The Index of Middle English Prose is an international collaborative project which will ultimately locate, identify and record all extant Middle English prose texts composed between c.1200 and c.1500, in both manuscript andprinted form in medieval and post-medieval versions. The first step towards this goal has been this series of Handlists, each recording the holdings of a major library or group of libraries. Compiled by scholars, Handlists include detailed descriptions ofeach prose item with identifications, categorisations and full bibliographical data. Every Handlist will also contain a series of indexes including listings of opening and closing lines, authors, titles, subject matter and rubrics. For students of the middle ages Handlists provide essential bibliographical tools and shed light on a wide range of subjects.
Gemma Wheeler
Gaimar's Estoire des Engleis: Kingship and Power
Regular price
$120.00
Save $-120.00
An important text from the "twelfth-century Renaissance" of history writing re-evaluated, drawing out its complex representations of monarchs from Cnut to William Rufus.
Geffrei Gaimar's Estoire des Engleis is its author's sole surviving work. His translation and adaptation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, expanded with a number of lengthy interpolations which appear to draw upon oral traditions and other, unknown written sources, is all that remains of an ambitious history which once reached back as far as Jason and the Golden Fleece. However, the extent of Gaimar's achievement - as poet, historian, and translator - has been obscured by a tendency among scholars to dismiss him as a writer of romance masquerading as history, his work riddled with guesswork, errors, and outright fabrications. This volume aims to challenge such views of Gaimar by providing the first holistic study of his Estoire's incisive commentary upon kingship: its virtues, vices and conflicting models, as applied to rulers such as Edgar "the Peaceable", Cnut, and the ill-fated William Rufus. One good king, for Gaimar, is much like another. A bad king, by contrast, is vividly characterised as ineffectual, tyrannical, or both. Gaimar, a product of that extraordinary period in medieval English culture often termed the "twelfth-century Renaissance'" blends history with literary tropes to yield a sophisticated account of the invasions, betrayals, and familial conflicts that shaped his England's history.
John H. Arnold, Katherine J. Lewis
A Companion to the Book of Margery Kempe
Regular price
$36.95
Save $-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.
Patrick W. Conner
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 10
Regular price
$120.00
Save $-120.00
Two further editions bring the number of published volumes of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicleseries to Edition with scholarly introduction, evaluating the relationship of the Abingdon Chronicle to other Chronicle manuscripts.
This edition of BL MS Cotton Tiberius B i presents for the first time the textual source of several of the most important extant manuscripts in the Chronicle tradition (including MSS B, C, D and E), and showsthe contribution ofAbingdon Abbey to its development. In his full and detailed introduction, Professor Conner explains his choice of manuscript; he also offers a theory, arguing against current thinking, for the relationship between MSS B and C; and suggests that the phenomenon of poetry in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle originated with Abingdon. Professor PATRICK W. CONNERteaches in the Department of English, West Virginia University.
Jehan Wauquelin, Nigel Bryant
The Medieval Romance of Alexander
Regular price
$36.95
Save $-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.
Liz Herbert McAvoy
The Enclosed Garden and the Medieval Religious Imaginary
Regular price
$115.00
Save $-115.00
During the Middle Ages, the arresting motif of the walled garden - especially in its manifestation as a sacred or love-inflected hortus conclusus - was a common literary device.
During the Middle Ages, the arresting motif of the walled garden - especially in its manifestation as a sacred or love-inflected hortus conclusus - was a common literary device. Usually associated with the Virgin Mary or the Lady of popular romance, it appeared in myriad literary and iconographic forms, largely for its aesthetic, decorative and symbolic qualities. This study focuses on the more complex metaphysical functions and meanings attached to it between 1100 and 1400 - and, in particular, those associated with the gardens of Eden and the Song of Songs. Drawing on contemporary theories of gender, gardens, landscape and space, it traces specifically the resurfacing and reworking of the idea and image of the enclosed garden within the writings of medieval holy women and other female-coded texts. In so doing, it presents the enclosed garden as generator of a powerfully gendered hermeneutic imprint within the medieval religious imaginary - indeed, as an alternative "language" used to articulate those highly complex female-coded approaches to God that came to dominate late-medieval religiosity. The book also responds to the "eco-turn" in our own troubled times that attempts to return the non-human to the centre of public and private discourse. The texts under scrutiny therefore invite responses as both literary and "garden" spaces where form often reflects content, and where their authors are also diligent "gardeners": the apocryphal Lives of Adam and Eve, for example; the horticulturally-inflected Hortus Deliciarum of Herrad of Hohenburg and the "green" philosophies of Hildegard of Bingen's Scivias; the visionary writings of Gertrude the Great and Mechthild of Hackeborn collaborating within their Helfta nunnery; the Middle English poem, Pearl; and multiple reworkings of the deeply problematic and increasingly sexualized garden enclosing the biblical figure of Susanna.
Sharon L. Jansen
Anne of France: Lessons for my Daughter
Regular price
$29.99
Save $-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.
Sarah J. Ogilvie-Thomson
The Index of Middle English Prose Handlist VIII
Regular price
$105.00
Save $-105.00
Published by Boydell & Brewer Inc.
P.J.C. Field
The Life and Times of Sir Thomas Malory
Regular price
$29.99
Save $-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
Regular price
$29.99
Save $-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
Cassandra Gorman
The Atom in Seventeenth-Century Poetry
Regular price
$130.00
Save $-130.00
An investigation into the remarkable "poetics of the atom" in English literary texts from the mid to late seventeenth century.
The early modern "atom" – understood as an indivisible particle of matter – captured the poetic imagination in ways that extended far beyond the reception of Lucretius and Epicurean atomism. Contrarily to fears of atomisation and materialist threat, many poets and philosophers of the period sought positive, spiritual motivation in the concept of material indivisibility. This book traces the metaphysical import of these poetic atoms, teasing out an affinity between poetic and atomic forms in seventeenth-century texts. In the writings of Henry More, Thomas Traherne, Margaret Cavendish, Hester Pulter and Lucy Hutchinson, both atoms and poems were instrumental in acts of creating, ordering and reconstructing knowledge. Their poems emerge as exquisitely self-conscious atomic forms, producing intimate reflections on the creative power and indivisibility of self, soul and God. The book begins with a survey of the imaginative possibilities surrounding the early modern "atom", before considering the indivisible centres of the Cambridge Platonist Henry More's cosmic, Spenserian poetics. The focus then turns to the lyrical bond formed between atom and soul in the writings of Thomas Traherne, and from there, to the experimental sequences of Margaret Cavendish and Hester Pulter, whose poetic spaces create new worlds and imagine alternative lives. The book concludes with a study of Lucy Hutchinson's creation poem Order and Disorder, which anticipates the regeneration of fallen being in atomic and alchemical terms.
Elisabeth Brewer
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Regular price
$29.99
Save $-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
Regular price
$29.95
Save $-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.
Carol Dover
A Companion to the Lancelot-Grail Cycle
Regular price
$36.95
Save $-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.
Wendy Scase, Laura Ashe, Philip Knox Kellie Robertson
New Medieval Literatures 21
Regular price
$120.00
Save $-120.00
Cutting-edge and fresh new outlooks on medieval literature, emphasising the vibrancy of the field.
New Medieval Literatures is an annual of work on medieval textual cultures, aiming to engage with intellectual and cultural pluralism in the Middle Ages and now. Its scope is inclusive of work across the theoretical, archival, philological, and historicist methodologies associated with medieval literary studies, and embraces the range of European cultures, capaciously defined. Essays in this volume engage with a wide range of subject matter, from as far back as Livy (d.c.AD 12/18) to Erwin Panofsky (d. 1968). They demonstrate that medieval textual cultures is a radically negotiable category and that medieval understandings of the past were equally diverse and unstable.They reflect on relationships between history, texts, and truth from a range of perspectives, from Foucault to "truthiness", a twenty-first-century media coinage. Materiality and the technical crafts with which humans engage withthe natural world are recurrent themes, opening up new insights on mysticism, knighthood, and manuscript production and reception. Analysis of manuscript illuminations offers new understandings of identity and diversity, while a survey of every thirteenth-century manuscript that contains English currently in Oxford libraries yields a challenging new history of script. Particular texts discussed include Chrétien de Troyes's Conte du Graal, Richard Rolle's Incendium amoris and Melos amoris, and the Middle English verse romances Lybeaus Desconus, The Erle of Tolous, Amis and Amiloun, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
Michael G. Sargent
De Cella in Seculum
Regular price
$130.00
Save $-130.00
Essays on the life of Hugh of Avalon
"All those concerned with the contribution of monasticism to the devotional life of the external world will find much to inform and stimulate them among these papers." JOURNAL OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY
Essays on the life of Hugh of Avalon, on the relationship between the hermitic Carthusian vocation and the outside world; on the reflection of the world in religious literature; and on the transmission of mystical and devotional ideals and writings for a secular audience.
