An investigation into a variety of texts providing guidance for teachers, parents, and children themselves.
The question and procedures of integrating children into wider society during the medieval and early modern period are debated across a wide range of contemporary texts, in both print and manuscript form. This study takes as its focus the ways in which vernacular literature (including English courtesy poems, incunabula and sixteenth-century printed household books, grammar school statutes, and pedagogic books) provided a guide to socialising children. Theauthor examines how the transmission and reception of this literature, showing how patterns of thought changed during the period for parents, teachers, and young people alike; and places children and family reading networks into the context of debates on the history of childhood, and the history of the book.
MERRIDEE L, BAILEY Is a social and cultural historian of late medieval and early modern England. She is an Associate Member of the Facultyof History, University of Oxford.
Piers Plowman and its Manuscript Tradition
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The first full survey of crucial witnesses to the reception of Piers Plowman.
The fifty-plus surviving manuscripts of William Langland's Piers Plowman cast important light on the early public life of this central Middle English work, but they have been relatively neglected by scholarship. This first full study of the subject examines the textual variants, marginal rubrics and companion texts in the manuscripts. It illuminates a reception quite distinct from the reformist poems written by Langland's imitators in "the Piers Plowman tradition". It reveals how the earliest scribes devised various traditional forms of presentation that proved remarkably durable in the poem's subsequent reception, even surviving into the age of print. Exploring Piers Plowman's appearances in the manuscripts, paired unexpectedly with such genres as romance, hagiography and travel literature, the book demonstrates the surprisingly affective responses of medieval readers to the represented lives of the narrator Will and the title figure Piers the Plowman. At the same time, it shows that the evidence for individual scribal agendas in particular copies is more ambiguous than often assumed, with each book reflecting the activities of an unknown number of hands and an uncertain mixture of design and accident. By drawing on evidence from textual scholarship as well as codicological and literary approaches, the author offers fresh insight into Piers Plowman's place in literary history and proposes new ways of understanding the late medieval manuscript as a multi-layered, collaborative product.
Sarah Wood is Associate Professor of Medieval English Literature at the University of Warwick
The Manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales
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Owen investigates what the manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales reveal about the way they came into being.
[see revs] This study of the manuscripts of the Canterbury Talescalls into question previous efforts to explain the complexities, the different orderings of the tales and the extraordinary shifts in textual affiliations within the manuscripts. Owen sees the manuscripts that survive, most of them collections of all or almost all the tales, as derived from the large number of single tales and small collections that circulated after Chaucer's death. This theory takes issue with all modern editions of the Canterbury Tales, which in Owen's view reflect the effort of medieval scribes and supervisors to make a satisfactory book of the collection of fragments Chaucer left behind. It is this collection of fragments, the authentic Tales of Canterbury by Geoffrey Chaucer, which reflects the different stages of the plan that was still evolving at his death. CHARLES A. OWEN Jr is former Professor of English and Chairman of Medieval Studies at the University of Conneticut.
The Making of Medieval History
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Essays on the discipline of medieval history and its practitioners, from the late eighteenth century onwards.
A hugely interesting set of essays, reflecting on a variety of ways in which medieval history has developed to the present time. Scholarship of the highest standard, deeply thought-provoking and deeply engaged with the inheritances and future tasks of medieval academic history. The collection will be essential reading for all medievalists. John Arnold, Professor of Medieval History, University of Cambridge.
Medieval history is present in manyforms in our world. Monuments from the Middle Ages or inspired by them are a familiar feature of landscapes across Europe and beyond; the period between the end of the Roman Empire in Western Europe and the Reformation and European expansion is an essential part of our imagination, be it conveyed through literature, the arts, science fiction or even video games; it is also commonly invoked in political debates. Specialists in the field have played a majorrole in shaping modern perceptions of the era. But little is known about the factors that have influenced them and their work. The essays in this volume provide original insights into the fabric and dissemination of medieval history as a scholarly discipline from the late eighteenth century onwards. The case-studies range from the creation of specific images of the Middle Ages to the ways in which medievalists have dealt with European identity, contributed to making and deconstructing myths and, more specifically, addressed questions relating to land and frontiers as well as to religion.
GRAHAM A. LOUD is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Leeds;MARTIAL STAUB is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Sheffield.
Contributors: Christine Caldwell Ames, Peter Biller, Michael Borgolte, Patrick Geary, Richard Hitchcock, Bernhard Jussen, Joep Leerssen, G.A. Loud, Christian Lübke, Jinty Nelson, Bastian Schlüter, Martial Staub, Ian Wood.
The Guild Book of the Barbers and Surgeons of York (British Library, Egerton MS 2572)
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A new exploration of the secular manuscripts and medieval medical texts associated with the York Guild and its members.
Produced in 1486 and subsequently augmented, the Guild Book of the Barbers and Surgeons of York (British Library Egerton MS 2572) is a unique record of the knowledge, ambitions, activities and civic relationships maintained by the Barbers and Surgeons Guild over a period of 300 years. The manuscript's earliest folios contain images, astrological tracts, a plague treatise and a bloodletting poem. To these were added early modern ordinances and oaths, a series of royal portraits, and the names of the Guild's masters and apprentices. It is a rare survival of late medieval medical knowledge placed within a civic context.
This new multi-disciplinary examination of the York Guild Book presents a comprehensive edition of its content and a detailed study of the creation and use of this fascinating manuscript. The York Guild Book was not owned by any one person but was intended to be representative of the types of manuscripts the Guild's members might have individually possessed. The Guild's commission elevated their manuscript's functional content into something which could be proudly owned and displayed, as is demonstrated by the stylishly executed pen and ink drawings, two of which are possibly unique. Through a contextualisation of the form and content of the manuscript, the book articulates ideas about material culture and the ceremonial role of secular manuscripts whilst shedding new light on the dissemination and status of medieval medical texts.
Apollonius of Tyre
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A comparative study of one of the most familiar stories in medieval romance (used by Gower, Shakespeare, etc.), from late Antiquity into the Renaissance.
The Historia Apollonii is a rare Latin example of a genre of literature more fully attested in Greek, the so-called `Greek romance' - popular stories which involve lovers or families separated byshipwreck and misfortune andeventually joyfully reunited. It was one of the most widely and continuously read texts to survive from late Antiquity through the middle ages and into the Renaissance almost unchanged. Elizabeth Archibald's study of the Historia Apollonii, taking a valuable comparative approach, discusses the text's merits and interest, its date and possible origin, the present state of scholarship, and the question of its reception and genre in the middle ages and Renaissance. There follows a complete survey of the medieval and early Renaissance use and knowledge of the Historia Apollonii throughout Europe; and the book is completed with the text and translation of the romance itself. An indispensable work for students of medieval romance.
ELIZABETH ARCHIBALD is Professor of English, Durham University.
The England of Piers Plowman
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Du Boulay broadens the traditional, literary, view of Langland in this extended study of the poet and his world, the first to be written by a historian this century
Professor Du Boulay's book is both a highly readable introduction to Langland's work and an original contribution to the history of religious thought. It rejects the view that Langland was primarily a political radical or a prophet of doom and sees him as both a great imaginative poet and a preacher of Christian charity. Writing in an age of intellectual subtlety and shifting social frontiers, Langland expressed deep anxieties yet offered to his fellow-Christians a way of interior repentance and practical love, guided by the enigmatic figure of Piers.
Chaucer's Religious Tales
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These thirteen essays by distinguished Chaucerians deal with the most neglected genre of the Canterbury Tales, the religious tales. Although the prose works are also discussed, the primary focus of the volume is on Chaucer's four poems in rhyme royal: the Clerk's Tale, the Man of Law's Tale, the Second Nun's Tale and the Prioress's Tale. Almost all of Chaucer's tales are religious in some sense, but these four works deal specifically and deeply with faith and spiritual transcendence. They appeal to qualities, such as pathos, not now in critical fashion, but at the same time they seem extraordinarily contemporary in their special interest inwomen and feminist issues. The time is appropriate to recognise their importance in Chaucer's canon, for he is a religious poet as surely as he is a poet of comedy and secular love. These essays survey past criticism on the religious tales and offer new approaches.
Contributors: C. DAVID BENSON, ELIZABETH ROBINSON, DEREK PEARSALL, BARBARA NOLAN, ROBERT WORTH FRANK, LINDA GEORGIANNA, CHARLOTTE C. MORSE, A.S.G. EDWARDS, CAROLYN COLETTE, ELIZABETHD. KIRK, GEORGE R. KEISER, JANE COWGILL.
Medieval Cantors and their Craft
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First full-length study of the role and duties of the medieval cantor.
Cantors made unparalleled contributions to the way time was understood and history was remembered in the medieval Latin West. The men and women who held this office in cathedrals and monasteries were responsible for calculating the date of Easter and the feasts dependent on it, for formulating liturgical celebrations season by season, managing the library and preparing manuscripts and other sources necessary to sustain the liturgical framework of time, andpromoting the cults of saints. Crucially, their duties also often included committing the past to writing, from simple annals and chronicles to more fulsome histories, necrologies, and cartularies, thereby ensuring that towns, churches, families, and individuals could be commemorated for generations to come. This volume seeks to address the fundamental question of how the range of cantors' activities can help us to understand the many different waysin which the past was written and, in the liturgy, celebrated across the Middle Ages. Its essays are studies of constructions, both of the building blocks of time and of the people who made and performed them, in acts of ritual remembrance and in written records; cantors, as this book makes clear, shaped the communal experience of the past in the Middle Ages.
Katie Ann-Marie Bugyis is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at St. Martin's University; Margot Fassler is Kenough-Hesburgh Professor of Music History and Liturgy at the University of Notre Dame and Robert Tangeman Professor Emerita of Music History at Yale University; A.B. Kraebel is Assistant Professor of English at Trinity University.
Contributors: Cara Aspesi, Anna de Bakker, Alison I. Beach, Katie Ann-Marie Bugyis, Margot E. Fassler, David Ganz, James Grier, Paul Antony Hayward, Peter Jeffery, Claire Taylor Jones, A.B.Kraebel, Lori Kruckenberg, Rosamond McKitterick, Henry Parkes, Susan Rankin, C.C. Rozier, Sigbjorn Olsen Sonnesyn, Teresa Webber, Lauren Whitnah
Petitions from Lincolnshire, c.1200-c.1500
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Stories of injustice, feuding, chicanery and natural disasters told through the words of Lincolnshire people in the Middle Ages.
When the normal channels for righting wrongs or asking favours were unavailable, the people of medieval England petitioned their kings - in parliament, council, or chancery. Lincolnshire's inhabitants took full advantage of these opportunities, and their stories are told now through their petitions drawn from The National Archives, edited here.
Throughout the county, over three centuries, Lincolnshire's petitioners sought redress for their wrongs or requested special favours. Petitions were presented by all sections of society: men and women, aristocrats, peasants, merchants, townsmen, bishops, abbots, and other clergy. Their stories illuminate political turmoil, religious and economic change, and the influence of geography. They also show vividly how Lincolnshire's experience was part of the national, and even international, story.
The introduction to this volume sets the documents within England's administrative, legal, political, economic and social framework, and is followed by the texts of almost 200 petitions. These were selected from a much greater possible number for their interest and variety; and each is enhanced by extensive notes
The Index of Middle English Prose Handlist VII
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Camelot Regained
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`Roger Simpson['s] finds are crisp, detailed, and convincing.' MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW The revival of interest in Arthurian literature in the early part of the 19th century has been largely unremarked until now. Roger Simpson's wide-ranging study of this period, in which he traces the dominant forms adopted by the Arthurian revival and presents a wealth of new material, shows it to have been of critical importance in the development of the legend and to have been a powerful early influence on Tennyson, whose role within the Arthurian revival is accordingly reassessed. His book also contains a complete bibliography of early 19th-century Arthurian poetry, drama and prose fiction, together with catalogues of paintings and illustrated books.
