Name: Realities and Fantasies of German Female Leadership
Brand: Elisabeth Krimmer
Price: 45.95 USD
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Elisabeth Krimmer

Realities and Fantasies of German Female Leadership

$45.95

A collection of essays achieving a deeper understanding of the historical roots and theoretical assumptions that inform the realities and fantasies of German female leadership.

The Western tradition of excluding women from leadership and disparaging their ability to lead has persisted for centuries, not least in Germany. Even today, resistance to women holding power is embedded in literary, cultural, and historical values that presume a fundamental opposition between the adjective "female" and the substantive "leader." Women who do achieve positions of leadership are faced with a panoply of prejudicial misconceptions: either considered incapable of leadership (conceived of as alpha-male behavior), or pigeonholed as suited only to particular forms of leadership (nurturing, cooperative, egalitarian, communicative, etc.).

Focusing on the German-speaking countries, this volume works to dismantle the prevailing disassociation of women and leadership across a range of disciplines. Contributions discuss literary works involving women's political authority and cultivation of community from Maria Antonia of Saxony to Elfriede Jelinek; women's social activism, as embodied by figures from Hedwig Dohm to Rosa Luxemburg; women in political film, environmentalism, neoliberalism, and the media from Leni Riefenstahlto Petra Kelly to Maren Ade; and political leaders Hillary Clinton and Angela Merkel.

Contributors: Dorothee Beck, Seth Berk, Friederike Brühöfener, Margaretmary Daley, Aude Defurne, Helga Druxes, Sarah Vandegrift Eldridge, Anke Gilleir, Rachel J. Halverson, Peter Hudis, Elisabeth Krimmer, Stephen Milder, Joyce Marie Mushaben, Lauren Nossett, Patricia Anne Simpson, Almut Spalding, Inge Stephan, Lisa Fetheringill Zwicker.

Elisabeth Krimmer is Professor of German at the University of California, Davis. Patricia Anne Simpson is Professor of German at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Realities and Fantasies of German Female Leadership

Jacqueline Vansant

Austria Made in Hollywood

$29.99

Considers over sixty Hollywood films set in Austria, examining the film industry, the influence of domestic factors on images of a foreign country, and the persistence of clichés.

Maria von Trapp, watching the final scene of The Sound of Music for the first time as "her" family escaped into Switzerland, exclaimed, "Don't they know geography in Hollywood? Salzburg does not border on Switzerland!" Hadshe thought about the beginning of the film, which transports viewers to "Salzburg, Austria in the last Golden Days of the Thirties," when the country was in fact suffering from extreme political and social unrest, she might haveasked, "Don't they know history either?" In The Sound of Music as well as in Hollywood's many other "Austria" films, the projections on the screen resemble reflections in a funhouse mirror. Elements of a "real" place with a"real" history inhabited by "real" people can be found in the fractured distortions, which have both drawn from and contributed to the general public's perceptions of the country and its citizens.
Austria Made in Hollywood focuses on films set in an identifiable Austria, examining them through the lenses of the historical contexts on both sides of the Atlantic and the prism of the ever-changing domestic film industry. The study chronicles theprotean screen images of Austria and Austrians that set them apart both from European projections of Austria and from Hollywood incarnations of other European nations and nationals. It explores explicit and implicit cultural commentaries on domestic and foreign issues inserted in the Austrian stories while considering the many, sometimes conflicting forces that shaped the films.

Steuart Bedford

Knowing Britten

$29.99

Knowing Britten is a vivid and insightful account of Steuart Bedford's long association with both Britten the man and his music - 2021 Book of the Year -Presto Music

The conductor and pianist Steuart Bedford (1939-2021) could not remember a time when he did not know Benjamin Britten. His mother, Lesley Duff, sang with the English Opera Group in the premieres of The Rape of Lucretia and Albert Herrring in the late 1940s, and the family was closely involved with Britten and Pears for many years. Following his music studies and time on the music staff at Glyndebourne, Bedford joined the English Opera Group, gradually becoming Britten's trusted surrogate conductor. As Britten's health began to fail, he took on responsibility for the premiere performances of Britten's final opera, Death in Venice, including its US premiere at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, and the dramatic cantata Phaedra among others.

Mila Ganeva

Film and Fashion amidst the Ruins of Berlin

$36.95

Shows how cinematic treatments of fashion during times of crisis offer subtle reflections on the everyday lives, desires, careers, and self-perceptions of postwar German women.

This book steers attention toward two key aspects of German culture - film and fashion - that shared similar trajectories and multiple connections, looking at them not only in the immediate postwar years but as far back as 1939. They formed spectacular sites of the postwar recovery processes in both East and West Germany. Viewed against the background of the abundant fashion discourses in the Berlin-based press, the films discussed include classics such as The Murderers Are among Us, Street Acquaintance, and Destinies of Women as well as neglected works such as And the Heavens above Us, Martina, Modell Bianka, and Ingrid. These films' treatments of fashion during times of crisis offer subtle reflections on the everyday lives, desires, careers, and self-perceptions of the women who made up a large majority of the postwar public. Costume - in films produced both by DEFA and by West German studios - is a productive site to explore the intersections between realism and escapism. With its focus on costumes within the context of the films' production, distribution, and reception, this book opens up wider discussions about the role of the costume designer, the ways film costumes can be read as intertexts, and the impact on audiences' behaviors and looks. The book reveals multiple connections between film and fashion, both across the temporal dividing line of 1945 and the Cold War split between East and West.

Mila Ganeva is Department Chair and Professor of German at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio.

Film and Fashion amidst the Ruins of Berlin

David Paulson

Family Firms in Postwar Britain and Germany

$39.95

Examines the culture and conduct of six small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in England and West Germany from 1945 to the late-1970s, drawing on numerous archives in Germany and Britain.

This is the first book length study that examines the detailed histories of SMEs in a comparative, transnational manner. Emerging from this study is an evaluation of German and British varieties of capitalism in action, showing that they were not fixed or static, but rather have changed considerably as they evolved over time.

The German companies studied formed part of the Mittelstand, the family-owned sector which is unique to German-speaking countries. This book explores whether the principles of a close identification with the surrounding region and a patriarchal culture within a 'family' atmosphere were adopted in practice then, and whether they are still applicable today.

Paulson compares the Mittelstand to British SMEs in order to understand how their approach differed from that of their German counterparts. For both countries, the 'ecosystem' which surrounded businesses is examined, paying particular attention to funding and vocational education. The book concludes that the potential for a British Mittelstand existed, but that British companies were often less well managed and had to operate within a less supportive external environment than that which favoured the Mittelstand.

Historical lessons learned from the management of these companies still resonate today, and can help us to understand contemporary differences in business performance. This book will therefore be of interest to scholars and students of twentieth-century business and economic history, as well as management studies.

Family Firms in Postwar Britain and Germany

Sally Francis

Burnham Norton Friary after the Dissolution

$29.99

The story of the fate of a small Norfolk priory after its dissolution by Henry VIII in 1538 shows how both its medieval and modern history can be recovered by archival and physical research.

Burnham Norton Friary, one of the first Carmelite houses founded in England (1242-47), was dissolved in 1538. Its remains comprise the restored gatehouse, west gable of the church rebuilt as a barn, Friary Cottage and an open space which was once the precinct.

The post-Dissolution history of monastic sites has generally not been well studied. At Norton, nothing was known of its owners between 1561 and 1914, what relationships, if any, they had, or how they used the site. The fate of the Friary buildings was poorly understood and details of the gatehouse restoration unknown. In this pioneering study, Sally Francis uses both modern archival research and a survey of local houses to recover the history and something of the architecture of the friary. Between 1538 and 1848 the church became a barn and the rest of the site was used as a farmstead. In 1848, its owner restored the gatehouse (1848/9), saving it from dereliction, but cleared away the farm buildings to turn the site into an 'Antiquarian relic.'

Studying the post-Dissolution history of the site has been a valuable exercise. It not only allows that phase of the site to be understood, it also illuminates aspects of the site's earlier history, which, given the loss of the Friary's own archives, could not otherwise be studied.

Burnham Norton Friary after the Dissolution

Edited by Janet Hadley Williams

Textual and Bibliographical Studies in Older Scots Literature

$36.95

Seminal investigations into the most important aspects of medieval Scots texts, with a particular focus on editing and manuscript context.

This rich selection from the writings of Priscilla Bawcutt, the major scholar of Older Scots literature, both honours her achievement and provides authoritative guidance to all involved in the pleasures and challenges of medieval and early modern Scottish studies.

The first five chapters, including a hitherto unpublished paper, gather her insights into how to examine, contextualize, and edit early poetic texts. Among her discussions are those on the importance of explanatory notes, the usefulness of fragments, the demands of transcription, and the need for objectivity when identifying supposed influences, date, or author. Bawcutt draws on a variety of texts, including Dunbar's "elrich fantasyis", Rolland's Court of Venus, and metrical Scottish charms to illustrate these aspects of editing. Two central chapters then give balance and coherence to the complex evidence of change in literary activities and tastes in early Scotland. First, an analytical survey of manuscript miscellanies, noting their diversity in size, condition, arrangement, copyists, owners, and purposes, offers many different ways to approach these compilations. Secondly, Bawcutt's study of one particular miscellany, the great five-part Bannatyne Manuscript, provides new information on the sources and authors of the many texts it contains and the diversity of their literary and cultural connections. Five further chapters combine textual and bibliographical studies with contextual explorations, into personal libraries, habits of reading, annotators, and book circulation within family groups, across borders, or over time. Among these illuminating essays are those on Gavin Douglas's imaginary library, and the influential first printed edition of his Eneados, both of increasing interest alongside the new edition of his translation.
A full bibliography of Priscilla Bawcutt's publications is also included.

Textual and Bibliographical Studies in Older Scots Literature

Elizabeth Emery, Richard Utz

Medievalism: Key Critical Terms

$36.95

Definitions of key words and terms for the study of medievalism.

The discipline of medievalism has produced a great deal of scholarship acknowledging the "makers" of the Middle Ages: those who re-discovered the period from 500 to 1500 by engaging with its cultural works, seeking inspiration from them, or fantasizing about them. Yet such approaches - organized by time period, geography, or theme - often lack an overarching critical framework. This volume aims to provide such a framework, by calling into question the problematic yet commonly accepted vocabulary used in Medievalism Studies. The contributions, by leading scholars in the field, define and exemplify in a lively and accessible style the essential terms used when speaking of the later reception of medieval culture.

The terms: Archive, Authenticity, Authority, Christianity, Co-disciplinarity, Continuity, Feast, Genealogy, Gesture, Gothic, Heresy, Humor, Lingua, Love, Memory, Middle, Modernity, Monument, Myth, Play, Presentism, Primitive, Purity, Reenactment, Resonance, Simulacrum, Spectacle, Transfer, Trauma, Troubadour

Elizabeth Emery is Professor of French and Graduate Coordinator at Montclair State University (Montclair, NJ, USA); Richard Utz is Chair and Professor of Medievalism Studies in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech (Atlanta, GA, USA).

Contributors: Nadia Altschul, Martin Arnold, Kathleen Biddick, William C. Calin, Martha Carlin, Pam Clements, Michael Cramer, Louise D'Arcens, Elizabeth Emery, Elizabeth Fay, Vincent Ferré, Matthew Fisher, Karl Fugelso, Jonathan Hsy, Amy S. Kaufman, Nadia Margolis, David Matthews,Lauryn S. Mayer, Brent Moberly, Kevin Moberly, Gwendolyn Morgan, Laura Morowitz, Kevin D. Murphy, Nils Holger Petersen, Lisa Reilly, Edward Risden, Carol L. Robinson, Juanita Feros Ruys, Tom Shippey, Clare A. Simmons, Zrinka Stahuljak, M. Jane Toswell, Richard Utz, Angela Jane Weisl.

F. H. M. Le Saux

A Companion to Wace

$36.95

Guide to the works of the twelfth-century chronicler Wace, setting him in his historical and cultural context.