Tony Hunt
Teaching and Learning Latin in Thirteenth Century England, Volume Three
Regular price
$170.00
Save $-170.00
Here at last is the first systematic study of the teaching and learning of Latin in thirteenth century England based on evidence from nearly 200 manuscripts where the text has been glossed in the vernacular. These glosses providethe key to discovering the linguistic competence and interest of students at an elementary level: men and women who needed a working knowledge of Latin for practical purposes. The received view that Latin was the exclusive language of the schoolroom is shown to be mistaken and the exhaustive recording of the vernacular glosses provides a hitherto untapped source of lexical materials in French and Middle English. An essential source-book for medievalists interested in language, literacy and culture.
Monika Otter
Goscelin of St Bertin: The Book of Encouragement and Consolation [Liber Confortatorius]
Regular price
$29.99
Save $-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.
Hyonjin Kim
The Knight without the Sword
Regular price
$120.00
Save $-120.00
Behind the chivalrous facade of Malory's work Kim detects the anxieties and aspirations of the real fifteenth-century aristocracy.
The question of how far the society in which Malory lived reflects that depicted in the Morte Darthur has always been hotly debated. While many critics have considered it a work of anachronistic escapism, more recently it has been argued that the romanticised world of chivalry and the reality of the gentry community revealed in contemporary letter collections represent complementary but irreconcilable aspects of fifteenth-century aristocratic life.This book challenges both assumptions, arguing that behind the chivalric facade of Malory's work lie the anxieties and aspirations of the "real" aristocracy: it presents three distinct pictures of the Malorian knight, as landowner, as an active member of political society, and as a representative of a social group earnestly preoccupied with its self-image and place in society. These three pictures, the author suggests, set behind the archetypal knight-errant in the foreground of Malory's chivalric narrative, illuminate not only Malorian chivalry, but especially the mentality of the late medieval aristocracy.
HYONJIN KIM is at the Language Research Institute, Seoul NationalUniversity.
Richard Axton, Peter Happe
The Plays of John Heywood
Regular price
$170.00
Save $-170.00
The series is performing an important service by providing fully annotated editions of Tudor humanists and playwrights in the original Tudor English, with glossaries and listing of textual variants and doubtful readings. COMPARATIVE DRAMA
`A first-rate edition that substantially advances the cause of scholarship.' COMPARATIVE DRAMA First complete and fully annotated collection of John Heywood's plays in the original language. It makes possible a reevaluation ofhis remarkable achievement as actor-playwright and an appreciation of his lively contribution to the English language. In all their experimental variety the comedies are seen to have the stamp of an idiosyncratic, theatricalintelligence coupled with a surprising seriousness and Heywood emerges as a resourceful apologist for traditional Catholic doctrine in a time of Reformation. In arguing for a new chronology, the editors suggest that Henry VIII'sservant and entertainer was capable of refreshing irreverence and political daring. Contents: Witty and Witles, Johan Johan, The Pardoner and theFrere, The Foure PP, A Play of Love, The Play of the Wether. Notes.Appendices: Verses from a lost Play of Reason, Translation of . RICHARD AXTON is a Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge, and University lecturer in English. PETER HAPPÉis the former Principal of Barton PeverilSixth-Form College.
Professor David Matthews
Subaltern Medievalisms
Regular price
$120.00
Save $-120.00
A fresh new approach to Victorian medievalism, showing it to be far from the preserve of the elite.
This book offers a challenge to the current study of nineteenth-century British medievalism, re-examining its general perception as an elite and conservative tendency, the imposition of order from above evidenced in the work of Walter Scott, in the Eglinton Tournament, and in endless Victorian depictions of armour-clad knights. Whilst some previous scholars have warned that medievalism should not be reduced to the role of an ideologically conservative discourse which always and everywhere had the role of either obscuring, ignoring, or forgetting the ugly truths of an industrialised modernity by appealing to a green and ordered Merrie England, there has been remarkably little exploration of liberal or radical medievalisms, still less of working-class medievalisms. Essays in this book question a number of orthodoxies. Can it be imagined that in the world of Ivanhoe, the Eglinton Tournament, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Alfred Tennyson, the working class remained largely oblivious to, or at best uninterested in, medievalism? What, if any, was the working-class medievalist counter-blast to conservatism? How did feminism and socialismdeploy the medieval past? The contributions here range beyond the usual canonical cultural sources to investigate the ephemera: the occasional poetry, the forgotten novels, the newspapers, short-lived cultural journals, fugitive Chartist publications. A picture is created of a richly varied and subtle understanding of the medieval past on the part of socialists, radicals, feminists and working-class thinkers of all kinds, a set of dreams of the Middle Agesto counter what many saw as the disorder of the times.
Michael Sheringham
André Breton
Regular price
$36.95
Save $-36.95
Published by Boydell & Brewer Inc.
Patrick J. Horner
The Index of Middle English Prose Handlist III
Regular price
$105.00
Save $-105.00
Published by Boydell & Brewer Inc.
David F. Johnson, Geert H.M. Claassens
Dutch Romances I
Regular price
$64.95
Save $-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
Regular price
$105.00
Save $-105.00
Published by Boydell & Brewer Inc.
Clare A. Simmons
Medievalist Traditions in Nineteenth-Century British Culture
Regular price
$120.00
Save $-120.00
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.
Larissa Tracy
Women of the Gilte Legende
Regular price
$29.99
Save $-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
Allan Holaday
The Plays of George Chapman
Regular price
$220.00
Save $-220.00
Much-needed modern critical edition. REVIEW OF ENGLISH STUDIES
Marianne E. Kalinke, Henrik Williams, Karin Palmgren
Norse Romance III
Regular price
$36.95
Save $-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.
David Dumville, Michael Lapidge
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 17
Regular price
$130.00
Save $-130.00
Latin translation, uncorrupted by the chronological dislocation which has affected every other text.
Edition of an important witness to the development of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, preserving in Latin translation a text uncorrupted by the major chronological dislocation which has affected every other text of the work. Includes the earliest surviving Life of St Neot, one of the compiler's sources.
Lucy M. Allen-Goss
Female Desire in Chaucer's Legend of Good Women and Middle English Romance
Regular price
$120.00
Save $-120.00
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.
Nicola McLelland
Ulrich von Zatzikhoven's Lanzelet
Regular price
$130.00
Save $-130.00
Wide-ranging survey of a neglected but significant early German version of the Lancelot legend.
Ulrich von Zatzikhoven's Lanzelet, written around the turn of the thirteenth century, has long intrigued scholars both within and outside German studies: the only remaining trace of a Lancelot legend free of the adulterousaffair with Guinevere, it has been seen both as a precursor of classical Arthurian romance in Germany, and as a post-classical imitation, and attempts to interpret it have often run foul of its contradictions. This new study takesa fresh look at its place in the history of German romance, arguing that Ulrich placed his work firmly in the Arthurian romance tradition, adopting its familiar motifs, courtly vocabulary, and idealised knightly hero, but ratherthan presenting a hero who falls from grace (as did Chrétien), his Lanzelet is truly flawless from the outset. While the repeated episodes and adventures emphasise this aspect of Lancelot, they are also related in strikingly different narrative styles, which Dr McLelland suggests are not the result of authorial incompetence, but rather a source of entertainment, and a challenge to the genre as a whole.
NICOLA McLELLAND is a Lecturer at Trinity College, Dublin.
Ralph Hanna
The Index of Middle English Prose Handlist I
Regular price
$105.00
Save $-105.00
Published by Boydell & Brewer Inc.
P.J.C. Field
Malory: Texts and Sources
Regular price
$130.00
Save $-130.00
Complete Malory articles by leading Malory scholar on issues relating to the text and sources of the Morte Darthur.
During the last thirty years, the study of Malory's text and sources has given rise to hotly contested issues and spectacular discoveries, as well as fundamental questions about the nature of his Morte Darthurand how we should read it. The debate has given rise to hotly contested issues and spectacular discoveries, even requiring forensic examination of the unique manuscript of Malory's great book; it has also thrown fresh light on Malory's art, politics, revisions, tastes, reading, knowledge of Europe, and sense of history. Professor Peter Field is a leading authority on these questions, and the essays collected here, revised and updated for this edition, are of great importance for an understanding of Malory. A new study considers the relative authoirty of the Winchester and Caxton texts.
P.J.C. FIELD is Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Wales, Bangor.
Alan H. Nelson
The Plays of Henry Medwall
Regular price
$120.00
Save $-120.00
Medwall's two surviving plays are among the few extant examples of 15th century household drama.
Bonnie Wheeler, Robert L. Kindrick, Michael N. Salda
The Malory Debate
Regular price
$190.00
Save $-190.00
Seminal essays on one of the most crucial issues in Arthurian studies.
