Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Culture – serie

Strife occurs everywhere among characters in The Canterbury Tales, in the stories as well as the links between them. Characters seem always ready to dispute, contradict, declaim, and contend about almost anything. A competitive spirit suffuses the work, from the tale-telling among pilgrims and the personal rivalries that develop on the pilgrimage to the conflicts, beguilings, and one-uppings that go on in the tales. By understanding the rivalries of the Canterbury world, we may then recognize why Chaucer so insists on the individuality of the characters he creates, why so many characters (rightly or wrongly) resist structures, and why they challenge or reject social dogmas, often overturning them. The essays that make up this collection offer several provocative interpretations of the rivalrous and rebellious spirits that inhabit the worlds of Chaucer's tales. The volume is intended for the dedicated teacher of Chaucer as well as for the specialist in medieval English studies. As Chaucer's poem displays the contestive spirit of human affairs, so the collective spirit of these essays reflects vigorous debate and multi-faceted challenge.

While the study of rhetoric has received a much-needed revival dating from about 1945, historical writing was not a favored object of scrutiny among the many studies of rhetoric's influence on medieval literature, education, and preaching (from the introduction). By 1978, some scholars had resolved to rectify this problem, and organized sessions at the thirteenth International Congress on Medieval Studies. This volume stands as a selection of works presented there, helping to fortify the strength of interest and inquiry directed toward rhetoric's symbiosis with historiography in centuries past (from the introduction).

This anthology aims to add flesh to the bones and the supplements, reservations, and alternatives for a deeper understanding of the tradition of natural law throughout the medieval period. It runs contrary to the opinion so commonly held since the Renaissance, that any tradition deemed medieval has little or even nothing to offer to contemporary needs and interests. The essays contained herein put to bed such a notion with fresh and interesting takes on Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, natural law in the traditions of Golden Age Spain, and more.

Essays in this volume explore wide-ranging topics: Constantinople, Cloistered Women, Popes and Holy Images, Kingship, Pastoral Care, and Pilgrimages to the works or lives of Sidonius Apollinaris, Gregory of Tours, John Damascene, and Anselm of Havelberg. Like the scholarship of the man who inspired the essays (Richard Sullivan) the essays are broad and incisive.

The collection of essays in Romance Epic expertly examines the Romance epic as a genre, delving into its ever-changing period, audience, and region. The essays span across a wide range of different topics: the specificity of the Romance epic and how well it fits into the genre of epic at all, the structure of the chansons de geste, school influences on the Old French, the reconstruction of lost chansons de geste, the evolution of the genre through centuries, and topics specific to certain works, such as problems in the Chanson de Roland and the El Cantar de Mio Cid.

At no time in the history of the West has translation played a more vital role than in the Middle Ages. Centuries before the appearance of the first extant vernacular documents, bilingualism, and preferably trilingualism, was a necessity in the scriptorium and chancery; and since the emergence of Romance had rendered the entire corpus of classical literature incomprehensible to all but the literati, both old and new worlds awaited (re)discovery or, to use Jerome's metaphor, conquest. The diversity of medieval translation is illustrated, although not encompassed, by the diversity of chapters in the present volume. Authors treat the methods and reception of translators of vernacular to Latin and vernacular to vernacular, texts of a variety of genres and many different languages and periods. The collection will present a welcome offering of different scholarly approaches to the critical issue of medieval translators and their craft.

Beowulf is by far the most popular text of the medieval world taught in American classrooms, at both the high school and undergraduate levels. More students than ever before wrestle with Grendel in the darkness of Heorot or venture into the dragon’s barrow for gold and glory. This increase of attention and interest in the Old English epic has led to a myriad of new and varying translations of the poem published every year, the production of several mainstream film and television adaptations, and many graphic novel versions. More and more teachers in all sorts of classrooms, with varying degrees of familiarity and training are called upon to bring this ancient poem before their students. This practical guide to teaching Beowulf in the twenty-first century combines scholarly research with pedagogical technique, imparting a picture of how the poem can be taught in contemporary American institutions.

