Kings College London Medieval Studies (KCLMS) – serie

Published by Boydell & Brewer Inc.

Contributors: Samuel G. Armistead, Roger Boase, Charles Burnett, Alan Deyermond, John Edwards, Brenda Fish, T.J. Gorton, Richard Hitchcock, David Hook, Francisco Marcos Marín, Ralph Penny, Barry Taylor, Roger M. Walker, Milija Pavlovic

Study of one of the key figures of Anglo-Saxon theologyA key examination of the Aelfric of Eynsham’s theology of great interest for scholars and students of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, produced by the Centre for Late Antique & Medieval Studies (CLAMS).

A fifteenth century satire of falconry booksA parody of falconry books by Evangelista de Carmona, a Comendador of the Order of St. John of Rhodes, whose style was based on tautologies or platitudes, puns, and irony.

Contributors: Alexander Kerr, Jean Subrenat, Joseph J. Duggan, Judith Belam, Marianne Ailes, Philippe Verelst, François Suard, Karen Pratt, James Simpson, Philip E. Bennett, Peter Noble, Tony Hunt, Edward A. Heinemann, Finn Sinclair, Colin Smith, Gordon Knott, Jan A. Nelson

The events of the destruction of Jerusalem as told through the lens of the languages of the Iberian peninsula. A collection of Catalan and Castilian texts on the destruction of Jerusalem of great interest to scholars of Spanish literature, Hispanic studies and history in general.

Contributors: Harold Short, Janet Bately, Stewart Brookes, Mary Clayton, Julie Coleman, Patrick W. Conner, Janet M. Cowen, Ivan Herbison, Joyce Hill, Susan Irvine, Peter Jackson, Christian J. Kay, Hugh Magennis, Janet L. Nelson, Eamonn O Carragáin, Lucy Perry, Edward Pettit, Jane Roberts, Gopa Roy, Katharine Scarfe Beckett, Donald Scragg, E.G. Stanley, Louise Sylvester, Paul Szarmach

Contributors: Anne J. Duggan, Peter Dronke, Cyril Edwards, Julia Walworth

Parallel Narratives examines several richly illustrated manuscripts as reflections of a transitional moment in the history of the book in medieval Germany. In the thirteenth century the nobility and their emulators had aspirations to own and to read books privately as an alternative to the traditional social experience of listening to recitation or to a reading in a group, large or small. But comfortable reading skills were not yet widespread. One solution was to `read' privately an illustrated book in which the images could carry the storyline without recourse to the written text. The focus of this study is a mid-thirteenth-century illustrated manuscript of Gottfried's Tristan. A close analysis of the visual narrative and its relation to the text demonstrates that the pictorial narrative presents a parallel independent telling of the Tristan story. A foil to the unusual Tristan is provided by a slightly later illuminated manuscript of the Willehalm von Orlens of Rudolph von Ems, in which the written text takes communicative precedence over sumptuous illuminations. In the course of developing its argumentthis book provides an introduction to the whole subject of the early manuscript illumination of vernacular German secular narratives.Julia C. Walworth is Research Fellow and Librarian at Merton College Oxford.

Essays looking at the process of teaching and learning to write in the middle ages, with evidence drawn from across Europe.The capacity to read and write are different abilities, yet while studies of medieval readers and reading have proliferated in recent years, there has so far been little examination of how people learnt to write in the middle ages- an aspect of literacy which this volume aims to address. The papers published here discuss evidence adduced from the "a sgraffio" writing of Ancient Rome, through the attempts of scribes to model their handwriting after that ofthe master-scribe in a disciplined scriptorium, to the repeated copying of set phrases in a Florentine merchant's day book. They show how a careful study of handwriting witnesses the reception of the twenty-three letter Latin alphabet in different countries of medieval Europe, and its necessary adaptation to represent vernacular sounds. Monastic customaries provide evidence of teaching and learning in early scriptoria, while an investigation of the grammarians is a reminder that for the medieval scholar learning to write did not mean simply mastering the skill of holding a quill and forming one's letters properly, but also mastering a correct understanding of grammar and punctuation. Other essays consider the European reception of the so-called Arabic numbers, provide an edition of a fifteenth-century tract on how to use abbreviations correctly, and illustrate how images of writing on wax tablets and learning in school can throw light on medieval practice. The volume concludes with a paper on the ways in which a sixteenth-century amateur theologican deployed Latin, Greek and Hebrew alphabets.P.R. Robinson is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of English Studies, University of London.Contributors: Paolo Fioretti, David Ganz, Martin Steinman, Patrizia Carmassi, Aliza Cohen-Mushlin, Annina Seiler, Alessandro Zironi, Jerzy Kaliszuk, Aslaug Ommundsen, Erik Niblaeus, Gudvardur Már Gunnlaugsson, Cristina Mantegna, Irene Ceccherini, Jesús Alturo, Carmen del Camino Martinez, Maria do Rosário Barbosa Morujao, Charles Burnett, Olaf Pluta, Lucy Freeman Sandler, Alison Stones, Berthold Kress