For the past fifty years, debates about which text of Malory scholars and teachers should prefer have sparked much controversy: which is the most authentic or authoritative, Caxton, the Winchester version, or a mixture of both (asproposed by Vinaver)? The papers in this volume represent the most important contributions to the dialogue; previously published articles have been updated where relevant and new issues are presented in several original essays, while the introductions place the argument in its theoretical and historical contexts.
Professor BONNIE WHEELER teaches at the Southern Methodist University; Professor MICHAEL SALDA teaches at the University of SouthernMississippi; Professor ROBERT KINDRICK teaches at the University of Montana.
Contributors: MICHAEL N. SALDA, KEVIN GRIMM, SHUNICHI NOGUCHI, CHARLES MOORMAN, P.J.C. FIELD, WILLIAM MATTHEWS, ROBERT KINDRICK, HELEN COOPER, TOSHIYUKI TAKAMIYA, YUJI NAKAO, NORMAN BLAKE
Christina M. Heckman
Debating with Demons
Regular price
$130.00
Save $-130.00
A consideration of the theme of demons as teachers in early English literature.
In early English literature ca 700-1000 C.E., demons are represented as teachers who use methods of persuasion and argumentation to influence their "pupils". By deploying these methods, related to the liberal arts of rhetoric anddialectic, demons become masters of verbal manipulation. Their pupils are frequently women or Jews, seemingly marginal figures but who often oppose the authority of demonic pedagogues and challenge their deceptive lessons. In poetic accounts of the Fall of the Angels, the Fall of Adam and Eve, and the lives of the saints, those who debate with demons redefine the significance of narrative, authority, and resistance in early medieval pedagogy. This book argues that these encounters between demonic teachers and their pupils are both epistemological, altering the pupils' knowledge, and ontological, affecting their state of being. As the pupils "learn", the physical locations theyoccupy align with rhetorical and dialectical topoi, or conceptual spaces in the mind, as minds, souls, bodies, and places are integrated into cohesive lived experience. The volume thus explores early medieval pedagogy as a spirituo-material practice, both embodied and emplaced, with the potential to alter the onto-epistemological dynamics of the world.
Janet M. Bately
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 3 MS A
Regular price
$130.00
Save $-130.00
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is the backbone of Anglo-Saxon history, an almost contemporary record of events for about five hundred years, and a vital resource for Anglo-Saxon historians. This collaborative edition will eventually include the seven base manuscripts with their contemporary continuations, and ancillary material which sheds light on the Chronicle. The nature of the Chronicle, its relation to official historiography, and its historical place, have long been debated: thisproject will provide a uniform edition from which further research can proceed. MS A (CCCC MS 173) is the oldest of the surviving copies of the Chronicle and physically the most complex; ittook shape initially during the tenth century and is generally endowed with considerable authority because of its age.
C. David Benson, Lynne S. Blanchfield
The Manuscripts of Piers Plowman: the B-version
Regular price
$105.00
Save $-105.00
Published by Boydell & Brewer Inc.
Marianne E. Kalinke
Norse Romance II
Regular price
$36.95
Save $-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
Megan E. Murton
Chaucer's Prayers
Regular price
$95.00
Save $-95.00
A close examination of the prayers in Chaucer's poetry sheds significant new light on his poetic practice.
In a culture as steeped in communal, scripted acts of prayer as Chaucer's England, a written prayer asks not only to be read, but to be inhabited: its "I" marks a space that readers are invited to occupy. This book examines the implications of accepting that invitation when reading Chaucer's poetry. Both in his often-overlooked pious writings and in his ambitious, innovative pagan narratives, the "I" of prayer provides readers with a subject-position thatcan be at once devotional and literary - a stance before a deity and a stance in relation to a poem. Chaucer uses this uniquely open, participatory "I" to implicate readers in his poetry and to guide their work of reading. In examining Christian and pagan prayers alongside each other, Chaucer's Prayers cuts across an assumed division between the "religious" and "secular" writings within Chaucer's corpus. Rather, it emphasizes continuities andapproaches prayer as part of Chaucer's broader experimentation with literary voice. It also places Chaucer in his devotional context and foregrounds how pious practices intersect with and shape his poetic practices. These insightschallenge a received view of Chaucer as an essentially secular poet and shed new light on his poetry's relationship to religion.
Michael Lapidge, James L. Rosier
Aldhelm
Regular price
$29.99
Save $-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
Regular price
$36.95
Save $-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
Norris J. Lacy
Early French Tristan Poems: I
Regular price
$130.00
Save $-130.00
12th-century French retellings and variations of the story of Tristan and Iseut.
The strong and enduring appeal of the Arthurian legends shows no signs of abating, yet many medieval Arthurian texts remain unedited or printed in editions no longer available, while comparatively few of them have been translatedinto English, thus making them inaccessible to the scholarly or general audience unable to read them in the original. The Arthurian Archives series addresses these problems, aiming to provide authoritative critical editionswith parallel translation of essentialtexts for Arthurian studies; each text will be accompanied by a brief introduction, variants and rejected readings, and critical notes. This first volume offers a collection of the French Tristan texts prior to the Prose Tristan; of particular importance is the recently-discovered Thomas fragment, here edited Ian Short. Contents: Béroul, The Romance of Tristan (Norris Lacy); Thomas, Tristan (Stewart Gregory); `The Carlisle Fragment' of Thomas's Tristan (Ian Short) Marie de France, Chevrefeuil (Richard O'Gorman)The Folie Tristan de Berne and the Folie Tristan d'Oxford (Samuel N. Rosenberg)
Edited by Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Katie Ann-Marie Bugyis and John Van Engen
Women Intellectuals and Leaders in the Middle Ages
Regular price
$190.00
Save $-190.00
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.
B.N. Sargent-Baur, R.F. Cook
Aucassin et Nicolete
Regular price
$29.95
Save $-29.95
Published by Boydell & Brewer Inc.
Anne Rooney
Hunting in Middle English Literature
Regular price
$120.00
Save $-120.00
An analysis of the hunt, its imagery and allusion, in Middle English literature.
This book examines for the first time the tradition of hunting imagery and allusion in specifically Middle English literature, and discovers that it differs from the parallel European tradition in its use of certain images. Anne Rooney begins with a review of the Middle English hunting manuals, the texts that taught the art of hunting principally through instruction in the terminology, horn calls and attendant ceremony of the hunt. The second chapter sets the Middle English tradition in its European context, with an account of the inheritance from Classical and medieval French literature. The central part of the book identifies and categorises hunting images in verse and prose romance, other narrative verse, lyric poetry and religious writings of many types. The final two chapters reassess hunting images in two important Middle English texts, The Book of the Duchess and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
Dr ANNE ROONEY teaches medieval English literatureat the University of Cambridge.
Roger Little
Saint-John Perse
Regular price
$29.95
Save $-29.95
Published by Boydell & Brewer Inc.
Crispin Geoghegan
Louis Aragon
Regular price
$36.95
Save $-36.95
Published by Boydell & Brewer Inc.
Peter S. Baker
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 8
Regular price
$130.00
Save $-130.00
Eighth volume in the collaborative edition - early 12C Canterbury manuscript. The introduction details other work by the same hand and his role in re-shaping Anglo-Saxon history.
This edition presents a bilingual (Old English and Latin) version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle written by a monk of Christ Church, Canterbury, probably in the first decade of the twelfth century. Though the Old English andLatin texts have been printed separately, this is the first edition to present the text intended by its compiler, who also produced the Latin translation and wrote the single extant manuscript. The introduction demonstrates that same monk who was responsible for this bilingual chronicle also revised MS A (the Parker Chronicle) and an ancestor of MS E (the Peterborough Chronicle) and was a forger of documents: he thus is significant as an early Norman reviser of Anglo-Saxon history.
PETER BAKER is Professor of English, University of Virginia.
Francis Leneghan
The Dynastic Drama of Beowulf
Regular price
$130.00
Save $-130.00
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.
Andrew McRae
Poly-Olbion: New Perspectives
Regular price
$130.00
Save $-130.00
First collection devoted to the Poly-Olbion, bringing out in particular its concerns with nature and the environment.