The twelfth-century writer Wace is best known for his two influential works on the history of England (the Roman de Brut) and on the history of the Normans (the Roman de Rou), but despite this he has, until recently,been neglected. This book aims to provide a comprehensive overview of all his surviving works, including his hagiographical pieces, La Vie de sainte Marguerite, la Vie de saint Nicolas and La Conception Nostre Dame.Beginning with an examination of the historical and textual background necessary to an informed understanding of the poet, it moves on to discuss the manuscript tradition of each of Wace's poems, together with the sources that underlie each text, highlighting the additions, omissions and modifications made by the poet in adapting his material for new, non-Latinate audience. Particular attention is given to Wace's swan-song, the Roman de Rou, wherehis skill in combining history and romance is most clearly revealed.

Dr F. H. M. Le Saux teaches in the Department of French at the University of Reading.

Takami Matsuda, Richard A. Linenthal, John Scahill

The Medieval Book and a Modern Collector

$64.95

New research into medieval English literature, with a particular focus on manuscripts and writing.

This acclaimed study of English medieval manuscripts and early printed books - many items from Professor Takamiya's own collection - quickly sold out in hardcover. The subjects range from Saint Jerome to Tolkien, with particular concentrations on Chaucer, Gower, Malory and religious and historical writings of the late middle ages. There are essays examining the work of early printers such as Caxton and de Worde, and of bibliophiles and antiquarians in modern times. Befitting a tribute to a bibliophile, this volume has been handsomely designed by Lida Kindersley of the Cardozo Kindersley Workshop in Cambridge, and is extensively illustrated. The volume as a whole constitutes a substantial body of research on medieval English literature, and early books and manuscripts.

Contributors: Richard Barber, Nicolas Barker, Richard Beadle, N.F. Blake, Julia Boffey, Piero Boitani, Derek Brewer, Helen Cooper, A.I. Doyle, Martha W. Driver, A.S.G. Edwards, P.J.C. Field, Christopher de Hamel, Ralph Hanna, Lotte Hellinga, Kristian Jensen, Edward Donald Kennedy, Richard A. Linenthal, Jill Mann, Takami Matsuda, David McKitterick, Rosamond McKitterick, Linne R. Mooney, Ruth Morse, Daniel W. Mosser, Tsuyoshi Mukai, Paul Needham, M.B. Parkes, Derek Pearsall, Oliver Pickering, P.R. Robinson, Michael G. Sargent, John Scahill, Kathleen L. Scott, Jeremy J. Smith, Isamu Takahashi, John J. Thompson, Linda Ehrsam Voigts, Yoko Wada, Bonnie Wheeler, Patrick Zutshi.

The Medieval Book and a Modern Collector

Elizabeth A. Andersen

Mechthild of Magdeburg: Selections from The Flowing Light of the Godhead

$29.99

Selections from this widely varied original mystical treatise offer insight into the lives of C13 female religious in northern Europe.

Here is one of the great surprises of German medieval literature. Compiled between c.1250 and c.1282, it is an extraordinary piece of imaginative writing. It integrates visions, auditions, dialogues, prayers, hymns, lyrical love poems, letters, allegories and parables, and draws creatively on features from hagiography, the disputation, the treatise, and magic spells, as the author documents her relationship with God and with her contemporaries. Selectionsfrom the text are presented here in translation with introduction and notes.

Dr Elizabeth A. Andersen teaches in the School of Modern Languages, Newcastle University.

Mechthild of Magdeburg: Selections from <I>The Flowing Light of the Godhead</I>

Kathleen Garay, Madeleine Jeay

The Life of Saint Douceline, a Beguine of Provence

$29.99

Douceline de Digne, founder of the beguine community of the Ladies of Roubaud in Provence, was an important woman mystic of her time; contextual material includes comparison with the beguines of northern Europe.

The Life of Douceline de Digne introduces to an English-speaking audience a 13th-century woman mystic [d.1274] of great significance in the study of female spirituality in the middle ages. Douceline combined an active life of community service [as Mother of the beguine community the Ladies of Roubaud] with vigorous mysticism, and was the focus of an intense cult in Provence after her death. The Life, probably written by Philippa de Porcellet, a member of Douceline's community in Marseilles, is complemented by a study of Douceline's importance in terms of her own spiritual experience, and also as founder and leader of the community, dedicated followers of Franciscan spirituality; she is also compared to other holy women of the later middle ages, especially the beguines of northern Europe.

The Life of Saint Douceline, a Beguine of Provence

Andrew Wawn

The Vikings and the Victorians

$49.95

The first book-length treatment of C19 fascination with Norse heroes.

This is the first book-length treatment of the Victorians' fascination with the old north. It explores the ways in which the terms 'Viking' and 'Viking Age', both unknown in 1800, were invented, explored and popularised during thenineteenth century. The material examined - published and unpublished - includes novels, poems, plays, lectures, reviews, secondary school textbooks, saga-stead travelogues, private correspondence, art and music, as well as dictionaries, grammars and scholarly editions of eddas and sagas. In the cast of characters Sir Walter Scott, William Morris, Edward Elgar and Rudyard Kipling appear alongside long-forgotten amateur enthusiasts from Lerwick to the Isleof Wight. We follow the pursuit of Viking-related archaeology, dialectology, folklore, philology, runology and mythology. We see the old north used to legitimise many concepts and causes - from buccaneering mercantilism and imperial expansion to jury trial and women's rights. In drawing this wide range of materials together, Andrew Wawn presents a comprehensive and colourful account of the construction and translation of the Viking Age in Queen Victoria'sBritain.
ANDREW WAWN is Professor of Anglo-Icelandic Studies at the University of Leeds.

Alan Lupack, Barbara Tepa Lupack

King Arthur in America

$45.95

The first full-length study to focus exclusively on American reinterpretations of the Arthurian legends.

The Arthurian legends have had an immense and enduring appeal in America, influencing both America's own mythologies and its literature, film, social history, and popular culture. This is the first full-length study to focus exclusively on American re-interpretations of Arthuriana, and it offers detailed treatments of major authors traditionally associated with the legends, including Mark Twain, Edwin Arlington Robinson, T.S. Eliot, and John Steinbeck; italso explores the important use of Arthurian material by authors not usually considered in an Arthurian context, and by lesser-known writers. Among the topics addressed in the chronological survey are the beginnings of American Arthurian literature and the different reactions to Tennyson; satire and parody; the moralising of knighthood and the development of a body of didactic literature for children; and the reinterpretations of Arthurian tradition in theworks of contemporary writers such as Walker Percy and John Updike. A concluding chapter analyses Arthurian themes in American popular fiction and film and demonstrates the extent to which the Arthurian tradition has influenced American popular culture. The volume is completed with a comprehensive bibliography.
ALAN LUPACK is Curator of the Rossell Hope Robbins Library at the University of Rochester; BARBARA TEPA LUPACKis former AcademicDean at SUNY and Fulbright Professor of American Literature in Poland and France.

Sam Newton

The Origins of Beowulf

$29.99

A detailed and passionate argument suggesting that Beowulf originated in the pre-Viking kingdom of 8th-century East Anglia.

Where did Beowulf, unique and thrilling example of an Old English epic poem come from? In whose hall did the poem's maker first tell the tale? The poem exists now in just one manuscript, but careful study of the literary and historical associations reveals striking details which lead Dr Newton to claim, as he pieces together the various clues, a specific origin for the poem.
Dr Newton suggests that references in Beowulf to the heroes whose names are listed in Anglo-Saxon royal genealogies indicate that such Northern dynastic concerns are most likely to have been fostered in the kingdom of East Anglia. He supports his thesis with evidence drawn from East Anglianarchaeology, hagiography and folklore. His argument, detailed and passionate, offers the exciting possibility that he has discovered the lost origins of the poem in the pre-Viking kingdom of 8th-century East Anglia.

SAMNEWTON was awarded his Ph.D. for work on Beowulf.

Morton W. Bloomfield, Charles W. Dunn

The Role of the Poet in Early Societies

$29.99

This study draws on a wide range of texts - early Irish, pre-modern Scottish Gaelic, early Welsh, Early Norse, Old English -to illustrate the role of the poet as a tool of power, as seer, and as ceremonial figure.

Todd Gray

Devon Parish Taxpayers, 1500-1650: Volume Three

$39.95

112 tax lists for Devon for the period from 1500 to 1650.

Tax lists are a key means of understanding parish life in the 1500s and early 1600s. This collection of 112 records for towns and villages such as Crediton and Dartmouth is published here for the first time. It reveals those individuals who were the bedrock of their societies and helps us in understanding how local society worked in this period. It is through the study of these documents that we can unravel how differently each parish was organised in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and see how people took part in parish life. The name lists also provide rich material for family and local historians.

Devon Parish Taxpayers, 1500-1650: Volume Three

Riina Turtio

State-building and National Militaries in Postcolonial West Africa

$39.95

Explores the fundamental role of the military in state-building in francophone postcolonial West Africa and how foreign economic and military aid has influenced it.

How did African armed forces in postcolonial states in francophone West Africa influence decolonization and state-building in African states? How did foreign assistance from ex-colonial powers, the USSR and the US and colonial state structures influence political systems, and sometimes result in weak and unstable governance? This book explores the development of national militaries in Cote d'Ivoire, Dahomey (now Benin), Guinea, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal, Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso) and Togo during the 1960s and 1970s. Revealing the strength of decision-making power by African political elites, the study also shows the decisive impact of foreign economic and military assistance on countries that did not experience a prolonged armed conflict. The author provides new insights into the way the decisions of African governments in building their national militaries impacted postcolonial states' autonomy, legitimacy, sovereign control and governance.
In West Africa, during the 1960s, France sought to maintain exclusive relations with its former colonies through military assistance, economic aid and close personal relations with African political and military elites. State coercive capacities extended far beyond the strength of political institutions, with soldiers' assumption of political roles linked to the weaknesses of colonial and postcolonial structures. Disagreements between French and American officials, as well as Arab-Israeli and Sino-Russo conflicts, increased African presidents' opportunities to mobilize external resources. Yet in the late 1980s, it became evident that national militaries and police were often the main causes of personal insecurity, rather than providing protection, and that some economies remained weak and political structures unstable.

This book is available as an Open Access ebook under the Creative Commons license CC-BY-NC. The open access version of this publication was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

State-building and National Militaries in Postcolonial West Africa

Charles Davis, J.E. Varey

Los Corrales de Comedias y los Hospitales de Madrid: 1574-1615

$85.00

Theatre archives from Madrid hospitals, in the period before municipal administration of theatres.

This is the first part of a two-volume edition of the surviving theatrical documents from the archives of the old Madrid hospitals, founders of the capital's playhouses. This book covers the first four decades of the corrales, a key period inwhich the hospitals still administered their theatres directly (and which therefore hardly figures in the municipal documentation published in previous volumes). It includes the original sale contracts of the theatres, from 1579-1582, and the account books for 1579-1587, and indispensable source of information on the acting companies, the construction of the theatres and the early stages of the theatre business in Madrid. The introduction contains a database analysis of the account books, illustrated with graphs and tables, and the volume includes calendars of performances and an index of names and places.

Los Corrales de Comedias y los Hospitales de Madrid: 1574-1615

Mary Salu

Essays on Troilus and Criseyde

$29.99

`Each essay opens up new directions without ignoring past critical trends...an important guide for new approaches to the text and meaning of Troilus and Criseyde and, as such, an important contribution to Chaucerian scholarship.' CHOICE`Are we to take the tone from the ending and read the whole poem ironically? Or read it sympathetically and dismiss the ending...? These interesting pieces share a determination to deal thoroughly with whatappear minor aspects of the poem and see if those offer any guide to the whole.' TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENTConntributors: ALFRED DAVID, JOHN FRANKIS, ALAN T. GAYLORD, MARK LAMBERT, JOHN McKINNELL, JAMES WIMSATT, BARRY WINDEATT.

Glenda McLeod, Charity Cannon Willard

The Vision of Christine de Pizan

$29.99

Translation of Christine's autobiographical Vision, both dealing with her own life and career, and offering a possible solution to the troubled state of France at the time.

Christine de Pizan's The Vision is both a powerful contemporary response to the chaos that would eventually precipitate Henry V's invasion of France, and a fascinating view of the author's own progress as a woman reader, writer, and public commentator in the late Middle Ages. As a long-time intimate of the French court, Christine here analyses the origins of the civil strife in which France found itself in 1405, and offers a possible future, callingfor its resolution in the voice of a prophet. Alongside her documentation of the difficulties faced by a medieval woman left widowed early in life, she also explores issues of gender and authorship, interpretation and misinterpretation in her remarkable career as a writer and advisor of princes.