An examination of the ideas of space and place as manifested in medieval texts, art, and architecture.This interdisciplinary collection of sixteen essays explores the significance of space and place in Late Antique and medieval culture, as well as modern reimaginings of medieval topographies. Its case studies draw on a wide variety of critical approaches and cover architecture, the visual arts (painting and manuscript illumination), epic, romance, historiography, hagiography, cartography, travel writing, as well as modern English poetry. Challenging simplistic binaries of East and West, self and other, Muslim and Christian, the volume addresses the often unexpected roles played by space and place in the construction of individual and collective identities in religious and secular domains. The essays move through world spaces (mappaemundi, the exotic and the mundane East, the Mediterranean); empires, nations, and frontier zones; cities (Avignon, Jerusalem, and Reval); and courts, castles and the architectureof subjectivity, closing with modern visions of the medieval world. They explore human movement in space and the construction of time and place in memory. Taking up pressing contemporary issues such as nationalism, multilingualism, multiculturalism and confessional relations, they find that medieval material provides narratives that we can use today in our negotiations with the past.Julian Weiss is Professor of Medieval and Early Modern Hispanic Studies, Sarah Salih Senior Lecturer in English, at King's College London.Contributors: Richard Talbert, Paul Freedman, Sharon Kinoshita, Luke Sunderland, Julian Weiss, Sarah Salih, Konstantin Klein, Katie Clark, Elizabeth Monti, Elina Gertsman, Elina Räsänen, Geoff Rector, Nicolay Ostrau, Andrew Cowell, Joshua Davies, Chris Jones, Matthew Francis

Ranging from Ireland to India and from the first to the third millennium, this collection brings together essays written from the perspective of gender, politics and national and cultural identities as well as the sociology of religion.Saints are more than distant figures from legends and wall paintings. Their lives and cults have been rewritten over and over again to suit changing cultural preconceptions and social and political agendas. The obscure Cambro-Breton saint Armel became a badge of loyalty to the Tudor dynasty; Eastern European countries have competed to lay claim to Cyril and Methodius, founding fathers of eastern Christianity; the Indian mystic and poet Kabir came from a Muslim background but was appropriated by both Hindus and Sikhs. And perhaps most bizarrely, right-wing groups in England march under the badge of the Middle Eastern saint George.While these ideas are familiar to historians of"popular" religion (that slippery term) in western Europe, they have a clear relevance to the study of religion in other continents and other faith traditions. Ranging from Ireland to India and from the first to the third millennium, this collection brings together essays written from the perspective of gender, politics and national and cultural identities as well as the sociology of religion. The main thrust is medieval and Christian but it also considers more recent developments in Sikh, Hindu and Muslim cults and in the heritagisation of religion. A substantial introduction offers an overview of the literature, sets out theoretical frameworks and suggests further avenues for exploration.Madeleine Gray is Professor of Ecclesiastical History at the University of South Wales.Contributors: Diane Auslander, Slavia Barlieva, Karen Casebier, Adam Coward, James M. Hegarty, Kate Helsen, Andrew Hughes, John R. Black, Madeleine Gray, Svitlana Kobets, Samantha Riches, Anne Schuchman, Jayita Sinha,

Offers new readings of Mandeville's Travels in its original historical context, in its textual history and in the present day.Mandeville's Travels was a medieval bestseller. Originally written in French in the mid-fourteenth century, it was translated into Latin and all the main European vernaculars, and survives in over three hundred manuscripts, some extensively illustrated. The book is a skilful translation and repackaging of existing travel and wonder narratives combined with original commentary, in which the probably fictitious English knight Sir John Mandeville recounts his journeys through Europe, the Holy Land and the Far East. It is a book of everything: a romance following a pilgrim-knight's journey, an encyclopaedic world-map in the form of a travelogue, a meditation on human religious, cultural and bodily diversity, an urgent enquiry into the trajectory of salvation history. It combines traditional wonders such as the Plinian "monstrous races" with an assessment of the geopolitical position of Latin Christendom in the wake of the failure of the Crusades to conquer the Middle East. Looking back to classical geography, it also, unknowingly, looked forward to the era of European colonial travel: Christopher Columbus took a copy with him when he sailed west across the Atlantic in 1492. This collection offers new readings of Mandeville's Travels in its original historical context, in its textual history and in the present day; in particular, recent developments in medieval racial theory enable new analyses of Mandeville's post-Crusades arc in the long history of European colonisation and racialisation. Contributors reassess its accounts of Jews, the Mongols, the Islamic Mamluk Empire and the imaginary eastern Christian empire of Prester John, with particular scrutiny of the text's reputation for "tolerance" of racial and religious difference. They examine its entry into print culture in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the interaction of its textual history with World War I and the aftermath of empire in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. They also consider its resonance in the present day, enquiring whether this medieval Christian book can speak to our diverse and divided moment.