Bart Besamusca - Böcker

New editor, new directions: the series broadens its scope to encompass European literatures other than French and English; still, however, "an indispensable component of any historical or Arthurian library". NOTES AND QUERIESThis new volume of Arthurian Literature, the first under its new editor Keith Busby, is devoted to the Roman van Walewein(The Romance of Walewein [Gawain]) by Penninc and Pieter Vostaert, an undisputed gem of Middle Dutch literature which has recently become accessible to an English-speaking audience through translation. Essentially a fairy-tale written into Arthurian romance, it presents a Gawain quite different to the man found in the English Sir Gawain and the Green Knightor the French Gauvain. Expert readings of the Walewein, especially commissioned and collected by BART BESAMUSCA and ERIK KOOPERof the University of Utrecht are provided by a group of renowned scholars, contributing to the on-going critical appraisal of the Walewein.KEITH BUSBY is George Lynn Cross Research Professor at the Center for Medieval and Renaissane Studies, University of Oklahoma.Contributors: BART BESAMUSCA, ERIK KOOPER, WALTER HAUG, DOUGLAS KELLY, NORRIS J. LACY, MATHIAS MEYER, AD PUTTER, FELICITY RIDDY, THEA SUMMERFIELD, JANE H.M. TAYLOR, BART VELDHOEN, NORBERT VOORWINDEN, LORI WALTERS

First full-length study in English of the Middle Dutch Lancelot-Compilation, of great significance for Arthurian studies.The Book of Lancelot is a study of the highly intriguing Middle Dutch Lancelot Compilation, a collection of ten Arthurian verse romances, compiled around 1320. Although the compilation is one of the most important Middle Dutch works, and has important implications for Arthurian studies, it is not well-known outside the Low Countries. This monograph, the first full-length English study of the compilation, aims to bring it to a wider audience,analysing the Middle Dutch work and comparing it to French narrative cycles, Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur, and Ulrich Füetrer's Buch der Abenteuer.The book consists of five chapters. The introductory chapter deals with the study of cyclicity, the literary context of the Lancelot Compilation, and the manuscript tradition. In the following three chapters the ten romances are studied one by one. Each analysis consists of two parts:a description of the compiler's source and a survey of his interventions. In the fifth and last chapter the Lancelot Compilation is characterized as a narrative cycle and compared with French, English and German cycles. The monograph concludes with an attempt to describe the essence of the compilation.BART BESAMUSCA is Associate Professor in the Department of Dutch at Utrecht University.

In the medieval Low Countries (modern-day Belgium and the Netherlands), Arthurian romance flourished in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The Middle Dutch poets translated French material (like Chretien's Conte du Graal and the Prose Lancelot), but also created romances of their own, like Walewein. This book provides a current overview of the Dutch Arthurian material and the research that it has provoked. Geographically, the region is a crossroads between the French and Germanic spheres of influence, and the movement of texts and manuscripts (West to East) reflects its position, as revealed by chapters on the historical context, the French material and the Germanic Arthuriana of the Rhinelands. Three chapters on the translations of French verse texts, the translations of French prose texts, and on the indigenous romances form the core of the book, augmented by chapters on the manuscripts, on Arthur in the chronicles, and on the post-medieval Arthurian material.

The essays in this volume are concerned with early printed narrative texts in Western Europe. The aim of this book is to consider to what extent the shift from hand-written to printed books left its mark on narrative literature in a number of vernacular languages. Did the advent of printing bring about changes in the corpus of narrative texts when compared with the corpus extant in manuscript copies? Did narrative texts that already existed in manuscript form undergo significant modifications when they began to be printed? How did this crucial media development affect the nature of these narratives? Which strategies did early printers develop to make their texts commercially attractive? Which social classes were the target audiences for their editions? Around half of the articles focus on developments in the history of early printed narrative texts, others discuss publication strategies. This book provides an impetus for cross-linguistic research. It invites scholars from various disciplines to get involved in an international conversation about fifteenth- and sixteenth-century narrative literature.