This collection, which brings together scholarsfrom the history of the book, law, science, medicine, literature, art, and philosophy, interrogates the role played by paratexts in establishingauthority, constructing bodies of knowledge, promoting education, shapingreader response, and preserving or subverting tradition in medieval manuscriptculture.

This book discusses how Shakespeare and Spenser configure the body and mind as a besieged castle or house; a walled city vulnerable to ruin; oras a built environment surrounded by the elements of earth, air, fire, or water. Building on current approaches to the subject of place and movement in terms of cognitive theory, ecocriticism, and posthumanism, Jennifer C. Vaught illustrates how architectural rhetoric in Shakespeare and Spenser provides a bridge between the human body and mind and the nonhuman world of stone and timber.

Scholars generally consider the sequence ofdense, epigrammatic dizains that compriseMaurice Scève's lyric sequence Délie to be anearly example of French Renaissanceimitation of Petrarch's lyric poetry. WhilePetrarch's Canzoniere is an important sourcefor Scève's Délie, both works are part of along poetic lineage that includes Occitantroubadours. The book argues that the 'Petrarchan' label is problematic for Scève'sDélie, and reveals Dante Alighieri as arelevant predecessor and source.

This volume features approaches to equine studies from disciplines as diverse as archaeology, legal, economic and military history, urban and rural history, art and literature. This volume explores the ubiquitous – and often ambiguous – role of the horse in medieval culture, where it was simultaneously a treasured animal and a means of transport, a military machine and a loyal companion. The contributors, many of whom have practical knowledge of horses, are drawn from established and budding scholars working in their areas of expertise.

Giovanni Villani’s New Chronicle traces the history of Europe, Italy, and Florence over a vast sweep of time – from the Tower of Babel to the great earthquake of 1348. In the eleventh and twelfth books, Villani depicts a particularly eventful period in the history of Florence, whose grandeur is illustrated in several famous chapters describing the city’s income, expenses, and magnificence. The dramatic account follows Florence’s internal affairs as well as its conflicts with powerful lords like Castruccio Castracani and Mastino della Scala. The chronicler’s perspective, however, ranges beyond his city, as he documents such events as the imperial coronation of Louis of Bavaria, the penitential pilgrimage of Venturino da Bergamo, and the first campaigns of the Hundred Year’s War.

This volume addresses the widespread medieval phenomenon of transgression as both a result of and the cause for the exclusion and persecution of those who were considered different. It is widely accepted that the essence of a manuscript cannot be fully grasped without studying its marginalia. Glosses sit on the margins of the text and clarify it, adding a whole new dimension to it and becoming an inextricable part of its content. Similarly, no society can be fully understood without knowledge of what lies on its margins, for the outliers of any given culture provide us with just as much information as its alleged foundational principles. In a time when the Western world ponders building walls up against perceived threats and frightening differences, this multidisciplinary collection of essays based on original and innovative pieces of research shows that it was mostly through tearing down walls that we learned our way forward.

This volume explores the interaction between emotion (as a literary phenomenon) and genre in medieval European literature. It draws on the field of the history of emotion to consider how the representation of emotion in literary works shapes generic expectations and signals generic frameworks. Alternatively, it considers how generic perceptions and conventions modulate or impact the emotive codes or styles used to convey the narrative matière.The volume presents a cross-cultural analysis of the various generic forms and their emotive codes in the linguistic and cultural traditions of Western Europe in the Middle Ages. In combining the methodological and theoretical perspectives of genre criticism and emotion studies for the first time in a systematic way, this volume is meant to fill a major gap in scholarship.Ranging across a wide array of literatures, including religious writings in Latin and Middle English, Old French lais, Old Norse saga literature, Middle High German Minnesang, and the medieval romance writ large, it aims to give insight into the ways in which generic frameworks and emotive codes interacted in giving shape to literary texts across medieval Europe.

