Boydell & Brewer Inc.

Renee Curtis's three-volume critical edition of the Prose Tristan is the only edition of this very important medieval work ever published; until the first volume appeared in 1963, the work was only accessible in the form of a fewfragments which had been edited and a summary of the romance made by E. Loseth in 1891. Dr Curtis's edition is based on a complete collation of all the manuscripts and this led her to choose the Carpentras manuscript 404 as thebasis of her edition. This second volume appeared in1976. Professor Brian Woledge, the eminent medievalislt, wrote of the first volume in Erasmus: "The publication of this book is an event of some importance in Arthurian studies. The Prose Tristan was one of the most widely read works in medieval France; written between1215 and 1235, it continued to be copied until the end of the Middle Ages and its popularity lasted another hundred years in printededitions. It was in fact in prose rather than in poetic form that the legend was known.... Dr Curtis is to warmly congratulated on undertaking this important task"

Published by Boydell & Brewer Inc.

Catalogue and scholarly consideration of these vital manuscripts.

Following her vital cataloguing of the surviving 200+ manuscripts of the Historia Regum Britanniein Volume III, Julia Crick has been able in Volume IV to present the information which the manuscripts contain both about thetextual development of Geoffrey's History and about its circulation and audience.
Crick begins by exploring the evidence for grouping the manuscripts. External evidence such as associated texts found frequently with the Historiais compared with the internal evidence of textual disruption, the notorious dedications, rubrication and trial passages collated from each manuscript. This information forms the basis for an account of the chronologyand geography of the circulation of the work as a whole, which in turn sheds light on the audience of the Historia, their taste in reading, and their status.JULIA CRICKis a Research Fellow at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. Arthurian Boydell & Brewer have become the Arthurian publishers par excellence, not simply for their excellent secondary material on the once and future king, but for their commitment to the publication of a largely Cambridge-based inquiry into the primeval sources of the Arthurian story. ENGLISH STUDIES [J.D. Burnley]
Following the cataloguing of the 200 surviving manuscripts of Geoffrey's HistoriaJulia Crick sets out to assesswhat these reveal about the textual development of the work and about its circulation and audience. Her meticulous and scholarly approach prises out information which will prove invaluable to all students of the 12th century.

Published by Boydell & Brewer Inc.

Published by Boydell & Brewer Inc.

Facsimile edition of an important witness to the impact of the Normans on the ecclesiastical culture of England.

Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, MS F [London, British Library, Cotton Domitian A.viii, folios 30-70] is unique in presenting a sustainedly bilingual [Latin and Old English] text. Palaeographicalevidence dates the manuscript to caAD1100; from its script it is clear that it was written at Canterbury. It is a witness - in language and script - to the impact of the Norman regime on the ecclesiastical culture of England and particularly its most important church. The evidence which it provides for the history of the Kentish dialect attests at the same time to the breakdown at Canterbury of the late West Saxon literary standard. In view of its importance in various contexts,the publisher and general editors now issue, as a supplementary volume to the collaborative edition, a complete facsimile of this interesting book as a preliminary to a new edition in the series, with an introduction outlining theproblems posed by the manuscript.

Professor DAVID DUMVILLE is Professor of History and Palaeography at the University of Aberdeen.

Renée Curtis's three-volume critical edition of the Prose Tristanis the only edition of this very important medieval work ever published; until the first volume appeared in 1963, the work was only accessible in the form ofa few fragments which had been edited and a summary of the romance made by E. Lö

Dr Morris examines how the legend grew through the retelling of what medieval writers believed was the story of an historical figure, based not on some lost Welsh biography, but on Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings ofBritain, the `authorised' version of Arthur's career. She looks at his antecedents, the story of his conception and birth, and his accession, moving on to discuss his warfare, his role in peacetime, his relationships with hisfamily, his personal attributes, and his problematical death, showing how Arthur remains a distinct character in medieval literature despite appearing in an infinite variety of guises. Arthur appears in medieval literature in an infinite variety of different guises, yet remains a distinct character. Medieval writers, however freely they treat their sources, respected the traditions of the past, and Dr Morris, in writing the 'biography' of Arthur, isconcerned to show the complex intelinking of different versions of his story. Her approach is through the sequence of events which make up Arthur's career. She looks in turn at his antecedents, the story of his conception and birth, and his accession, the initial 'facts' and the discusses his warfare, his role in peacetime, his relationships with his family, and his personal attributes. The problems surrounding Arthur's death are examined in the finalchapter. Throughout the book, Dr Morris is concerned to 'use Arthur tro find out about the sources rather than vice versa' and in so doing illustrates both how medieval writers retold what they believe to be the story of a real historical figure and how the familiar story of Arthur gradually took shape over the centuries, based not on some lost Welsh biography, but on Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain the 'authorised' version of Arthur's career for almost all medieval writers

