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.

For a long time scholars have generally shared the belief that late medieval authors - particularly in England and especially Chaucer - wrote for private readers. This book challenges that view and current orthodoxies in orality-literacy theory. It assembles and analyses in depth, for the first time, an overwhelming mass of evidence that in both Britain and France from the mid-fourteenth to the late-fifteenth century, literate, elite audiences continued to prefer public reading (aloud in groups) to private reading. This book offers the first sustained critique of Walter Ong's Orality and...

In this study of vernacular French narrative from the twelfth century through the later Middle Ages, Donald Maddox considers the construction of identity in a wide range of fictions. He focuses on crucial encounters, widespread in medieval literature, in which characters are informed about fundamental aspects of their own circumstances and selfhood. The study offers many new perspectives on the poetic and cultural implications of identity as an imaginary construct during the long formative period of French literature.

A companion to Mary Carruthers' earlier study of memory in medieval culture, The Book of Memory, this book, The Craft of Thought, examines medieval monastic meditation as a discipline for making thoughts, and discusses its influence on literature, art, and architecture, deriving examples from a variety of late antique and medieval sources, with excursions into modern architectural memorials. The study emphasizes meditation as an act of literary composition or invention, the techniques of which notably involved both words and making mental "pictures" for thinking and composing.

This is a study of the Wycliffite heresy, otherwise known as Lollardy, which flourished in England in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Kantik Ghosh examines major texts by John Wyclif, William Woodford, Nicolas Love, Thomas Netter as well as the anonymous authors of the English Wycliffite Sermons, along with a wide range of scholastic, homiletic and meditative texts in Latin and English. Whatever the ultimate fate of Lollardy as a religious movement, he reveals that the debates it initiated successfully changed the intellectual landscape of England.

Mary Erler traces networks of female book ownership and exchange which have so far been obscure, and shows how women were responsible for owning as well as circulating devotional books. Seven narratives of individual women who lived between 1350 and 1550 are enclosed by an overview of nuns' reading and their surviving books, and a survey of women who owned the first printed books in England. An appendix lists a number of books not previously attributed to female ownership.

Up to the twelfth century, writing in the western vernaculars dealt almost exclusively with religious, historical and factual themes, all of which were understood to convey the truth. The second half of the twelfth century saw the emergence of a new genre--the romance--which was consciously conceived as fictional and therefore allowed to break free from traditional presuppositions. Green examines this period of crucial importance for the romance genre and for the genesis of medieval fiction.

Gestures and looks played an even more important role in public and private exchanges of medieval society, than they do today. Gestures meant more than words, for example, in ceremonies of homage and fealty. In this compelling study, medievalist Burrow examines the role of non-verbal communication in a range of narrative texts, including Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, the anonymous Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Malory's Morte D'arthur, the romances of Chretien de Troyes, the prose Lancelot, Boccaccio's Il Filostrato, and Dante's Commedia.

Emily Steiner describes the rich intersection between legal documents and English literature in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. She argues that documentary culture (including charters, testaments, patents and seals) enabled writers to think in new ways about the conditions of textual production in late Medieval England.

Ranging across a variety of academic disciplines, including art history, cartography, and Anglo-Saxon and Arabic studies, this volume highlights the connections between medieval and postcolonial studies through the exploration of a common theme: translation in its broadest sense as a mechanism of, and metaphor for, cultures in contact, confrontation and competition. The essays form a set of case studies of translation as the transfer of language, culture, and power.