Glenda McLeod is Professor Emerita, Gainesville State College; Charity Cannon Willard was Professor Emerita, Ladycliff College.

Sheila M. Bell

Nathalie Sarraute

$29.95

Published by Boydell & Brewer Inc.

Albrecht Classen

Late-Medieval German Women's Poetry

$29.99

A considerable collection of German women's poetry in translation, results of ingenious archival research.

Although there were a number of outstanding women writers of the late middle ages, it was not thought that women composed lyric poetry. Classen proves this to be a misconception, presenting here a selection of secular love songs and religious hymns composed by fifteenth- and sixteenth-century German women poets, translated for the first time. Many seem to have left their works anonymously, or hid their names using acrostics; in these and other cases, Classen has identified a considerable corpus of writing which now fills the gap previously supposed to exist in the history of medieval and early-modern German women's poetry.

Dr Albrecht Classen is University DistinguishedProfessor and Undergraduate Advisor in the Department of German Studies, University of Arizona

Marigold Best

Ramón Pérez de Ayala

$36.95

Published by Boydell & Brewer Inc.

Louise D'Arcens

Comic Medievalism

$29.99

First full-length critical study of humour in medievalism.

The role of laughter and humour in the postmedieval citation, interpretation or recreation of the middle ages has hitherto received little attention, a gap in scholarship which this book aims to fill. Examining a wide range of comic texts and practices across several centuries, from Don Quixote and early Chaucerian modernisation through to Victorian theatre, the Monty Python films, television and the experience of visiting sites of "heritage tourism" such as the Jorvik Viking Museum at York, it identifies what has been perceived as uniquely funny about the Middle Ages in different times and places, and how this has influenced ideas not just about the medieval but also aboutmodernity. Tracing the development and permutations of its various registers, including satire, parody, irony, camp, wit, jokes, and farce, the author offers fresh and amusing insight into comic medievalism as a vehicle for critical commentary on the present as well as the past, and shows that for as long as there has been medievalism, people have laughed at and with the middle ages.

Louise D'Arcens is Associate Professor in English Literaturesat the University of Wollongong.

Siân Echard

A Companion to Gower

$36.95

An introduction to Gower and his work, focusing on his sources, historical context and literary tradition; special attention is paid to Confessio Amantis.

Chaucer, Gower and Lydgate were the three poets of their time considered to have founded the English poetic tradition. Gower, like Lydgate, eventually fell victim to changing tastes but is now enjoying renewed scholarly attention.Current work in manuscript studies, linguistic studies, vernacularity, translation, politics, and the contexts of literary production has found a rich source in Gower's trilingual, learned, and politically engaged corpus. This Companion to Gower offers essays by scholars from Britain and North America, covering Gower's works in all three of his languages; they consider his relationships to his literary sources, and to his social, material and historical contexts; and they offer an overview of the manuscript, linguistic, and editorial traditions. Five essays concentrate specifically on the Confessio Amantis, Gower's major Middle English work, reading it in terms of its relationship to vernacular and classical models, its poetic style, and its treatment of such themes as politics, kingship, gender, sexuality, authority, authorship and self-governance. A reference bibliography, arranged as a chronologyof criticism, concludes the volume.

Contributors J.A. BURROW, ARDIS BUTTERFIELD, NATHALIE COHEN, E.H. COOPER, SIAN ECHARD, ROBERT EPSTEIN, JOHN HINES, EDWARD MOORE, DEREK PEARSALL, RUSSELL PECK, A.G. RIGG, SIMON ROFFEY, JEREMY J. SMITH, DIANE WATT, WINTHROP WETHERBEE, ROBERT F. YEAGER.

SIAN ECHARD is associate professor, Department of English, University of British Columbia.
The Companion can serve as an introduction to Gower and his works for the advanced undergraduate or graduate student, and the essays will also be of interest to experts in Middle English studies and in Gower.

Conor McCarthy

Seamus Heaney and Medieval Poetry

$29.99

First examination of the use made by Seamus Heaney of medieval poetry in his translations and adaptations, including the acclaimed Beowulf.

A remarkable survey of Heaney's work and its debt to medieval poetry. [...]McCarthy has presented a compelling analysis of Heaney's use of medieval poetry. THE MEDIEVAL REVIEW

Seamus Heaney's engagement with medieval literature constitutes a significant body of work by a major poet that extends across four decades, including a landmark translation of Beowulf. This book, the first to look exclusively at this engagement, examines both Heaney's direct translations and his adaptation of medieval material in his original poems. Each of the four chapters focuses substantially on a single major text: Sweeney Astray (1983), Station Island [1984], Beowulf [1999] and The Testament of Cresseid [2004]. The discussion examines Heaney's translation practice in relation to source texts from a variety of languages [Irish, Italian, Old English, and Middle Scots] from across themedieval period, and also in relation to Heaney's own broader body of work. It suggests that Heaney's translations and adaptations give a contemporary voice to medieval texts, bringing the past to bear upon contemporary concernsboth personal and political.

CONOR MCCARTHY gained his PhD from Trinity College Dublin.

Vera Morton, Jocelyn Wogan-Browne

Guidance for Women in Twelfth-Century Convents

$29.99

Collection of letters and texts offering guidance for nuns, and including selections from Abelard's letters to Heloise.

These translated letters and texts composed for younger and older women in twelfth-century convents illuminate the powerful medieval ideals of virginity and chastity. Abelard's history of women's roles in the church and his letteron women's education, both written for Heloise in her work as abbess, are seen here alongside previously untranslated letters and texts for abbesses and nuns in England and France. An interpretive essay explores the practical and spiritual engagement of women's convents with medieval commemorative and memorial practices, showing that the professional concern of women religious with death goes far beyond the stereotype of nuns as dead to the world, or enclosed in living death.

VERA MORTON gained an MA in Medieval Studies at the University of Liverpool in 1994. JOCELYN WOGAN-BROWNE is Professor of English at Fordham University, NY.

Guidance for Women in Twelfth-Century Convents

Margaret Clunies Ross

A History of Old Norse Poetry and Poetics

$36.95

Accessible guide to and description of the medieval poetic tradition in Scandinavia.

This is the first book in English to deal with the twin subjects of Old Norse poetry and the various vernacular treatises on native poetry that were a conspicuous feature of medieval intellectual life in Iceland and the Orkneys from the mid-twelfth to the fourteenth centuries. Its aim is to give a clear description of the rich poetic tradition of early Scandinavia, particularly in Iceland, where it reached its zenith, and to demonstrate the social contextsthat favoured poetic composition, from the oral societies of the early Viking Age in Norway and its colonies to the devout compositions of literate Christian clerics in fourteenth-century Iceland.
The author analyses the two dominant poetic modes, eddic and skaldic, giving fresh examples of their various styles and subjects; looks at the prose contexts in which most Old Norse poetry has been preserved; and discusses problems of interpretation thatarise because of the poetry's mode of transmission. She is concerned throughout to link indigenous theory with practice, beginning with the pre-Christian ideology of poets as favoured by the god ódinn and concluding with the Christian notion that a plain style best conveys the poet's message.

Margaret Clunies Ross is McCaughey Professor of English Language and Early English Literature and Director of the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Sydney.

A History of Old Norse Poetry and Poetics

A.S.G. Edwards

A Companion to Middle English Prose

$36.95

Survey of and guide to all the major authors and genres in Middle English prose.

The essays in this volume provide an up-to-date and authoritative guide to the major prose Middle English authors and genres. Each chapter is written by a leading authority on the subject and offers a succinct account of all relevant literary, history and cultural factors that need to considered, together with bibliographical references. Authors examined include the writers of the Ancrene Wisse, the Katherine Group and the Wohunge Group; Richard Rolle; Walter Hilton; Nicholas Love; Julian of Norwich; Margery Kempe; "Sir John Mandeville"; John Trevisa, Reginald Pecock; and John Fortescue. Genres discussed include romances, saints' lives, letters, sermon literature, historicalprose, anonymous devotional writings, Wycliffite prose, and various forms of technical writing. The final chapter examines the treatment of Middle English prose in the first age of print.

Contributors: BELLA MILLETT, RALPH HANNA III, AD PUTTER, KANTIK GHOSH, BARRY A. WINDEATT, A.C. SPEARING, IAN HIGGINS, A.S.G. EDWARDS, VINCENT GILLESPIE, HELEN L. SPENCER, ALFRED HIATT, FIONA SOMERSET, HELEN COOPER, GEORGE KEISER, OLIVER S. PICKERING, JAMES SIMPSON, RICHARD BEADLE, ALEXANDRA GILLESPIE.

Angel Suárez Muñoz

El Teatro en Badajoz: 1860-1886

$85.00

Catalogue, with full introduction, of theatrical performances in Badajoz in the latter part of the nineteenth century.

This volume catalogues performances in Badajoz, briefly between 1860 and 1863, and fully from 1864, when the newspaper La crónica de Badajoz, a basic source for the whole work, was founded. The catalogue concludes with theinauguration of the newTeatro López de Ayala in 1886. The introduction analyses information on theatres, repertory companies and theatre business.

Hilda R Ellis Davidson

A Companion to the Fairy Tale

$36.95

Offers an excellent introduction to the work currently and historically being done on fairy tales by folk-lorists. MEDIEVAL REVIEW

Introduction by Derek Brewer.
This book discusses the characteristics of the traditional fairy tale in Europe and North America, and various theories of its development and interpretation. The book deals with the main collections - the Grimm brothers, Hans Andersen, Perrault and Afanes'ev - and with the development of tales in various regions of Europe, including Ireland, Wales, Scandinavia, Germany and Russia, as well as India, where it was once claimed that they originated.
The subject of the fairy tale is a controversial one: problems discussed here include the relationship between tales recorded from story-tellers and literary works, the importance of printed worksfor the spread of the tales, the growth of recent examples with a feminine approach, the spread of popular tales like Cinderella, special types like the cumulative tales, possible effects of TV, and the nature of traditional plots and characters. Above all, the collection is concerned with the distribution and long survival of these tales, and the nature of their appeal.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE KATHARINE BRIGGS FOLKLORE AWARD 2004.

Contributors: GRAHAM ANDERSON, DAVID BLAMIRES, RUTH BOTTIGHEIMER, DEREK BREWER, MARY BROCKINGTON, ANNA CHAUDHRI, HILDA ELLIS DAVIDSON, ROBIN GWYNDAF, BENGT HOLBEK, DAVID HUNT, REIMUND KVIDELAND, PATRICIA LYSAGHT, NEIL PHILIP, JAMES RIORDAN, PAT SCHAEFER, TOM SHIPPEY, JOYCE THOMAS.

Jeffrey Johnson

The Theology of John Donne

$29.99

John Donne discussed as an original religious thinker, drawing on his extant sermons for evidence of his personal theology.

John Donne is here treated as an original religious thinker; the evidence for the distinguishing features of his theology is drawn primarily from his extant sermons studied in context, beginning with an exploration of what is forDonne the fundamental belief for regulating Christian faith and practice, the doctrine of the Trinity. Building on this theological groundwork, Johnson goes on to examine such topics as Donne's understanding of common prayer; thepre-eminence of sight and spectacle, in terms of religious self-fashioning and the iconoclastic controversy; the doctrine of repentance, in conjunction with Donne's own sense of clerical calling; and the doctrine of grace, including Donne's views regarding the controversy over the Lord's Supper.
JEFFREY JOHNSON is Professor of English at Northern Illinois University.

Robert de Boron, Nigel Bryant

Merlin and the Grail

$29.99

This trilogy establishes a provenance for the Holy Grail and, through the figure of Merlin, links Joseph of Arimathea with mythical British history and with the knightly adventures of Perceval's Grail quest.

It is hard to overstate the importance of this trilogy of prose romances in the development of the legend of the Holy Grail and in the evolution of Arthurian literature as a whole. They give a crucial new impetus to the story of the Grail by establishing a provenance for the sacred vessel - and for the Round Table itself - in the Biblical past; and through the controlling figure of Merlin they link the story of Joseph of Arimathea with the mythical Britishhistory of Vortigern and Utherpendragon, the birth of Arthur, and the sword in the stone, and then with the knightly adventures of Perceval's Grail quest and the betrayal and death of Arthur, creating the very first Arthurian cycle. Ambitious, original and complete in its conception, this trilogy - translated here for the first time - is a finely paced, vigorous piece of storytelling that provides an outstanding example of the essentially oral nature of early prose.