Poly-Olbion (1612-1622), the collaborative work of the poet Michael Drayton, the legal scholar John Selden, and the engraver William Hole, ranks among the most remarkable literary productions of early modern England, and arguably among the most important. An ambitious and idiosyncratic survey of the history, topography, and ecology of England and Wales - ranging in its preoccupations from the supernatural conception of Merlin to the curious habits of beavers, and from celebrations of martial glory to laments over the diminishment of woodlands - the book seems determined to pack all of national and natural history between its covers. In the course of thirty songs, Drayton's Muse traverses a varying landscape in which personified rivers, hills, and forests sing of past glories and disasters, pursuing local and regional rivalries whilst propounding a heterogeneous vision of Britain. However, perhaps because of its very uniqueness, it has received relatively little critical attention. This is the first ever volume of essays on Poly-Olbion, and a reflection of the work's increasing prominence in scholarship on the literature and culture of early modern England: the poem has long been central to critical studies of early modern nationhood and nationalism, but in the last decade it has also assumed a central place in discussions of pre-modern approaches to ecological sustainability and environmental degradation. The contributors here address questions about the form and purpose of Poly-Olbion, as well as engaging with these dominant critical debates, reflecting the extent to which the preoccupations of Drayton and his collaborators have become our own.
Tony Hunt
Teaching and Learning Latin in Thirteenth Century England, Volume One
Regular price
$190.00
Save $-190.00
First systematic study of the teaching aid which constituted the set-texts of Latin instruction in 13c England.
Based on nearly two hundred manuscripts containing vernacular glosses, this is the first systematic study of the teaching aids which constituted the set-texts of Latin instruction in thirteenth-century England, some of which are printed here for the first time. These glosses provide the key to discovering the linguistic competence and interest of students at an elementary level: men and women who needed a working knowledge of Latin for practical purposes.The received view that Latin was the exclusive language of the schoolroom is shown to be mistaken and the exhaustive recording of the vernacular glosses provides a hitherto untapped source of lexical materials in French and Middle English.
Glyn S. Burgess
Two Medieval Outlaws
Regular price
$29.99
Save $-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.
R. Allen Brown
Anglo-Norman Studies vols 11-20 [10 volume set]
Regular price
$895.00
Save $-895.00
Published by Boydell & Brewer Inc.
Helen Weinstein
Catalogue of the Pepys Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge
Regular price
$220.00
Save $-220.00
Full bibliographical information on Pepys's outstanding ballad collection.
Pepys' ballad collection is the largest surviving collection of English ballads printed in London in the seventeenth century, and is an outstanding source for English popular culture of the period. collection, already available infacsimile form, are now properly accessible. Ballads: i. Catalogue provides a full bibliographical history of each ballad; ii. Indexes and Listsorganises and presents information on the ballads, classified as titles, tunes, music, first lines, refrains,authors, licenses, printers/publishers/imprints, and watermarks.
Ezra Horbury
Prodigality in Early Modern Drama
Regular price
$75.00
Save $-75.00
Examination of the motif of the prodigal son as treated in early modern drama, from Shakespeare to Beaumont and Fletcher.
Why is it bad to spend too much money? In early modern England, the concept of prodigality governed all forms of financial excess and misuse, from gambling away your family estate to buying too much food. To be prodigal was not only to lack self-discipline but to be immorally excessive. Prodigals were foolish, reckless, and sinful, but their lives were also ones of excitement, lust, luxury, and intrigue. Ambivalently positioned between conservative financial ideals and increasingly popular economic indulgences, prodigals embodied a nation's anxieties about the advent of early capitalism. This book analyses the prodigal youth archetype in early modern drama, examining plays byShakespeare, Middleton, Jonson, Randolph, Chapman, Marston, Beaumont and Fletcher, Davenport, Gascoigne, Heywood, as well as anonymous works and morality plays. The theatres, which were so often criticised for financial excess, became the perfect setting for the rebellious exploits of prodigal youths, and their rises and falls were dramatised with increasing glamorisation between 1500 and 1642. By discussing humanist education practices, Aristotelian ethics, urban change, cuckoldry, usury, and sex work, the author offers the first examination of prodigality and the ways in which England at first condemned, then tolerated, and then eventually came to celebrate excessive spending.
EZRA HORBURY is Lecturer in Renaissance/Early Modern Literature at the University of York.
Richard Barber
Arthurian Literature I - X and XI (index)
Regular price
$695.00
Save $-695.00
`[The series] epitomises what is best in Arthruain scholarship today.' ZEITSCHRIFT FÜ ROMANISCHE PHILOLOGIE Since the first volume in 1982, edited by Richard Barber, Arthurian Literaturehas appeared annually. Its original purposewas to offer a forum for long scholarly articles on all aspects - literary, historic, and artistic - of the Arthurian legend in Europe in the medieval and early modern periods, and bibliographical studies of all periods. Under new editors, whose first volume is Arthurian Literature 12 (1993), that original intention has been expanded to include shorter items of under 5000 words, along with the regular Updates to earlier volumes. All articles are refereed, and Arturian Literaturehas become the year-book of serious Arthurian scholarship.
Fernando Marcos Alvarez
Teatros y Vida Teatral en Badajoz: 1601-1700
Regular price
$85.00
Save $-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.
Jenny Rowland
Early Welsh Saga Poetry
Regular price
$240.00
Save $-240.00
The early Welsh Saga Englynion are lyric poems in character, long presumed to be the poetic remains of lost stories, told in a mixture of prose and verse. Three main cycles survive, centred on the figures of Llywarch Hen, who loses all his sons in his vicarious quest for glory; Unrien Rheged, a king unwillingly betrayed by his follower and kinsman; and Heledd, the sole survivor of an English invasion of her country. There are also many non-cyclicalpoems of the same type with other narrator figures such as the leper of Abercuawg. The best poems display considerable artistry and emotional intensity. The critical discussion of the saga Englynion seeks to restore the lost narrative background by careful reading of internal indications and by comparative study. The growth, nature and artistry of each cycle is fully explored, as well as how each relates to the larger corpus. Relevant early Welsh traditions and history are also cited. This is the first full edition of the saga Englynion since Sir Ifor Williams's Canu Llywarch Hen, and uses two additional manuscript copies. Full translations make the work accessible to a wider audience.
Stephen H Rigby
Historians on John Gower
Regular price
$85.00
Save $-85.00
John Gower's poetry offers an important and immediate response to the turbulent events of his day. The essays here examine his life and his works from an historical angle, bringing out fresh new insights.
The late fourteenth century was the age of the Black Death, the Peasants' Revolt, the Hundred Years War, the deposition of Richard II, the papal schism and the emergence of the heretical doctrines of John Wyclif and the Lollards. These social, political and religious crises and conflicts were addressed not only by preachers and by those involved in public affairs but also by poets, including Chaucer and Langland. Above all, though, it is in the verse of John Gower that we find the most direct engagement with contemporary events. Yet, surprisingly, few historians have examined Gower's responses to these events or have studied the broader moral and philosophical outlook which he used to make sense of them.
Here, a number of eminent medievalists seek to demonstrate what historians can add to our understanding of Gower's poetry and his ideas about society (the nobility and chivalry, the peasants and the 1381 revolt, urban life and the law), the Church (the clergy, papacy, Lollardy, monasticism, and the friars) gender (masculinity and women and power), politics (political theory and the deposition of Richard II) and science and astronomy. The book also offers an important reassessment of Gower's biography based on newly-discovered primary sources.
STEPHEN RIGBY is Emeritus Professor of Medieval Social and Economic History at the University of Manchester; SIAN ECHARD is Professor of English, University of British Columbia.
Contributors: Mark Bailey, Michael Bennett, Martha Carlin, James Davis, Seb Falk, Christopher Fletcher, David Green, David Lepine, Martin Heale, Katherine Lewis, Anthony Musson, Stephen Rigby, Jens Röhrkasten.
Edited by Lori Jones and Nükhet Varlik
Death and Disease in the Medieval and Early Modern World
Regular price
$170.00
Save $-170.00
This collection highlights and nuances some of the recent critical advances in scholarship on death and disease, across and beyond the pre-modern Mediterranean world, Christian, Islamic and Jewish healing traditions.
Across and beyond the pre-modern Mediterranean world, Christian, Islamic and Jewish healing traditions shared inherited medical paradigms containing similar healthy living precepts and attitudes toward body, illness and mortality. Yet, as the chapters collected here demonstrate, customs of diagnosing, explaining and coping with disease and death often diverged with respect to knowledge and practice. Offering a variety of disciplinary approaches to a broad selection of material emerging from England to the Persian Gulf, the volume reaches across conventional disciplinary and historiographical boundaries. Plague diagnoses in pre-Black Death Arabic medical texts, rare, illustrated phlebotomy instructions for plague patients, and a Jewish plague tract utilising the Torah as medicine reflect critical re-examinations of primary sources long thought to have nothing new to offer. Novel re-interpretations of Giovanni Villani's "New Chronicle", canonisation inquests and saints' lives offer fresh considerations of medieval constructions of epidemics, disabilities, and the interplay between secular and spiritual healing. Cross-disciplinary perspectives recast late medieval post-mortem diagnoses in Milan as a juridical - rather than strictly medical - practice, highlight the aural performativity of the Franciscan deathbed liturgy, explore the long evolution of lapidary treatments for paediatric and obstetric diseases and thrust us into the Ottoman polychromatic sensory world of disease and death. Finally, considerations of the contributions of modern science alongside historical primary sources generates important new ways to understand death and disease in the past. Overall, the contributions juxtapose and interlace similarities and differences in their local and historical contexts, while highlighting and nuancing some of the recent critical advances in scholarship on death and disease - two historiographical subfields long approached separately.