ROGER SIMPSON is Director, Centre for Overseas Student Programmes, at the University of East Anglia
Brothers and Sisters in Medieval European Literature
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A wideranging and groundbreaking investigation of the sibling relationship as shown in European literature, from 500 to 1500.
The literature of the European Middle Ages attends closely to the relationship of brother and sister, laying bare sibling behaviours in their most dramatic forms as models to emulate, to marvel at or to avoid. The literary treatment of siblings opens up multiple perspectives on brothers' and sisters' emotions: love, hate, rivalry, desire, nurturing and ambivalence underlie sibling stories. These narratives are in turn inflected by rank, social context andmost crucially, gender. This book examines these sibling relationships, focusing on the important vernacular literatures of Iceland, France, England and Germany, and building on recent research on siblings in psychology, history and social science. Multiple and subtle patterns in sibling interaction are teased out, such as the essential sibling task of "borderwork" (the establishment of individuality despite genetic resemblance), and the tensions caused by the easy substitutability of one sibling for another in certain social situations. When the sibling bond is extended to the in-law relation, complex emotional, strategic and political forces and powerful ambivalences nuancethe relationship still further. Quasi-siblings: foster- or sworn-brothers complete the sibling picture in ways which reflect and contrast with the sibling blood-tie.
CAROLYNE LARRINGTON is a Fellow and Tutor in medieval English literature at St John's College, University of Oxford.
Steep, Strait and High
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Architectural and historical surveys of many of the most important buildings in Lincoln.
This volume illuminates the development of different building styles in timber, stone and brick over a period of 750 years, in one of the oldest areas of Lincoln. High quality and detailed architectural drawings are accompanied by documentary accounts which explain the historical context, and tell some of the fascinating and tragic stories of the people who lived and worked there from the mid-twelfth century until the First World War, including the medieval Jewish community. Steep Hill is already internationally regarded for the quality of its cultural environment as well as its picturesque architecture, and the Strait and the upper part of the long High Street have a wide range of different architectural styles in their buildings, of considerable interest. Steep, Strait and High forms the final volume in a series of architectural and historical surveys of the historic buildings of Lincoln, based on forty-five years of research, originally undertaken by the Survey of Ancient Houses, sponsored by the Lincoln Civic Trust, and now continued in the work of the Survey of Lincoln.
Christopher Johnson, Chair of theSurvey of Lincoln, was an archivist and latterly service manager at Lincolnshire Archives prior to becoming Information and Records Manager at Lincolnshire County Council; Stanley Jones was a lecturer at Sheffield College of Art,and has been deeply involved in the Survey of Ancient Houses in Lincoln.
Aspects of Malory
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This volume of essays is aimed at advancing the appreciation of Malory, an author who has always been enjoyed by the common reader, but is still sometimes underestimated by the critics. Despite an increasing number of articles onMalory, there is a need for a general survey of recent research, which Aspects of Malory provides. The volume opens with a note by the late Professor Vinaver on Malory's prose, and three essays on Malory's Englishness andhis English sources, including an essay by P. J. C. Field which argues for an English rather than a French origin for the Tale of Gareth. This is followed by two essays on Malory's French sources, by Jill Mann and Mary Hynes-Berry. Terence McCarthy re-exasmines the sequence of the tales, and three further essays look at the scribal and textual tradition of Malory's work, in particular the relationship between the Winchester MS, Caxton's printed version, and the history of the MS. Finally, Richard R. Griffith reconsiders the authorship question, and proposes a long-forgotten Thomas Malory as the most likely candidate. There is a bibliography of recent research compiled byProfessor Takamiya. .`Full of sound scholarship'. TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
Chaucer: Complaint and Narrative
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`Lively and interesting... Complaint and its interaction with its narrative context is explored across the range of Chaucer's oeuvre from the shorter poems to various Tales.' NOTES & QUERIES
Counters the view of Chaucer's complaints as exercises in a worn-out French tradition by demonstrating how his effort to fuse lyric and narrative modes led him to experiment with complaint. `His analyses give new perspectives on several of Chaucer's works - an intelligent, original and profitable view.'STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER
Ordinale Exoniense III: Appendix
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The Exeter Ordinale is a huge ordinal issued by John de Grandisson, bishop of Exeter [1327-69], in 1337; it is edited on the basis of manuscripts that belonged to, and were annotated by, the bishop himself. The compilationmarked an important point in medieval study of the liturgy, and the Legenda [liturgical readings for saints' days] which it contains are regarded as one of the most important sources for the study of English medieval hagiography, particularly for saints of English origin.
Abortion in the Early Middle Ages, c.500-900
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First full-length study of attitudes to abortion in the early medieval west.
When a Spanish monk struggled to find the right words to convey his unjust expulsion from a monastery in a desperate petition to a sixth-century king, he likened himself to an aborted fetus. Centuries later, a ninth-century queenfound herself accused of abortion in an altogether more fleshly sense. Abortion haunts the written record across the early middle ages. Yet, the centuries after the fall of Rome remain very much the "dark ages" in the broader history of abortion. This book, the first to treat the subject in this period, tells the story of how individuals and communities, ecclesiastical and secular authorities, construed abortion as a social and moral problem across anumber of post-Roman societies, including Visigothic Spain, Merovingian Gaul, early Ireland, Anglo-Saxon England and the Carolingian empire. It argues early medieval authors and readers actively deliberated on abortion and a cluster of related questions, and that church tradition on abortion was an evolving practice. It sheds light on the neglected variety of responses to abortion generated by different social and intellectual practices, including church discipline, dispute settlement and strategies of political legitimation, and brings the history of abortion into conversation with key questions about gender, sexuality, Christianization, penance and law. Ranging across abortion miracles in hagiography, polemical letters in which churchmen likened rivals to fetuses flung from the womb of the church and uncomfortable imaginings of resurrected fetuses in theological speculation, this volume also illuminates the complex cultural significance of abortion in early medieval societies.
Zubin Mistry is Lecturer in Early Medieval European History, University of Edinburgh.
The Medieval Translator
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These studies of the theory and practice of translation in the middle ages show a wide range of translational practices, on texts which range from anonymous Middle English romances and Biblical commentaries to the writings of Usk,Chaucer and Malory. Included among them is a paper on a hitherto unknown woman translator, Dame Eleanor Hull; a paper which compares a draft translation with its fair copy to show how its translator worked; a paper which shows how the mystic Rolle sought to "translate" his heightened spiritual experiences into words; and so on. In a medieval translation the general priority of meaning over form and style enabled, even obliged, the translator to act more like an author than like a scribe. Consequently, the study of medieval translation throws important light on contemporary, attitudes to, and understandings of, fundamental literary questions: for example, and most importantly, that of the role of the author.
Traditional Romance and Tale
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This stimulating and controversial book suggests an original approach to the study of traditional literature, focussing on medieval romance and on folktale [especially fairytale]. Although a number of new and striking interpretations of such stories are offered, the emphasis is on how they 'work' - how stories mean, rather than what individual stories mean. Dr Wilson observes that such stories have survived for many centuries, though they are conspicuously lacking in everyday logic. She argues that since the story-telling experience is one of re-creation and creation on the part of both story-teller and audience, and since the process of following the story demands imaginative identification of teller and audience with hero or heroine, then it is possible to examine the story from the protagonist's - and the audience's - own exploratory dream. Dr Wilson then discusses the magical and pictorial structures and processes of such stories. This is a literary study, relatively short, non-technical, highly condensed, richly suggestive. It concentrates on stories as artistic entities; psychological and psychoanalytical insights are subordinate to the literary aim. Although original, this book takes its place alongside much other work in related fields of literary, psychological, folklore, anthropological and sociological studies, which recognises the supreme imaginative significance of traditional stories and examines the multiple ways in which they convey meaning.
Arthurian Literature VII
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The Divine Office in Anglo-Saxon England, 597-c.1000
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First full-scale survey and examination of liturgical practice and its fundamental changes over four centuries.
At the heart of life in any medieval Christian religious community was the communal recitation of the daily "hours of prayer" or Divine Office. This book draws on narrative, conciliar, and manuscript sources to reconstruct the history of how the Divine Office was sung in Anglo-Saxon minster churches from the coming of the first Roman missionaries in 597 to the height of the "monastic revival" in the tenth century. Going beyond both the hagiographic "Benedictine" assumptions of older scholarship and the cautious agnosticism of more recent historians of Anglo-Saxon Christianity, the author demonstrates that the early Anglo-Saxon Church followed a non-Benedictine "Roman" monasticliturgical tradition. Despite Viking depredations and native laxity, this tradition survived, enriched through contact with varied Continental liturgies, into the tenth century. Only then did a few advanced monastic reformers conclude, based on their study of ninth-century Frankish reforms fully explained for the first time in this book, that English monks and nuns ought to follow the liturgical prescriptions of the Rule of St Benedict to the letter. Fragmentary manuscript survivals reveal how monastic leaders such as Dunstan and Æthelwold variously adapted the native English liturgical tradition - or replaced it - to implement this forgotten central plank of the "Benedictine Reform".
Jesse D. Billett is Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Divinity, Trinity College, Toronto.
Robert Thornton and his Books
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Essays examining the compiler and contents of two of the most important and significant extant late medieval manuscript collections.
The Yorkshire landowner Robert Thornton (c.1397- c.1465) copied the contents of two important manuscripts, Lincoln Cathedral, MS 91 (the "Lincoln manuscript"), and London, British Library, MS Additional 31042 (the "London manuscript") in the middle decades of the fifteenth century. Viewed in combination, his books comprise a rare repository of varied English and Latin literary, religious and medical texts that survived the dissolution of the monasteries, when so many other medieval books were destroyed. Residing in the texts he copied and used are many indicators of what this gentleman scribe of the North Riding read, how he practised his religion, and what worldly values he held for himself and his family. Because of the extraordinary nature of his collected texts - Middle English romances, alliterative verse (the alliterative Morte Arthure only exists here), lyrics and treatises of religion ormedicine - editors and scholars have long been deeply interested in uncovering Thornton's habits as a private, amateur scribe. The essays collected here provide, for the first time, a sustained, focussed light on Thornton and hisbooks. They examine such matters as what Thornton as a scribe made, how he did it, and why he did it, placing him in a wider context and looking at the contents of the manuscripts.
Susanna Fein is Professor of Englishat Kent State University; Michael Johnston is an Assistant Professor of English at Purdue University.
Contributors: Julie Nelson Couch, Susanna Fein, Rosalind Field, Joel Fredell, Ralph Hanna, Michael Johnston, George R. Keiser, Julie Orlemanski, Mary Michele Poellinger, Dav Smith, Thorlac Turville-Petre.
Chaucer's Narrators
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The book begins with a brief prefatory discussion of its relation to structuralist and post-structuralist criticism. The first chapter, `Apocryphal Voices', surveys the basis of modern critical approaches to persona and `irony' in Chaucer's poetry, and suggests that such approaches are better suited to unequivocally written contexts. A systematic hesitation between a wholly written and a wholly spoken context requires critical distinctions between types of persona, and a number of distinctions in the range between persona and voice. `Morality in its Context' examines the Pardoner and his tale and argues against a `dramatic' view of the tale itself, while the third chapter, 'Chaucer's Development of Persona', is a study of possible sources for Chaucer's handling of the narratorial '1', looking at the English `disour', the French `dits amoureux', Italian and Latin sources of influence, and the Roman de la Rose. The last two chapters apply the principles outlined so far to Troilus and The Canterbury Tales, with a particular examination of the literary history of the Squire'stale to show that modern interest in dramatic persona has obscured many other important issues and leads to drastic misreading. This is a challenging and lucid work which questions many of the received attitudes of recentChaucer criticism, and offers a reasoned and approachable alternative view.