NIGEL BRYANT is head of drama at Marlborough College. He has also provided editions in English of the anonymous thirteenth-century romance Perlesvaus, published as The High Book of the Grail, and Chretien's Perceval: The Story of the Grail.

Diane Watt

Secretaries of God

$29.99

A history of women prophets from medieval saints to radical Protestants.

Diane Watt sets aside the conventional hiatus between the medieval and early modern periods in her study of women's prophecy, following the female experience from medieval sainthood to radical Protestantism. The English women prophets and visionaries whose voices are recovered here all lived between the twelfth and the seventeenth centuries and claimed, through the medium of trances and eucharistic piety, to speak for God. They include Margery Kempe and the medieval visionaries, Elizabeth Barton (the Holy Maid of Kent), the Reformation martyr Anne Askew and other godly women described in John Foxe's Acts and Monuments, and Lady Eleanor Davies as an example of a woman prophetof the Civil War. The strategies women devised to be heard and read are exposed, showing that through prophecy they were often able to intervene in the religious and political discourse of the their times: the role of God's secretary gave them the opportunity to act and speak autonomously and publicly.

Winner of Foster Watson Memorial Gift for 1998.

Professor Diane Watt is Head of the School of English and Languages, University of Surrey.

Meg Twycross

Medieval English Theatre 43

$29.99

The ludic element of drama in the Middle Ages - or drama with early subject matter - is here to the fore.

Medieval English Theatre is the premier journal in early theatre studies. Its name belies its wide range of interest: it publishes articles on theatre and pageantry from across the British Isles up to the opening of the London playhouses and the suppression of the civic mystery cycles, and also includes contributions on European and Latin drama, together with analyses of modern survivals or equivalents, and of research productions of medieval plays.
This edition combines, perhaps unexpectedly, royalty and games. Games of all kinds, from jousting and "Christmas games" to those usually associated with children, are shown, it is suggested, to be more than they at first appear. Apparently run-of-the-mill entertainments, when presented to the court by the Londoners, by the court to a visiting emperor , or by the retainers of royalty and nobility to the general public for commercial gain, turn out to have unexpected political resonances; while the potential underlying sadism of children's games gains a horrific immediacy when diverted to the torturing of Christ. Even today, the musical SIX says a great deal more about royalty and role-playing than initially might appear, especially when set against eye-witness accounts of the first meeting of Anna of Cleves with Henry VIII, and what modern novelists have made of it . In the process we learn a great deal more about the detail of these games, from the maskerie costumes of James VI and Anna of Denmark to the elaborate fantasy challenges of the jousters in 1400/1401, which incidentally suggest that fourteenth-century court culture, whose language was Anglo-French, is a major missing link in the history of what is usually treated as purely English literature.

Contributors: Philip Bennett, Philip Butterworth, Sarah Carpenter, Elisabeth Dutton, James Forse, Gordon Kipling, Michael Pearce, Meg Twycross.

Julia Boffey, A.S.G. Edwards

A Companion to Fifteenth-Century English Poetry

$29.99

This collection of seventeen original essays by leading authorities offers, for the first time, a comprehensive overview of the significant authors and important aspects of fifteenth-century English poetry.

This collection of seventeen original essays by leading authorities offers, for the first time, a comprehensive overview of the significant authors and important aspects of fifteenth-century English poetry. The major poets of thecentury, John Lydgate and Thomas Hoccleve, receive detailed analysis, alongside perhaps lesser-known authors: John Capgrave, Osbern Bokenham, Peter Idley, George Ashby and John Audelay. In addition, several essays examine genres and topics, including romance, popular, historical and scientific poetry, and translations from the classics. Other chapters investigate the crucial contexts for approaching poetry of this period: manuscript circulation, patronageand the influence of Chaucer.

Julia Boffey is Professor of Medieval Studies at Queen Mary, University of London; A.S.G. Edwards is Professor of Medieval Manuscripts at the University of Kent.

Contributors: Anthony Bale, Julia Boffey, A.S.G. Edwards, Susanna Fein, Alfred Hiatt, Simon Horobin, Sarah James, Andrew King, Sheila Lindenbaum, Joanna Martin, Carol Meale, Robert Meyer-Lee, Ad Putter, John Scattergood, Anke Timmermann, DanielWakelin, David Watt.

A Companion to Fifteenth-Century English Poetry

Derek Brewer

Chaucer and his World

$29.99

Subtle and illuminating life of Chaucer, drawn against the turbulent backdrop of 14th century England.

`Brewer brings to his task a full scholarly knowledge of the sources of Chaucerian biography... Of obvious value to students reading Chaucer and to all who read him for pleasure; more advanced scholars will also find in it much toprovoke thought and advance understanding.' TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENTChaucer's tales, rich in comedy and pathos, have an immediate appeal; they draw freely and vividly from the romance and colour of the times in which he lived, and his world that of the second half of the 14th century is rich in cultural interest. It was a time of new exploration and new individualism, of peasant revolt and passionate religious dissent, and of a remarkable flowering of the arts. Chaucer lived at thevery centre of the action, and this book follows the stages of his career, illuminating with reference to the art and architecture of the time and through reference to his writings, the physicalenvironment and intellectual climate in which he lived. Reissue: first published 1978. DEREK BREWER was Professor of English Literature emeritus, University of Cambridge.

William D. Paden, Frances Freeman Paden

Troubadour Poems from the South of France

$36.95

Modern English translations of a wide selection of troubadour poems.

The poetry of the troubadours was famous throughout the middle ages, but the difficulty and diversity of the original languages have been obstacles to its appreciation by a wider audience. This collection aims to redress the situation, presenting English verse translations in contemporary idiom and a highly readable form. It includes some 125 poems, with a strong representation of those composed by women, and goes beyond traditional limits in time to feature a sampling of the earliest texts in the Occitan language, written in the tenth and eleventh centuries, and later works from the early fourteenth. Though most poems translated in the book were written in Occitan, the vernacularof southern France, there are also a few translations of poems written in the same place and time but in other languages, including Latin, Hebrew, Norse, Catalan, and Italian. Genres include love songs, satires, invectives, pastourelles, debates, laments, and religious songs.
A comprehensive introduction places the troubadours in their historical context and traces the development of their art; headnotes introduce each poet, and the book ends with a bibliography and suggestions for further reading.

WILLIAM D. PADEN is a Professor of French and Italian at Northwestern University, and was recently named a Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques. FRANCES FREEMAN PADEN is a Distinguished Senior Lecturer in The Writing Program and Gender Studies, also at Northwestern University.

Troubadour Poems from the South of France

Henry Ansgar Kelly

Chaucerian Tragedy

$36.95

A study of Chaucer's definition of tragedy - with special reference to Troilus -and its lasting influence on English dramatists.

This book is concerned with the medieval idea of what constituted tragedy; it suggests that it was not a common term, and that those few who used the term did not always intend the same thing by it. Kelly believes that it was Chaucer's work which shaped notions of the genre, and places his achievement in critical and historical context. He begins by contrasting modern with medieval theoretical approaches to genres, then discusses Boccaccio's concept of tragedy before turning to Chaucer himself, exploring the ideas of tragedy prevalent in medieval England and their influence on Chaucer, and showing how Chaucer interpreted the term. Troilus and Criseyde is analysed specifically as a tragedy, with an account of its reception in modern times; for comparison, there is an analysis of how John Lydgate and Robert Henryson, two of Chaucer's imitators, understood and practiced tragedy.
Professor HENRY ANSGAR KELLY teaches at UCLA.

John H. Arnold, Katherine J. Lewis

A Companion to the Book of Margery Kempe

$36.95

Margery Kempe and her Book studied in both literary and historical context.

Margery Kempe's Book provides rare access to the "marginal voice" of a lay medieval woman, and is now the focus of much critical study. This Companion seeks to complement the existing almost exclusively literary scholarship with work that also draws significantly on historical analysis, and is concerned to contextualise Kempe's Book in a number of different ways, using her work as a way in to the culture and society of medieval northern Europe. Topics include images and pilgrimage; women, work and trade in medieval Norfolk; political culture and heresy; the prophetic tradition; female mystics and the body; women's roles and lifecycle; religious drama and reenactment; autobiography and gender.

Contributors: JOHN H. ARNOLD, P.H. CULLUM, ISABEL DAVIS, ALLYSON FOSTER, JACQUELINE JENKINS, KATHERINE J. LEWIS, KATE PARKER, KIM M. PHILLIPS, SARAH SALIH, CLAIRE SPONSLER, DIANE WATT,BARRY WINDEATT.

A Companion to the Book of Margery Kempe

Jehan Wauquelin, Nigel Bryant

The Medieval Romance of Alexander

$36.95

Nigel Bryant's is the first translation of an example of the many medieval romances about Alexander, as popular in their day as those about Arthur.

The figure of Alexander the Great haunted the medieval imagination - as much as Arthur, as much as Charlemagne. His story was translated more often in medieval Europe than any work except the Gospels. Yet only small sections of the Alexander Romance have been translated into modern French, and Nigel Bryant's is the first translation into English.
The Deeds and Conquests of Alexander the Great is Jehan Wauquelin's superb compendium, written for the Burgundian court in the mid-fifteenth century, which draws together all the key elements of the Alexandrian tradition.With great clarity and intelligence Wauquelin produced a redaction of all the major Alexander romances ofthe twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries - including the verse Roman d'Alexandre, The Vows of the Peacock and La Venjance Alixandre - to tell the whole story of Alexander's miraculous birth and childhood, hisconquests of Persia and India, his battles with fabulous beasts and outlandish peoples, his journeys in the sky and under the sea, his poisoning at Babylon and the vengeance taken by his son.
This is an accomplished and exciting work by a notable writer at the Burgundian court who perfectly understood the appeal of the great conqueror to ambitious dukes intent upon extending their dominions.

NIGEL BRYANT has translated five major Arthurianromances from medieval French, including Perceforest in which Alexander features prominently. He has also translated the fourteenth-century chronicles of Jean le Bel.

Sharon L. Jansen

Anne of France: Lessons for my Daughter

$29.99

Anne of France (1461-1522) composed these lessons - presented as a portrait of an ideal princess - as guidance in negotiating the pitfalls facing a woman in the world of politics. First English translation.

Anne of France (1461-1522), daughter of Louis XI and sister of Charles VIII, was one of the most powerful women of her time. As the fifteenth century drew to a close, Anne composed a series of enseignements, "lessons", forher daughter Suzanne of Bourbon. These instructions represent a distillation of a lifetime's experience, and are presented through the portrait of an ideal princess to help her negotiate the difficult passage of a woman in the world of politics. The lessons are here translated into English for the first time and accompanied by full introduction, commentary and notes.

Professor Sharon L. Jansen teaches in the Department of English, Pacific Lutheran University.

Anne of France: <I>Lessons for my Daughter</I>

Sarah J. Ogilvie-Thomson

The Index of Middle English Prose Handlist VIII

$105.00

Published by Boydell & Brewer Inc.

The Index of Middle English Prose Handlist VIII

P.J.C. Field

The Life and Times of Sir Thomas Malory

$29.99

The most comprehensive consideration of the competing arguments for Malory's identitu yet undertaken.`A tour de force of historical scholarship and detective work - so good it sets the mind racing.'LITERARY REVIEW

Malory's stories of King Arthur and the Round Table have been widely read for centuries, but their author's own life has been as variously reported as that of any Arthurian knight. The first serious attempts to identify him were made in the 1890s, but the man who then seemed most likely to have written the book was later found to have been accused of attempted murder, rape, extortion, and sacrilegious robbery and to have spent ten years or more in prison.Could this be reconciled with the authorship of the most famous chivalric romance in English? Other candidates for authorship were proposed but there was little consensus.
This book gives the most comprehensive consideration of the competing arguments yet undertaken. It is a fascinating piece of detective work followed by a full account of the life of the man identified as theMalory. Close consideration of individual documents, many of whichwere entirely unknown in 1966, when the last book on Malory's life appeared, makes possible a fuller and more convincing story than has ever been told before.
Professor P.J.C. FIELD teaches in the Department of English at theUniversity of Wales, Bangor.

