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Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms (Material Texts)
by Jessica BrantleyIn Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms, Jessica Brantley offers an innovative introduction to manuscript culture that uses the artifacts themselves to open some of the most vital theoretical questions in medieval literary studies. With nearly 200 illustrations, many of them in color, the book offers both a broad survey of the physical forms and cultural histories of manuscripts and a dozen case studies of particularly significant literary witnesses, including the Beowulf manuscript, the St. Albans Psalter, the Ellesmere manuscript of the Canterbury Tales, and The Book of Margery Kempe. Practical discussions of parchment, scripts, decoration, illustration, and bindings mix with consideration of such conceptual categories as ownership, authorship, language, miscellaneity, geography, writing, editing, mediation, illustration, and performance—as well as of the status of the literary itself.Each case study includes an essay orienting the reader to particularly productive categories of analysis and a selected bibliography for further research. Because a high-quality digital surrogate exists for each of the selected manuscripts, fully and freely available online, readers can gain access to the artifacts in their entirety, enabling further individual exploration and facilitating the book’s classroom use. Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms aims to inspire a broad group of readers with some of the excitement of literary manuscript studies in the twenty-first century. The interpretative frameworks surrounding each object will assist everyone in thinking through the implications of manuscript culture more generally, not only for the deeper study of the literature of the Middle Ages, but also for a better understanding of book cultures of any era, including our own.
Medieval English in a Multilingual Context: Current Methodologies and Approaches (New Approaches to English Historical Linguistics)
by Sara M. Pons-Sanz Louise SylvesterThis edited book examines the multilingual culture of medieval England, exploring its impact on the development of English and its textual manifestations from a multi-disciplinary perspective. The book offers overviews of the state of the art of research and case studies on this subject in (sub)disciplines of linguistics including historical linguistics, onomastics, lexicology and lexicography, sociolinguistics, code-switching and language contact, and also includes contributions from literary and socio-cultural studies, material culture, and palaeography. The authors focus on the variety of languages in use in medieval Britain, including English, Old Norse, Norn, Dutch, Welsh, French, and Latin, making the argument that understanding the impact of medieval multilingualism on the development of English requires multidisiplinarity and the bringing together of different frameworks in linguistics and cultural studies to achieve more nuanced answers. This book will be of interest to academics and students of historical linguistics and medieval textual culture.
Medieval Family Roles: A Book of Essays (Garland Medieval Casebooks #Vol. 15)
by Cathy Jorgensen ItnyreThis colelction of twelve original essays by European and American scholars, offers some of the latest research in three broad areas of medieval history: marriage, children, and family ties.
Medieval Folklore: A Guide to Myths, Legends, Tales, Beliefs, and Customs
by Carl Lindahl; John McNamara; John LindowOver a decade in the making, Medieval Folklore offers a wide-ranging guide to the lore of the Middle Ages--from the mundane to the supernatural. Definitive and lively articles focus on the great tales and traditions of the age and includes information on daily and nightly customs and activities; religious beliefs of the pagan, Christian, Muslim, and Jew; key works of oral and written literature; traditional music and art; holidays and feasts; food and drink; and plants and animals, both real and fantastical. <p><p> While most books on medieval folklore focus primarily on the West, this unique volume brings together an eclectic range of experts to treat the subject from a global perspective. Especially remarkable are the surveys of the major medieval traditions including Arab-Islamic, Baltic, English, Finno-Ugric, French, Hispanic, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Jewish, Scandinavian, Scottish, Slavic, and Welsh. <p> For anyone who has ever wanted a path through the tangle of Arthurian legends, or the real lowdown on St. Patrick, or the last word on wolf lore--this is the place to look.
Medieval German Literature: A Companion (Garland Medieval Bibliographies Ser.)
by Marion Gibbs Sidney M. JohnsonMedieval German Literature provides a comprehensive survey of this Germanic body of work from the eighth century through the early fifteenth century. The authors treat the large body of late-medieval lyric poetry in detail for the first time.