What does it mean to be authentic? The term is as pervasive today as it is difficult to define. To be ‘authentic’ in the Middle Ages or Early Modernity was no less of a complex task, albeit framed in ways different to today’s concept of authenticity as an individualistic or capitalistic venture (think ‘being true to oneself’ or ‘brand authenticity’). This volume examines a range of medieval and early modern approaches to authenticity in literature, asking how authenticity was defined, privileged, constructed, and contested in the periods covered. Essays trace the shifting status of authenticity across four literary categories which most test the concept of premodern authenticity: forgeries, histories, translations, and continuations. Contributions engage with works across Latin, Greek, English, French, and Irish, and set authenticity in conversation with medieval and modern perspectives on authority, truth, and morality.

This volume addresses the widespread medieval phenomenon of transgression as both a result of and the cause for the exclusion and persecution of those who were considered different. It is widely accepted that the essence of a manuscript cannot be fully grasped without studying its marginalia. Glosses sit on the margins of the text and clarify it, adding a whole new dimension to it and becoming an inextricable part of its content. Similarly, no society can be fully understood without knowledge of what lies on its margins, for the outliers of any given culture provide us with just as much information as its alleged foundational principles. In a time when the Western world ponders building walls up against perceived threats and frightening differences, this multidisciplinary collection of essays based on original and innovative pieces of research shows that it was mostly through tearing down walls that we learned our way forward.

For all its spiritual cheerfulness and obvious importance as a tale to conclude tales, a last word from a notable maker of words, The Parson's Tale seems to have inspired sentence and solaas in remarkably few critics. This volume rejects the tradition that assumes the tale to be of questionable literary value. The studies included span the range of Parson's Tale criticism from the textual, to the philological, to the hermeneutical. What they share is the assumption that if one is to understand the role of The Parson's Tale, one must begin by accepting the language and method by which Chaucer fashioned it. This rethinking of traditional scholarship on this crucial aspect of The Canterbury Tales will be of great interest to Chaucer scholars and students of medieval literature.

This collection of essays was the first published in North America that sought to describe the methodology and some results of a scholarly enterprise hailed in the preface to the volume as one of the most vibrant, innovative, and productive movements in medieval scholarship at the present time.Under the direction of Monique Bourin an international team of scholars has been considering onomastics from the perspective of history rather than that of linguistics or philology. By examining data on both the micro and macro levels, researchers are beginning to describe how medieval patterns of naming have implications for our understanding of family relationships, kinship, and larger social structures that were not fully realized by earlier scholars.

It would not be an exaggeration to observe that in the last two decades Gower studies have developed in response to a widening appreciation of his poetry. On John Gower: Essays at the Millennium represents the third volume of essays originating from sessions of the John Gower Society at the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo, Michigan. The contributions here and in the previous volumes provide insight into the shifts and trends in Gower studies over time. This collection offers a vibrant and fresh view of the field of Gower studies today, making it and its companion volumes an essential set for Gower scholars.

Whereas some literary motifs such as the tyrant, the beggar, and the crone have equivalents in the real world, the Loathly Lady is a creature of the imagination. Yet she is not merely a whimsical fantasy. This volume concentrates on the medieval English Loathly Lady tales, which develop the motif as a vehicle for social ideology. One of the primary agendas of this collection is to promote the non-canonical Loathly Ladies as worthwhile subjects for scholarly consideration. The examinations here of the medieval English Loathly Lady tales engage with a myriad of concerns, including anxieties about virginity and sex, power and assimilation, beauty and beastliness. These broad examinations of this enigmatic literary motif are an excellent contribution to the field and will be of great interest to scholars.

The Middle Ages provided an important, if complex, set of literary and historiographic models for early modern authors, although the early modern authors responded to the alien political, religious, and cultural landscape of medieval England through their more present ideological concerns. From Shakespeare's manipulation of his medieval source material to Protestant responses to medieval Catholicism, this collection of essays explores the ways that early modern English writers responded to the medieval English literary and historical record, dealing with topics such as historiographic bias, print history, intertextuality, and cultural history.

