The 'Long Twelfth Century' (1075-1225) was an era of seminal importance in the development of the book in medieval Europe and marked a high point in its construction and decoration. This comprehensive study takes the cultural changes that occurred during the 'Twelfth-Century Renaissance' as its point of departure to provide an overview of manuscript culture encompassing the whole of Western Europe. Written by senior scholars, chapters are divided into three sections: the technical aspects of making books; the processes and practices of reading and keeping books; and the transmission of texts...

Anglo-Saxons valued education yet understood how precarious it could be, alternately bolstered and undermined by fear, desire, and memory. They praised their teachers in official writing, but composed and translated scenes of instruction that revealed the emotional and cognitive complexity of learning. Irina Dumitrescu explores how early medieval writers used fictional representations of education to explore the relationship between teacher and student. These texts hint at the challenges of teaching and learning: curiosity, pride, forgetfulness, inattention, and despair. Still, these...

This study shows some of the ways in which medieval Scandinavians received and reinterpreted pre-Christian religion.

First full-length study of the mouth's centrality to discourses of physical, ethical and spiritual 'good' in Middle English literature.

Brings 'new formalist' approaches to Chaucer, focusing on formal agency, bodies, disability, ethics, poetics, reception, and scale.

Important intervention in Middle English studies that challenges widely accepted narratives on the identities of Chaucer's scribes.

This collection conducts an intersectional investigation of affects, feelings, and emotions in non-religious late Middle English literatures. From Geoffrey Chaucer to Gavin Douglas, eight chapters by leading scholars examine the coexistence of emotion and affect in Late Medieval representations of feeling.