Medieval Hagiography: An Anthology (Garland Library of Medieval Literature #14)
by Thomas HeadFirst published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Medieval Herbal Remedies: The Old English Herbarium and Anglo-Saxon Medicine
by Anne Van ArsdallThis book presents for the first time an up-to-date and easy-to-read translation of a medical reference work that was used in Western Europe from the fifth century well into the Renaissance. Listing 185 medicinal plants, the uses for each, and remedies that were compounded using them, the translation will fascinate medievalist, medical historians and the layman alike.
Medieval Herbal Remedies: The Old English Herbarium and Early-Medieval Medicine
by Anne Van ArsdallFeatured here is a modern translation of a medieval herbal, with a study showing how this technical treatise on herbs was turned into a literary curiosity in the nineteenth century. The contours of this second edition replicate the first; however, it has been revised and updated throughout to reflect new scholarship and new findings. New information is presented on Oswald Cockayne, the nineteenth-century philologist who first translated the Old English medical texts for the modern world. Here the medieval text is read as an example of technical writing (i.e., intended to convey instructions/information), not as literature. The audience it was originally aimed at would know how to diagnose and treat medical conditions and knew or was learning how to follow its instructions. For that reason, while working on the translation, specialists in relevant fields were asked to shed light on its terse wording, for example, herbalists and physicians. Unlike many current studies, this work discusses the Herbarium and other medical texts in Old English as part of a tradition developed throughout early-medieval Europe associated with monasteries and their libraries. The book is intended for scholars in cross-cultural fields; that is, with roots in one field and branches in several, such as nineteenth-century or medieval studies, for historians of herbalism, medicine, pharmacy, botany, and of the Western Middle Ages, broadly and inclusively defined, and for readers interested in the history of herbalism and medicine.
Medieval Historical Writing: Britain and Ireland, 500–1500
by Emily Steiner Jennifer Jahner Elizabeth M. TylerHistory writing in the Middle Ages did not belong to any particular genre, language or class of texts. Its remit was wide, embracing the events of antiquity; the deeds of saints, rulers and abbots; archival practices; and contemporary reportage. This volume addresses the challenges presented by medieval historiography by using the diverse methodologies of medieval studies: legal and literary history, art history, religious studies, codicology, the history of the emotions, gender studies and critical race theory. Spanning one thousand years of historiography in England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland, the essays map historical thinking across literary genres and expose the rich veins of national mythmaking tapped into by medieval writers. Additionally, they attend to the ways in which medieval histories crossed linguistic and geographical borders. Together, they trace multiple temporalities and productive anachronisms that fuelled some of the most innovative medieval writing.
Medieval Iberian Crusade Fiction and the Mediterranean World (Toronto Iberic)
by David A. WacksReading crusader fiction against the backdrop of Mediterranean history, this book explains how Iberian authors reimagined the idea of Crusade through the lens of Iberian geopolitics and social history. The Crusades transformed Mediterranean history and inaugurated complex engagements between Western Europe, the Balkans, North Africa, and the Middle East in ways that endure to this day. Narratives of Crusades powerfully shaped European thinking about the East and continue to influence the representation of interaction between Christian and Muslim states in the region. The Crusade, a French idea that gave rise to Iberian, North African, and Levantine campaigns, was very much a Mediterranean phenomenon. French and English authors wrote itineraries in the Holy Land, chronicles of the Crusades, and fanciful accounts of Christian knights who championed the Latin Church in the East. This study aims to explore the ways in which Iberian authors imagined their role in the culture of Crusade, both as participants and interpreters of narrative traditions of the crusading world from north of the Pyrenees.
Medieval Iconography: A Research Guide
by John B. Friedman and Jessica M. WegmannFirst published in 1998, the present volume aims to help the researcher locate visual motifs, whether in medieval art or in literature, and to understand how they function in yet other medieval literary or artistic works.