Sarah Salih

A Companion to Middle English Hagiography

$29.99

The Saints' Life was one of the most popular forms of literature in medieval England. This volume offers crucial information for an understanding of the genre.

The saints were the superheroes and the celebrities of medieval England, bridging the gap between heaven and earth, the living and the dead. A vast body of literature evolved during the middle ages to ensure that everyone, from kings to peasants, knew the stories of the lives, deaths and afterlives of the saints. However, despite its popularity and ubiquity, the genre of the Saint's Life has until recently been little studied. This collection introduces the canon of Middle English hagiography; places it in the context of the cults of saints; analyses key themes within hagiographic narrative, including gender, power, violence and history; and, finally, shows how hagiographic themessurvived the Reformation. Overall it offers both information for those coming to the genre for the first time, and points forward to new trends in research.
Dr SARAH SALIH is Senior Lecturer in English, King's College London.

Contributors: SAMANTHA RICHES, MARY BETH LONG, CLAIRE M. WATERS, ROBERT MILLS, ANKE BERNAU, KATHERINE J. LEWIS, MATTHEW WOODCOCK

A Companion to Middle English Hagiography

Elisabeth Brewer

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

$29.99

This anthology of medieval writing provides a context for a deeper understanding of the Gawain-poet's originality and skill.

The intertextuality of this brilliant poem can be more fully understood through Elisabeth Brewer's presentation of modern English versions of themes familiar from Gawain and the Green Knight -beheading, seduction and othertraditional material - from a range of medieval writings. Her book is a delightful and unusual small anthology of medieval literature; but its greatest success lies in providing a context for a fuller understanding of Sir Gawain, through its presentation of extracts and poems (including translation from Celtic and French originals) illustrating the tradition in which the Gawain-poet wrote, underscoring his own great achievement. It is both anintroduction to the poem and a useful tool for critical comparison. First published in 1975 as From Cuchulainn to Gawain.ELISABETH BREWERlectured in English at Homerton College, Cambridge.

Christopher Corèdon, Ann Williams

A Dictionary of Medieval Terms and Phrases

$29.95

The first dictionary of medieval terms intended for the non-specialist with an interest in the medieval world.

An interest in the middle ages often brings the non-specialist reader up short against a word or term which is not understood or only imperfectly understood. This dictionary is intended to put an end to all that: it has been designed to be of real help to general readers and specialists alike.
The dictionary contains some 3,400 terms as headwords, ranging from the legal and ecclesiastic to the more prosaic words of daily life. Latin was the language of the church, law and government, and many Latin terms illustrated here are frequently found in modern books of history of the period; similarly, the precise meaning of Old English and Middle English terms may elude today's reader: this dictionary endeavours to provide clarity. In addition to definition, etymologies of many words are given, in the belief that knowing the origin and evolution of a word gives a better understanding. There are also examples of medieval terms and phrases still in use today, a further aid to clarifying meaning.
CHRISTOPHER COREDON has also compiled the Dictionary of Cybernyms. Dr ANN WILLIAMS, historical consultant on the project, was until her retirement Senior Lecturer in medieval history at the Polytechnic of North London.

A Dictionary of Medieval Terms and Phrases

Carol Dover

A Companion to the Lancelot-Grail Cycle

$36.95

Arthur and the grail stories appeared in this French prose cycle together for the first time; scholars explore its social, historical, literary and manuscript contexts and account for its enduring interest.

The early thirteenth-century French prose Lancelot-Grail Cycle (or Vulgate Cycle) brings together the stories of Arthur with those of the Grail, a conjunction of materials that continues to fascinate the Western imagination today. Representing what is probably the earliest large-scale use of prose for fiction in the West, it also exemplifies the taste for big cyclic compositions that shaped much of European narrative fiction for three centuries.
A Companion to the Lancelot-Grail Cycle is the first comprehensive volume devoted exclusively to the Lancelot-Grail Cycle and its medieval legacy. The twenty essays in this volume, all by internationally known scholars, locate the work in its social, historical, literary, and manuscript contexts. In addition to addressing critical issues in the five texts that make up the Cycle, the contributors convey to modern readers the appeal that the text must have had for its medieval audiences, and the richness of composition that made it compelling. This volume will become standard reading for scholars, students, and more general readers interested in the Lancelot-Grail Cycle, medieval romance, Malory studies, and the Arthurian legends.

Contributors: RICHARD BARBER, EMMANUELE BAUMGARTNER, FANNI BOGDANOW, FRANK BRANDSMA, MATILDA T. BRUCKNER, CAROL J. CHASE, ANNIE COMBES,HELEN COOPER, CAROL R. DOVER, MICHAEL HARNEY, DONALD L. HOFFMAN, DOUGLAS KELLY, ELSPETH KENNEDY, NORRIS J. LACY, ROGER MIDDLETON, HAQUIRA OSAKABE, HANS-HUGO STEINHOFF, ALISON STONES, RICHARD TRACHSLER. CAROL DOVER is associate professor of French and director of undergraduate studies, Georgetown University, Washington DC.

A Companion to the <I>Lancelot-Grail Cycle</I>

Monika Otter

Goscelin of St Bertin: The Book of Encouragement and Consolation [Liber Confortatorius]

$29.99

Late eleventh-century spiritual counsel for a woman recluse, anticipating medieval advice literature for anchoresses.

Goscelin's Liber Confortatorius is extraordinary both as an example of high-medieval spiritual practice and as a record of a personal relationship. Written in about 1083 by the monk Goscelin to a protegee and personal friend, the recluse Eva, it takes up the tradition of St Jerome's letters of spiritual guidance to women, and anticipates medieval advice literature for anchoresses. As a compendious treatise, it has much to tell us about the intellectual interests and preoccupations of religious people in the late eleventh century. As a personal document, it allows a fascinating and uncommonly intimate insight into the psychology of religious life and the relationships betweenmen and women in the high middle ages. This English translation is presented here with notes and introduction.

Monika Otter is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Dartmouth College.

Goscelin of St Bertin: The Book of Encouragement and Consolation [Liber Confortatorius]

Michael Sheringham

André Breton

$36.95

Published by Boydell & Brewer Inc.

Patrick J. Horner

The Index of Middle English Prose Handlist III

$105.00

Published by Boydell & Brewer Inc.

The Index of Middle English Prose Handlist III

David F. Johnson, Geert H.M. Claassens

Dutch Romances I

$64.95

Edition with English translation of Middle Dutch version of the adventures of Gawain.

The gem in the crown of Middle Dutch Arthurian romance, the Roman van Walewein embodies the transformation of popular folktale into courtly romance. The framework of the romance is a tripartite series of quests, in which the hero, Walewein, must acquire and relinquish successive marvellous objects. Events are set in motion after Arthur and his knights have completed their meal, when a flying chess set enters the hall; Walewein embarks on a series ofquests to capture it and bring it back to Arthur. This edition of the text, accompanied by facing English translation, brings this important work to a wider audience; it is accompanied by an introduction, variants and rejected readings, and critical notes.

David F. Johnson is Professor of English, Florida State University; Geert H.M. Claassens is Professor of Middle Dutch Literature at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium.

Oliver S. Pickering, Susan Powell

The Index of Middle English Prose Handlist VI

$105.00

Published by Boydell & Brewer Inc.

The Index of Middle English Prose Handlist VI

Larissa Tracy

Women of the Gilte Legende

$29.99

The first modern translation of one of the most influential books to come from the middle ages.

The Gilte Legende was widely read as a model for everyday life, including the education of women through examples set by early Christian martyrs. This book divides the lives of female saints into: the "ryght hooly virgins",who vocally defend their bodies against Roman persecution; "holy mothers", who give up their traditional role to pursue a life of contemplation; the "repentant sinners", who convert and voice their defiance against a society thatdemanded silence in women; and the "holy transvestites", who cast off their gender identity to find absolution and salvation. Their lives reach through the ages to speak to a modern audience, forcing a re-examination of women's roles in the medieval period.

LARISSA TRACY is Adjunct Assistant Professor of English at Georgetown University and George Mason University.

Series editor JANE CHANCE

Marianne E. Kalinke, Henrik Williams, Karin Palmgren

Norse Romance III

$36.95

Final volume in three-volume set of translations of Arthurian romances from medieval Scandinavia.

Hærra Ivan (Sir Ivan, the Knight with the Lion) is the first major work of fiction in Swedish, and an important Scandinavian example of Arthurian romance. The translation from the French original was carried out at the request of the German-born Queen Eufemia of Norway, a country with a richer literary culture than Sweden at the time: Hærra Ivan thus brought Continental, courtly culture to the then recently formalised Swedish feudal class.
Last edited in 1931, the poem has been unjustly neglected in recent years; this edition and English translation, with introduction, will make it widely accessible to international scholars.

Professor MARIANNE KALINKE teaches in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; HENRIK WILLIAMS teaches in the Department of Scandinavian Languages at Uppsala University.

Ralph Hanna

The Index of Middle English Prose Handlist I

$105.00

Published by Boydell & Brewer Inc.

The Index of Middle English Prose Handlist I

C. David Benson, Lynne S. Blanchfield

The Manuscripts of Piers Plowman: the B-version

$105.00

Published by Boydell & Brewer Inc.

The Manuscripts of <I>Piers Plowman</I>: the B-version

Marianne E. Kalinke

Norse Romance II

$36.95

13-14c Norse versions of French narratives of Arthur's knights, with modern prose translations.

The Knights of the Round Table is devoted to translations and adaptations of French narratives featuring King Arthur's knights. It contains prose translations of three of Chrétien de Troyes's Arthurian romances, including atranslation of Perceval. Erex saga diverges considerably in content and structure from the French source and most likely represents a thorough revision by an Icelander of what was originally a Norwegian translation.Additionally, the volume contains both an Old Norse translation and an Icelandic adaptation of the French Lai du cort mantel, the ribald story of a chastity-testing mantle at King Arthur's court.

The translators are: MARIANNE E. KALINKE, KIRSTEN WOLF, HELEN MACLEAN and MATTHEW JAMES DRISCOLL

Professor MARIANNE E. KALINKE teaches in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Michael Lapidge, James L. Rosier

Aldhelm

$29.99

Translation with notes of Aldhelm's famous treatise on virginity, and his less well-known letters.

Aldhelm, born c.640 in Wessex, and becoming abbot of Malmesbury and later bishop of Sherborne, was the first English man of letters; up to 1100, his prose writings were the most widely read of any Latin literature produced in Anglo-Saxon England. His surviving prose works include a long treatise De virginitate, and a number of letters; these in particular are an important source of knowledge concerning Anglo-Saxon England. The treatise, a lengthy exhortation on virtue addressed to nuns at Barking Abbey, is a fascinating series of exempla drawn from the prodigious range of Aldhelm's knowledge of patristic literature, and tailored to the expectations of a seventh-century Anglo-Saxon female audience. Because of the extreme difficulty of his Latin, however, Aldhelm's prose works have rarely been read, and have never been adequately appreciated - which this translation seeks to remedy. It is accompanied with an introduction outlining Aldhelm's central importance to Anglo-Saxon literary culture; a critical biography which throws new light on what has previously been assumed about him; and an essay establishing an accurate canon and chronology of his writings.

Elizabeth Archibald

A Companion to Malory

$36.95

Malory's Morte Darthur - text, history and reception - expertly appraised by international scholars.

This collection of original essays by an international group of distinguished medievalists provides a comprehensive introduction to the great work of Sir Thomas Malory, which will be indispensable for both students and scholars. It is divided into three main sections, on Malory in context, the art of the Morte Darthur, and its reception in later years. As well as essays on the eight tales which make up the Morte Darthur, there are studies ofthe relationship between the Winchestermanuscript and Caxton's and later editions; the political and social context in which Malory wrote; his style and sources; and his treatment of two key concepts in Arthurian literature, chivalry and the representation of women. The volume also includes a brief biography of Malory with a list of the historical records relating to him and his family. It ends with a discussion of the reception of the Morte Darthurfrom the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, and a select bibliography.

Contributors: P.J.C. FIELD, FELICITY RIDDY, RICHARD BARBER, ELIZABETH EDWARDS, TERENCE MCCARTHY, CAROL MEALE, JEREMY SMITH, ELIZABETH ARCHIBALD,BARBARA NOLAN, HELEN COOPER, JILL MANN, DAVID BENSON, A.S.G. EDWARDS

B.N. Sargent-Baur, R.F. Cook

Aucassin et Nicolete

$29.95

Published by Boydell & Brewer Inc.