The Index of Middle English Prose Handlist V
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Missale Gothicum I
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Historia Regum Britannie of Geoffrey of Monmouth I
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An admirable piece of work that will be welcomed by the many scholars who have long recognised the need for an easily accessible copy of the Historia. English Historical Review
An admirable piece of work that will be welcomed by the many scholars who have long recognised the need for an easily accessible copy of the Historia. English Historical Review
Geoffrey of Monmouth's HistoriaRegum Britannie was one of the most influential literary works of the 12th century. It offered a new and allegedly authoritative history of the British from their first colonisation of the island under Brutus until the late 7th century AD; hence its immediate and lasting popularity. The characters which the author introduced to a wider audience have become central figures in English literature, including the most spectacular of Geoffrey's reshapings, the figure of King Arthur. It is Geoffrey's account of Arthur which lies behind almost all subsequent Arthurian Romance. It is hardly surprising that no comprehensive edition of the Historia Regum Britannie as yet exists, because over two hundred manuscripts survive, many of which have never been thoroughly examined. In practical terms, this new edition, based on Bern, Burgerbibliothek, MSD. 568, will make this important text readily availableagain; all emendations to correct scribal errors are clearly indicated.
Christians and Jews in Angevin England
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The shocking massacre of the Jews in York, 1190, is here re-examined in its historical context along with the circumstances and processes through which Christian and Jewish neighbours became enemies and victims.
The mass suicide and murder of the men, women and children of the Jewish community in York on 16 March 1190 is one of the most scarring events in the history of Anglo-Judaism, and an aspect of England's medieval past which is widely remembered around the world. However, the York massacre was in fact only one of a series of attacks on communities of Jews across England in 1189-90; they were violent expressions of wider new constructs of the nature of Christian and Jewish communities, and the targeted outcries of local townspeople, whose emerging urban politics were enmeshed within the swiftly developing structures of royal government. This new collection considers the massacreas central to the narrative of English and Jewish history around 1200. Its chapters broaden the contexts within which the narrative is usually considered and explore how a narrative of events in 1190 was built up, both at the timeand in following years. They also focus on two main strands: the role of narrative in shaping events and their subsequent perception; and the degree of convivencia between Jews and Christians and consideration of the circumstances and processes through which neighbours became enemies and victims.
Sarah Rees Jones is Senior Lecturer in History, Sethina Watson Lecturer, at the University of York.
Contributors: Sethina Watson, Sarah Rees Jones, Joe Hillaby, Nicholas Vincent, Alan Cooper, Robert C. Stacey, Paul Hyams, Robin R. Mundill, Thomas Roche, Eva de Visscher, Pinchas Roth, Ethan Zadoff, Anna Sapir Abulafia, Heather Blurton, Matthew Mesley, Carlee A.Bradbury, Hannah Johnson, Jeffrey J. Cohen, Anthony Bale
Constructing History across the Norman Conquest
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An investigation into the hugely significant works produced by the Worcester foundation at a period of turmoil and change.
From the mid-eleventh to the mid-twelfth century Worcester was a monastic community of unparalleled importance. Not only was it home to many of the most famous bishops and monks of the period, including Bishop Wulfstan II: it was also a centre of notable and ambitious scholarly production. Under Wulfstan's guidance, a number of Worcester brethren undertook historical research that resulted in the writing of such renowned texts as Hemming's Cartulary and the Worcester Chronica Chronicarum. Significantly, these historical endeavours spanned the political chasm of the Norman Conquest. The essays collected here aim to shed new light on different aspects of the Worcester "historical workshop", whose literary ouput was, in several respects, pioneering in contemporary European scholarship. Several chapters address the different ways in which the monks organised and updated their archives of documents, both via their sequence of cartularies, with a special focus on the narrative parts of Hemming's Cartulary, and via an interesting (and previously unedited) prose account of the foundation of the see. Others focus on the famous Worcester Chronica Chronicarum, attributed both to Florence and to John, investigating the major model for its composition and structure (the work of Marianus Scotus), the stages in which it was completed, and its connections with Welsh chronicles, as well as the related and fascinating abbreviated version, written mostly in the hand of John himself, and known as the Chronicula. The volume thus elucidates how the Worcester monks navigated the period across the Conquest through the composition of different genres of texts, and how these texts shaped their own institutional memory.
The Hereford Breviary, Edited from the Rouen edition of 1505 with Collation of Manuscripts by Walter Howard Frere of the Community of the Resurrection and Langton E.G. Brown, Sub-Librarian of the Chapter Library, Hereford, Vol.2.
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The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England IV
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These papers are the proceedings of the fourth international Exeter Symposium. They promote enquiry into, and understanding of, the medieval mystics and the cultural context to which they belong. Here, historians, literary critics, theologians, philosophers and bibliographical scholars explore ways in which the contemplative tradition was mediated and perceived in the very early and very late medieval period, and ask fundamental questions about the natureof contemporary understanding of this subject.
CONTRIBUTORS: GEORGE R. KEISER, SUE ELLEN HOLBROOK, WILLIAM F. POLLARD, JAMES HOGG, SANDRA MCENTIRE, ANNE SAVAGE, PETER DINZELBACHER, NICHOLAS WATSON, PETER MOORE, ROBERT K.FORMAN
Scribes and the City
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Scribes played a crucial part in the flourishing and availability of literature in English during the time of Chaucer. This book reveals for the first time who they were, where and how they worked, and the crucial role they playedin bringing this literature to a wider public.
A sensational book... will permanently affect and change the way we see the history of the book in England. Professor Derek Pearsall, Harvard University.
Geoffrey Chaucer is called the Father of English Literature notbecause he was the first author to write in English - he wasn't - but because his works were among those of his generation produced in sufficient numbers to reach a wider audience. He and his contemporaries wrote before the age of print, so the dissemination of his writings in such quantity depended upon scribes, who would manually copy works like The Canterbury Tales in manuscripts. This book is the first to identify the scribes responsible for the copying of the earliest manuscripts (including Chaucer's famous scribe, Adam). The authors reveal these revolutionary copyists as clerks holding major bureaucratic offices at the London Guildhall, working for the mayor andaldermen, officiating in their courts, and recording London business in their day jobs - while copying medieval English literature as a sideline. In particular, they contributed to the new culture of English as the language of notonly literature, but government and business as well.
LINNE R. MOONEY is Professor of Medieval English Palaeography in the Department of English and Related Literature, and Director of the Centre for Medieval Studiesat the University of York; ESTELLE STUBBS is a researcher in the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics based at the Humanities Research Institute at the University of Sheffield.
Le Roman de Tristan en prose III
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Renee Curtis's three-volume critical edition of the Prose Tristan is the only edition of this very important medieval work ever published; until the first volume appeared in 1963, the work was only accessible in the form of a fewfragments which had been edited and a summary of the romance made by E. Loseth in 1891. Dr Curtis's edition is based on a complete collation of all the manuscripts and this led her to choose the Carpentras manuscript 404 as thebasis of her edition. This second volume appeared in1976. Professor Brian Woledge, the eminent medievalislt, wrote of the first volume in Erasmus: "The publication of this book is an event of some importance in Arthurian studies. The Prose Tristan was one of the most widely read works in medieval France; written between1215 and 1235, it continued to be copied until the end of the Middle Ages and its popularity lasted another hundred years in printededitions. It was in fact in prose rather than in poetic form that the legend was known.... Dr Curtis is to warmly congratulated on undertaking this important task"
Borough Government in Restoration Grantham
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The key theme of the Hall Book remains Borough Governance. The town's charters and rights were confirmed and extended in 1664 by the Charter of Charles II.
The key theme of the Hall Book remains Borough Governance. The town's charters and rights were confirmed and extended in 1664 by the Charter of Charles II. James II's Charter of 1685 led to the Alderman becoming Mayor, the First Twelve becoming Aldermen and the Second Twelve becoming Councillors. James also sought to extend his powers with more rights to interfere, as with other cities and boroughs across the country. The Quo Warranto issued in April 1688 and the removal of six Aldermen resulted in an un-sought for Charter later in 1688 but this may not have even been physically received in Grantham as the events of the Glorious Revolution intervened and governance was restored under the terms of the 1631 Charter of Charles I. The borough of Grantham was then governed in these terms until the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835. Subsidiary themes include the precautions against plague in 1665; the issue and recall of the town's half-pennies in 1667-1674; references to non-conformity in 1668-69 and the lives of some of the Corporation members.
The Mozarabic Psalter
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Complete Plays of John Bale volume I
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Ordinale Sarum, sive Directorium Sacerdotum
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Historia Regum Britannie of Geoffrey of Monmouth IV
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Catalogue and scholarly consideration of these vital manuscripts.
Following her vital cataloguing of the surviving 200+ manuscripts of the Historia Regum Britanniein Volume III, Julia Crick has been able in Volume IV to present the information which the manuscripts contain both about thetextual development of Geoffrey's History and about its circulation and audience. Crick begins by exploring the evidence for grouping the manuscripts. External evidence such as associated texts found frequently with the Historiais compared with the internal evidence of textual disruption, the notorious dedications, rubrication and trial passages collated from each manuscript. This information forms the basis for an account of the chronologyand geography of the circulation of the work as a whole, which in turn sheds light on the audience of the Historia, their taste in reading, and their status.JULIA CRICKis a Research Fellow at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. Arthurian Boydell & Brewer have become the Arthurian publishers par excellence, not simply for their excellent secondary material on the once and future king, but for their commitment to the publication of a largely Cambridge-based inquiry into the primeval sources of the Arthurian story. ENGLISH STUDIES [J.D. Burnley] Following the cataloguing of the 200 surviving manuscripts of Geoffrey's HistoriaJulia Crick sets out to assesswhat these reveal about the textual development of the work and about its circulation and audience. Her meticulous and scholarly approach prises out information which will prove invaluable to all students of the 12th century.
A Parson in Wartime
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A vivid picture of wartime Lincolnshire, and an engagingly readable account of the life of a busy parish priest.
Arthur Hopkins arrived in the Lincolnshire town of Boston in November 1942 to take up the post of Vicar of St Thomas's Church in the working-class parish of Skirbeck Quarter. He was already writing almost daily instalments of a diary for the social research organisation, Mass Observation. Generously conceived, it is written almost as if it were a series of letters to a friend abroad, providing descriptions and comments on everyday life in wartime. Little was beneath his notice. This was a man who had attended university with the King after the Great War and had prominent relations, but was also egalitarian in his leanings and sympathetic to the "common people". His is the diary ofa thoughtful and perceptive individual who had a realistic sense of himself, his society, and the fragility of life; the engagingly readable entries reveal fascinating details of wartime Lincolnshire and the life of a busy parishpriest. The diary is edited here with introduction and notes.
Patricia and Robert Malcolmson are social historians with a special interest in English diaries written between the 1930s and 1950s. They have edited for publication over a dozen of these diaries.
