medieval Introductions to the Authors (Codex latinus monacensis 19475)
Medieval commentaries typically included an accessus, a standardized introduction to an author or book. In the twelfth century these introductions were anthologised, referred to now as Accessus ad auctores. They served as the first handbooks of literary criticism. The earliest and most comprehensive example, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 19475, saec. XII,is presented here for the first time in a faithful critical edition, with a new translation and explanatory notes addressing different aspects of the text. This book's aim is to present an accurate version of the text while respecting the arrangement and integrity of the anthology as a whole, and includes previously unpublished material from the anthology.
£35.00
Medieval Institute Publications Croxton Play of the Sacrament
The Croxton Play of the Sacrament, which survives in a single sixteenth-century copy, dramatizes the physical abuse by five Muhammad-worshipping Syrian Jews of a Host, the bread consecrated by a priest during the Christian Mass. The text is the work of a playwright possessed of a tremendous theatrical imagination, notwithstanding his choice of subject matter.
£17.50
Medieval Institute Publications Discovery and Distinction in the Early Middle Ages: Studies in Honor of John J. Contreni
Celebrating the career of one of the most prodigious modern scholars of the early Middle Ages, Discovery and Distinction in the Early Middle Ages showcases the vibrancy of early medieval European history, highlighting new perspectives on the Carolingian renaissance in art, court culture, education, politics, religion, travel, and Jewish-Christian relations. The volume is divided into four parts: Authors and Audiences, Schools and Scholars, Context and Connections, and Visions and Voices. The collection will be of interest both to those already well versed in the topics discussed and to a wider audience eager to learn more about the expanding horizons of early medieval European history.
£19.25
Medieval Institute Publications Renaissance Retrospections: Tudor Views of the Middle Ages
The Middle Ages provided an important, if complex, set of literary and historiographic models for early modern authors, although the early modern authors responded to the alien political, religious, and cultural landscape of medieval England through their more present ideological concerns. From Shakespeare's manipulation of his medieval source material to Protestant responses to medieval Catholicism, this collection of essays explores the ways that early modern English writers responded to the medieval English literary and historical record, dealing with topics such as historiographic bias, print history, intertextuality, and cultural history.
£17.50
Medieval Institute Publications Piers Plowman, a parallel-text edition of the A, B, C and Z versions: Volume II, Part 2: Commentary, Bibliography and Indexical Glossary
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.
£18.04
Medieval Institute Publications Mankind
Mankind is at once conventional in its adherence to morality and extraordinary in its effervescence and wit. The text is a morality play warning Mankind how it may be led astray by temptation, while simultaneously entertaining the audience with banter between the characters representing vice. In its small-scale staging, with a smaller number of actors and props, it was written for a theater troupe of the kind that foreshadows modern professional English drama. Presented with a gloss, notes, an introduction, and a glossary, this edition of the lively Middle English play is perfect for any level of Middle English instruction and invaluable to those who teach early drama.
£13.61
Medieval Institute Publications Two Moral Interludes: The Pride of Life and Wisdom
With the METS editions of Everyman (2008), Mankind (2010), and The Castle of Perseverance (2010), this volume completes the presentation of the five surviving Middle English morality plays. In addition to the texts of The Pride of Life (the earliest of the surviving morality plays) and Wisdom (which is unusual for the size of its cast and the fact that it survives in multiple copies), Klausner's edition includes two appendices which provide the texts of primary sources for the two plays as well as appropriate music (liturgical music, song, and dances) which may have accompanied performances, especially Wisdom.
£15.86
Medieval Institute Publications Poetry, Place, and Gender: Studies in Medieval Culture in Honor of Helen Damico
The essays in this collection honor Helen Damico's extensive interests in Old Norse and later medieval literatures as well as her primary focus on Anglo-Saxon studies, embracing Old English poetry, archaeology, art history, paleography, liturgy, landscape, and gender. Each of the essays contributes new interpretations, new evidence, even new technologies to further the study of some key medieval works.
£19.25
Medieval Institute Publications Sources of Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture: The Apocrypha
This book forms part of a longstanding project by numerous scholars to map the sources which influenced the literary culture of Anglo-Saxon England. It aims at a comprehensive, descriptive list of all authors and works known in Britain between c. 500 and c. 1100 CE. This volume brings up to date the entries on apocrypha first published in Sources of Anglo-Saxon literary culture: a trial version (1990).