The setting of medieval Arthurian romance, as typified by Malory's Morte Darthur, plays an important part in the creation of the atmosphere of the stories, and in intensifying the drama of the action. Professor Whitaker looks at the Arthurianworld which Malory inherited form his sources and to which he added his own details, and examines its different aspects: castles and forests, kingdoms and empires, showing how these diverge from reality to meetthe particular requirements of romance, how new political and temporal relationships are set up for the same reason, and how it was shaped by the presence of the Otherworld in the Celtic stories from which many episodes were drawn.

Published by Boydell & Brewer Inc.

The revival of interest in Arthurian legend in the 19th century was a remarkable phenomenon, apparently at odds with the spirit of the age. Tennyson was widely criticised for his choice of a medieval topic; yet The Idylls of the Kingwere accepted as the national epic, and a flood of lesser works was inspired by them, on both sides of the Atlantic. Elisabeth Brewer and Beverly Taylor survey the course of Arthurian literature from 1800 to the presentday, and give an account of all the major English and American contributions. Some of the works are well-known, but there are also a host of names which will be new to most readers, and some surprises, such as J. Comyns Carr's King Arthur, rightly ignored as a text, but a piece oftheatrical history, for Sir Henry Irving played King Arthur, Ellen Terry was Guinevere, Arthur Sullivan wrote the music, and Burne-Jones designed the sets.
The Arthurian works of the Pre-Raphaelites are discussed at length, as are the poemsof Edward Arlington Robinson, John Masefield and Charles Williams. Other writers have used the legends as part of a wider cultural consciousness: The Waste Land, David Jones's In Parenthesis and The Anathemata, and the echoes ofTristan and Iseult in Finnigan's Wake are discussed in this context. Novels on Arthurian themes are given their due place, from the satirical scenes of Thomas Love Peacock's The Misfortunes of Elphin and Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court to T.H. White's serio-comic The Once and Future King and the many recent novelists who have turned away from the chivalric Arthur to depict him as a Dark Age ruler.
The Return of King Arthurincludes a bibliography of British and American creative writing relating to the Arthurian legends from1800 to the present day.

Full indexes by topic, keyword and individual work\author form a complete subject-index, based on the indexes in source bibliographies. This is a complete bibliography of Arthurian literature to 1978, the result of five years' work by Professor Cedric Pickford and Dr Rex Last of the University of Hull. It consists of a complete alphabetical author-listing, with key numbers for each item, of all critical material recorded in the standard Arthurian bibliographies (Bruce, Modern Languages Quarterly, BBSIA and various other minor lists) with full indexes by topic, keyword and individual work,/author. The total is over 10,000 main entries, with all recorded reviews listed after each entry. Where summaries exist in BBSIA, this is indicated in the main entries. The computer programs have been specially devised and written for this bibliography by Dr Last, and programming and editing of the material has taken morethan two years. Updating volumes are planned to appear at five-year intervals.

Edition, with notes and introductions, of the elaborate entertainments offered to Elizabeth by her courtiers.

The entertainments offered by Elizabethan courtiers to their Queen are a central part of the elaborate cult surrounding the figure of Elizabeth. Yet the fascinating literary texts written for these occasions have been comparatively neglected, despite years of growing interest in both "Gloriana" herself and the masques in general. This book presents an extended study of the entertainments by way of introduction to four of the actual texts. The general introduction examines the origins of the entertainments in court spectacles and pageants of the early Tudor period, and shows how they underline the central place of the cult of Elizabethan court life during her reign, as well as considering the literary traditions of chivalry and romance on which the texts of the entertainments rely so heavily. The four major texts edited here are: The Four Foster Children of Desire (1581), and those at Cowdray in 1591,Elvetham (1591), and Ditchley (1592). Two minor texts, on Bisham and Rycote (1592), are also included. Each text is preceded by an introduction and is fully annotated; there are also notes on the music and a full bibliography.