The Tracts of Clement Maydeston, with the Remains of Caxton's Ordinale
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This volume presents a kind of anticipated companion volume to the HBS edition of the Directorium Sacerdotum, a variety of ordinal or directory, which was privately compiled by Clement Maydeston, who though a priest held formally the post of "deacon" at the Brigittine Abbey of Syon, Middlesex (c. 1390-1456). Despite these origins, the compilation acquired a de facto official status. The Directorium Sacerdotum itself was published as volumes 20 and 22. The Directorium aimed in part at providing calendrical and rubrical solutions for those observing the Sarum Use. It did this by making a distinction between the practice of the Salisbury cathedral chapter and the practice that could reasonably be required from the many others in England who followed in general the Sarum Use. Maydeston's position was that outside the Salisbury chapter it was reasonable to make modifications to meet local conditions and calendars. This was deemed unacceptable by some, who maintained that the practice observed at Salisbury itself should be followed everywhere. This line of argument ignored the fact that in any case there were contradictions between the existing manuscript drafts of the Sarum ordinal and the rubrics of the liturgical books. The edition focuses in particular on two printed texts which offer Maydeston's defence. The first is the Defensorium Directorii Sacerdotum printed in successive editions of the Directorium Sacerdotum by Wynkyn de Worde in 1495. The second is the text Crede Michi, a longer and more considered rubrical tract compiled by Maydeston but incorporating rubrical adjudications made by the Salisbury canons c. 1440-1450, and partly based on an earlier work by one John Raynton. The text given is that printed by Wynkyn de Worde in the quarto of 1495.
Arthurian Literature III
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Texts and Traditions of Medieval Pastoral Care
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New essays on the burgeoning of pastoral and devotional literature in medieval England.
Pastoral and devotional literature flourished throughout the middle ages, and its growth and transmutations form the focus of this collection. Ranging historically from the difficulties of localizing Anglo-Saxon pastoral texts tothe reading of women in late-medieval England, the individual essays survey its development and its transformation into the literature of vernacular spirituality. They offer both close examinations of particular manuscripts, and of individual texts, including an anonymous Speculum iuniroum, the Speculum religiosorum of Edmund of Abingdon and later vernacular compositions and translations, such as Handlyng Synne and Bonaventure's Lignum Vitae. The reading and devotional use of texts by women and solitaries is also considered. They therefore form an appropriate tribute to the work of Bella Millett, whose research has done so much to advance our knowledge of the field.
Contributors: Alexandra Barratt, Mishtooni Bose, Joseph Goering, Brian Golding, C. Annette Grise, Cate Gunn, Ralph Hanna, Bob Hasenfratz, Catherine Innes-Parker, E. A. Jones, Derek Pearsall, Elaine Treharne, Nicholas Watson, Jocelyn Wogan-Browne
Arthurian Literature V
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Chant, Liturgy, and the Inheritance of Rome
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The influence of Rome on medieval plainsong and liturgy explored in depth.
Containing substantial new studies in music, liturgy, history, art history, and palaeography from established and emerging scholars, this volume takes a cross-disciplinary approach to one of the most celebrated and vexing questions about plainsong and liturgy in the Middle Ages: how to understand the influence of Rome? Some essays address this question directly, examining Roman sources, Roman liturgy, or Roman practice, whilst others consider the sway ofRome more indirectly, by looking later sources, received practices, or emerging traditions that owe a foundational debt to Rome.
Daniel J. DiCenso is Assistant Professor of Music at the College of the Holy Cross; Rebecca Maloy is Professor of Musicology at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Contributors: Charles M. Atkinson, Rebecca A. Baltzer, James Borders, Susan Boynton, Catherine Carver, Daniel J. DiCenso, David Ganz, Barbara Haggh-Huglo, David Hiley, Emma Hornby, Thomas Forrest Kelly, William Mahrt, Charles B. McClendon, Luisa Nardini, Edward Nowacki , Christopher Page, Susan Rankin, John F. Romano, Mary E. Wolinski
A History of the County of Stafford
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Authoritative and comprehensive history of the town of Tamworth and its environs.
In the centre of a parish with several townships, Tamworth was important for the rulers of pre-Viking Mercia and became a burh in 913 under Æthelflæd, "lady of the Mercians", who may also have installed relics of St Edith in the church there. Although a castle was built after the Norman Conquest, its lords did not control the town, which became a corporation under Elizabeth I and is now the head of a district council. Throughout its history Tamworth has functioned as a market centre, with some cloth-working and paper-making, although cotton mills, opened by Robert Peel (the later Prime Minster's father), just outside the town in the 1790s were soon moved to a canal junction to the south in Fazeley, where tape-making survived (as also in the town) until the late twentieth century. Deposits of coal and clay exploited from the nineteenth century resulted in mining villages at Glascote and Wilnecote inthe eastern half of the parish, which lay in Warwickshire, as did half the town until transferred to Staffordshire in 1890. The Warwickshire part of the parish was added in 1965 in connection with the decision to take in a Birmingham overspill population, which together with private developments created vast housing estates, the population of "greater Tamworth" more than doubling by the early 21st century. The volume also includes the adjoining parish of Drayton Bassett, which had close links with the town and where Peel built a mansion house, demolished in the earlier twentieth century: its site is now part of a major amusement park.
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 1 MS F
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Facsimile edition of an important witness to the impact of the Normans on the ecclesiastical culture of England.
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, MS F [London, British Library, Cotton Domitian A.viii, folios 30-70] is unique in presenting a sustainedly bilingual [Latin and Old English] text. Palaeographicalevidence dates the manuscript to caAD1100; from its script it is clear that it was written at Canterbury. It is a witness - in language and script - to the impact of the Norman regime on the ecclesiastical culture of England and particularly its most important church. The evidence which it provides for the history of the Kentish dialect attests at the same time to the breakdown at Canterbury of the late West Saxon literary standard. In view of its importance in various contexts,the publisher and general editors now issue, as a supplementary volume to the collaborative edition, a complete facsimile of this interesting book as a preliminary to a new edition in the series, with an introduction outlining theproblems posed by the manuscript.
Professor DAVID DUMVILLE is Professor of History and Palaeography at the University of Aberdeen.
Medieval Petitions
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New research into petitions and petitioning in the middle ages, illuminating aspects of contemporary law and justice.
The mechanics, politics and culture of petitioning in the middle ages are examined in this innovative collection. In addition to important and wide-ranging examinations of the ancient world and the medieval papacy, it focuses particularly on petitions to the English crown in the later middle ages, drawing on a major collection of documents made newly accessible to research in the National Archives. A series of studies explores the political contexts of petitioning, the broad geographical and social range of petitioners, and the fascinating "worm's-eye" view of medieval life that is uniquely offered by petitions themselves; and particular attention is given to the performative qualities of petitioning and its place in the culture of royal intercession. With their vivid new insights into judicial conventions and the legal creativity spawned by political crisis, these papers provide a closely integrated assessment of current scholarship and new research on these most fascinating and revealing of medieval social texts.
CONTRIBUTORS: W. MARK ORMROD, GWILYM DODD, SERENA CONNOLLY, BARBARA BOMBI, PATRICK ZUTSHI, PAUL BRAND, GUILHEM PEPIN, ANTHONY MUSSON, SIMON J. HARRIS, SHELAGH A. SNEDDON, DAVID CROOK
A History of the County of Gloucester
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Describes the area's varied agrarian history and industrial activity.
This volume provides authoritative accounts of thirteen ancient parishes alongside the River Severn near Gloucester or its tributary, the Leadon. Ten form a contiguous block north and west of Gloucester, extending from Upleadon toSandhurst; two more, Minsterworth and Elmore, lie on opposite banks of the Severn below Gloucester. The volume also includes Twyning, a parish near Tewkesbury bordering Worcestershire. It is a countryside of extensive meadows vulnerable to periodic flooding, of rich farmland between prominent, formerly wooded ridges, and of dispersed small settlements. Arable farming, which was widespread under its medieval monastic owners, eventually gave way to dairying, but cider and perry orchards, quarrying and fishing have also been important. River trade and settlement, and crossings by bridge and ferry, have influenced the area's economy and communications pattern, and its proximity to Gloucester attracted prominent citizens to build country houses and acquire estates there. Most parishes retain medieval work in their churches, and timber-framed domestic buildings are widespread. More recently, at Hartpury, the largest and most populous parish included in the volume, a large college campus has developed. .
John Jurica worked until his retirement in 2010 for the Gloucestershire VCH as assistant editor from 1973, and from 2007 as county editor: John Chandler, who had previously worked for the VCH project in Wiltshire and Herefordshire, was contracted in 2011 by the Gloucestershire County History Trust as editor to complete this volume and bring it topublication.
The Liber Ymnorum of Notker Balbulus
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First edition with the melodies of an immensely significant ninth-century liturgical masterpiece.
Winner of the Palisca Prize by the American Musicological Society, 2017
These two volumes present an important and distinctive collection of Carolingian poetry, composed for the liturgy in the last quarter of the ninth century by Notker Balbulus ("the stammerer"), monk of St Gall (d. 912). Notker was not the first liturgical composer inspired by the Carolingian renaissance of learning to make new texts for elaborate Alleluia melodies, but hewas certainly the first to raise the sequence genre to a consistently refined linguistic and theological level, and to provide a repertory for the annual cycle of holy feasts. His collection circulated widely in Germanic areas inthe tenth and eleventh centuries, while some of his compositions - such as Sancti spiritus - became staples throughout Europe. Notker's Liber ymnorum has never before been edited with the melodies after which his sequences were fashioned and to which they were sung. Provided here is a full edition of Notker's dedicatory preface, followed by 49 sequences. Each sequence is presented with two musical notations ("Carolingian", in neumes, and pitched on staves), followed by translations and an extensive commentary. A full introduction provides a context for the work.
The Character of King Arthur in Medieval Literature
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Dr Morris examines how the legend grew through the retelling of what medieval writers believed was the story of an historical figure, based not on some lost Welsh biography, but on Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings ofBritain, the `authorised' version of Arthur's career. She looks at his antecedents, the story of his conception and birth, and his accession, moving on to discuss his warfare, his role in peacetime, his relationships with hisfamily, his personal attributes, and his problematical death, showing how Arthur remains a distinct character in medieval literature despite appearing in an infinite variety of guises. Arthur appears in medieval literature in an infinite variety of different guises, yet remains a distinct character. Medieval writers, however freely they treat their sources, respected the traditions of the past, and Dr Morris, in writing the 'biography' of Arthur, isconcerned to show the complex intelinking of different versions of his story. Her approach is through the sequence of events which make up Arthur's career. She looks in turn at his antecedents, the story of his conception and birth, and his accession, the initial 'facts' and the discusses his warfare, his role in peacetime, his relationships with his family, and his personal attributes. The problems surrounding Arthur's death are examined in the finalchapter. Throughout the book, Dr Morris is concerned to 'use Arthur tro find out about the sources rather than vice versa' and in so doing illustrates both how medieval writers retold what they believe to be the story of a real historical figure and how the familiar story of Arthur gradually took shape over the centuries, based not on some lost Welsh biography, but on Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain the 'authorised' version of Arthur's career for almost all medieval writers
A History of the County of Staffordshire
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Comprehensive and authoritative history of north-west Staffordshire, including Keele, Trentham and Audley.
Covering the hilly north-west part of the county from the Cheshire border to the valley of the river Trent south of Newcastle-under-Lyme, this volume treats parishes that lie mostly on the North Staffordshire coalfield and where both coal and ironstone mining and iron-making became important, especially in the nineteenth century. A rich archive has been used to illustrate the origins of this industrial activity in the Middle Ages, when the area was characterised by scattered settlements, with an important manorial complex and a grand fourteenth-century church at Audley, a hunting lodge for the Stafford lords at Madeley, a small borough at Betley, and at Keele and Trentham religioushouses which became landed estates with mansion houses after the Dissolution. In the nineteenth century Trentham gained fame for its spectacular gardens created by the immensely rich dukes of Sutherland, and Keele rose to prominence in 1950 as the site of Britain's first campus university. After coalmining ceased in the twentieth century several villages and mining hamlets acquired large housing estates, which in Trentham parish were absorbed into Stoke-on-Trent.