Victor Muchineripi Gwande
Manufacturing in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1890-1979
Regular price
$120.00
Save $-120.00
A key book on Zimbabwe's industrial policy and the relationship between manufacturing, the state, and economic interest groups.
Under pressure from local manufacturers, and recognising that industrial policy was a legitimate instrument for development, on 1 July 2016, to boost domestic production, the Government of Zimbabwe passed Statutory Instrument 64 which limited imports and foreign manufactures, allowing local producers satisfy demand. Zimbabwe's neighbours immediately protested that this flouted the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC)'s Protocol on Trade, which aimed to increase trade across borders at regional and national levels. This matter revived the conversation about protectionism as an instrument of industrial policy. Protectionism in Africa is neither limited to Zimbabwe, nor is it a new phenomenon. This book brings a historical perspective to the conversation by exploring the policy proposals and political pressure exerted by manufacturing businesses on the trajectory of industrialisation in colonial Zimbabwe, and reveals that the major point of contention between the state, industry, and other economic interest groups in this period was protection. Tracing changing attitudes to the country's political economy, the author examines the way in which industrialists advanced their interests through the Association of Rhodesian Industries (ARnI) and other trade bodies, and shows how this pitted them not only against the state but other blocs of capital - farmers, miners and commerce. He examines the impact of the post-war Customs Union Agreement with South Africa, manufacturing strategy under UDI, and examines the impact of Southern Rhodesia's development on its trading partners in South Africa, Zambia and Malawi. Casting new light on the continuing debate on regional trade, this important book adds to our understanding of the settler colony's economic, business, and political history.
Laurel Braswell
The Index of Middle English Prose Handlist IV
Regular price
$105.00
Save $-105.00
Published by Boydell & Brewer Inc.
Tamara Atkin
Manuscript and Print in Late Medieval and Early Modern Britain
Regular price
$95.00
Save $-95.00
Essays on book history, manuscripts and reading during a period of considerable change.
The production, transmission, and reception of texts from England and beyond during the late medieval and early renaissance periods are the focus of this volume. Chapters consider the archives and the material contexts in which texts were produced, read, and re-read; the history of specific manuscripts and early printed books; and some of the continuities and changes in literary and book production, dissemination, and reception in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Responding to Professor Julia Boffey's pioneering work on medieval and early Tudor material and literary culture, they cover a range of genres - from practical texts written in Latin to works of Middle English poetryand prose, both secular and religious - and examine an assortment of different reading contexts: lay, devotional, local, regional, and national.
TAMARA ATKIN is Senior Lecturer in Late Medieval and Early RenaissanceLiterature, and JACLYN RAJSIC is Lecturer in Medieval Literature, at the School of English and Drama, Queen Mary University of London.
Contributors: Laura Ashe, Priscilla Bawcutt, Martin Camargo, Margaret Connolly, Robert R. Edwards, A.S.G. Edwards, Susanna Fein, Joel Grossman, Alfred Hiatt, Pamela M. King, Matthew Payne, Derek Pearsall, Corinne Saunders, Barry Windeatt, R.F. Yeager.
Leslie J. Workman
Studies in Medievalism IV
Regular price
$130.00
Save $-130.00
This volume is devoted to medievalism in England, including: The Antiquarian Impulse in England, 1500-1730, The Two Noble Kinsmen and the Problem of Chivalry, From Medievalism to Historicism, Catholic History and the MiddleAges, Rossetti's Quest for God's Graal.
Medievalism - the whole spectrum of post-medieval response to the middle ages - is now accepted as a vital key to the understanding of Western culture and society from 1500 to the present, pervading every aspect of our time, fromthe popularto the scholarly and artistic. Studies in Medievalism, published annually, is the one series to provide a regular forum for discussion of issues related to medievalism. This volume is devoted to medievalism in England, appropriately, since England has always played a central part in the development of medievalism. Contributors from England, Germany, Japan, Canada and the United States deal with topics ranging from 16th-century antiquarianism to 20th-century detective fiction.
Contributors: D.R. WOOLF, DENNIS O'BRIEN, PETER HADORN, A. CAMERON AIRHEART, MARTIN WALSH, R.J.SMITH, ROGER SIMPSON, RAYMOND CHAPMAN, CLARE SIMMONS, THOMAS COOKSEY, RENATE HAAS, YURIFUWA, ANTHONY HARRISON, ROBERT BURTON, EDWIN CHRISTIAN, BLAKE LINDSY, MARC BAER.
Michael Lapidge, James L. Rosier
Aldhelm
Regular price
$36.95
Save $-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.
Margaret Clunies Ross
Poetry in Sagas of Icelanders
Regular price
$130.00
Save $-130.00
First full analysis of the skaldic verse appearing in the family sagas of Icelanders, considering why and how it is deployed.
Sagas of Icelanders, also called family sagas, are the best known of the many literary genres that flourished in medieval Iceland, most of them achieving written form during the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Modern readers and critics often praise their apparently realistic descriptions of the lives, loves and feuds of settler families of the first century and a half of Iceland's commonwealth period (c. AD 970-1030), but this ascription of realism fails to account for one of the most important components of these sagas, the abundance of skaldic poetry, mostly in dróttkvætt "court metre", which comes to saga heroes' lips at moments of crisis. These presumed voices from the past and their integration into the narrative present of the written sagas are the subject of this book. It investigates what motivated Icelandic writers to develop this particular mode, and what particular literary effects they achieved by it. It also looks at the various paths saga writers took within the evolving prosimetrum (a mixed verse and prose form), and explores their likely reasons for using poetry in diverse ways. Consideration is also given to the evolution of the genre in the context of the growing popularity in Iceland of romantic and legendary sagas. A final chapter is devoted to understanding why a minority of sagas of Icelanders do not use poetry at all in their narratives.
Francisco Reus Boyd-Swan
Teatro en Alicante, 1901-1910
Regular price
$49.95
Save $-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.
Philip Knox, Kellie Robertson, Wendy Scase Laura Ashe
New Medieval Literatures 19
Regular price
$130.00
Save $-130.00
An invigorating annual for those who are interested in medieval textual cultures and open to ways in which diverse post-modern methodologies may be applied to them. Alcuin Blamires, Review of English Studies
New Medieval Literatures is an annual of work on medieval textual cultures, aiming to engage with intellectual and cultural pluralism in the Middle Ages and now. Its scope is inclusive of work across the theoretical, archival, philological, and historicist methodologies associated with medieval literary studies, and embraces both the British Isles and Europe. Essays in this volume trace institutional histories, examining the textual and memorial practices of religious institutions across the British Isles; explore language games that play with meaning in Anglo-French poetry; examine the interplay of form and matter in Italian song; position Old Norse sagas in an ecocritical and a postcolonial framework; consider the impact of papal politics on Middle English poetry; and read allegorical poetry as a privileged site for asking fundamental questions about the nature of the mind. Texts discussed include lives of St Aebbe of Coldingham, with a focus on the twelfth-century Latin Vita and its afterlives; a range of Latin and vernacular works associated with institutional houses, including the Vie de Edmund le rei by Denis Piramus and the Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis; both the didactic and lyrical writings of Walter de Bibbesworth; the trecento Italian caccia, especially examples by Vincenzo da Rimini and Lorenzo Masini;Bárðar saga, Egils saga, and other Old Norse works that reveal the traces of encounters with a racial other; John Gower's Confessio Amantis, in striking juxtaposition with late-medieval accounts of ecclesiastical crisis; and Alain Chartier's Livre de l'Espérance.
PHILIP KNOX Is University Lecturer in English and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge; KELLIE ROBERTSON is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at theUniversity of Maryland; WENDY SCASE is Geoffrey Shepherd Professor of Medieval English Literature at the University of Birmingham; LAURA ASHE is Professor of English at the University of Oxford and Fellow and Tutor at Worcester College, Oxford.
Contributors: Daisy Delogu, Thomas Hinton, Thomas O'Donnell, Daniel Remein, Jamie L. Reuland, Zachary Stone, Christiania Whitehead.
E.H. Ruck
An Index of Themes and Motifs in Twelfth-Century French Arthurian Poetry
Regular price
$105.00
Save $-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.
Chretien de Troyes, Nigel Bryant
Perceval
Regular price
$36.95
Save $-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.