As Hanks and Jesmok note in their introduction, "pursuing opponents and pursuing love move the Morte's narrative, but the work's richness comes from its romance and tragic elements: the human quest for maturity and fulfillment and those uncontrollable forces that undermine the quest and destroy the dream. Malory's use of myth and magic to explore these themes has received extensive scholarly attention, but his views on and thematic use of Christianity have long needed a closer look."

In the late medieval and early modern periods, Scottish latinity had its distinctive stamp, most intriguingly so in its effects upon the literary vernacular and on themes of national identity. This volume shows how, when viewed through the prism of latinity, Scottish textuality was distinctive and fecund. The flowering of Scottish writing owed itself to a subtle combination of literary praxis, the ideal of eloquentia, and ideological deftness, which enabled writers to service a burgeoning national literary tradition.

Offering a broad overview of memorialization practices across Europe and the Mediterranean, this book examines local customs through particular case studies. These essays explore complementary themes through the lens of commemorative art, including social status; personal and corporate identities; the intersections of mercantile, intellectual, and religious attitudes; upward (and downward) mobility; and the cross-cultural exchange.

One of the most challenging problems in the history of Western ideas stems from the emergence of Modernity out of the preceding period of the Latin Middle Ages. This volume develops and extends the insights of the noted scholar Thomas M. Izbicki into the so-called medieval/modern divide. The contributors include a wide array of eminent international scholars from the fields of History, Theology, Philosophy, and Political Science, all of whom explore how medieval ideas framed and shaped the thought of later centuries. This sometimes involved the evolution of intellectual principles associated with the definition and imposition of religious orthodoxy. Also addressed is the Great Schism in the Roman Church that set into question the foundations of ecclesiology. In the same era, philosophical and theoretical innovations reexamined conventional beliefs about metaphysics, epistemology and political life, perhaps best encapsulated by the fifteenth-century philosopher, theologian and political theorist Nicholas of Cusa.

This volume considers the reception in the early modern period of four popular medieval myths of nationhood – the legends of Brutus, Albina, Scota and Arthur – tracing their intertwined literary and historiographical afterlives. The book thus speaks to several connected areas and is timely on a number of fronts: its dialogue with current investigations into early modern historiography and the period’s relationship to its past, its engagement with pressing issues in identity and gender studies, and its analysis of the formation of British national origin stories at a time when modern Britain is seriously considering its own future as a nation.

This volume contributes to the study of early English poetics. In these essays, several related approaches and fields of study radiate outward from poetics, including stylistics, literary history, word studies, gender studies, metrics, and textual criticism. By combining and redirecting these traditional scholarly methods, as well as exploring newer ones such as object-oriented ontology and sound studies, these essays demonstrate how poetry responds to its intellectual, literary, and material contexts.

The contributors propose to connect the small (syllables, words, and phrases) to the large (histories, emotions, faiths, secrets). In doing so, they attempt to work magic on the texts they consider: turning an ordinary word into something strange and new, or demonstrating texture, difference, and horizontality where previous eyes had perceived only smoothness, sameness, and verticality.

A "blind spot" suggests an obstructed view, or partisan perception, or a localized lack of understanding. Just as the brain "reads" the "blind spot" of the visual field by a curious process of readjustment, Shakespearean drama disorients us with moments of unmastered and unmasterable knowledge, recasting the way we see, know and think about knowing. Focusing on such moments of apparent obscurity, this volume puts methods and motives of knowing under the spotlight, and responds both to inscribed acts of blind-sighting, and to the text or action blind-sighting the reader or spectator. While tracing the hermeneutic yield of such occlusion is its main conceptual aim, it also embodies a methodological innovation: structured as an internal dialogue, it aims to capture, and stake out a place for, a processive intellectual energy that enables a distinctive way of knowing in academic life; and to translate a sense of intellectual "community" into print.