Nigel Tringham is a Senior Lecturer in History at Keele University, with special responsibility for researching and writing the volumes of the Staffordshire Victoria County History.
The Reign of Edward II
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A new review of the most significant issues of Edward II's reign.
Edward II presided over a turbulent and politically charged period of English history, but to date he has been relatively neglected in comparison to other fourteenth and fifteenth-century kings. This book offers a significant re-appraisal of a much maligned monarch and his historical importance, making use of the latest empirical research and revisionist theories, and concentrating on people and personalities, perceptions and expectations, rather than dry constitutional analysis. Papers consider both the institutional and the personal facets of Edward II's life and rule: his sexual reputation, the royal court, the role of the king's household knights, the nature of law and parliament in the reign, and England's relations with Ireland and Europe.
Contributors: J.S. HAMILTON, W.M. ORMROD, IAN MORTIMER, MICHAEL PRESTWICH, ALISTAIR TEBBIT, W.R. CHILDS, PAUL DRYBURGH, ANTHONY MUSSON, GWILYM DODD, ALISON MARSHALL, MARTYN LAWRENCE, SEYMOUR PHILLIPS.
Arthur's Kingdom of Adventure
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The setting of medieval Arthurian romance, as typified by Malory's Morte Darthur, plays an important part in the creation of the atmosphere of the stories, and in intensifying the drama of the action. Professor Whitaker looks at the Arthurianworld which Malory inherited form his sources and to which he added his own details, and examines its different aspects: castles and forests, kingdoms and empires, showing how these diverge from reality to meetthe particular requirements of romance, how new political and temporal relationships are set up for the same reason, and how it was shaped by the presence of the Otherworld in the Celtic stories from which many episodes were drawn.
Missale Gothicum II
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A History of the County of Gloucester
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Describes the area's varied agrarian history and industrial activity.
This volume of the county history covers the part of north-west Gloucestershire extending from the foothills of the Malverns in the north to the distinctive feature of May Hill in the south. Centred on the parish and former markettown of Newent, it also covers the ancient parishes of Bromesberrow, Dymock, Huntley, Kempley, Longhope, Oxenhall, Pauntley, Preston, and Taynton. Over much of the area a pattern of scattered farmsteads and small fields emerged from the clearance of ancient woodland. That process continued after the Norman Conquest but with the consolidation of farms from the later middle ages the story became one of the abandonment of numerous farmhouses and farmsteads. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries road improvements facilitated the growth of outlying villages and squatter settlement on common and waste land created a number of hamlets, as on May Hill and on the Herefordshire border at Gorsley. The volume also describes the area's varied agrarian history, from sheep, dairy and arable farming to its orchards, and, more recently, viniculture. Industrial activity has included glassworks and ironworks,and charcoal production. Newent, the chief trading centre from the thirteenth century on, saw both a short-lived coalfield, one of the principal objects for the construction of Herefordshire and Gloucestershire canal, and a spa.
The Theme of Government in Piers Plowman
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Return of King Arthur British and American Arthurian Literature since 1800
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The revival of interest in Arthurian legend in the 19th century was a remarkable phenomenon, apparently at odds with the spirit of the age. Tennyson was widely criticised for his choice of a medieval topic; yet The Idylls of the Kingwere accepted as the national epic, and a flood of lesser works was inspired by them, on both sides of the Atlantic. Elisabeth Brewer and Beverly Taylor survey the course of Arthurian literature from 1800 to the presentday, and give an account of all the major English and American contributions. Some of the works are well-known, but there are also a host of names which will be new to most readers, and some surprises, such as J. Comyns Carr's King Arthur, rightly ignored as a text, but a piece oftheatrical history, for Sir Henry Irving played King Arthur, Ellen Terry was Guinevere, Arthur Sullivan wrote the music, and Burne-Jones designed the sets. The Arthurian works of the Pre-Raphaelites are discussed at length, as are the poemsof Edward Arlington Robinson, John Masefield and Charles Williams. Other writers have used the legends as part of a wider cultural consciousness: The Waste Land, David Jones's In Parenthesis and The Anathemata, and the echoes ofTristan and Iseult in Finnigan's Wake are discussed in this context. Novels on Arthurian themes are given their due place, from the satirical scenes of Thomas Love Peacock's The Misfortunes of Elphin and Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court to T.H. White's serio-comic The Once and Future King and the many recent novelists who have turned away from the chivalric Arthur to depict him as a Dark Age ruler. The Return of King Arthurincludes a bibliography of British and American creative writing relating to the Arthurian legends from1800 to the present day.
The Idea of the Castle in Medieval England
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A new way of looking at the medieval castle - as a cultural reflection of the society that produced it, seen through art and literature.
Medieval castles have traditionally been explained as feats of military engineering and tools of feudal control, but Abigail Wheatley takes a different approach, looking at a range of sources usually neglected in castle studies. Evidence from contemporary literature and art reveals the castle's place at the heart of medieval culture, as an architecture of ideas every bit as sophisticated as the church architecture of the period. This study offers a genuinely fresh perspective. Most castle scholars confine themselves to historical documents, but Wheatley examines literary and artistic evidence for its influence on and response to contemporary castle architecture. Sermons, sealsand ivory caskets, local legends and Roman ruins all have their part to play. What emerges is a fascinating web of cultural resonances: the castle is implicated in every aspect of medieval consciousness, from private religious contemplation to the creation of national mythologies. This book makes a compelling case for a new, interdisciplinary approach to castle studies.
ABIGAIL WHEATLEY gained her PhD at the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of York.
The Second Recension of the Quignon Breviary, Following an edition printed at Antwerp in 1537 and collated with Twelve Other Editions, To which is Prefixed a Handlist of Editions of the First and Second Recensions.
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Arthurian Bibliography II
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Full indexes by topic, keyword and individual work\author form a complete subject-index, based on the indexes in source bibliographies. This is a complete bibliography of Arthurian literature to 1978, the result of five years' work by Professor Cedric Pickford and Dr Rex Last of the University of Hull. It consists of a complete alphabetical author-listing, with key numbers for each item, of all critical material recorded in the standard Arthurian bibliographies (Bruce, Modern Languages Quarterly, BBSIA and various other minor lists) with full indexes by topic, keyword and individual work,/author. The total is over 10,000 main entries, with all recorded reviews listed after each entry. Where summaries exist in BBSIA, this is indicated in the main entries. The computer programs have been specially devised and written for this bibliography by Dr Last, and programming and editing of the material has taken morethan two years. Updating volumes are planned to appear at five-year intervals.
Entertainments for Elizabeth I
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Edition, with notes and introductions, of the elaborate entertainments offered to Elizabeth by her courtiers.
The entertainments offered by Elizabethan courtiers to their Queen are a central part of the elaborate cult surrounding the figure of Elizabeth. Yet the fascinating literary texts written for these occasions have been comparatively neglected, despite years of growing interest in both "Gloriana" herself and the masques in general. This book presents an extended study of the entertainments by way of introduction to four of the actual texts. The general introduction examines the origins of the entertainments in court spectacles and pageants of the early Tudor period, and shows how they underline the central place of the cult of Elizabethan court life during her reign, as well as considering the literary traditions of chivalry and romance on which the texts of the entertainments rely so heavily. The four major texts edited here are: The Four Foster Children of Desire (1581), and those at Cowdray in 1591,Elvetham (1591), and Ditchley (1592). Two minor texts, on Bisham and Rycote (1592), are also included. Each text is preceded by an introduction and is fully annotated; there are also notes on the music and a full bibliography.
The Second Recension of the Quignon Breviary, Following an edition printed at Antwerp in 1537 and collated with Twelve Other Editions, To which is Prefixed a Handlist of Editions of the First and Second Recensions.
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A History of the County of Wiltshire
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Authoritative account of Cricklade and neighbouring towns, in an area immediately west of Swindon.
Cricklade, the Anglo-Saxon borough fortified by Alfred against the Danes, is the market town at the heart of this volume. As a notorious rotten borough, its corruption influenced the passing of the 1832 Parliamentary Reform Act. The town and the surrounding parishes described here are bordered by Gloucestershire to the north and Swindon to the East. They extend along the upper Thames valley and over the Wiltshire claylands to the limestone ridge in the south. The royal forest of Braydon covered much of the area in the middle ages and provided extensive grazing for livestock. Although disafforestation took place under Charles I, agricultural exploitation was limited by poor soils and parts were later returned to woodland or nature reserve. The settlements of traditional limestone buildings were remote until canal and rail transport increased trade in dairy products and the expansion of employment opportunities in Swindon resulted in their residential development, and an annexation of a small part of the area by the growing town.
Time in the Medieval World
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A look at the competing notions of time in the middle ages, from the spiritual - death, the Last Judgement - to the practical - lawyers' calculations, clocks and calendars.
By exploring some of the more important senses of time which were in circulation in the medieval world, scholars from a wide range of disciplines trace competing definitions and modes of temporality in the middle ages, explainingtheir influence upon life and culture. The issues explored include anachronism as a feature in earlier senses of time, perceptions of death and of the Last Judgement, time in literary narratives and in music, constructions of timeas used in the professions, and original work on the particular systems and technologies which were used for the keeping of time, such as clocks and calendars.
Contributors: PAUL BRAND, PETER BURKE, MARY J. CARRUTHERS, DEBORAH DELIYANNIS, CHRISTOPHER HUMPHREY, ROBERT MARKUS, AD PUTTER, HOWARD WILLIAMS.
The Early Plays of Robin Hood
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David Wiles argues that the prolific Robin Hood plays of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were the Spring equivalent of the Christmas mumming tradition.
Robin Hood was the subject of many fifteenth and sixteenth century folk-plays, of which only traces remain. As a result, the ballads, many of which have survived, have usually been regarded as the main-spring of traditions about the famous outlaw. David Wiles however, argues that the dramatic tradition was equally, if not more, important. He sees the plays, associated with Whitsun revels, died out much earlier, and so must be reconstructed from fragmentaryscripts and the tantalising glimpses afforded by sources such as churchwardens' accounts. Robin Hood emerges as an emblem both of the Spring and of rebellion; as a Summer king, the player of Robin Hood flouted and parodied regular authority. With such a background, the plays ceased to be an acceptable part of parish life after the Reformation, and the games were suppressed, while the myth of Robin Hood was manipulated and made respectable.
A History of the County of York: East Riding
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An authoritative and comprehensive account of an important area centred upon Great Driffield.
Great Driffield, a thriving market town serving an extensive agricultural hinterland, stands at the junction of the Yorkshire Wolds and Holderness. The centre of an important Anglo-Saxon manor, in royal hands in the early middle ages, the main settlement was transformed from a large village into a boom town following the opening of a canal in 1770 that linked it to the expanding markets of Hull and the West Riding; its social, religious and political lifeflourished in the Victorian period particularly. This volume covers its history and that of its adjoining rural townships of Little Driffield, Elmswell and Kelleythorpe, from the Neolithic period to the beginning of the twenty-first century; it provides the first detailed account of the town's trades and industries, as well as exploring landownership, local government, and social, religious and political life.
The editors are former staff of the University of Hull.
Bach Sources in America
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A portrait of the composer from his various manuscripts.
America possesses more autograph manuscripts and other primary Bach sources than any other country outside Germany. Dispersed in 30 different places are at least nineteen autograph manuscripts, fifty-five original performing parts and other autograph writings, a portrait of the composer from life, and Bach's own Bible. Of the 130 autograph scores of Church cantatas that survive, fourteen plus a cantata fragment are in the United States.
The Customary of the Benedictine Monasteries of Saint Augustine, Canterbury, and Saint Peter, Westminster.
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Published by Boydell & Brewer Inc.