Medieval Images, Icons, and Illustrated English Literary Texts: From the Ruthwell Cross to the Ellesmere Chaucer
by Maidie HilmoThe function of images in the major illustrated English poetic works from the Anglo-Saxon period to the early fifteenth century is the primary concern of this book. Hilmo argues that the illustrations have not been sufficiently understood because modern judgments about their artistic merit and fidelity to the literary texts have got in the way of a historical understanding of their function. The author here proves that artists took their work seriously because images represented an invisible order of reality, that they were familiar with the vernacular poems, and that they were innovative in adapting existing iconographies to guide the ethical reading process of their audience. To provide a theoretical basis for the understanding of early monuments, artefacts, and texts, she examines patristic opinions on image-making, supported by the most authoritative modern sources. Fresh emphasis is given to the iconic nature of medieval images from the time of the iconoclastic debates of the 8th and 9th centuries to the renewed anxiety of image-making at the time of the Lollard attacks on images. She offers an important revision of the reading of the Ruthwell Cross, which changes radically the interpretation of the Cross as a whole. Among the manuscripts examined here are the Caedmon, Auchinleck, Vernon, and Pearl manuscripts. Hilmo's thesis is not confined to overtly religious texts and images, but deals also with historical writing, such as Layamon's Brut, and with poetry designed ostensibly for entertainment, such as the Canterbury Tales. This study convincingly demonstrates how the visual and the verbal interactively manifest the real "text" of each illustrated literary work. The artistic elements place vernacular works within a larger iconographic framework in which human composition is seen to relate to the activities of the divine Author and Artificer.Whether iconic or anti-iconic in stance, images, by their nature, were a potent means of influencing the way an English author's words, accessible in the vernacular, were thought about and understood within the context of the theology of the Incarnation that informed them and governed their aesthetic of spiritual function. This is the first study to cover the range of illustrated English poems from the Anglo-Saxon period to the early 15th century.
Medieval Indian Literature, an Anthology: Volume One, Surveys and Selections (Assamese - Dogri)
by K. Ayyappa PanikerThe rise of modern Indian languages is a fascinating part of medieval Indian history. Selections from Assamese and Dogri medieval literature.
Medieval Invasions In Modern Irish Literature
by Julieann Veronica UlinMedieval Invasions in Modern Irish Literature offers the first book-length treatment of the literary return to and reinterpretation of Giraldus Cambrensis's twelfth century The History of the Conquest of Ireland. Writers studied include W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, James Joyce, Sean O'Faol#65533;in, Miche#65533;l Mac Liamm#65533;ir, Brendan Behan and Jamie O'Neill.
Medieval Islamic Historiography: Remembering Rebellion (Routledge Research in Medieval Studies #5)
by Heather N. KeaneyThis book is a comparative analysis of the medieval Sunni historiography of the caliphate of Uthman b. Affan and the revolt against him. By comparing treatments of Uthman in pietistic literature and universal chronicles, the work traces the gradual silencing of more critical accounts in favor of those that portray Uthman as a saintly companion of the Prophet Muhammad. Through a comparative analysis of authors between genres and time periods, this book shows how authors were able to convey their personal perspectives on important religio-political tensions that emerged through the revolt against Uthman, namely the tension between Sunnis and Shiis, religious and political authority and appeals to maintain stability and unity vs. appeals for greater justice. This last debate, which in many ways began with the revolt against Uthman, has been repeated most recently in the Arab Spring. This work therefore provides readers with helpful historical context for important contemporary debates.
Medieval Literature for Children
by Daniel T. KlineThis volume will be a critical anthology of primary texts whose main audience was children and/or adolescents in the medieval period. Texts will include theoretical and interpretative introductions and commentary.
Medieval Literature in Translation
by Charles W. JonesComprehensive anthology contains exquisite cross-section of Western medieval literature, from Boethius and Augustine to Dante, Abelard, Marco Polo, and Villon, masterfully translated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Charles Eliot Norton, C. K. Scott Moncrieff, Lord Tennyson, Sir Walter Scott, Thomas Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, Lord Byron, others. "No better anthology exists." -- Commonweal.
Medieval Literature: An Introduction to Type-Scenes
by Dominique BattlesThis is the first book-length exploration of the type-scenes of western medieval literature from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries, spanning both the Latinate and Germanic traditions. Type-scenes are the recurring, stock scenes comprising the basic structure and cognitive guidance for narrative. These formulaic scenes enabled medieval poets to express originality while honoring tradition. Central to medieval poetic invention, type-scenes form the vital “internal organs” of narrative, each serving a specialized function while working in concert with other organs to create and sustain the story. This accessible and engaging guide to medieval type-scenes consists of three parts: Part I is a compendium of the type-scenes commonly found in medieval narrative, including analyses of examples from individual poems. Part II explores combinations of type-scenes within single works of literature for purposes of chronology, characterization, or virtuosity. Part III examines how a single type-scene manifests across multiple poems, adapting to a variety of settings and periods, while maintaining its original intent. This volume kindles in scholars, teachers, and students alike a new and refreshing awareness of the foundational narrative strategies of medieval literature.
