This book concentrates on the mathematical theory of plasticity and fracture, and presents it in a thermomechanical framework. It follows the macroscopic, phenomenological approach, which proposes equations abstracted from generally accepted experimental facts, studies the adequacy of the consequences drawn from these equations to those facts, and then provides useful tools for designers and engineers. Many examples of plasticity and fracture are presented, and each chapter concludes with problems for students.

Chinese and Americans often unwittingly communicate at cross-purposes because they are misled by the cultural trappings of talk. This book aims to clarify their misunderstandings by tracing the development of Chinese communicative strategies from Confucius to the boardrooms and streets of Hong Kong. Its formal analysis of taped interchanges and in-depth interviews reveals Chinese speakers' distinctive ways of communicating and relating, thus highlighting the pitfalls of hidden assumptions underlying talk.

Chaucer's Legend of Good Women is a testament to the disparate views of women prevalent in the Middle Ages. Dr. Percival contends that the complex medieval notion of Woman informs the structure of the poem: in the Prologue Chaucer praises conventional ideas of female virtue, while in the Legends he demonstrates a humorous skepticism, apparently influenced by a contemporary antifeminist tradition. This is a comprehensive account of the Legend's interpretative puzzles, which does not ignore the element of political writing and adds to a close and nuanced reading of the text an examination of...

What happens when a prestigious text of one period is read and reused in a different, much later world? What can we learn from the annotations accumulated by a single manuscript as it moved among new institutions and readerships? In this study Christopher Baswell takes as his model Virgil's Aeneid, and the many kinds of appeal it held for the culture of the Middle Ages. He examines a series of Latin manuscripts of the text which were copied in twelfth-century England but reused and reannotated for three centuries, and shows how medieval vernacular poets used Virgil's prestige to lay their own...

This study examines two great poems of the later medieval period, the Latin philosophical epic, Alan of Lille's Anticlaudianus (1181-3), and John Gower's English poem, the Confessio Amantis (1390-3). James Simpson locates these works in a cultural context dominated by two kinds of literary humanism, in which the concept of self is centered in the intellect and the imagination respectively, and shows the very different modes of thought that lie behind their conceptions of selfhood and education.

This book investigates how people learned to read in the Middle Ages. It uses glosses--medieval teachers' notes--on classical Latin texts to show how these complex works were used in a very basic and literal way in the classroom, and argues that this has profound implications for our understanding of medieval literacy and hermeneutics. Suzanne Reynolds discusses issues including the relationship of Latin and vernacular languages, the role of classical texts in medieval culture, ideas of allegory in the Middle Ages, and medieval literary theory.

The first book-length study of a seminal 'feminist' text from the Middle Ages.

This collection examines the significance of the ways in which writing was used in the Celtic countries between c.400 and c.1500. It is concerned with the amount and types of material committed to writing as well as with the social groups that promoted the use of literacy and had access to its products. Presenting the fruits of much new research, the book is intended as a contribution to the study both of medieval literacy generally and of the history and cultures of Ireland, Scotland, Wales and Brittany in the Middle Ages.

Did growing literacy in the later medieval period foster popular heresy, or did heresy provide a crucial stimulus to the spread of literacy? This collective volume, by established scholars from Britain, continental Europe and the United States, considers the importance of the written word in pre-Lutheran heresies, and explores the extent to which heretics' familiarity with books paralleled or exceeded that of their orthodox contemporaries.

This collection of essays focuses on the questions of women's access to a written culture and their representation in literature in late medieval Britain. It explores women's engagement with Anglo-Norman, English, Welsh and Latin, and addresses such issues as orality and literacy and women's exclusion from a written tradition. It considers the historical evidence for women's activity as writers, patrons and readers, and examines the representation of women within different literary genres--both secular and religious--their possession or lack of power, and their roles as lovers, mothers and...