Chaucer's Dream Poetry: Sources and Analogues
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This volume makes available in translation the texts that lie behind Chaucer's dream poems - The Book of the Duchess, The Parliament of Fowls, The House of Fame and Prologue to the Legend of Good Women. Chaucer's dream poems are now being increasingly studied and appreciated. With their attractively bookish dreamer figure and their graceful use of conventions and traditions, they have their distinctive place in Chaucer's work. But the nodernreader of these medieval poems particularly needs a sense of their literary context in the tradition of comparable narrative poems - largely in OId French - which Chaucer knew and drew upon. None of these French poems has ever been made available in English translation before, and many of the texts are difficult to access, being available only in dated French scholarly editions. The authors represented are Froissart, Machaut and Deschamps, as well as someminor and anonymous poems, and there are also relevant translations from Cicero and Boccaccio. The book gives an idea of what Chaucer's sources were in themselves, and in what ways the English poet was inspired to use and go beyond them, and this presents a picture of the poet at work. Some of the French poems are translated carefully by Chaucer, while with other poems he is selective, interested in certain sections of his sources only. In further cases, the original material can be seen to have provided a more general point of departure for Chaucer's own developments on his work.
A History of the County of Oxford
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The latest volume for Oxfordshire is devoted to eight parishes between the market towns of Burford and Witney in the west of the county. The area is predominantly rural, the only urban centre being Carterton. Founded in 1900 as acolony of smallholders, it became one of the county's fastest growing towns after World War II due to its proximity to Brize Norton's military airbase. Oxfordshire: Volume XV is a richly detailed history of these parishes, covering everything from Anglo-Saxon settlement to 20th-century urbanisation, agriculture to rural industry, religious influences to famous residents.
The Processional of the Nuns of Chester, Edited from a Manuscript in the possession of the Earl of Ellesmere at Bridgewater House
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This manuscript, now now Huntington Library, MS EL 34 B 7, contains a fifteenth- century Latin text interesting for its admixture of English rubrics, as well as prayers and hymns. Chester was in the Lichfield diocese, and thus inthe Province of Canterbury, so it is no surprise that the text is closer to Sarum than York usage.
Re-using Manuscripts in Late Medieval England
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A fresh appraisal of late medieval manuscript culture in England, examining the ways in which people sustained older books, exploring the practices and processes by which manuscripts were crafted, mended, protected, marked, gifted and shared.
During the "long fifteenth century" (here, 1375-1530), the demand for books in England flourished. The fast-developing book trade produced them in great quantity. Fragments of manuscripts were often repurposed, as flyleaves and other components such as palimpsests; and alongside the creation of new books, medieval manuscripts were also repaired, recycled and re-used.
This monograph examines the ways in which people sustained older books, exploring the practices and processes by which manuscripts were crafted, mended, protected, marked, gifted and shared. Drawing on the codicological evidence gathered from an extensive survey of extant manuscript collections, in conjunction with historical accounts, recipes and literary texts, it presents detailed case studies exploring parchment production and recycling, the re-use of margins, and second-hand exchanges of books. Its engagement with the evidence in - and inscribed on - surviving books enables a fresh appraisal of late medieval manuscript culture in England, looking at how people went about re-using books, and arguing that over the course of this period, books were made, used and re-used in a myriad of sustainable ways.
The Companion Guide to Edinburgh and the Borders
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Long overdue: Revised, updated, freshly-illustrated Edinburgh joins the Companion Guide series, informative on Edinburgh's - and Scotland's - past and present.
Edinburgh is one of Europe's most elegant and cosmopolitan cities, the Old Town rebuilt on the medieval street plan after being burned down by the English in 1544, and the eighteenth-century classical New Town more extensive thananything else of its kind in Europe. Edinburgh was the capital of an independent kingdom for more than two hundred and fifty years, and it has the air of a capital, with buildings where kings were born or where some of their moreprominent subjects were assassinated, streets once trodden by Mary Queen of Scots and Bonnie Prince Charlie, and a rich artistic life that comes into exhilarating full flower in August with the Edinburgh Festival.
Edinburgh is also the gateway to some of the most spectacularly beautiful country in Britain: lying southward is the romantic landscape of the Borders, where Alexander Youngson is an admirable guide to the ruined abbeys, the castles thathave withstood countless sieges, and the great houses still owned by families 'that the Flood could not wash away'.
A.J. YOUNGSON is former chairman of the Fine Art Commission for Scotland.
Three Rastell Plays
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The three interludes in this volume come from the press of John Rastell, barrister, printer, adventurer, member of parliament, brother-in-law of Thomas More, and one of the first men in England to have a stage built at his own house. The Four Elements is unique in its genre of scientific morality play. Rastell composed it himself to expound the rudiments of natural science and to air his own frustrating experience of venturing to the New World, in 1517. The anonymous Calisto and Melebea is based on the beginning of the notorious Spanish novel, La Celestina, and has an elegance and subtlety in its satirical comedy of manners that is not found elsewhere in earlyEnglish drama. Gentleness and Nobiblitycrisply debates the case of aristocracy against meritocracy in a mocking humanist vein. It is probably by John Heywood, Rastell's son-on-law. The variety of the play testifies to Rastell's enterprise as publisher and their conmon theme of social responsibility to his strength of personality.
Saints' Legends in Medieval Sarum Breviaries
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Comprehensive catalogue of the hagiographical lessons in Sarum breviaries, with key studies of the most crucial elements.
Sarum Use was the most widely used form of the liturgy in late medieval England, but its service books were much less standardized than their modern counterparts. The lack of uniformity is particularly marked in Sarum breviaries' lessons on saints, which can vary enormously from copy to copy. This book is the first comprehensive examination of those lessons and the manuscripts that preserve them. It provides a catalogue of over 80 manuscripts and 12 early printed versions, giving a brief description of each one, sometimes correcting previous views of its date and provenance, and identifying each copy's divergences from the standard Sarum roster of saints. The book also identifies the textual families into which the manuscripts fall and the extent of their divergence from the lessons in both the early printed versions and the inadequate nineteenth-century edition on which modern scholars have previously depended. The author's findings offer an introduction to the unexpectedly rich variety of hagiographical lessons that survive, identify some of the sources behind them, and shed new light on the ways in which the Sarum breviary developed and was disseminated in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
The Victoria History of the County of Oxford: Volume XX
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Unique multi-disciplinary study of a key part of the Oxfordshire Chilterns over a thousand years, based on intensive new research and exploring landscape, settlement, farming, and social and religious life.
Drawing on intensive new research, this volume covers a dozen ancient parishes straddling the south-west end of the Chiltern hills, set within a large southwards loop of the Thames close to Reading, Wallingford, and Henley-on-Thames. London, connected by river, road, and (later) rail, lies some 40 miles east. The uplands feature the dispersed settlement and wood-pasture typical of the Chilterns, contrasted with nucleated riverside villages such as Whitchurch and Goring. Caversham, formerly "a little hamlet at the bridge", developed from the 19th century into a densely settled suburb of Reading (across the river), while other recent changes have largely obliterated the ancient pattern of "strip" parishes stretching from the river into the hills, which bound vale and upland together and had its origins in 10th-century estate structures.
The economy was predominantly agricultural until the 20th century, with woodland playing a significant role alongside rural crafts and industry. Crowmarsh Gifford (near Wallingford) had an early market and fair. Gentrification and tourism gained momentum from the mid 19th century, accelerated by the arrival of the railway from 1840 and especially affecting riverside villages such as Goring and Shiplake, which saw extensive new building by wealthy incomers. Goring was earlier the site of an Augustinian nunnery and (probably) of a small pre-Conquest minster, while Mapledurham and several other places became foci for post-Reformation Roman Catholic recusancy, with Protestant Nonconformity expanding from the 19th century. Major buildings include mansion houses at Hardwick (in Whitchurch) and Mapledurham, alongside timber or brick vernacular structures and some striking modernist additions.
Ethnicity in Medieval Europe, 950-1250
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An investigation into how racial stereotypes were created and used in the European Middle Ages.
Students in twelfth-century Paris held slanging matches, branding the English drunkards, the Germans madmen and the French as arrogant. On crusade, army recruits from different ethnic backgrounds taunted each other's military skills. Men producing ethnography in monasteries and at court drafted derogatory descriptions of peoples dwelling in territories under colonisation, questioning their work ethic, social organisation, religious devotion and humanness. Monks listed and ruminated on the alleged traits of Jews, Saracens, Greeks, Saxons and Britons and their acceptance or rejection of Christianity. In this radical new approach to representations of nationhood in medieval western Europe, the author argues that ethnic stereotypes were constructed and wielded rhetorically to justify property claims, flaunt military strength and assert moral and cultural ascendance over others. The gendered images of ethnicity in circulation reflect a negotiation over self-representations of discipline, rationality and strength, juxtaposed with the alleged chaos and weakness of racialised others. Interpreting nationhood through a religious lens, monks and schoolmen explained it as scientifically informed by environmental medicine, an ancient theory that held that location and climate influenced the physical and mental traits of peoples. Drawing on lists of ethnic character traits, school textbooks, medical treatises, proverbs, poetry and chronicles, this book shows that ethnic stereotypes served as rhetorical tools of power, crafting relationships within communities and towards others.
Companion Guide to Istanbul
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The traveller gets exactly what he needs, and in a handy format. THE TIMES The author seems to have covered every road in the country, and has something of interest to say about virtually every site. COUNTRY LIFE
Istanbul is the only city in the world that stands astride two continents, spreading across from Europe into Asia at the southern end of the Bosphorus, the incomparably beautiful strait linking the Black Sea with the Sea of Marmara in northwestern Turkey. This Companion Guide to Istanbul goes as far as the region around Marmara from the Bosphorus to the Dardanelles, which flows into the Aegean past the historic ruins of Troy on its Asian shore.Revised and updated for this new edition, the book is a guide to the Byzantine and Ottoman monuments and to the many other places of great historic interest around the Marmara, including Edirne, Bursa and Iznik, ancient Nicaea, as well as the renowned archaeological site of Homeric Troy. It is also an introduction to Turkey itself and to its people and their way of life, which they are more than willing to share with the traveller who takes the time to become acquainted with them.
JOHN FREELY has lived and worked on America's east coast, in Britain, and around the Mediterranean, but is long-time Professor of Physics at the University of the Bosphorus, Istanbul, and has been resident for many years in Turkey. His understanding of the land and its people has made him a respected interpreter of Turkey ancient and modern.
The Yorkshire Historical Dictionary
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An invaluable reference work, providing definitions for a plethora of words old and new from Yorkshire's dialect.
This volume offers an unparalleled collection of words and phrases gleaned from Yorkshire's archives. The language it contains tells the story of Yorkshire in the words of the people who experienced it, providing a powerful new look at the county's intangible heritage and what it means to be from Yorkshire. The Dictionary uses a broad range of sources to widen the English lexicon, with new vocabulary for (among others) by-names and place-names; for agricultural and animal terms; and for specialist craft and industries. As well as new words such as fulture (a mixture of manure and bedding), working tree (a stand for hides to be worked upon), stonery (a place where stones could be quarried), and wand hagger (part of a wood set out for producing wands, or saplings, for baskets, hurdles, etc.), there are earlier references to established words that appear in the Oxford English Dictionary, such as necessary-house (privy, here from 1414 compared to 1609), orange (as a colour, here from 1504 compared to 1600) and oliver (a tilt hammer, used by early iron-workers, here from 1350, compared to 1846). The Dictionary also fills in in gaps in our understanding of the development of regional language, from "borrowings" from the Baltic and Low Countries to its decline from the Tudor period on.
This is the first time such a comprehensive glossary of regional words has been published. Its wide-ranging scope, underpinned with excellent scholarship, means this volume will be of interest not just to historians of Yorkshire, but to local historians across the country, as well as linguists and place-name and surname researchers.