Roger Little

Saint-John Perse

$29.95

Published by Boydell & Brewer Inc.

Crispin Geoghegan

Louis Aragon

$36.95

Published by Boydell & Brewer Inc.

Glyn S. Burgess

Two Medieval Outlaws

$29.99

Fascinating insights into medieval life. THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

Eustace the Monk and Fouke Fitz Waryn belong in the great tradition of medieval outlaws, and aspects of their lives, part-fact, part-fiction, find a reflection in the life of that most famous of all outlaws, Robin Hood. Glyn Burgess puts into modern English the two romances of the thirteenth century which relate their deeds, Li Romans de Witasse le Moine and Fouke le Fitz Waryn. He presents the historical reality of their respective "heroes",important but neglected figures: both were born around 1170; both broke with their overlords, the count of Boulogne and King John, at around the same time; and both spent a period as outlaws, during which they toyed with their lords and exacted revenge for the injustice they suffered. Eustace was not only an outlaw and a sea captain, but a pirate and magician; he was one of the most feared men of his day. Fouke's life was dominated by his attempt to takepossession of Whittington Castle in Shropshire, to which his family laid claim.
Alongside the historical discussion of the lives of the protagonists of the two romances, Glyn Burgess reveals the multiple layers of the romances themselves: historically verifiable facts, information which cannot be proved but rings true, and a wide range of material which is manifestly imaginary, containing stock motifs also found in other romances of the period. His bringing to life of two forgotten outlaws is a fascinating context for his spirited translation of the romances.

GLYN S. BURGESS is Emeritus Professor of French at the University of Liverpool.

Fernando Marcos Alvarez

Teatros y Vida Teatral en Badajoz: 1601-1700

$85.00

Documents on the theatre in Badajoz in the seventeenth century, presented with introduction and catalogue.

The rich panorama of theatrical activity in Badajoz throughout the seventeenth century is revealed in the 368 documents presented here. Drawn from seven archives, they cover a wide range of topics: companies and actors, performances, playhouses, and the Corpus festivity. They contain many details of actors' lives; they are also notable for the valuable data they offer on the playhouses, especially of the splndid theatre of 1667-71 in the calle del Domine Galindo. Catalogue of actors and indexes of names, places, works and subjects.

Teatros y Vida Teatral en Badajoz: 1601-1700

Laurel Braswell

The Index of Middle English Prose Handlist IV

$105.00

Published by Boydell & Brewer Inc.

The Index of Middle English Prose Handlist IV

Michael Lapidge, James L. Rosier

Aldhelm

$36.95

Translations from the Latin of the ingenious works of Aldelm, first English man of letters. Introduction, bibliography and notes to the texts included.

Aldhelm was the first Latin poet of Europe who was not a native speaker of Latin. The ingenuity and originality which he brought to the task of composing Latin poetry ensured that his poems would be widely read everywhere, but they were studied especially in England during the early medieval period. Aldhelm's poetic corpus includes the Carmina Ecclesiastica, a series of dedicatory poems which contain a wealth of detail about early Anglo-Saxon churches; the Carmen de Virginitate, a verse counterpart to his earlier prose De Virginitate, but which includes an extensive passage describing an allegorical battle of the vices and virtues; a collection of 100 riddles or Enigmata, which are an imaginative investigation of the structure of the natural world; and a brief rhythmical poem describing the effects of a mighty storm in southwest England. In each of the poetic genres he essayed, Aldhelm found a host of later imitators, and it is not an exaggeration to say that he was the most influential Latin poet whose works were studied in Anglo-Saxon England; indeed, many surviving Old English poems are simple translations or adaptations of Latin poems by Aldhelm.

The translations are presented here with an introduction outlining what is known of Aldhelm's life and writings, and an appendix by NEIL WRIGHT contains a translation of Aldhelm's De Metris, a technical treatise on the composition of Latin verse.

Francisco Reus Boyd-Swan

Teatro en Alicante, 1901-1910

$49.95

A listing of plays performed in the theatres of Alicante during the first decade of the 20th century.

With this volume, the scope of the Fuentesseries widens both geographically and chronologically. The first volumes dealt with Madrid, concentrating, though not exclusively, on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Latervolumes covered Alcalà de Henares, Tudela and Córdoba. In the present volume Francisco Reus Boyd-Swan lists the plays performed in the theatres of Alicante during the first decade of the twentieth century.
Recent critics have become aware of the need to treat the theatre of the provinces of Madrid in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as seriously as that of the capital, and to study it in equal depth. In his Introduction the author recounts the history of the twelve theatres which were in use in the period and studies legislation affecting the theatres, special performances, times and prices of perfomances and analyses the theatre-going public and the types of plays presented.
The main listing of plays is in chronological order, supported by indexes of playwrights, librettists and composers. Twelve illustrations include plans of theatres and reproductions of contemporary posters.

FRANCISCO REUS BOYD-SWAN is a graduate of the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Spain's Open University.

E.H. Ruck

An Index of Themes and Motifs in Twelfth-Century French Arthurian Poetry

$105.00

Index of themes in 12c French Arthurian verse romances from literary themes to everyday motifs.

There has long been a need for an index of the themes in the French Arthurian verse romances. E.H. Ruck's analysis includes not only therecognised literary themes - the Unspelling Quest, the FaithlessWife -of the verse romances from Wace's Brut to Froissart'sMeliador, but also the other, less obvious, motifs of equalsignificance to the researcher, hawthorns, for example, and weaponry.
Dr Ruck's index encompasses the Arthurian part of Wace's Brut; all of the works of Chrétien de Troyes; all four Tristan poems together with Marie de France's Chevrefoil and Lanval; the lais of Tyolet, Melion, Cor and Mantel; Renaut de Beaujeu's Le Bel Inconnu; La Mule sans frein and Le Chevalier à l'épée. As the index is intended first and foremost for the use of Arthurian scholars, the non-Arthurian parts of the Brut and the Laisof Marie de France have not been included, although reference is made to them in the notes.
E.H. RUCK studied at the universities of Exeter, Lancaster, and Reading, where she worked for her PhD.

An Index of Themes and Motifs in Twelfth-Century French Arthurian Poetry

Chretien de Troyes, Nigel Bryant

Perceval

$36.95

The original version of one of the greatest and most potent of medieval legends.

Chrétien de Troyes' Perceval is the most important single Arthurian romance. It contains the very first mention of the mysterious grail, later to become the Holy Grail and the focal point of the spiritual quest of the knights of Arthur's court.

Chrétien left the poem unfinished, but the extraordinary and intriguing theme of the Grail was too good to leave, and other poets continued and eventually completed it. This is the only English translation to include selections from the three continuations and from the work of Gerbert de Montreuil, making the romance a coherent whole, and following through Chrétien's essential theme of the making of a knight, in both worldlyand spiritual terms. It is thus the most complete account available in English of the essential Arthurian romance, the origin of the Grail legend.

Kathleen Basford, Paul Hardwick

The Green Man

$29.99

Delightful, oft-reprinted guide to the foliate heads so common in medieval sculpture. This was the first-ever monograph dedicated to the Green Man.

The Green Man, the image of the foliate head or the head of a man sprouting leaves, is probably the most common of all motifs in medieval sculpture. Nevertheless, the significance of the image lay largely unregarded until KathleenBasford published this book - the first monograph of the Green Man in any language -and thereby earned the lasting gratitude of scholars in many fields, from art history and folklore to current environmental studies. This book has opened up new avenues of research, not only into medieval man's understanding of nature, and into conceptions of death, rebirth and resurrection in the middle ages, but also into our concern today with ecology and our relationship with the green world. It is therefore a work of living scholarship and its publication in paperback will be greatly and justly welcomed.

Trevor Field

Maurice Barrès

$29.95

Published by Boydell & Brewer Inc.

Julia Boffey

Middle English Lyrics

$36.95

A collection attesting to the richness and lasting appeal of these short forms of Middle English verse.

The body of short Middle English poems conventionally known as lyrics is characterized by wonderful variety. Taking many different forms, and covering an enormous number of subjects, these poems have proved at once attractive andchallenging for modern readers and scholars. This collection of essays explores a range of Middle English lyrics from the thirteenth to the early sixteenth century, both religious and secular in flavour. It directs attention to the intrinsic qualities of these short poems and at the same time explores their capacity to illuminate important aspects of medieval cultural practice and production: forms of piety, contemporary conditions and events, the historyof feelings and emotions, and the relationships of image, song, performance and speech to the written word. The issues covered in the essays include editing lyrics; lyric manuscripts; affect; visuality; mouvance and transformation; and the relationships between words, music and speech. A particularly distinctive feature of the collection is that most of the essays take as a point of departure a specific lyric whose particularities are explored within wider-ranging critical argument.

Derek Brewer

Medieval Comic Tales

$29.99

Medieval humour revealed in an anthology of 80 tales from England, France, Italy, Germany and Spain.

During the middle ages, a common fund of comic tales circulated throughout Europe. Writers such as Boccaccio, Chaucer, Rabelais and Cervantes drew on this material, and used it for their own purposes, but the brilliant medieval versions also deserve to be known in their own right. They are of great cultural interest and considerable entertainment value, varying from humour to farce, from sophisticated literary parody to blunt crudeness. Piety jostles blasphemy, and sex and death are everywhere good for a joke. The tales presented here, translated into clear modern English by experts in their fields, are from French, Spanish, Dutch, German, medieval Latin, Italian and English.
.Scholars and students and the general reader alike will find the book accessible, useful and enjoyable.

The late DEREK BREWER was Professor Emeritus of English Literature, University of Cambridge.

Richard Hitchcock

The Kharjas

$36.95

Published by Boydell & Brewer Inc.

Peter Tremewan

Prévost

$36.95

Published by Boydell & Brewer Inc.

Elisabeth Dutton, Olivia Robinson

Medieval English Theatre 42

$49.95

Essays on the performance of drama from the Middle Ages, ranging from the well-known cycles of York to matter from Iran.

Medieval English Theatre is the premier journal in early theatre studies. Its name belies its wide range of interest: it publishes articles on theatre and pageantry from across the British Isles up to the opening of the London playhouses and the suppression of the civic mystery cycles, and also includes contributions on European and Latin drama, together with analyses of modern survivals or equivalents, and of research productions of medieval plays.
Theatrical performance is central to the groups and communities discussed in this volume, and to their particular and local expressions of faith. The articles presented explore the drama of a variety of different communities from religious orders and houses, through local, medieval and post-medieval lay communities, to contemporary worshippers. Contributors examine complex relationships between theatrical performance and faith, understanding religious theatre as a mode of worship and a method of exploring belief, as well as a site for the study of synchronous and asynchronous connections and fractures within communities. Particular topics addressed include the fragments of play-scripts surviving from the monastery at Mont-St-Michel; the Barking Abbey Easter celebrations; and how the sixteenth-century community which owned the surviving copy of the Towneley plays might have understood them in relation to their own faith. The volume is completed with an exploration of traditional Iranian religious theatre from an ethnographic perspective, in a bid to uncover and understand its very particular effects on the contemporary communities who perform and attend it in the twenty-first century.

ELISABETH DUTTON and OLIVA ROBINSON run the Medieval Convent Drama project, based at the University of Fribourg and funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, which provides the impetus for this special issue of Medieval English Theatre. Contributors: Aurélie Blanc, Eleanor Lucy Deacon, George Gandy, Camille Marshall, James Stokes

Linda Paterson

Singing the Crusades

$36.95

A full-scale survey of crusading lyrics in Old French and Occitan.

The crusading movements provoked a vast and diverse mass of reactions in the medieval West. While Latin sources provide official versions of its preaching, organisation and events, the vernacular lyrics of the troubadours and trouvères present a secular perspective, through a cornucopia of on-the-spot responses in France, Occitania, Italy, the Iberian Peninsula, Cyprus, Syria and Greece.
This book constitutes the first comprehensive, modern analysis of Old French and Occitan lyric texts relating to the crusades. It brings out their full range, from propaganda for the crusades, to criticisms of crusading and crusaders through vituperation, humour or cynicism, to their use as apretext for political or personal wrangling. It also shows how they shed light on many aspects of medieval life, among them chivalric and courtly values (often in tension with clerical ones), regional politics, sexual behaviour, personal experiences of crusading and captivity, the complex interaction of Christians, Greeks and Muslims, and bafflement in the face of failure and God's imponderable purposes.