Dr Jennifer Nuttall
Thomas Hoccleve: New Approaches
Regular price
$130.00
Save $-130.00
This volume, the first collection of essays devoted to Hoccleve since 1996, both confirms his importance in shaping the English poetic tradition after Chaucer's death and demonstrates the depth of ongoing critical interest in Hoccleve's work in its own right.
The Middle English poet Thomas Hoccleve, known particularly for his entertainingly biographical verse describing life as a Privy Seal clerk in early fifteenth-century Westminster, is now recognised as a key figure in the literature of later medieval England. This volume, the first collection of essays devoted to Hoccleve since 1996, both confirms his importance in shaping the English poetic tradition after Chaucer's death and demonstrates the depth of ongoing critical interest in Hoccleve's work in its own right. Chapters explore the idiosyncratic forms of his two principle works, TheRegiment of Princes and Series, as well as Hoccleve's distinctive imagery of moving feet, of swelling and bursting bodies, and of the actions of personified Death. Other essays consider the presence of the figure of the woman reader, the part played by the codex in posthumous literary sanctification, the links between Hoccleve's formulary of model letters and documents and his own verse, and the mutually informing relations of Hoccleve's minor poetry and major works. They are preceded by a substantial introduction, considering contemporary responses to Hoccleve in the light of current trends in literary criticism and surveying the reception of his works between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Larissa Tracy
Medieval English and Dutch Literatures: the European Context
Regular price
$170.00
Save $-170.00
This collection honours the scholarship of Professor David F. Johnson, exploring the wider view of medieval England and its cultural contracts with the Low Countries, and highlighting common texts, motifs, and themes across the textual traditions of Old English and later medieval romances in both English and Middle Dutch.
Few scholars have contributed as much to the wider view of medieval England and its cultural contacts with the Low Countries than Professor David F. Johnson. His wide-ranging scholarship embraces both the textual traditions of Old English, especially in manuscript production, and later medieval romances in both English and Middle Dutch, highlighting their common texts, motifs, and themes.
Taking Johnson's work as its starting point and model, the essays collected here investigate early English manuscript production and preservation, illuminating the complexities of reinterpreting Old English poetry, particularly Beowulf, and then go on to pursue those nuances through later English and Middle Dutch Arthurian romances and drama, including Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Canterbury Tales, and the Roman van Walewein. They explore a plethora of material, including early medieval textual traditions and stone sculpture, and draw on a range of approaches, such as Body and Disability Theories. Overall, the aim is to bring multiple disciplines into dialogue with each other, in order to present a richer and more nuanced view of the medieval literary past and cross-cultural contact between England and the Low Countries, from the pre-Conquest period to the late-Middle Ages, thus forming a most appropriate tribute to Professor Johnson's pioneering work.
Lindsay Ann Reid
Shakespeare's Ovid and the Spectre of the Medieval
Regular price
$130.00
Save $-130.00
A study of how the use of Ovid in Middle English texts affected Shakespeare's treatment of the poet.
The debt owed by Shakespeare to Ovid is a major and important topic in scholarship. This book offers a fresh approach to the subject, in aiming to account for the Middle English literary lenses through which Shakespeare and his contemporaries often approached Greco-Roman mythology. Drawing its principal examples from The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew, Romeo and Juliet, Lucrece, and Twelfth Night, it reinvestigates a selection of moments in Shakespeare's works that have been widely identified in previous criticism as "Ovidian", scrutinising their literary alchemy with an eye to uncovering how ostensibly classical references may be haunted by the under-acknowledged, spectral presences of medieval intertexts and traditions. Its central concern is the mutual hauntings of Ovid, Geoffrey Chaucer, and John Gower in the early modern literary imagination; it demonstrates that "Ovidian" allusions to mythological figures such as Ariadne, Philomela, or Narcissus in Shakespeare's dramatic and poetic works were sometimes simultaneously mediated by the hermeneutic and affective legacies of earlier vernacular texts,including The Legend of Good Women, Troilus and Criseyde, and the Confessio Amantis.
LINDSAY ANN REID is a Lecturer in English at the National University of Ireland, Galway.
Kathleen Basford, Paul Hardwick
The Green Man
Regular price
$29.99
Save $-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.
Katherine Marie Olley
Kinship in Old Norse Myth and Legend
Regular price
$130.00
Save $-130.00
This wide-ranging study offers a new understanding of Old Norse kinship in which the individual self was expanded to encompass its kin.
Family interactions in Old Norse myth and legend were often fraught, competitive, even violent as well as loving, protective and supportive. Focusing particularly on intergenerational relationships in the legendary sagas, the Poetic Edda and Snorra Edda, this book reveals not only why ambivalence was so characteristic of mythic-heroic kinship relations but how they were able to endure, even thrive, in spite of such pressures. Close attention is paid to the way gender inflects the dynamic between parents and their children and to the patronymic naming system which prevailed in Old Norse society, while outdated assumptions about the existence of a special relationship between a man and his sister's son inherited from earlier Germanic society are reassessed for the first time in decades. What emerges from this wide-ranging study is a new understanding of Old Norse kinship as a dynamic transpersonal process rather than a presocial fact, in which the individual self was expanded to encompass its kin. Taking the lead from recent anthropological research into kinship and with exciting implications for our understanding of Old Norse personhood, emotions, and the life course, this book challenges its readers to rethink many of the basic ontological assumptions which they bring to their interpretations of Old Norse myth and legend.
Sebastian Sobecki, John Scattergood
A Critical Companion to John Skelton
Regular price
$120.00
Save $-120.00
Introduces Skelton and his work to readers unfamiliar with the poet, gathers together the vibrant strands of existing research, and opens up new avenues for future studies.
John Skelton is a central literary figure and the leading poet during the first thirty years of Tudor rule. Nevertheless, he remains challenging and even contradictory for modern audiences. This book aims to provide an authoritative guide to this complex poet and his works, setting him in his historical, religious, and social contexts. Beginning with an exploration of his life and career, it goes on to cover all the major aspects of his poetry, from the literary traditions in which he wrote and the form of his compositions to the manuscript contexts and later reception.
SEBASTIAN SOBECKI is Professor of Medieval English Literature and Culture at the University of Groningen; JOHN SCATTERGOOD is Professor (Emeritus) of Medieval and Renaissance English at Trinity College, Dublin.
Contributors: Tom Betteridge, Julia Boffey, John Burrow, David Carlson, Helen Cooper, Elisabeth Dutton,A.S.G. Edwards, Jane Griffiths, Nadine Kuipers, Carol Meale, John Scattergood, Sebastian Sobecki, Greg Waite
Rebecca Stephenson
Textual Identities in Early Medieval England
Regular price
$130.00
Save $-130.00
New approaches to a range of Old English texts.
Throughout her career, Professor Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe has focused on the often-overlooked details of early medieval textual life, moving from the smallest punctum to a complete reframing of the humanities' biggest questions. In her hands, the traditional tools of medieval studies -- philology, paleography, and close reading - become a fulcrum to reveal the unspoken worldviews animating early medieval textual production. The essays collected here both honour and reflect her influence as a scholar and teacher. They cover Latin works, such as the writings of Prudentius and Bede, along with vernacular prose texts: the Pastoral Care, the OE Boethius, the law codes, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and Ælfric's Lives of Saints. The Old English poetic corpus is also considered, with a focus on less-studied works, including Genesis and Fortunes of Men. This diverse array of texts provides a foundation for the volume's analysis of agency, identity, and subjectivity in early medieval England; united in their methodology, the articles in this collection all question received wisdom and challenge critical consensus on key issues of humanistic inquiry, among them affect and embodied cognition, sovereignty and power, and community formation.
Tony Hunt
Plant Names of Medieval England
Regular price
$170.00
Save $-170.00
` Compiled with great care, cautious in its claims and rich with suggestions for further scholarship; will be of great value to lexicographers and all students of medieval medicine and botany.' PAULINE THOMPSON, NOTES AND QUERIES
`...compiled with great care, cautious in its claims and rich with suggestions for further scholarship...' NOTES AND QUERIES The first reference work on the botanical language of the English middle ages to appear inprint. Covering approximately 1800 names, applied to some six hundred species, and including over five hundred names not recorded in the OED, it is an indispensable reference work and a comprehensive guide to the bibliography of the subject. Lexicologistswill find a wealth of new material.
Rebecca Thomas
History and Identity in Early Medieval Wales
Regular price
$120.00
Save $-120.00
Crucial texts from ninth- and tenth-century Wales analysed to show their key role in identify formation.
