This collection of essays offers an interdisciplinary study of roads and wayfinding in medieval England, Wales and Scotland. It looks afresh at the relationship between the road as a material condition of daily life and the formation of local and national communities, arguing that the business of road maintenance, road travel and wayfinding constitutes social bonds. Setting Britain's thoroughfares against the backdrop of the extant Roman road system, it argues for a technique of road construction and care that is distinctively medieval and challenges the long-held picture of a medieval...

Reading Robin Hood explores and explains stories about the mythic outlaw - a figure who always represents the values of natural law and stands up for true justice - from the middle ages to the present.
While a few books have described the outlaw myth, usually in its earlier forms, and occasional academic essays have commented on elements of the Robin Hood story, this is the first in-depth analysis of the whole sequence and the varying elements of the adventures of Robin Hood. First, it explores the medieval tradition from early poems into the long-surviving sung ballads - and also two...

This collection explores some of the many ways in which sanctity was closely intertwined with the development of literary strategies across a range of writings in late medieval Britain. Rather than looking for clues in religious practices in order to explain such changes, or reading literature for information about sanctity, these essays consider the ways in which sanctity - as concept and as theme - allowed writers to articulate and to develop further their 'craft' in specific ways. While scholars in recent years have turned once more to questions of literary form and technique, the kinds of...

Author of The Canterbury Tales and foundation of the English literary tradition, Geoffrey Chaucer has been popular with readers, writers and scholars for over 600 years. More than 4600 books, essays, poems, stories, recordings and websites pertaining to Chaucer were published between 1997 and 2010, and this bibliography identifies each of them separately, providing publication information and a descriptive summary of contents. The bibliography also offers several useful discovery aids to enable users to locate individual items of interest, whether it be a study of the Wife of Bath's love...

This volume contains an entirely new and accessible translation into modern English of the medieval Latin Gesta Romanorum. Based on the standard Gesta edition by Hermann "Osterley, it is the first such translation to appear since 1824, and the first to take appropriate account of modern scholarly priorities. The Gesta Romanorum are tales drawn from a wide variety of sources, such as classical mythology, legend and historical chronicles, and are accompanied in almost every case by allegorical Christian interpretations. They were enormously popular throughout the Middle Ages, and had a huge...

This is the first book-length study of the late-fourteenth-century Scottish Legendary, the only extant collection of saints' lives in the vernacular from medieval Scotland. The fifty saints' legends are remarkable for their narrative art: the enjoyment of reading the legends is heightened, while didactic and edifying content is toned down. This study scrutinises the dynamics of hagiographic narration, its implicit assumptions about literariness and the functions of telling the lives of the saints. Focusing on the role of the narrator, the depiction of the saintly characters, their...

This book investigates the role of 'texts' - including books, maps, stones and caskets - in the conveyance and transformation of knowledge and ideas throughout the Middle Ages. It contains original contributions by leading medievalists, who explore the topic from different yet complementary angles, offering diverse interdisciplinary and multi-cultural approaches on a wide variety of subjects. -- .

The South English Legendary is the major collection of saints' lives in medieval English. A medieval 'bestseller', with 50 or so manuscripts and manuscript fragments and nearly 300 separate items in circulation in various combinations and books from the late thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, the Legendary has become increasingly well known in recent years through modern editions of individual texts and study of particular manuscripts. Meanwhile greatly increased interest in saints' lives, in literary and historical scholarship and the cultural and post-disciplinary turn in literary...

Nonhuman voices in Anglo-Saxon literature and material culture uncovers the voice and agency possessed by nonhuman things across Anglo-Saxon literature and material culture. It makes a new contribution to 'thing theory' and rethinks conventional divisions between animate human subjects and inanimate nonhuman objects in the early Middle Ages.

Anglo-Saxon writers and craftsmen describe artefacts and animals through riddling forms or enigmatic language, balancing an attempt to speak and listen to things with an understanding that these nonhumans often elude, defy and withdraw from us. But...

Reading Robin Hood explores and explains stories about the mythic outlaw - a figure who always represents the values of natural law and stands up for true justice - from the middle ages to the present.

While a few books have described the outlaw myth, usually in its earlier forms, and occasional academic essays have commented on elements of the Robin Hood story, this is the first in-depth analysis of the whole sequence and the varying elements of the adventures of Robin Hood. First, it explores the medieval tradition from early poems into the long-surviving sung ballads - and also two...