A Virtuous Knight
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A radical re-interpretation of the chivalric biography of Boucicaut.
The Livre des fais du bon messire Jehan le Maingre (1409) is one of the most famous chivalric biographies of the Middle Ages. It presents Jean II Le Meingre, known as Boucicaut (1366-1421), as an ideal knight and role model, and has frequently been seen by modern scholars as a last-ditch effort to defend traditional chivalric values that were supposedly in decline. Here, however, Craig Taylor argues that the biography is a much more complex and interesting text, fusing traditional notions of chivalry with the most fashionable new ideas in circulation at the French court at the start of the fifteenth century. Rather than a nostalgic criticism of contemporary knighthood, it should be seen as a showcase of the latest ideas on chivalry, written to renew the enthusiasm of the great French princes for a man who was in grave danger of falling out of favour: its purpose was to celebrate and to defend a beleaguered Boucicaut against his critics at the royal court, and to explain his actions as governor of Genoa, his failed crusading enterprises in the Eastern Mediterranean and his unsuccessful efforts to broker a solution to the Papal Schism.
CRAIG TAYLOR is a Reader in Medieval History at the University of York; he was Director of its Centre for Medieval Studies from 2010 to 2011 and from 2014 to 2017.
A History of the County of Essex
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An important contribution to the social, cultural and economic history of seaside resorts and their hinterland in Essex.
The nine Essex parishes lying in a coastal district between St Osyth and the Naze headland at Walton encompass a number of distinct landscapes, from sandy cliffs to saltmarshes, recognised as environmentally significant. The landscape has constantly changed in response to changing sea levels, flooding, draining and investment in sea defences. Inland, there was an agriculturally fertile plateau based on London Clay, but with large areas of Kesgrave sands and gravels, loams and brickearths. Parts were once heavily wooded, especially at St Osyth. The district was strongly influenced by the pattern of estate ownership, largely held by St Paul's Cathedral from the mid-10th century.About 1118-19 a bishop of London founded a house of Augustinian canons at St Osyth, which became one of the wealthiest abbeys in Essex. Most other manors and their demesnes in the district were small and their demesne tenants were of little more than local significance. After the Reformation all of the former church lands in the district were granted to the royal servant Thomas Darcy, 1st baron Darcy of Chiche (d. 1558). Darcy built a great mansion, St Osyth Priory, on the site of the former abbey, which became the centre of his new estate. The area's economy was strongly affected by the coast and its many valuable natural resources, including the extraction or manufacture ofsand, gravel, septaria, copperas and salt, and activities such as fishing, tide milling, wrecking and smuggling. However, it remained a largely rural district and its wealth ultimately depended upon the state of farming. Until the eighteenth century it specialised in dairying from both sheep and cattle, but afterwards production shifted towards grain. The coastal area has produced significant evidence of early man and was heavily exploited and settled in prehistory. The medieval settlement pattern largely conformed to a typical Essex model, with a complex pattern of small villages, hamlets and dispersed farms, many located around greens or commons. The largest settlement wasthe nucleated village or small town at St Osyth, located outside the abbey gates, which had a formal market and wool fair in the Middle Ages.In the 19th and 20th centuries the coast witnessed the development of seaside resorts atWalton, Clacton and Frinton. Some overspill affected the surrounding more rural parishes, and from the 1920s new types of resort developed in the form of seaside camps, chalets and caravan parks.
Farming and Society in North Lincolnshire
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Engaging account of the fortunes of a farming family during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Proputty, proputty, proputty: Tennyson's "Northern Farmer, New Style" could hear the word in the rhythm of his horse's hooves as he cantered between his fields. The Dixon family built up their estate in Holton-le-Moor, betweenMarket Rasen and Caistor, from a minor purchase in 1741 to the point where they owned the whole parish, with a fine house, a governess for their daughters, and a phaeton in which to ride out. But despite these marks of status, they remained working farmers well into the Victorian era. Even more remarkably, they created and preserved a comprehensive archive, including farming accounts, diaries and correspondence. Dr Richard Olney has known this archive for nearly fifty years, first uncovering the documentary riches at Holton Hall (where manuscripts from the loft had to be lowered in baskets to the study below) and subsequently cataloguing the entire collection in the LincolnshireArchives. In this book he creates a vivid portrait of the building up of a farming estate over several generations, revealing the introduction of agricultural improvements, the use of canals and, later, railways to access wider markets, and the place of "the middling sort" in nineteenth-century English rural society.
Richard Olney was an archivist at the Lincolnshire Archives Office from 1969 to 1975, and an Assistant Keeper with the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts from 1976 to 2003. His publications include Lincolnshire Politics 1832-1885 (Oxford 1973) and Rural Society and County Government in Nineteenth-Century Lincolnshire (History of Lincolnshire Committee 1979).
Contemporary descriptions of objects no longer extant examined to reconstruct these lost treasures.
Surviving accounts of the material culture of medieval Europe - including buildings, boats, reliquaries, wall paintings, textiles, ivory mirror cases, book bindings and much more - present a tantalising glimpse of medieval life, hinting at the material richness of that era. However, students and scholars of the period will be all too familiar with the frustration of trying to piece together a picture of the past from a handful of fragments. The "material turn" has put art, architecture, and other artefacts at the forefront of historical and cultural studies, and the resulting spotlight on the material culture of the past has been illuminating for researchers in many fields. Nevertheless, the loss of so much of the physical remnants of the Middle Ages continues to thwart our understanding of the period, and much of the knowledge we often take for granted is based on a series of arbitrary survivals.
The twelve essays in this book draw on a wide array of sources and disciplines to explore how textual records, from the chronicles of John of Worcester and Matthew Paris and inventories of monastic treasuries and noble women to Beowulf and early English riddles, when combined with archaeological and art-historical evidence, can expand our awareness of artistic and cultural environments. Touching on a broad range of issues around how we imaginatively reconstruct the medieval past and a variety of objects, both precious and ephemeral, this volume will be of fundamental interest to medieval scholars, whatever their disciplinary field.
Contributors: Katherine Baker, Marian Bleeke, Deirdre Carter, Laura Cleaver, Judith Collard, Joshua Davies, Kathryn Gerry, Karl Kinsella, Katherine A. Rush, Katherine Weikert, Beth Whalley, Victoria Yuskaitis
Heresy in Late Medieval Germany
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First major survey of the German inquisitor Petrus Zwicker, one of the most significant figures in the repression of heresy.
In the final years of the fourteenth century, waves of persecution shattered German-speaking Waldensian communities, with the scale of inquisitions matching or even greater than the better-known trials in southern France. In the middle of the persecution was the influential and enigmatic figure of the Celestine provincial and inquisitor of heresy, Petrus Zwicker (d.after 1404). His surviving texts and inquisition protocols offer a fresh, intriguing picture of the medieval repression of heresy. Zwicker was an accurate and intelligent interrogator with direct access to the Waldensians' sources and knowledge. But although he is one of the most effective inquisitors of the MiddleAges, he was even more important as the author of anti-heretical texts. His Cum dormirent homines became a standard work on Waldensianism in the fifteenth century (and this study attributes another anti-heretical treatise,the Refutatio errorum, to him). With his unique biblicist and pastoral style, Zwicker struck the right note at a moment when the Church was in crisis. His texts spread rapidly, they were preached to the people and translated into German, and helped to build the fear of heresy, anti-clericalism and disobedience in the years of the Great Western Schism. This book is the first full-length study on Zwicker and his significance to the history of heresy and its repression. It offers a meticulous analysis of the sources left by him and teases out new, ground-breaking discoveries from careful examination of previously poorly known manuscripts.
Dr REIMA VALIMAKI isa postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of Cultural History, University of Turku
A History of the County of Derby
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The history of the town of Bolsover and neighbouring parishes, from prehistory to the present day.
The history and topography of the small market town of Bolsover in north-east Derbyshire and four parishes immediately to its north (Barlborough, Clowne, Elmton - including Creswell - and Whitwell) are covered in this volume. Alllie mainly on a magnesian limestone ridge, rather than the exposed coalfield, and therefore only became mining communities late in the nineteenth century. Since the end of deep mining in Derbyshire all have faced a difficult period of economic and social adjustment. As well as the general development of the five parishes, the book includes detailed accounts of the medieval castle at Bolsover, the mansion built on the site of the castle by the Cavendish family of Welbeck in the seventeenth century, and Barlborough Hall, a late sixteenth-century prodigy house built by a successful Elizabethan lawyer.
Philip Riden teaches in the Department of History at the University of Nottingham; he has been the editor of the Victoria County History of Derbyshire since 1996, when he re-established the VCH in the county.
Lincolnshire Parish Clergy, c.1214-1968: A Biographical Register
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The second volume in what will be a complete biographical record of all parish priests in Lincolnshire.
The parish churches of Lincolnshire are justly celebrated. The spires of Grantham and Louth, and the famous Boston Stump, provide a focal point from the surrounding landscape of fen, wold and marsh. The charms of remote country churches along the byways of the county have been extolled in prose and verse by writers such as Henry Thorold and Sir John Betjeman. Their architecture, their stained glass and sculpture, furniture and fabric, have all been carefully recorded. Yet little is known of the people who served these churches, the rectors and vicars who, in word and sacrament, taught the Christian faith to successive generations of parishioners. This volume forms the second part of a much-needed survey of Lincolnshire parish clergy. It covers the deaneries of Beltisloe, comprising twenty-one parishes clustered around Colsterworth and Corby, and of Bolingbroke, with twenty-five parishes centred on Spilsby. Starting from 1214, when Bishop Hugh of Wells introduced the earliest system of episcopal registration in Western Europe, the parish lists set out the succession of rectors or vicars for each church. Brief biographical sketches demonstrate the rich variety of the county's parsons - pastors, scholars, athletes, travellers and writers, soldiers and schoolmasters. This register gives to each of them his place in the history of Lincolnshire.
DrNicholas Bennett is Visiting Senior Fellow of the University of Lincoln.
Writing History in the Anglo-Norman World
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The contexts for the works of eleventh and twelfth-century historians are here brought to the fore.
History was a subject popular with authors and readers in the Anglo-Norman world. The volume and richness of historical writing in the lands controlled by the kings of England, particularly from the twelfth century, has long attracted the attention of historians and literary scholars, whilst editions of works by such writers as Orderic Vitalis, John of Worcester, Symeon of Durham, William of Malmesbury, Gerald of Wales, Roger of Howden, and Matthew Paris has made them well known. Yet the easy availability of modern editions obscures both the creation and circulation of histories in the Middle Ages. This collection of essays returns to the processes involved in writing history, and in particular to the medieval manuscript sources in which the works of such historians survive. It explores the motivations of those writing about the past in the Middle Ages, and the evidence provided by manuscripts for the circumstances in which copies were made. It also addresses the selection of material for copying, combinations of text and imagery, and the demand for copies of particular works, shedding new light on how and why history was being read, reproduced, discussed, adapted, and written.
LAURA CLEAVER is Senior Lecturer in Manuscript Studies, Institute of English Studies, University of London; ANDREA WORM is Professor of Art History. Kunsthistorischen Institut, Eberhard Karls University, Tubingen.
