Contributors: Eric Stanley, Daniel Donoghue, Carole Weinberg, John Frankis, Cyril Edwards, Andrew Breeze, Herbert Pilch, Elizabeth J. Bryan, W.R.J. Barron, Richard Dance, Philip Durkin, Michiko Ogura, Robert McColl Millar, Gloria Mercatanti, Rosamund Allen, James Noble, Lucy Hay, Joseph D. Parry, Marie-Francoise Alamichel, Kelley M. Wickham-Crowley, Kenneth J. Tiller, Lucy Perry, Wayne Glowka

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...

This volume brings two areas of study that have traditionally been kept apart into explosive contact. For the first time, it draws the historical literatures and cultures of the Middle Ages into the orbit of modern science fiction, aligning the cosmologies, technologies and wonders of the past with visions of the future. The essays it contains consider where, how and why -science- and -fiction- interact in medieval literature; they explore the ways in which works of modern science fiction illuminate medieval counterparts; and they also identify the presence and absence of the medieval past in...