Brian Nelson

Emile Zola

$29.95

Published by Boydell & Brewer Inc.

Crispin Geoghegan

Louis Aragon

$36.95

Published by Boydell & Brewer Inc.

Michael Bishop

Pierre Reverdy

$36.95

Published by Boydell & Brewer Inc.

Lucy M. Allen-Goss

Female Desire in Chaucer's Legend of Good Women and Middle English Romance

$29.99

An examination of female same-sex desire in Chaucer and medieval romance.

In both medieval and modern contexts, women who do not desire men invite awkward silences. Men's dissident sexual practices have been discussed energetically by writers of law and religion, medicine and morality; reams of medieval texts are devoted to horrified or fascinated references to men's deviant intimacies with men. Yet women - despite the best efforts of recent scholars - remain at the margins of this picture, especially in studies of literature.
This book aims to re-centre female desire. Identifying a feminine or lesbian hermeneutic in late-medieval English literature, it offers new approaches to medieval texts often denigrated for their omissions and fragmentation, their violence and uneven poetic texture. The hermeneutic tradition Chaucer inherited, stretching from Jerome to Jean de Meun, represents female bodies as blank tablets awaiting masculine inscription, rather than autonomous agents. In the Legend, Chaucer considers the unspoken problem of female desires and bodies that resist, evade, and orient themselves away from such a position.
Can women take on hermeneutic authority, that phallic capacity, without rendering themselves monstrous or self-defeating? This question resonates through three Middle English romances succeeding the Legend: the alliterative Morte Arthure, the Sowdone of Babylon, and Undo Your Door. With combative innovation, they repurpose the hermeneutic tradition and Chaucer's use of it to celebrate an array of audacious female desires and embodiments which cross and re-cross established categories of masculine and feminine, licit and illicit, animate and inanimate. Together, these texts make visible the desires and the embodiments of women who otherwise slip out of visibility, in both medieval and post-medieval contexts.

Female Desire in Chaucer's <i>Legend of Good Women</i> and Middle English Romance

Glyn S. Burgess, Douglas Kelly

The Roman de Troie by Benoît de Sainte-Maure

$54.95

Winner of the 2018 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Award

First English translation of an important twelfth-century romance, giving an account of the Trojan war and its consequences.

Benoît de Sainte-Maure's Roman de Troie, dating to around 1165, is, along with the Roman de Thèbes and the Roman d'Eneas, one of the three "romances of antiquity" (romans d'antiquité). These romances launched the plots, themes and structures of the genre, then blossoming in the hands of authors such as Chrétien de Troyes. As an account of the Trojan War, Benoît's work is of necessity a poem about war and its causes, how it was fought and what its consequences were for the combatants. But the author's choice of the octosyllabic rhyming couplet, his fondness for description, his ability to recount the intensity of personal struggles, and above all his fascination with the trials and tribulations of Love, which affect some of the work's most prominent warriors (among them Paris and his love for Helen, and Troilus and his love for Briseida), all combine to fashion this romance - in which events from long ago are presented as a reflection of the poet's own feudal and courtly worlds.
This translation, the first into English, aims to bring the poem and the author to a wider audience. It is accompanied by an introduction and notes.

The <I>Roman de Troie</I> by Benoît de Sainte-Maure

Clare A. Simmons

Medievalist Traditions in Nineteenth-Century British Culture

$29.99

A survey of the rituals of the year in Victorian England, showing the influence of the Middle Ages.

What does a maypole represent? Why eat hot cross buns? Did Dick Whittington have a cat? All these questions are related to a larger one that nineteenth-century Britons asked themselves: which was more fun: living in their own time, or living in the Middle Ages? While Britain was becoming the most industrially-advanced nation in the world, many vaunted the superiority of the present to the past-yet others felt that if shadows of past ways of life haunted the present, they were friendly ghosts.
This book explores such ghosts and how real or imagined remnants of medieval celebration in a variety of forms created a cultural idea of the Middle Ages. As Britons found, or thought that they found, traces of the medieval in traditions tied to times of the year, medievalism became not only the justification but also the inspiration for community festivity, from Christmas and Boxing Day through Maytime rituals to Hallowe'en, as show in the writings of amongst many others Keats, Browning and Dickens.

Medievalist Traditions in Nineteenth-Century British Culture

P.J.C. Field

Sir Thomas Malory: Le Morte Darthur

$39.95

Peter Field's new edition of the Morte Darthur has been hailed as "our standard critical edition of Malory". This paperback of Vol 1 only makes the complete definitive original spelling text edition available, with the same pagination as in Vol 1 of the original two-volume hardback edition.

This Paperback is volume 1 (text only) of the original two-volume edition. Selected as a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title of 2014, the two-volume scholarly edition of the Morte Darthur examined the two surviving versions of the text: Caxton's edition of 1485 and the Winchester manuscript, known to have existed around 1480 but lost until 1934. All major modern scholarly editions have favoured one of these to the point of preserving corrigible error. This paperback includes the definitive original spelling text edition of Malory's classic text which has been described as a "major event in the long history of Malory scholarship". Anyone wishing to have this text along with the full critical apparatus assembled by Professor Field is referred to the two-volume hardcover edition, which remains in print.

P.J.C. Field is Professor of English at Bangor University.

Sir Thomas Malory: <I> Le Morte Darthur</I>

Sarah Carpenter, Elisabeth Dutton, Gordon Kipling Meg Twycross

Medieval English Theatre 41

$29.99

Essays on the performance of drama from the middle ages, ranging from the well-known cycles of York to matter from Iran.

Medieval English Theatre is the premier journal in early theatre studies. Its name belies its wide range of interest: it publishes articles on theatre and pageantry from across the British Isles up to the opening of the London playhouses and the suppression of the civic mystery cycles, and also includes contributions on European and Latin drama, together with analyses of modern survivals or equivalents, and of research productions of medieval plays.
The articles here focus on civic theatre and display. Chester, York, Durham and Newcastle, and London. Practicalities are to the fore: what the Drawers of Dee actually did, how the actors in the York Corpus Christi Play knewwhat time it was, the difficulties presented to London pageantry by unauthorised house-extensions and horse-droppings. Even the stately entertainments of a royal tour by James VI & I featured (in Newcastle, of course) negotiationover the monopoly on coal disguised as a historical event in a play about King Alfred and Canute. Ranging further afield is an introduction to the living tradition of Iranian mystery plays, whose history and development have somethought-provoking parallels with those of medieval waggon plays in the West. Finally, the director and producer discuss their 2019 production of John Redford's Wit and Science by Edward's Boys, the first to be played by aboys' company since the sixteenth century.

Professor Kathryn Kerby-Fulton

Women Intellectuals and Leaders in the Middle Ages

$49.95

Wide-ranging examination of women's achievements in and influence on many aspects of medieval culture.

Medieval women were normally denied access to public educational institutions, and so also denied the gateways to most leadership positions. Modern scholars have therefore tended to study learned medieval women as simply anomalies, and women generally as victims. This volume, however, argues instead for a via media. Drawing upon manuscript and archival sources, scholars here show that more medieval women attained some form of learning than hitherto imagined, and that women with such legal, social or ecclesiastical knowledge also often exercised professional or communal leadership.

Bringing together contributors from the disciplines of literature, history and religion, this volume challenges several traditional views: firstly, the still-prevalent idea that women's intellectual accomplishments were limited to the Latin literate. The collection therefore engages heavily with vernacular writings (in Anglo-Saxon, Middle English, French, Dutch, German and Italian), and also with material culture (manuscript illumination, stained glass, fabric and jewelry) for evidence of women's advanced capabilities. But in doing so, the contributors strive to avoid the equally problematic view that women's accomplishments were somehow limited to the vernacular and the material. So several essays examine women at work with the sacred languages of the three Abrahamic traditions (Latin, Arabic and Hebrew). And a third traditional view is also interrogated: that women were somehow more "original" for their lack of learning and and dependence on their mother tongue. Scholars here agree wholeheartedly that women could be daring thinkers in any language; they engage readily with women's learnedness wherever it can be found.

Women Intellectuals and Leaders in the Middle Ages

Laura Kalas

Margery Kempe's Spiritual Medicine

$29.99

The Book of Margery Kempe set in the context of medieval medical discourse.

Margery Kempe's various illnesses, mental, spiritual and physical, are a recurring theme in her Book. This volume, the first full-length interdisciplinary study from a medical humanities perspective, offers a medicalized reading of Kempe's spirituality in the context of the ubiquitous medieval notion of Christ the Physician, and thus a new way of interpreting the Book itself: as a narrative of Kempe's own engagement with the medical paradigms of which she has previously been a passive subject.
Focusing on the interactions of medicine, mysticism and reproduction as a feminist project, the author explores the ontology of female flesh; the productive use of pain, suffering and sickness; and the ethics of a maternal theology based on the melancholic and surrogate activities that underlie Kempe's experience. Structured broadly via a traverse through the life course, the book shows how Kempe's response to suffering is illuminated by the medieval medical discourse by which she is contemporaneously read, and by which she engineers her own construction and understanding of self. It also explores Kempe's persistent attendance to her mystical body and refusal to compromise her instinct to authentically show how she feels.

Francis Leneghan

The Dynastic Drama of Beowulf

$36.95

A strikingly original approach to Beowulf, linking its structure to the dynastic life-cycle.

The original audience of Beowulf was steeped in ancient Scandinavian royal legend. But for modern readers of the poem, these traditions are frustratingly obscure and confusing.

This book argues that Beowulf is a dynastic drama centred on the fortunes of three great royal houses, the Scyldings, Scylfings and Hrethlings. At the centre of the poem is the Geatish hero, whose adventures provide the link between these three dynasties. By unravelling the web of Scandinavian royal legends known to the work's original audience, the volume allows the modern reader to appreciate better the role of the monsters as portents of dynastic and national crises. It begins by offering a new interpretation of the work's structure based on the principle of the dynastic life-cycle, providing explanations for features of the poem that have never been satisfactorily explained, most famously its many digressions and episodes. Highlighting the work's often-overlooked originality, it then proposes that the poet created a fictionalized monster-slaying hero and inserted him into royal legend in order to dramatize specific moments of dynastic crisis. Finally, it brings into focus the poet's debt to biblical paradigms of kingship and considers how the Anglo-Saxons came to read Beowulf as their own Book of Kings.

Laura Saetveit Miles

The Virgin Mary's Book at the Annunciation

$36.95

Winner of the 2021 Frank S. and Elizabeth D. Brewer Prize of the American Society of Church History

Winner of the 2022 SMFS Best First Book in Medieval Feminist Studies Award

An overlooked aspect of the iconography of the Annunciation investigated - Mary's book.

The Annunciation remains one of the most recognizable scenes in western Christianity: the angel Gabriel addressing the Virgin Mary, capturing the moment when Christ becomes incarnate. But one consistent detail has evaded our scrutiny - Mary's book. What was she reading? What does her book mean?
This innovative study traces the history of Mary's book at the Annunciation from the early Middle Ages through to the Reformation, focusing on a wide variety of religious treatises, visionary accounts, and art. It argues that the Virgin provided a sophisticated model of reading and interpretation that was foundational to devotional practices across all spectrums of society in medieval England, and especially for enclosed female readers. By imitating the Virgin, readers learned how to read; they learned how to pray; they learned how to channel God through vision and revelation. Most of all, they learned how to conceive God spiritually, just as Mary had conceived him physically, and just as she had conceived intellectually her reading of the Old Testament prophecies foretelling the Incarnation - that she herself was part of their fulfillment. The Annunciation offered a hermeneutic model of conception radically based on the reproductive female body, otherwise deeply problematic in medieval culture.
Scholars have long studied the importance of the Virgin Mary for medieval people. But few would think of her as an intellectual role model. Yet that is what this book contends - that Mary's reading at the Annunciation is, essentially, a missing link for understanding how reading, interpretation, and devotion worked in the Middle Ages.

The Virgin Mary's Book at the Annunciation

Edited by Megan G. Leitch and Cory James Rushton

A New Companion to Malory

$36.95

A comprehensive survey of Malory's Morte Darthur, one of the most important texts of the Middle Ages.