Contributors: Stephen Church, Kathryn Gerry, Anne Lawrence-Mathers, Laura Pani, Charles C. Rozier, Gleb Schmidt, Laura Slater, Michael Staunton, Caoimhe Whelan, Andrea Worm
The Companion Guide to Venice
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`It offers all that the visitor with a concern for beauty and for leisurely sight-seeing will require.' Financial Times`If ever a guidebook were designed to be read as literature it is Mr Honour's. Even those who know Venice welland love it well will add to their appreciation from this seemingly endless store of information.' Economist
Offers all that the visitor with a concern for beauty and for leisurely sight-seeing will require. FINANCIAL TIMES
The best guide book I have ever encountered... and a book I found it impossible not to read from beginning to end. OBSERVER
There are few pleasanter ways of passing a summer's evening than sitting over a cup of coffee, and perhaps a glass of Aurum, in the Piazza San Marco. It is especially agreeable on those nights when the Venetian city band thunders away at some throbbingly romantic piece... And all the while the younger inhabitants parade around the square, chattering, flirting, quarrelling and staring at their visitors with that same unwinking gaze that Venetians have turned on their guests for the past five centuries. The facade of San Marco closes the scene in a glitter of golden mosaic and a bubbling of cupolas, while the great thick red campanile stretches up into the warm mothy darkness of the summer sky.
Hugh Honour, it is clear, knows Venice exceptionally well and catches the rhythms of the city's life with unerring skill. His guide, with its winning blend of evocativedetail and precise information, spurs the reader to investigate Venice's wonders: Piazza San Marco is only the beginning of a journey into the heart of Venice and its history.
Saints, Cure-Seekers and Miraculous Healing in Twelfth-Century England
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Traces the journey from ill health to miraculous cure through the lens of hagiographical texts from twelfth-century England.
The cults of the saints were central to the medieval Church. These holy men and women acted as patrons and protectors to the religious communities who housed their relics and to the devotees who requested their assistance in petitioning God for a miracle. Among the collections of posthumous miracle stories, miracula, accounts of holy healing feature prominently and depict cure-seekers successfully securing their desired remedy for a range of ailments and afflictions. What can these miracle accounts tell us of the cure-seekers' experiences of their journey from ill health to recovery, and how was healthcare presented in these sources?
This book aims to answer these questions via an in-depth study of the miraculous cure-seeking process, considering Latin miracle accounts produced in twelfth-century England, a time both when saints' cults flourished and there was an increasing transmission and dissemination of classical and Arabic medical works. Focused on seven shorter miracula (including Eadmer of Canterbury's Miracula S. Dunstani and Thomas of Monmouth's Vita et Passione S. Wilelmi Martyris Norwicensis) with a predominantly localised appeal, and thus on a select group of cure-seekers - including Abbot Osbert of Notley who suffered from an eye complaint, Leofmær the bedridden knight, and Gaufrid who experienced a bad tooth extraction - the volume brings together studies of healthcare and pilgrimage, looking at the alternative to secular medical intervention and the practicalities and processes of securing saintly assistance.
A History of the County of Oxford
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Authoritative account of the history of Henley-on-Thames and its neighbouring parishes.
Focused on the south-west Chilterns, this volume looks at the riverside market town of Henley-on-Thames, now famous for its annual Royal Regatta, and at the four neighbouring parishes of Bix, Harpsden, Rotherfield Greys and Rotherfield Peppard. Henley began as a planned town, probably in the late twelfth century, and became a major inland port, funnelling grain, wood and (later) malt into London. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it developed as a coaching centre, and from the nineteenth flourished as a fashionable resort and commuting area, following the belated arrival of the railway and the self-conscious promotion of the Regatta. The adjoining parishes stretch from the river to the Chilterns uplands, comprising a mixed landscape of wood pasture, small hedged closes, and (in the Middle Ages) small open fields. Settlement is characteristically dispersed, and as elsewhere in the Chilterns the balance between crops, grazing and wood exploitation varied over time. The area contains deserted or shrunken settlements, including Bolney and the newly-discovered site of Bix Gibwyn church; its important buildings include Greys Court, established probably in the eleventh century, while Henley itself contains a richness of eighteenth-century brick-built houses alongside medieval timber-framing, several examples of which have recently been dated by dendrochronology.
The EneadosGavin Douglas's Translation of Virgil's Aeneid.
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First volume in a new edition of Douglas's "Eneados", providing a comprehensive introduction and commentary.
Although Virgil's Aeneid was one of the most widely admired works of the European Middle Ages, the first complete translation to appear in any form of English was Gavin Douglas's magisterial verse rendering into Older Scots, completed in 1513, which he called the "Eneados". It included not only the twelve books of Virgil's original, but a thirteenth added by the Italian humanist scholar Maphaeus Vegius, and lively, original prologues to every book.D.F.C. Coldwell's four-volume modern edition of it was published in 1957-64 for the Scottish Text Society, but for some time now has needed revision. This new edition will provide a corrected version of Coldwell's text and variants in subsequent volumes. The first volume, here, the Introduction and Commentary, offers a wealth of new scholarship, comparing Douglas's text to his exact Latin source (first identified by Professor Bawcutt in a 1973 essay reprinted here); vastly expanding the Commentary; offering detailed new analysis of the manuscript and print witnesses to the text and its early reception and circulation; and surveying modern Douglas criticism. There is also a new Bibliography.
English Orders for Consecrating Churches
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Published by Boydell & Brewer Inc.
The Construction of Vernacular History in the Anglo-Norman Prose Brut Chronicle
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First full-length interpretive study of the prose Brut tradition, setting its manuscript context alongside textual analysis.
The prose Brut chronicle was the most popular vernacular work of the late Middle Ages in England, setting a standard for vernacular historical writing well into the age of print, but until recently it has attracted little scholarly attention. This book combines a study of the chronicle's sources, content, and methods of composition, with its manuscript contexts. Using the Anglo-Norman Oldest Version as a touchstone, it investigates the chronicle's social ideals, its representation of women, and its distinctive versions of such elements of British history as the Trojan foundation myth, the ruin of the Britons, the Norman Conquest, and Arthur and Merlin, arguing that its humane, populist vision demands reassessment of medieval popular understandings of British history, and of the presumed dominance of imperialism, next-worldly piety, misogyny, and a taste for violence in late-medieval culture. The book also analyses evidence for the production of the Anglo-Norman Brut, and examines the ways in which its makers and users reconstructed British history through manuscript context, ordinatio and apparatus, annotationand illustration.
Julia Marvin is a Fellow of the Medieval Institute and Associate Professor in the Program of Liberal Studies at the University of Notre Dame.
The Cartulary of Alvingham Priory
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Edition of documents from a Gilbertine "double house" of monks and nuns reveals much about religious life at the time.
Alvingham Priory (founded in 1155), situated just to the north-east of Louth in Lincolnshire, was one of the famous Gilbertine houses of the county: double houses of monks and nuns following the rule of St Gilbert of Sempringham.Its cartulary, created circa 1264, contains over 1,300 entries. Most are copies of charters granting lands, property, rents and privileges, but it also includes genealogies of benefactors, valuations of the priory's property, memoranda and accounts of disputes. Many documents record the names of those who entered the community as nuns or canons, or who were associating themselves with it by requests for confraternity or burial, throwing light on the way inwhich local families interacted with the priory and with each other. Meanwhile, the details of lands granted to the priory provide information about local land-holders, field- and place-names, farming practices and the various activities which supported the religious community. Although its holdings were scattered across north-east Lincolnshire, from Conesby to Boston and from Lincoln to Saltfleetby, much of the priory's property was located in the low-lying lands east of Louth, and its charters demonstrate the importance of the area's waterways, bridges, ditches and banks, not just as geographical boundaries but as resources to be exploited, maintained and, importantly, to be shared in a harmonious way by the local community, religious and lay. The documents are presented here with introduction and notes.
Jill Redford gained her PhD at the University of York and is assistant archivist tothe Company of Merchant Adventurers of the City of York.
A History of the County of Somerset
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Somerset's Polden hills divide the county's central marshlands, Sedgemoor to the south and the Brue Valley to the north. Traces of human activity there include wooden trackways built across those marshes six thousand years ago. Most of the written sources tell the story of men from settlements on the nearby hills or isolated 'islands' who looked to those low-lying lands for food and fuel for themselves and food for their stock. Those sources, dating from the late Saxon period and particularly rich in the middle ages, derive largely from the archives of the former abbey of Glastonbury, main landowner in the eighteen parishes of this volume. Pastoral farming dominated and still dominates, its early progress due to successful drainage and flood-prevention schemes, one of the largest dating from the late twelfth century. Each parish has its own long story: of Glastonbury-planned origins at Shapwick and perhaps also at Catcott, Edington, and Chilton Polden; of trade along the tidal river Parrett at Huntspill and Puriton (Dunball); of the gradual expansion of the 'island' farmers of Westonzoyland, Middlezoy and Othery into the surrounding marsh; of the long-enduring common arable fields at High Ham; of the rise and fall of peat digging. ROBERT DUNNING is County Editor, Victoria County History of Somerset. Forthcoming: IX: Glastonbury and Street
English Monastic Litanies of the Saints after 1100
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Edition of rare surviving litanies from the middle ages, providing evidence for monastic worship.
The litanies of the monastic orders in England, above all those of the Benedictines, are key witnesses of devotion to the saints of the British Isles, whose relics and shrines were mostly in Benedictine abbeys and cathedral priories. However, although many of the calendars of the Benedictines have been published, litanies are more rare, and the majority of those within this volume are presented as text editions for the first time. The majority of the textsare Benedictine, but the few surviving litanies from the other monastic orders, Carthusians, Cistercians and Cluniacs, are included, and also those of the Order of Fontevrault. This volume, the second of a set of three, contains the litanies from the Cluniac Priory of Pontefract to York, St Mary's Abbey.
Nigel Morgan is Honorary Emeritus Professor of the History of Art at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College.
The Taill of Rauf Coilyear
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First edition of a lively medieval romance.
The author of the fifteenth-century Older Scots romance of Rauf Coilyear may be unknown, but the popularity of this comic king-in-disguise tale is undisputed; it is cited by William Dunbar and Gavin Douglas at the turn of the century, and again in the mid-sixteenth century Complaynt of Scotland. The disguised king in this case is Charlemagne, and the hero a bluff collier called Ralph, who unwittingly plays host to him for one stormy night and teaches his bemused guest some rough lessons in his own version of courtesy. When Ralph is lured to court, the mistaken identities continue as he encounters the great Sir Roland and battles Saracens. Throughout, the scrappy hero maintains his dignity, as indeed does his king: both parties finish the tale immensely pleased with each other and with the bond they have forged. The text survives only in a 1572 print by Robert Lekpreuik (whose own career seems tohave been only marginally less exciting than Rauf's: he printed it in St Andrews while attempting to evade imprisonment in Edinburgh, ultimately without success). It is edited here with an introduction and notes.
RALPHHANNA is Emeritus Professor of Palaeography, University of Oxford.
Anglo-Italian Cultural Relations in the Later Middle Ages
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Essays demonstrating the importance and inflence of Italian culture on medieval Britain.
Between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, the rise of international trade, the growth of towns and cities, and the politics of diplomacy all helped to foster productive and far-reaching connections and cultural interactions between Britain and Italy; equally, the flourishing of Italian humanism from the late fourteenth century onwards had a major impact on intellectual life in Britain.
The aim of this book is to illustrate the continuity and the variety of these exchanges during the period. Each chapter focuses on a specific area (book collection, historiography, banking, commerce, literary production), highlighting the significance of the productive interchange of people and ideas across diverse cultural communities; it is the lived experience of individuals, substantiated by written evidence, that shapes the book's collective understanding of how two European cultures interacted with each other so fruitfully.
MICHELE CAMPOPIANO is Senior Lecturer in Medieval Latin Literature at the University of York; HELEN FULTON is Professor of Medieval Literature at the University of Bristol.
Contributors: Helen Bradley, Margaret Bridges, Michele Campopiano, Carolyn Collette, Victoria Flood, Helen Fulton, Bart Lambert, Ignazio del Punta