David Wiles argues that the prolific Robin Hood plays of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were the Spring equivalent of the Christmas mumming tradition.

Robin Hood was the subject of many fifteenth and sixteenth century folk-plays, of which only traces remain. As a result, the ballads, many of which have survived, have usually been regarded as the main-spring of traditions about the famous outlaw. David Wiles however, argues that the dramatic tradition was equally, if not more, important. He sees the plays, associated with Whitsun revels, died out much earlier, and so must be reconstructed from fragmentaryscripts and the tantalising glimpses afforded by sources such as churchwardens' accounts. Robin Hood emerges as an emblem both of the Spring and of rebellion; as a Summer king, the player of Robin Hood flouted and parodied regular authority. With such a background, the plays ceased to be an acceptable part of parish life after the Reformation, and the games were suppressed, while the myth of Robin Hood was manipulated and made respectable.

This volume makes available in translation the texts that lie behind Chaucer's dream poems - The Book of the Duchess, The Parliament of Fowls, The House of Fame and Prologue to the Legend of Good Women. Chaucer's dream poems are now being increasingly studied and appreciated. With their attractively bookish dreamer figure and their graceful use of conventions and traditions, they have their distinctive place in Chaucer's work. But the nodernreader of these medieval poems particularly needs a sense of their literary context in the tradition of comparable narrative poems - largely in OId French - which Chaucer knew and drew upon. None of these French poems has ever been made available in English translation before, and many of the texts are difficult to access, being available only in dated French scholarly editions. The authors represented are Froissart, Machaut and Deschamps, as well as someminor and anonymous poems, and there are also relevant translations from Cicero and Boccaccio. The book gives an idea of what Chaucer's sources were in themselves, and in what ways the English poet was inspired to use and go beyond them, and this presents a picture of the poet at work. Some of the French poems are translated carefully by Chaucer, while with other poems he is selective, interested in certain sections of his sources only. In further cases, the original material can be seen to have provided a more general point of departure for Chaucer's own developments on his work.

The three interludes in this volume come from the press of John Rastell, barrister, printer, adventurer, member of parliament, brother-in-law of Thomas More, and one of the first men in England to have a stage built at his own house. The Four Elements is unique in its genre of scientific morality play. Rastell composed it himself to expound the rudiments of natural science and to air his own frustrating experience of venturing to the New World, in 1517. The anonymous Calisto and Melebea is based on the beginning of the notorious Spanish novel, La Celestina, and has an elegance and subtlety in its satirical comedy of manners that is not found elsewhere in earlyEnglish drama. Gentleness and Nobiblitycrisply debates the case of aristocracy against meritocracy in a mocking humanist vein. It is probably by John Heywood, Rastell's son-on-law. The variety of the play testifies to Rastell's enterprise as publisher and their conmon theme of social responsibility to his strength of personality.

Investigation of literary and archaeological evidence in search of pagan sources for the Arthurian legend.

`Darrah makes the valid point that episodes in the Arthurian romances read like motifs from the ancient mythologies...[he] reconstructs a lost British paganism, grounded in the rivers, hills and woods, and especially those grey monoliths...reminders of a cosmology vanished from this island. NIKOLAI TOLSTOY, DAILY TELEGRAPH
`Contends, with a good deal of evidence, that the impact of pre-Christian Welsh, Irish, Scottish, Cornish and Breton religion is greater than has been previously thought... Extensively researched and well written.' CHOICE

The origins of Arthurian romance will always be a hotly disputed subject. The great moments of the legends belong partly to dimly-remembered history, partly to the poets' imagination down the ages, yet there is another strand to the stories which goes back deeper and further: the traces of ancient pagan religion, found both in Arthurian heroes who have inherited the attributes of gods, and in episodes which reflect ancient religious rituals.
Darrah's careful study of the thematic relationships of, particularly, the more obscure episodes of the romances and his identification of the relative geography of Arthurian Britain as portrayed in the romances will be valuable even to those who differ with his conclusions. His most original contribution to an unravelling of a pagan Arthurian past lies in his appropriation of the fascinating evidence of standing stones and pagan cultic sites. This is dark and difficult territory, but building on elusive clues, and tracing a range of sites, especially in south-west Britain, John Darrah hasadded a significant new dimension to the search for the sources of the legends of Arthur and his court.

JOHN DARRAH has also written The Real Camelot.