WINNER OF THE FRANCIS JONES PRIZE 2022
Early medieval writers viewed the world as divided into gentes ("peoples"). These were groups that could be differentiated from each other according to certain characteristics - by the language they spoke or the territory they inhabited, for example. The same writers played a key role in deciding which characteristics were important and using these to construct ethnic identities. This book explores this process of identity construction in texts from early medieval Wales, focusing primarily on the early ninth-century Latin history of the Britons (Historia Brittonum), the biography of Alfred the Great composed by the Welsh scholar Asser in 893, and the tenth-century vernacular poem Armes Prydein Vawr ("The Great Prophecy of Britain"). It examines how these writers set about distinguishing between the Welsh and the other gentes inhabiting the island of Britain through the use of names, attention to linguistic difference, and the writing of history and origin legends. Crucially important was the identity of the Welsh as Britons, the rightful inhabitants of the entirety of Britain; its significance and durability are investigated, alongside its interaction with the emergence of an identity focused on the geographical unit of Wales.
Michael J. Warren
Birds in Medieval English Poetry
Regular price
$130.00
Save $-130.00
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.
MICHAEL J. WARREN is currently Visiting Lecturer at Royal Holloway University, where he gained his PhD.
Anne Curry, Rémy Ambühl
A Soldiers' Chronicle of the Hundred Years War
Regular price
$190.00
Save $-190.00
A remarkable and very important unpublished chronicle written by two soldiers, covering in detail the English campaigns in France from 1415 to 1429. It lists many individuals who served in the war, and was written specifically for Sir John Fastolf, the English commander.
This previously unpublished chronicle from the mid-fifteenth century covers the English wars in France from 1415 to 1429. It is highly unusual in that it was written by two soldiers, Peter Basset and Christopher Hanson. William Worcester, secretary to the English commander Sir John Fastolf, also had a hand in it, and it was specifically written for Sir John. The content is unusual, as it includes many lists of individuals serving in the war, and records their presence at battles, naming more than 700 in all. Over half these individuals are French or Scottish, so it would seem that the authors had a particularly detailed knowledge of French military participation. The narrative is important for the English campaigns in Maine in the 1420s in which Fastolf was heavily involved and which otherwise receive little attention in chronicles written on either side of the Channel. The progress of the war is well mapped, with around 230 place names mentioned. The chronicle was extensively used in the sixteenth century by several heralds and by Edward Hall. As a result, it had an influence on Shakespeare. The death of the earl of Salisbury at Orleans in 'Henry VI Part I' Follows the chronicle closely. The 'Mirror for Magistrates' Salisbury narrative is also derived from the chronicle. Another point of interest is that the chronicle is by a scribe who can be identified, and proves to be the only known fifteenth-century account of the war written in England in French, which adds an important linguistic dimension to its study.
C. Paul Christianson
Memorials of the Book Trade in Medieval London
Regular price
$105.00
Save $-105.00
The Bridge charity both patronised artisans involved with the manuscript-book trade and administered properties occupied by craftsmen connected with it. Its records provide `an invaluable and factual picture of the 15th-century book trade.' BOOK COLLECTOR In Memorials of the Book Trade in Medieval London, Paul Christianson presents a detailed account and assessment of the early records of the Bridge House Estates, the City of London trust responsible for the properties and the business and civic affairs of old London Bridge. These records reveal the organisation and administration of the Bridge charity itself as well as its frequent patronage of London artisans, particularly those involved with the manuscript-book trade. As artifacts, the records illustrate many features of contemporary book production, including binding techniques, the early use of paper, and the development of decorative penworkand of uniform styles of handwriting. The records of properties held by the Bridge charity in areas of the city occupied by craftsmen connected with the book trade also provide a series of unique insights into the organisation and location of that trade throughout the 15th century and into the 16th century. The book is illustrated with plates showing all the major palaeographical and other features of the Bridge house records and is of considerable importance to the study of the book trade and, more generally, of the history of the city of London itself.C. PAUL CHRISTIANSON is Mildred Foss Thompson Professor of English Language and Literature, The College of Wooster, Ohio.
Liam Lewis
Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts
Regular price
$120.00
Save $-120.00
A redefinition of the animal's relationship to sound and language in French texts from medieval England.
The barks, hoots and howls of animals and birds pierce through the experience of medieval texts. In captivating episodes of communication between species, a mandrake shrieks when uprooted from the ground, a saint preaches to the animals, and a cuckoo causes turmoil at the parliament of birds with his familiar call. This book considers a range of such episodes in Old French verse texts, including bestiaries, treatises on language, the Life of Saint Francis of Assisi and the Fables by Marie de France, aiming to reconceptualize and reinterpret animal soundscapes. It argues that they draw on sound to produce competing perspectives, forms of life, and linguistic subjectivities, suggesting that humans owe more to animal sounds than we are disposed to believe. Texts inviting readers to listen and learn animal noises, to seek spiritual consolation in the jargon of birds, or to identify with the speaking wolf, create the conditions for an assertion of human exceptionalism even as they simultaneously invite readers to question such forms of control. By asking what it means for an animal to cry, make noise, or speak in French, this book provides an important resource for theorizing sound and animality in multilingual medieval contexts, and for understanding the animal's role in the interpretation of the natural world.
Karl Fugelso
Studies in Medievalism XXVII
Regular price
$130.00
Save $-130.00
Essays tackling the difficult but essential question of how medievalism studies should look at the issue of what is and what is not "authentic".
Given the impossibility of completely recovering the past, the issue of authenticity is clearly central to scholarship on postmedieval responses to the Middle Ages. The essays in the first part of this volume address authenticitydirectly, discussing the 2017 Middle Ages in the Modern World conference; Early Gothic themes in nineteenth-century British literature; medievalism in the rituals of St Agnes; emotions in Game of Thrones; racism in Disney's Middle Ages; and religious medievalism. The essayists' conclusions regarding authenticity then inform, even as they are tested by, the subsequent papers, which consider such matters as medievalism in contemporary French populism; nationalism in re-enactments of medieval battles; postmedieval versions of the Kingis Quair; Van Gogh's invocations of Dante; Surrealist medievalism; chant in video games; music in cinematic representations of the Black Death; and sound in Aleksei German's film Hard to Be a God.
Karl Fugelso is Professor of Art History at Towson University in Baltimore, Maryland.
Contributors: Aida Audeh, Tessel Bauduin, Matthias Berger, Karen Cook, Timothy Curran, Nickolas Haydock, Alexander Kolassa, Carolyne Larrington, David Matthews, E.J. Pavlinich, Lotte Reinbold, Clare Simmons, Adam Whittaker, Daniel Wollenberg.
A.J. Minnis
Gower's Confessio Amantis: Responses and Reassessments
Regular price
$120.00
Save $-120.00
Published by Boydell & Brewer Inc.
Christopher Joby
John Cruso of Norwich and Anglo-Dutch Literary Identity in the Seventeenth Century
Regular price
$170.00
Save $-170.00
The first book-length biography of John Cruso of Norwich (b. 1592/3), a second-generation migrant poet, translator and military author, that explores ideas and practices of identity formation in the early modern period.
John Cruso of Norwich (b. 1592/3), the eldest son of Flemish migrants, was a man of many parts: Dutch and English poet, translator, military author, virtuoso networker, successful merchant and hosier, Dutch church elder and militia captain. This first book-length biography, making extensive use of archival and literary sources, reconstructs the life and work of this multi-talented, self-made man, whose literary oeuvre is marked by its polyvocality.
Cruso's poetry includes a Dutch amplificatio on Psalm 8, some 221 Dutch epigrams, and elegies (one of which frames the most important Anglo-Dutch literary moment in the seventeenth century, a collection of Dutch and Latin elegies which marked the death of the London Dutch church minister, Simeon Ruytinck, and included verses by Constantijn Huygens and Jacob Cats). As a military author, Cruso published five works, in English, including two translations from the French. These works display his knowledge of the canon of classical and Renaissance literature, which, in turn, allowed him to fashion himself as a miles doctus, a learned soldier, and make a contribution to military science in England prior to and during the English Civil Wars.
In focusing on the rich and varied life and works of John Cruso, this book also explores ideas and practices of identity formation in the early modern period, as well as allowing Cruso's life to shed further light on the migrant experience in seventeenth-century Norwich. Joby shows how a second-generation migrant could successfully integrate himself into English society, whilst continuing to engage with his Low Countries heritage.
Donald Scragg
A Conspectus of Scribal Hands Writing English, 700-1100
Regular price
$120.00
Save $-120.00
Comprehensive, annotated list of over a thousand Anglo-Saxon scribal hands, linking them to place and manuscript.
This book documents the entire corpus of scribal hands writing in the vernacular from the eighth century to post-Conquest. More than a thousand hands are listed, together with details of their work, which ranges from a few words or sentences in marginalia to multiple volumes; glosses and marginalia are included, together with Latin charters containing some English. Overall, it offers a comprehensive view of the scale of literacy in early medieval England, locating the familiar material produced in Alfred's day in a significantly wider context, and providing an invaluable starting point for a variety of manuscript studies.