Medieval Literature: Criticism and Debates (Routledge Criticism And Debates In Literature Ser.)
by Holly A. Crocker and D. Vance SmithMedieval Literature: Criticism and Debates combines classic critical essays alongside new voices and approaches, highlighting vibrant debates on medieval literature that will continue to shape critical conversations for the coming decades.Holly A. Crocker and D. Vance Smith present a fascinating collection of essays from leading contemporary scholars of medieval literature and culture, examining topics including gender, sexuality, politics, belief, language, nationhood, science and desire. The volume sheds light on critical discussions of the medieval period and shows the continuing relevance and vivacity of Medieval English literature in the twenty-first century. Each section is thoroughly introduced and the essays develop various debates in key areas, providing a springboard for readers to establish their own study, arguments and opinions. Further reading sections make this volume an accessible and important resource for those studying literature from the Medieval period and beyond.Contributors: Anthony Bale, Sarah Beckwith, Anke Bernau, Glenn Burger, Ardis Butterfield, Christopher Cannon, Christine Chism, Lisa H. Cooper, Susan Crane, Holly A. Crocker, George Edmondson, Ruth Evans, Sylvia Federico, Laurie Finke, Aranye Fradenburg, Frank Grady, Richard Firth Green, Patricia Clare Ingham , Hannah Johnson, Steven Justice, David Lawton, Robert Mills, J. Allan Mitchell, Nicholas Perkins, Tison Pugh, Elizabeth Robertson, Kellie Robertson, Jessica Rosenfeld, Sarah Salih, Corinne Saunders, Martin Shichtman, D. Vance Smith, Emily Steiner, Jennifer Summit, Stephanie Trigg, Marion Turner, David Wallace, Angela Jane Weisl, Nicolette Zeeman
Medieval Literature: The Basics (The Basics)
by Angela Jane Weisl Anthony Joseph CunderMedieval Literature: The Basics is an engaging introduction to this fascinating body of literature. The volume breaks down the variety of genres used in the corpus of medieval literature and makes these texts accessible to readers. It engages with the familiarities present in the narratives and connects these ideas with a contemporary, twenty-first century audience. The volume also addresses contemporary medievalism to show the presence of medieval literature in contemporary culture, such as film, television, games, and novels. From Dante and Chaucer to Christine de Pisan, this book deals with questions such as: What is medieval literature? What are some of the key topics and genres of medieval literature? How did it evolve as technology, such as the printing press, developed? How has it remained relevant in the twenty-first century? Medieval Literature: The Basics is an ideal introduction for students coming to the subject for the first time, while also acting as a springboard from which deeper interaction with medieval literature can be developed.
Medieval Marvels and Fictions in the Latin West and Islamic World
by Michelle KarnesA cross-cultural study of magical phenomena in the Middle Ages. Marvels like enchanted rings and sorcerers’ stones were topics of fascination in the Middle Ages, not only in romance and travel literature but also in the period’s philosophical writing. Rather than constructions of belief accepted only by simple-minded people, Michelle Karnes shows that these spectacular wonders were near impossibilities that demanded scrutiny and investigation. This is the first book to analyze a diverse set of writings on such wonders, comparing texts from the Latin West—including those written in English, French, Italian, and Castilian Spanish —with those written in Arabic as it works toward a unifying theory of marvels across different disciplines and cultures. Karnes tells a story about the parallels between Arabic and Latin thought, reminding us that experiences of the strange and the unfamiliar travel across a range of genres, spanning geographical and conceptual space and offering an ideal vantage point from which to understand intercultural exchange. Karnes traverses this diverse archive, showing how imagination imbues marvels with their character and power, making them at once enigmatic, creative, and resonant. Skirting the distinction between the real and unreal, these marvels challenge readers to discover the highest capabilities of both nature and the human intellect. Karnes offers a rare comparative perspective and a new methodology to study a topic long recognized as central to medieval culture.