£17.50
Medieval Institute Publications Eye and Mind: Collected Essays in Anglo-Saxon and Early Medieval Art by Robert Deshman
Robert Deshman wove together a dense and tightly structured nexus of Early Christian, Carolingian, Anglo-Saxon, and Ottonian manuscript illuminations, ivories, textiles, mosaics, and wall paintings on the one hand, and contemporary exegetical, liturgical, and political writings on the other. In so doing, he ultimately demonstrated the intrinsic connections among visual culture, theology, philosophy, political theory, and ecclesiastic doctrine and practice. Although he used the word only once in his own writings, at the very end of his career, Deshman was truly an interdisciplinary scholar of the first order. The thirteen articles collected in this volume were published between 1971 and 1997 (four posthumously) in six different journals and four edited books. Reprinting them is meant not only to make the articles more accessible but also to present a cohesive body of work (primarily on Anglo-Saxon art) that as a whole has yet to be surpassed or methodologically replaced in the scholarly literature.
£18.04
Medieval Institute Publications The Seven Seals of the Apocalypse: Medieval Texts in Translation
Filling today's religious book market are Apocalypse commentaries teaching that the seven seals of Revelation 5-8 describe tragedies that are to take place in the last days. Medieval Europeans, on the other hand, thought very differently about the seven seals. Some used the seven seals for catechetical purposes and associated them with seven major events in the life of Christ or seven gifts of the Holy Spirit. Other medieval writers taught that the seven seals contained symbols about life in the church between the first and second comings of Christ. Still others viewed the seals as milestones in the grand outline of salvation history. This book illustrates this vastness of medieval interpretive tradition on the seven seals. It includes fifteen texts from the sixth through the fifteenth centuries, which have been organized under three headings: those illustrating christological interpretations of the seven seals, those proposing ecclesiastical interpretations, and those giving historical interpretations.
£13.61
Medieval Institute Publications The Book of John Mandeville
The Book of John Mandeville has tended to be neglected by modern teachers and scholars, yet this intriguing and copious work has much to offer the student of medieval literature, history, and culture. [It] was a contemporary bestseller, providing readers with exotic information about locales from Constantinople to China and about the social and religious practices of peoples such as the Greeks, Muslims, and Brahmins. The Book first appeared in the middle of the fourteenth century and by the next century could be found in an extraordinary range of European languages: not only Latin, French, German, English, and Italian, but also Czech, Danish, and Irish. Its wide readership is also attested by the two hundred fifty to three hundred medieval manuscripts that still survive today. Chaucer borrowed from it, as did the Gawain-poet in the Middle English Cleanness, and its popularity continued long after the Middle Ages.
£17.50
Medieval Institute Publications John Stone's Chronicle: Christ Church Priory, Canterbury, 1417-1472
It is the purpose of this small book to offer to the reader selections from Stone's modest compilation of the internal life of his own monastic community—obituaries of monks, the celebration of the liturgy, even the weather—set against the wider events of the tumultuous fifteenth century in England.
£17.50
Medieval Institute Publications Siege of Jerusalem
The fourteenth-century Siege of Jerusalem has been called by Ralph Hanna "the chocolate-covered tarantula of the alliterative movement" for its apparent anti-Semitism and is, as Livingston notes in his introduction, "simply difficult for twenty-first-century readers to like." The poem, which describes the destruction of the Second Temple by Roman forces in AD 70, is graphic in detail and unpleasant in its relish of the suffering of the Jews. But as Livingston points out, "Like the gritty violence of Alliterative Morte Arthure, the gore in Siege is perhaps best read as a grim awareness of the terrible realities of war, not as a bloodthirsty and berserk cry for further bloodshed. The poem chronicles a historical war, and it is this historical quality that must stand out: the poem not only has resonances of the bloodshed that battle inevitably brings, but it also is, in a very literal sense, history. This is to say, the war is over. The vengeance of Jesus has been accomplished. The Siege-poet's answer to the social-political-religious question of whether there is such a thing as a just war is that there was one: Titus and Vespasian's vengeance for the death of Christ. . . . Further efforts to avenge Christ were unnecessary. . . . That the poem is a call to action and to crusade, then, seems to be a claim that is far less sustainable than its opposite: a call to peace and to remembrance."
£13.61
Medieval Institute Publications The Liturgy of the Medieval Church
This volume seeks to address the needs of teachers and advanced students who are preparing classes on the Middle Ages or who find themselves confounded in their studies by reference to the various liturgies that were fundamental to the lives of medieval peoples. In a series of essays, scholars of the liturgy examine "The Shape of the Liturgical Year," "Particular Liturgies," "The Physical Setting of the Liturgy," "The Liturgy and Books," and "Liturgy and the Arts." A concluding essay, which originated in notes left behind by the late C. Clifford Flanigan, seeks to open the field, to examine "liturgy" within the larger and more inclusive category of "ritual." "The essays are intended to be introductory but to provide the basic facts and the essential bibliography for further study. They approach particular problems assuming a knowledge of medieval Europe but little expertise in liturgical studies per se.
