Joshua Byron Smith – författare

Why would the sprawling thirteenth-century French prose Lancelot-Grail Cycle have been attributed to Walter Map, a twelfth-century writer from the Anglo-Welsh borderlands known for his stinging satire, religious skepticism, ghost stories, and irrepressible wit? And why, though the attribution is spurious, is it not, in some ways, implausible?Joshua Byron Smith sets out to answer these and other questions in the first English-language monograph on Walter Map-and in so doing, he offers a new explanation for how narratives about the pre-Saxon inhabitants of Britain, including King Arthur and his knights, first circulated in England. Smith contends that it was inventive clerics like Walter, and not traveling minstrels or professional translators, who popularized these stories. Smith examines Walter's only surviving work, the De nugis curialium, to demonstrate that it is not the disheveled text that scholars have imagined but rather five separate works in various stages of completion. This in turn provides new evidence to support his larger contention, that ecclesiastical networks of textual exchange played a major role in exporting Welsh literary material into England.Medieval readers incorrectly envisioned Walter withdrawing ancient Latin documents about the Holy Grail from a monastery and compiling them in order to compose the Lancelot-Grail Cycle. In this detail they were wrong, Smith acknowledges, but a model of literary transmission that is not vernacular and popular but Latinate and ecclesiastical demands our serious consideration.

Introduction to Middle Welsh offers a comprehensive introduction to Middle Welsh grammar, leading the student through sixty chapters of carefully scaffolded exercises and readings. Written in an engaging style and aimed toward learners without any knowledge of Modern Welsh, this book guides students to a high intermediate level of proficiency with the language, focusing particularly on prose.The first twenty chapters employ both original Middle Welsh sentences and simplified sentences based on originals, allowing learners to master basic grammatical concepts without being overwhelmed by vocabulary. New vocabulary is introduced at the end of each lesson, so that learners can complete the exercises and translation without looking up words in the glossary. The glossary, for its part, contains over 1,500 vocabulary items,which provides students with many of the most commonly used words in Middle Welsh literature. When available, useful etymologies are also provided, making connections to languages that students might already know. In addition to several hundred carefully chosen sentences for translation exercises, Introduction to Middle Welsh includes eighteen selections from literature, ranging from poetry to law, showing the variety of the Middle Welsh literary corpus.Ideal for the classroom or self-taught learners, Introduction to Middle Welsh will appeal to those with an interest in Welsh, medieval literature, and Celtic studies.