Medieval Mobilities: Gendered Bodies, Spaces, and Movements (The New Middle Ages)
by Basil Arnould Price Jane Bonsall Meagan KhouryThis collection explores the intersection of gender and mobility across the Global Middle Ages. Medieval Mobilities questions how medieval people, texts, images, and ideas move across physiological, geographical, literary, and spiritual boundaries. In what ways do these movements afford new configurations of gender, sexuality, and being? Enacting a dialogue between medieval studies, feminist thought, and queer theory, Medieval Mobilities proposes that attending to the undulations of premodern gender and sexuality may help destabilize unstated assumptions about ways of being and loving in the Middle Ages. This volume also brings together emergent and established scholars to challenge an increasingly static academy and instead envision a scholarly practice focused on intergenerational, international, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Drawing upon wide range of primary sources and theoretical frameworks, the resultant essays unsettle the imagined fixity of gender and propose alternative conceptualizations of embodiment, identity, and difference in the medieval world.
Medieval Monstrosity and the Female Body (Routledge Studies In Medieval Religion And Culture Ser. #8)
by Sarah Alison MillerThe medieval monster is a slippery construct, and its referents include a range of religious, racial, and corporeal aberrations. In this study, Miller argues that one incarnation of monstrosity in the Middle Ages—the female body—exists in special relation to medieval teratology insofar as it resists the customary marginalization that defined most other monstrous groups in the Middle Ages. Though medieval maps located the monstrous races on the distant margins of the civilized world, the monstrous female body took the form of mother, sister, wife, and daughter. It was, therefore, pervasive, proximate, and necessary on social, sexual, and reproductive grounds. Miller considers several significant texts representing authoritative discourses on female monstrosity in the Middle Ages: the Pseudo-Ovidian poem, De vetula (The Old Woman); a treatise on human generation erroneously attributed to Albert the Great, De secretis mulierum (On the Secrets of Women), and Julian of Norwich’s Showings. Through comparative analysis, Miller grapples with the monster’s semantic flexibility while simultaneously working towards a composite image of late-medieval female monstrosity whose features are stable enough to define. Whether this body is discursively constructed as an Ovidian body, a medicalized body, or a mystical body, its corporeal boundaries fail to form properly: it is a body out of bounds.
Medieval Nonsense: Signifying Nothing in Fourteenth-Century England (Fordham Series in Medieval Studies)
by Jordan KirkFive hundred years before “Jabberwocky” and Tender Buttons, writers were already preoccupied with the question of nonsense. But even as the prevalence in medieval texts of gibberish, babble, birdsong, and allusions to bare voice has come into view in recent years, an impression persists that these phenomena are exceptions that prove the rule of the period’s theologically motivated commitment to the kernel of meaning over and against the shell of the mere letter.This book shows that, to the contrary, the foundational object of study of medieval linguistic thought was vox non-significativa, the utterance insofar as it means nothing whatsoever, and that this fact was not lost on medieval writers of various kinds. In a series of close and unorthodox readings of works by Priscian, Boethius, Augustine, Walter Burley, Geoffrey Chaucer, and the anonymous authors of the Cloud of Unknowing and St. Erkenwald, it inquires into the way that a number of fourteenth-century writers recognized possibilities inherent in the accounts of language transmitted to them from antiquity and transformed those accounts into new ideas, forms, and practices of non-signification. Retrieving a premodern hermeneutics of obscurity in order to provide materials for an archeology of the category of the literary, Medieval Nonsense shows how these medieval linguistic textbooks, mystical treatises, and poems were engineered in such a way as to arrest the faculty of interpretation and force it to focus on the extinguishing of sense that occurs in the encounter with language itself.
Medieval Ovid: Frame Narrative and Political Allegory
by Amanda J. GerberOvid's Metamorphoses played an irrefutably important role in the integration of pagan mythology in Christian texts during the Middle Ages. This book is the only study to consider this Ovidian revival as part of a cultural shift disintegrating the boundaries between not only sacred and profane literacy but also between academic and secular politics.