£35.00
Medieval Institute Publications Three Purgatory Poems: The Gast of Gy, Sir Owain, The Vision of Tundale
Though our modern understanding of the medieval doctrine of Purgatory is generally shaped by its presentation by Dante in the Divine Comedy, there is a lengthy history of speculation about the nature of such a place of purgation. Through these fourteenth-century Middle English poems, readers can experience something of the controversies that surfaced and resurfaced even after Aquinas had articulated his doctrine of the Communion of Saints. The Gast of Gy, as Foster notes, puts a human face on the doctrine of Purgatory, not only in the amiable, logical, and patient person of the Gast of Gy himself, . . . but also in the careful and cautious dialogue between the Gast and the Pryor who questions him. Sir Owain and The Vision of Tundale present two accounts of the purgatorial journeys of living individuals who are offered a chance to see the torments they have brought upon themselves by their less-than-perfect lives along with the opportunity to return and amend those lives. All three poems were quite popular, as was the doctrine of Purgatory itself. And why not? As Foster notes in his general introduction, it the doctrine of Purgatory had everything: adventure and adversity, suffering and excitement, and, most importantly, a profound theological warning wrapped in the joyful solace of communion with the departed and hope for our own sinful selves.
£22.00
Medieval Institute Publications Medieval Notaries and Their Acts: The 1327-1328 Register of Jean Holanie
The book explores the beginnings of the continental European notarial tradition, acquainting readers with the format of notarial documents, the books containing notarial acts, and with the variety of notarial acts. Sample documents have been selected for their interest and their illustration of specific types of contracts. All are from the 1327-28 notarial registry of Jean Holanie, the royal public notary of Montpellier.
£13.61
Medieval Institute Publications Sovereignty and Salvation in the Vernacular, 1050-1150: Das Ezzolied, Das Annolied, Die Kaiserchronik, vv. 247-667, Das Lob Salomons, Historia Judith
These texts will be of interest because they represent a kind of writing - at the intersection of ecclesiastical and secular power, drawing on the whole range of medieval Latin learning, yet written in vernacular verse - that is not found elsewhere in the European Middle Ages. In addition, they may be of use in teaching since, although relatively short, they illustrate a great number of characteristic medieval ways of writing and can be linked to a number of quite remarkable historical figures.
£17.50
Medieval Institute Publications Ava's New Testament Narratives: "When the Old Law Passed Away"
Ava is the first woman whose name we know who wrote in German. She wrote her poem - or poems - on the lives of John the Baptist and Jesus Christ sometime early in the twelfth century, no later than 1127. It seems certain that she was a layperson, and her work reflects a level of learning that raises all sorts of interesting questions about the education of the laity, especially the education of lay woman, and about the nature of authorship in the Middle Ages, generally and particularly in medieval Germany.
£17.50
Medieval Institute Publications The Regiment of Princes
Thomas Hoccleve was born in 1367 and entered government service as clerk in the office of the Privy Seal in 1387, an office that he held until his death in 1426. His earliest datable poem (the "Epistle of Cupid," a free translation of Christine de Pisan's "Epistre au Dieu d'Amour") was completed about 1402. The Regiment of Princes, written about 1410–11, was composed at a time when England was still feeling the consequences of the deposition of Richard II. Essentially it is addressed to a prince on the subject of his governance, but it exhibits considerable generic instability and thus raises fundamental questions about how we should understand the tone of considerable portions of the poem. For all the problems it presents, The Regiment shows that Hoccleve has strengths as a poet. At times he could be a very talented prosodist. In autobiographical sections of the poem he creates a most interesting early-modern subjectivity. He has distinctive observations to make about his time, and, in his self-critical awareness, probes the limits of what is means to be a poet writing in the wake of Chaucer.
£22.00
Medieval Institute Publications Romance Epic: Essays on a Medieval Literary Genre
The collection of essays in Romance Epic expertly examines the Romance epic as a genre, delving into its ever-changing period, audience, and region. The essays span across a wide range of different topics: the specificity of the Romance epic and how well it fits into the genre of epic at all, the structure of the chansons de geste, school influences on the Old French, the reconstruction of lost chansons de geste, the evolution of the genre through centuries, and topics specific to certain works, such as problems in the Chanson de Roland and the El Cantar de Mio Cid.
£17.50
Medieval Institute Publications The Idea of Music: An Introduction to Musical Aesthetics in Antiquity and the Middle Ages
Music has long been neglected by aestheticians, who tend to privilege discussions of visual arts and literature. In this volume, Herbert M. Schueller brings the aesthetics of music into the fold, tracing the development of the idea from classical antiquity through the medieval period. He writes in a manner accessible to scholars whose specialties lie outside of technical music theory, keeping in mind especially the aesthetician but also general medieval scholars, and even the general reader.
£100.00