Rosamond McKitterick, Richard Beadle
Catalogue of the Pepys Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge V
Regular price
$220.00
Save $-220.00
Modern Manuscriptscovers all post-medieval MSS in the Library, describing the contents of nearly 250 volumes, ranging from the great naval collections to the individual letters and notes. It includes some of the best knownitems in the Library (the Anthony Roll of Henry VIII's navy; the Maitland poems, the Diary itself), as well as a wide variety of MSS hitherto neglected for want of a complete catalogue. Building on the specialist catalogues of M.R. James and J.R. Tanner, the present volume encompasses not only naval and maritime affairs, but also poetry, history, law, liturgy, genealogy, sorcery and much else, describing in greatest detail those items which remain unpublished.
Trevor Field
Maurice Barrès
Regular price
$29.95
Save $-29.95
Published by Boydell & Brewer Inc.
Julia Boffey
Middle English Lyrics
Regular price
$36.95
Save $-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.
Krista A. Murchison
Manuals for Penitents in Medieval England
Regular price
$65.00
Save $-65.00
First comprehensive survey of a major genre of medieval English texts: its purpose, characteristics, and reception.
The "bestseller list" of medieval England would have included many manuals for penitents: works that could teach the public about the process of confession, and explain the abstract concept of sin through familiar situations. Among these 'bestselling' works were the Manuel des péchés (commonly known through its English translation Handlyng Synne), The Speculum Vitae, and Chaucer's Parson's Tale. This book is the first full-length overview of this body of writing and its material and social contexts. It shows that while manuals for penitents developed under the Church's control, they also became a site of the Church's concern. Manuals such as the Compileison (which was addressed to a much broader audience than its English analogue, Ancrene Wisse) brought learning that had been controlled by the Church into the hands of layfolk and, in so doing, raised significant concerns over who should have access to knowledge. Clerics worried that these manuals might accidentally teach people new sins, remind them of old ones, or become sites of prurient interest. This finding, and others explored in this book, call for a new awareness of the complications and contradictions inherent in late medieval orthodoxy and reveal plainly that even writing that happened firmly within the Church's control could promote new and complex ways of thinking about religion and the self.
Hetta Elizabeth Howes
Transformative Waters in Late-Medieval Literature
Regular price
$120.00
Save $-120.00
A consideration of the metaphor of water in religious literature, especially in relation to women.
Women are frequently depicted as unpredictable, difficult to categorise and prone to transformation in medieval religious writings. Water is equally elusive: rivers, wells and seas slip and slide out of the readers' grasp as they alter in metaphorical meaning.
This book considers a large span of watery images in a small cluster of late-medieval devotional writings by and for women, in order to explore the association between women and water in the medieval religious imagination. Using writings by Aelred of Rievaulx, Julian of Norwich and a number of anonymous translators - as well as medical, scientific, and encyclopaedic works - it argues for water as an all-purpose metaphor with a particularly resonance for them. Its chapters are organised around a number of particular usages of water as a means of mediation and exchange between the human and the divine, from crossing a stream to dissolving in the peaceful sea of God's love. Through analysis of such recurring tropes, this book reveals that whilst water can be used to hint at transformation of the soul, and greater access to the divine, male authors also use the very same metaphorical material to regulate such access for their female readers.
Derek Brewer
Medieval Comic Tales
Regular price
$29.99
Save $-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.
Marie Addyman
Nature: An English Literary Heritage
Regular price
$170.00
Save $-170.00
A journey through texts on, about, or reflecting our experience of the natural world.
What might it mean to study ideas of nature within our English literary heritage? In posing this question this volume invites us both to discover a diversity of ways of looking at a major continuing topos within English literature, and to ask what we mean by nature itself within this context. Starting from the premise of considering the pathetic fallacy which demands that nature reflects our emotional needs and beliefs as well as providing our material sustenance, the author explores the astonishing variety of themes grouped under the banner of "nature writing". Some chapters consider the broad distinctions of nature experienced as time and mortality for human beings, and nature perceived as "out there" in the local or larger environment; others demonstrate how nature is commandeered in the erotic pastoral lyrics of the Elizabethan sonneteers, how the concept of a "natural" family underpins the tragedy of King Lear, and how definitions of what is natural are used to validate dominion over women and animals as well as the earth itself.
A literary heritage of nature is here envisaged as a polyphony of voices across the centuries in which English texts influence and are influenced by their continental and North American fellow-artists. The colonial preoccupations of the Elizabethan Sir Walter Ralegh are re-examined in the writings of the American nineteenth-century defender of nature David Henry Thoreau. The seventeenth-century Norfolk physician Sir Thomas Browne's musings begin and end the meditations by W.G. Sebald on his twentieth-century East Anglian pilgrimage in The Rings of Saturn. Mary Shelley's new genre of science fiction is turned upside down in Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics. Ted Hughes translates Ovid. Seamus Heaney takes his inspiration from English, Irish and continental peers and predecessors.
This polyphonic chorus of writing about nature has always enriched our literature and continues to do so. At the same it demonstrates how we have naturalised nature in our culture, as both a celebration, and an admonishment for what we take for granted in our attitudes to the natural world.
Dennis McCarthy, June Schlueter
A Brief Discourse of Rebellion and Rebels by George North
Regular price
$95.00
Save $-95.00
A new source for Shakespeare's plays, only recently uncovered, is investigated here with a full edition and facsimile of the text.
New sources for Shakespeare do not turn up every day... This is a truly significant one that has not heretofore been studied or published. The list of passages now traced back to this source is impressive. - David Bevington, Professor Emeritus, University of Chicago
"A Brief Discourse of Rebellion and Rebels" is the only uniquely existent, unpublished manuscript that can be shown to have been a source for Shakespeare's plays. George North wrote the treatise in 1576 while at Kirtling Hall, the North family estate in Cambridgeshire. His manuscript, newly uncovered by the authors at the British Library, has many implications for our understanding of Shakespeare's plays. for example, not only does it bring clarity to the Fool's mysterious reference to Merlin in King Lear, but also upsets the prevailing opinion that Shakespeare invented the final hours of Jack Cade in 2 Henry VI. Linguistic and thematic correspondences between the North manuscript and Shakespeare's plays make it clear that the playwright borrowed from this document in other plays as well, including Richard III, 3 Henry VI, Henry V, King John, Macbeth, and Coriolanus. The opening chapters of the book investigate such connections; the volume also contains both a transcript and a facsimile of "A Brief Discourse", making this previously unknown document readily available.
DENNIS MCCARTHY is an independent scholar; JUNE SCHLUETER is Charles A. Dana Professor Emerita of English at Lafayette College, Easton, Pennsylvania.
Cathy Hume
Middle English Biblical Poetry
Regular price
$120.00
Save $-120.00
A new analysis of the neglected genre of medieval Biblical poetry.
Medieval England had a thriving culture of rewriting the Bible in art, drama, and literature in Latin, French and English. Middle English biblical poetry was central to this culture, and although these poems have suffered from critical neglect, sometimes dismissed as mere "paraphrase", they are rich, innovative and politically engaged. Read in the same gentry and noble households as secular romance, biblical poems borrow and adapt romance plots and motifs, present romance-inflected exotic settings, and share similar concerns: reputation, order, family and marriage. This book explores six poems from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries that retell episodes from the Old Testament: the ballad-like Iacob and Iosep, two lives of Adam and Eve; an alliterative version of the Susanna story, the Pistel of Susan; and the Gawain-poet's Patience and Cleanness. Each chapter identifies new sources and influences for the poems, including from biblical glosses and manuscript illustration. The book also investigates the poems' relationships with contemporary cultures of literature and religion, including with secular romance, and offers new readings of each poem and its cultural functions, showing how they bridge the chasm between medieval Christian England and the Jews and pagans of the pre-Christian Mediterranean world. It also considers reading contexts, arguing that the poems and their manuscripts offer hints about the social class and gender of their household audiences.
![Goscelin of St Bertin: The Book of Encouragement and Consolation [Liber Confortatorius]](http://indiepubs.com/cdn/shop/files/9781843842941_8ec9b662-26e7-49cc-8389-09d2b295ee0e_400x.jpg?v=1721434893)
![Anglo-Norman Studies vols 11-20 [10 volume set]](http://indiepubs.com/cdn/shop/files/9780851157351_400x.jpg?v=1719574896)
![Goscelin of St Bertin: The Book of Encouragement and Consolation [Liber Confortatorius]](http://indiepubs.com/cdn/shop/files/9781843842941_8ec9b662-26e7-49cc-8389-09d2b295ee0e_{width}x.jpg?v=1721434893)
![Anglo-Norman Studies vols 11-20 [10 volume set]](http://indiepubs.com/cdn/shop/files/9780851157351_{width}x.jpg?v=1719574896)
