The Knight's Tale is one of the most controversial of all the Canterbury Tales. Does Chaucer portray Theseus, the duke of Athens whose actions dominate the tale, as an ideal ruler, one who is noble, wise and chivalrous, or does the duke's behaviour reveal him to be immoral, self-seeking and tyrannical? This book (now in a corrected second printing) assesses the duke's conduct and thought in terms of the ideals set out in medieval mirrors for princes, particularly in Giles of Rome's De Regimine Principum. It argues that, when judged by the standards of these works, Theseus...

The Historia de Jacob Xalabin, an anonymous novel written in Catalan c.1400, focuses on the figure of the Ottoman prince Yakub Celebi, son of Murad I and half-brother of Bayezid I. It ends with the first detailed account of the battle of Kosovo of 1389, which left a lasting mark on the history of the Balkans. This text, mixing historical and fictional elements, is one of the earliest depictions in Western Literature of the rising Ottoman empire. Because of this, it is most relevant for Mediterranean studies and debates about orientalism. Juan Carlos Bayo has prepared a new critical...

The late thirteenth-century, monolingual Oxford manuscript, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 108, bears singular importance to medieval studies, for it preserves and anthologizes unique versions of several seminal Middle English texts, including South English Legendary, Havelok the Dane, and King Horn and Somer Soneday. While critics have traditionally classified these poems by genre, this book returns them to their manuscript context in a comprehensive examination of this vernacular codex. Considering the manuscript as a "whole book" rather than a miscellany of...

The present volume has grown out of the conference held at Princeton University on November 12-14, 2009. Its essays explore a coherent, interrelated nexus of topics that illuminate our understanding of the cultural transactions (social, political, economic, religious and artistic) of the Greek East and Latin West: unexpected cultural appropriations and forms of resistance, continuity and change, the construction and hybridization of traditions in a wide expanse of the eastern Mediterranean. Areas that the volume addresses include the benefits and liabilities of periodization, philosophical...

In Virgil's third Eclogue, Palaemon concludes the poetry competition between Menalcas and Damoetas by saying that he cannot choose between them, a judgment that is emblematic of the contest between Neo-Latin and vernacular poetry in Renaissance France. Both forms of poetry draw on similar roots, both are equally accomplished, and the contest between them is largely amicable. The Judgment of Palaemon illustrates the almost symbiotic relationship between Renaissance Latin and French poetry, while exploring poets' motivation for choosing one language over another, the different...

Spoken Word and Social Practice: Orality in Europe (1400-1700) addresses historians and literary scholars. It aims to recapture oral culture in a variety of literary and non-literary sources, tracking the echo of women's voices, on trial, or bantering and gossiping in literary works, and recapturing those of princes and magistrates, townsmen, villagers, mariners, bandits, and songsmiths. Almost all medieval and early modern writing was marked by the oral. Spoken words and turns of phrase are bedded in writings, and the mental habits of a speaking world shaped texts. Writing also shaped...

In this work Jeffrey Glodzik argues that Vergil played a central role in the prevailing discourse of Renaissance Rome. Roman humanists associated with the papacy employed the language of Vergil to express a vision for Rome and its divinely-ordained destiny. Using the transformation methodology allelopoiesis, he shows that in their neo-Latin works Roman humanists focused on a Christian interpretation of the fourth eclogue to highlight an incipient Golden Age, ignored pessimistic readings of the Aeneid to emphasize the glories of a renewed imperium, and encapsulated Vergil’s words to...