Malory's Morte Darthur is now a canonical and widely-taught text. Recent decades have seen a transformation and expansion of critical approaches in scholarship, as well as significant advances in understanding its milieux:textual, literary, cultural and historical. This volume adds to and updates the influential Companion of 1996, offering scholars, teachers and students alike a full guide to the text and the author. The essays it contains provide a synthetic overview of, and fresh perspectives on, the key questions about and contexts connected with the Morte.

MEGAN G. LEITCH is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Cardiff University; CORY JAMES RUSHTON is Associate Professor in the Department of English at St Francis Xavier University, Canada.

Contributors: Dorsey Armstrong, Thomas Crofts, Siân Echard, Rob Gossedge, Daniel Helbert, Amy Kaufman, Megan Leitch, Andrew Lynch, Catherine Nall, Ralph Norris, Raluca Radulescu, Lisa Robeson, Meg Roland, Cory Rushton, Masako Takagi, Kevin Whetter.

Chrétien de Troyes

The Complete Story of the Grail

$60.00

The first ever translation of the whole of the rich and compelling body of tales contained in Chrétien's poem and its four Continuations.

The mysterious and haunting Grail makes its first appearance in literature in Chrétien de Troyes' Perceval at the end of the twelfth century. But Chrétien never finished his poem, leaving an unresolved story and an incomplete picture of the Grail. It was, however, far too attractive an idea to leave. Not only did it inspire quite separate works; his own unfinished poem was continued and finally completed by no fewer than four other writers.
The Complete Story of the Grail is the first ever translation of the whole of the rich and compelling body of tales contained in Chrétien's poem and its four Continuations, which are finally attracting the scholarly attention they deserve. Besides Chrétien's original text, there are the anonymous First Continuation (translated here in its fullest version), the Second Continuation attributed to Wauchier de Denain, and the intriguing Third and Fourth Continuations - probably written simultaneously, with no knowledge of each other's work - by Manessier and Gerbert de Montreuil. Two other poets were drawn to create preludes explaining the background to Chrétien's story, and translated here also are their works: The Elucidation Prologue and Bliocadran.
Only in this, The Story of the Grail's complete form, can the reader appreciate the narrative skill and invention of the medieval poets and their surprising responses to Chrétien's theme - not least their crucial focus on the knight as a crusader. Equally, Chrétien's original poem was almost always copied in conjunction withone or more of the Continuations, so this translation represents how most medieval readers would have encountered it.

Nigel Bryant's previous translations from Medieval French include Perlesvaus - the High Bookof the Grail, Robert de Boron's trilogy Merlin and the Grail, the Medieval Romance of Alexander, The True Chronicles of Jean le Bel and Perceforest.

Michael J. Warren

Birds in Medieval English Poetry

$36.95

First full-length study of birds and their metamorphoses as treated in a wide range of medieval poetry, from the Anglo-Saxons to Chaucer and Gower.

Birds featured in many aspects of medieval people's lives, not least in their poetry. But despite their familiar presence in literary culture, it is still often assumed that these representations have little to do with the real natural world. By attending to the ways in which birds were actually observed and experienced, this book aims to offer new perspectives on how and why they were meaningful in five major poems -- The Seafarer, the Exeter Book Riddles, The Owl and the Nightingale, The Parliament of Fowls and Confessio Amantis. In a consideration of sources from Isidore of Seville and Anglo-Saxon place-names to animal-sound word lists and Bartholomew the Englishman, the author shows how ornithological truth and knowledge are integral to our understandings of his chosen poems. Birds, he argues, are relevant to the medieval mind because their unique properties align them with important religious and secular themes: seabirds that inspire the forlorn Anglo-Saxon pilgrim; unnamed species that confound riddling taxonomies; a belligerent owl who speaks out against unflattering literary portraits. In these poems, human actions and perceptions are deeply affected by the remarkable flights and voices of birds.

Amanda Hopkins, Robert Allen Rouse, Cory James Rushton

Sexual Culture in the Literature of Medieval Britain

$29.99

An examination into aspects of the sexual as depicted in a variety of medieval texts, from Chaucer and Malory to romance and alchemical treatises.

It is often said that the past is a foreign country where they do things differently, and perhaps no type of "doing" is more fascinating than sexual desires and behaviours. Our modern view of medieval sexuality is characterised bya polarising dichotomy between the swooning love-struck knights and ladies of romance on one hand, and the darkly imagined and misogyny of an unenlightened "medieval" sexuality on the other. British medieval sexual culture also exhibits such dualities through the influential paradigms of sinner or saint, virgin or whore, and protector or defiler of women. However, such sexual identities are rarely coherent or stable, and it is in the grey areas, the interstices between normative modes of sexuality, that we find the most compelling instances of erotic frisson and sexual expression.
This collection of essays brings together a wide-ranging discussion of the sexual possibilitiesand fantasies of medieval Britain as they manifest themselves in the literature of the period. Taking as their matter texts and authors as diverse as Chaucer, Gower, Dunbar, Malory, alchemical treatises, and romances, the contributions reveal a surprising variety of attitudes, strategies and sexual subject positions.

Amanda Hopkins teaches in English and French at the University of Warwick; Robert Allen Rouse is Associate Professor of English atthe University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada; Cory James Rushton is Associate Professor of English at St Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia, Canada.

Contributors: Aisling Byrne, Anna Caughey, Kristina Hildebrand, Amy S. Kaufman, Yvette Kisor, Megan G. Leitch, Cynthea Masson, Hannah Priest, Samantha J. Rayner, Robert Allen Rouse, Cory James Rushton, Amy N. Vines

Cover image for Sexual Culture in the Literature of Medieval Britain, isbn: 9781843844440

Frederick M. Biggs

Chaucer's Decameron and the Origin of the Canterbury Tales

$36.95

A major and original contribution to the debate as to Chaucer's use and knowledge of Boccaccio, finding a new source for the "Shipman's Tale".

A possible direct link between the two greatest literary collections of the fourteenth century, Boccaccio's Decameron and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, has long tantalized readers because these works share many stories, which are, moreover, placed in similar frames. And yet, although he identified many of his sources, Chaucer never mentioned Boccaccio; indeed when he retold the Decameron's final novella, his pilgrim, the Clerk, states that it was written by Petrarch. For these reasons, most scholars now believe that while Chaucer might have heard parts of the earlier collection when he was in Italy, he did not have it at hand as he wrote.
This volumeaims to change our understanding of this question. It analyses the relationship between the "Shipman's Tale", originally written for the Wife of Bath, and Decameron 8.10, not seen before as a possible source. The book alsoargues that more important than the narratives that Chaucer borrowed is the literary technique that he learned from Boccaccio - to make tales from ideas. This technique, moreover, links the "Shipman's Tale" to the "Miller's Tale"and the new "Wife of Bath's Tale". Although at its core a hermeneutic argument, this book also delves into such important areas as alchemy, domestic space, economic history, folklore, Irish/English politics, manuscripts, and misogyny.

FREDERICK M. BIGGS is Professor of English at the University of Connecticut.

Chaucer's Decameron and the Origin of the <I>Canterbury Tales</I>

Phillipa Hardman, Marianne Ailes

The Legend of Charlemagne in Medieval England

$54.95

The first full-length examination of the medieval Charlemagne tradition in the literature and culture of medieval England, from the Chanson de Roland to Caxton.

The Matter of France, the legendary history of Charlemagne, had a central but now largely unrecognised place in the multilingual culture of medieval England. From the early claim in the Chanson de Roland that Charlemagne held England as his personal domain, to the later proliferation of Middle English romances of Charlemagne, the materials are woven into the insular political and cultural imagination. However, unlike the wide range of continental French romances, the insular tradition concentrates on stories of a few heroic characters: Roland, Fierabras, Otinel. Why did writers and audiences in England turn again and again to these narratives, rewriting and reinterpreting them for more than two hundred years?
This book is the first full-length study of the tradition. It investigates the currency and impact of the Matter of France with equal attention to English and French-language texts, setting each individual manuscript or early printed text in its contemporary cultural and political context. The narratives are revealed to be extraordinarily adaptable, using the iconic opposition between Carolingian and Saracen heroes to reflect concerns with national politics, religious identity, the future of Christendom, chivalry and ethics, and monarchy and treason.

The Legend of Charlemagne in Medieval England

Andrew B.R. Elliott

Medievalism, Politics and Mass Media

$29.99

An exploration of how the Middle Ages are manipulated ideologically in today's communication.

In 2001, George Bush provoked global uproar by describing the nascent War on Terror as a "Crusade". His comments, however, were welcomed by Al-Qaeda, who had long been describing Western powers in precisely the same terms, as modern Crusaders once again invading the Middle East. Ten years later in 2011, Anders Behring Breivik launched a tragic attack in Norway, killing 77 unarmed civilians, mostly teenagers. Breivik saw himself as a Templar Knight, a member of a group of knights allegedly resurrected in London in 2002 by one "Lionheart". Later investigations suggested that the blogger, Lionheart, might have had links to the right-wing, anti-Muslim, English Defence League and otherso-called "counterjihad" blogging networks decrying an Islamic invasion of Europe.
Though extreme examples, these cases all share a crucial detail: the framing of current political issues in terms of recognisable medieval precedents. In the widespread use of medievalism across social- and mass-media channels, it is clear that such political medievalisms are not intended as a specific reference to a historical precedent, but as a use of the past for modern concerns. The argument of this book is that we need new ways of analysing this kind of medievalism; extending far beyond the concept of anachronism or inaccuracy, references to Crusades, Templars and Vikings affect the way weunderstand our world. Using theories of communicationand media studies to examine popular medievalism, the author investigates what effect such medieval terminology can have on a mass-mediated audience and on the understanding ofthe Middle Ages in general.

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Larissa Tracy

Castration and Culture in the Middle Ages

$39.95

Essays exploring medieval castration, as reflected in archaeology, law, historical record, and literary motifs.

Castration and castrati have always been facets of western culture, from myth and legend to law and theology, from eunuchs guarding harems to the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century castrati singers. Metaphoric castration pervadesa number of medieval literary genres, particularly the Old French fabliaux - exchanges of power predicated upon the exchange or absence of sexual desire signified by genitalia - but the plain, literal act of castration and its implications are often overlooked.
This collection explores this often taboo subject and its implications for cultural mores and custom in Western Europe, seeking to demystify and demythologize castration. Its subjects includearchaeological studies of eunuchs; historical accounts of castration in trials of combat; the mutilation of political rivals in medieval Wales; Anglo-Saxon and Frisian legal and literary examples of castration as punishment; castration as comedy in the Old French fabliaux; the prohibition against genital mutilation in hagiography; and early-modern anxieties about punitive castration enacted on the Elizabethan stage. The introduction reflects on these topics in the context of arguably the most well-known victim of castration in the middle ages, Abelard.

Larissa Tracy is Associate Professor of Medieval Literature at Longwood University.

Contributors: Larissa Tracy, Kathryn Reusch, Shaun Tougher, Jack Collins, Rolf H. Bremmer Jr, Jay Paul Gates, Charlene M. Eska, Mary A. Valante, Anthony Adams, Mary E. Leech, Jed Chandler, Ellen Lorraine Friedrich, Robert L.A. Clark, Karin Sellberg, LenaWånggren

Castration and Culture in the Middle Ages

Christine Rauer, Christine Rauer

The Old English Martyrology

$45.95

International Society of Anglo-Saxonists 2015 Publication Prize: Best Edition

New edition with facing-page translation of a highly significant and influential Old English text.

The Old English Martyrology is one of the longest and most important prose texts written in Anglo-Saxon England; it also represents one of the most impressive examples of encyclopaedic writing from the European Middle Ages.Probably intended as a reference work, it was used and transmitted for over 200 years, providing its readers with information on native and foreign saints, time measurement, the seasons of the year, biblical events, and cosmology. Its lively and engaging vignettes illustrate the importance of miracle stories for the early medieval cult of saints.
This new edition presents a revised text, with a facing-page, newly-prepared English translation; they are accompanied by a commentary based on a fresh comparison with some 250 Latin and Old English texts, the first published glossary for this text, and extensive bibliographical information and indices.

Dr Christine Raueris a Senior Lecturer in the School of English and the Institute of Mediaeval Studies at the University of St Andrews, Scotland.